Members of the nationalist American Third Position Party (A3P), whose website was defaced by Anonymous, organised Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul’s meetings and campaigns, according emails hacked by the collective. Chairman of the British National Party (BNP) Nick Griffin also took part in meetings with Paul and other representatives of A3P.

“According to these messages, Ron Paul has regularly met with many A3P members, even engaging in conference calls with their board of directors,” read a statement from Anonymous.

Paul’s connections with racist supporters have been highlighted by the media in America. Bill White, a former member of the neo-Nazi group the National Socialist Movement, became disillusioned with Paul after a spokesman for the Republican candidate called white supremacy “a small ideology”.

Following the incident, he wrote on a popular white supremacist website: “Both Congressman Paul and his aides regularly meet with members of the Stormfront set, American Renaissance, the Institute for Historic Review, and others at the Tara Thai restaurant in Arlington, Virginia, usually on Wednesdays,” he said. “I have attended these dinners, seen Paul and his aides there, and been invited to his offices in Washington to discuss policy.”

“Paul is a white nationalist of the Stormfront type who has always kept his racial views and his views about world Judaism quiet because of his political position,” he added.

Adolf Hitler spoke briefly with one of the SS soldiers standing guard outside the Führerbunker, the last refuge of the inner circle of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party. “Germany,” he said, “can hope for the future only if the whole world thinks I am dead.”

It seems impossible to believe that Adolf Hitler could not only have escaped Germany but, in fact, survived in relative comfort in Argentina until his death of natural causes in 1962. Simon Dunstan and Gerrard Williams’ new book Grey Wolf: The Escape of Adolf Hitler, which released earlier this month, presents a remarkable, linear account of a sequence of shadowy events occurring in the final days of World War II that is neatly timelined and meticulously sourced.

The book navigates the various stages of creation and execution of what may have been one of the most daring and enigmatic escapes in history. It examines the early preparations of a secret German base in the Canary Islands as well as mid-level contacts between Germany and the United States, when the latter was presented with an opportunity to turn a blind-eye to Hitler’s escape with the choice of “a carrot or a stick.” (The U.S. could, on the one hand, accept a secret exile for a dozen members of the Nazi hierarchy, in which case Germany would dutifully capitulate and peacefully transfer her gold, art and scientific patents to a victorious, U.S.-led allied coalition. Alternatively, they could refuse such an offer, in which event said treasures would be destroyed and the great, unscathed cities of the U.S. east coast would find themselves under sudden and punishing attack from submarine-launched, nerve gas equipped, V-1 rockets.)

The indicators of an escape are presented in chillingly irrefutable detail. There is the case of Luftwaffe pilot Peter Baumgart who declared, in court testimony, he had personally flown Hitler and his entourage to an intermediate destination in Denmark. Baumgart’s testimony would be corroborated by notes from the U.S. Army interrogation of an SS officer who claimed to have witnessed the escape, though – according to Dunstan and Williams – at least one of the men would mysteriously disappear shortly after levying the charges.

Or consider the series of declassified FBI telegrams from August 1945 reporting of local police activity investigating the presence of Hitler in Villa Gessel, Argentina – a German colony in a country whose political power class had become agents of influence of Berlin.

Or, perhaps, claims of former sailors of the Admiral Graf Spee – a German cruiser scuttled off the Argentine coast whose crew had been stranded in that nation – that they had assisted in securing the scene of Hitler’s coastal landing from a Kriegsmarine U-Boat and had personally interacted with the Führer.

Rudolf Brazda, last known survivor of the so-called “Pink Triangles” — gays interned in Nazi camps because of their homosexuality — died in France Wednesday aged 98, officials said. “Rudolf passed on peacefully in his sleep at dawn on August 3″ at an old people’s hospital in Bantzenheim, eastern France, said Philippe Couillet, a friend and associate of the deceased.

Brazda, born in 1913, was sent to the Buchenwald concentration camp in August 1942 and reamined there until it was liberated by US troops in 1945. After the war he moved to Alsace, the eastern French region that borders Germany, and lived there until his death. He was awarded France’s Legion of Honour in April this year.

Tens of thousands of people were convicted under Nazi Germany’s laws that made homosexual acts a crime. Those who were sent to concentration camps had to wear a pink triangle on their prison clothes that identified them as homosexual.

More: Agence France-Presse via the Raw Story:

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In the latest episode of The Infinite and the Beyond, we look into the popular issues with conspiracy theories and uncover the truth behind what they are. Is the government really spying us? Do conspiracy theories actually reveal anything significant or is there something deeper and more personal behind their existence in the world?

In “A Corner in the Occult” we visit early 20th century Germany and discuss the Nazis and the issues pertaining to their possible involvement with occultism. Many people like to attribute their rise to power and the events pertaining to the Second World War to their involvement in the occult arts and even demonic influence.

We also read some listener email and in “The Essence of Magick” series we talk about visualization and astral projection. Learn why visualization is so important to the magickal arts and learn how to astral project in this episode’s installment of this great and informative series!

And to close, we finish the episode with a look into the ever present concern and pursuit for world peace. Take a new perspective on the issues surrounding world peace and why it may not be the easiest thing to accomplish after all despite what some people say about it.

To message the show please go here.

Disinfo.com site note: New video link, thanks to commenters below.

At 83, Dina Gottliebova Babbitt still recalls the rickety easel where in 1944, under orders from the infamous Nazi doctor Josef Mengele, she painted watercolors of the haggard faces of Gypsy prisoners.

But her memories of the Auschwitz concentration camp, vivid though they are, aren’t enough for Mrs. Babbitt. Seven of the 11 portraits that saved Mrs. Babbitt and her mother remain not far from where she created them, on display at the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum in Poland.

“They are definitely my own paintings; they belong to me, my soul is in them, and without these paintings I wouldn’t be alive, my children and grandchildren wouldn’t be alive,” Mrs. Babbitt said with a Czech accent as she served schnitzel in her cottage here in the hills outside Santa Cruz. “I created them. Who else’s could they be?”

[Full Article at NY Times]

The Germans viewed canines as being almost as intelligent as humans and attempted to build an army of fearsome ’speaking’ dogs, extraordinary new research shows. Hitler hoped the clever creatures would learn to communicate with their SS masters — and he even had a special dog school set up to teach them to talk. The incredible findings show Nazi officials recruited so-called educated dogs from all over Germany and trained them to speak and tap out signals using their paws.

The Germans hoped to use the animals for the war effort, such as getting them to work alongside the SS and guard concentration camps to free up officers. The bizarre ‘Wooffan SS’ experiment has come to light after years of painstaking research by academic Dr Jan Bondeson into unique and amazing dogs in history.

The school, based in Leutenburg near Hannover and led by headmistress Margarethe Schmitt, was set up in the 1930s and continued throughout the war years. It was reported to have had some success, with dogs tapping out words with their paws. Some of them were able to imitate the human voice and one, when asked who Adolf Hitler was, is said to have replied ‘Mein Fuhrer’.

Lars von Trier. Photo: Christian Geisnaes

Movie director Lars von Trier’s new movie is called Melancholia. At the press conference for the movie at the Cannes Film Festival, Von Trier shocked his stars, including Kirsten Dunst and Charlotte Gainsbourg, by telling everyone that he’s a Nazi, that he understands Hitler and that his next movie could be called The Final Solution.

Some choice quotes:

“For a long time I thought I was a Jew and I was happy to be a Jew. Then I met Susanne Bier and I wasn’t so happy. But then I found out I was actually a Nazi. My family were German. And that also gave me some pleasure. What can I say? I understand Hitler…I sympathize with him a bit.”

“I don’t mean I’m in favor of World War II and I’m not against Jews, … In fact I’m very much in favor of them. All Jews. Well, Israel is a pain in the ass but…”

“Now how can I get out of this sentence? Ok. I’m a Nazi.”

Those bits start at about 35 minutes into this video of the conference. If you want to watch more of his madness, earlier on he describes his wish to make a porn movie with Kirsten Dunst.

UPDATE: Von Trier has now been banned from the Cannes Film Festival, which has issued this statement:

The Festival de Cannes provides artists from around the world with an exceptional forum to present their works and defend freedom of expression and creation. The Festival’s Board of Directors, which held an extraordinary meeting this Thursday 19 May 2011, profoundly regrets that this forum has been used by Lars Von Trier to express comments that are unacceptable, intolerable, and contrary to the ideals of humanity and generosity that preside over the very existence of the Festival.

The Board of Directors firmly condemns these comments and declares Lars Von Trier a persona non grata at the Festival de Cannes, with effect immediately.

As a child, Theo Haser was a loyal member of the Hitler Youth. But decades later, haunted by the horror of the Holocaust, he converted to Judaism.

As a young boy, growing up amid the nationalist frenzy of Nazi Germany, Theo Haser idolised Hitler.

When the fuehrer came to his hometown of Munich to visit, Theo and his father were at the front of the crowd reaching out to touch his hand.

“I know if I was able to shake his hand I probably wouldn’t have washed for a few months,” he recalls.

Seventy years later, in a bid to come to terms with his Nazi past, Theo has become a Jew.

“I wanted to be part of a community, this was something I had never felt in my life,” he says. “I wasn’t running away from something, I was joining something entirely new.”

For more information, see original article.

For years, so many twins have been born in the small southern Brazilian town of Cândido Godói that residents wonder whether something mysterious lurks in the water, or even if Josef Mengele, the Nazi physician known as the Angel of Death, conducted experiments on the women there.

But a group of scientists now says it can rule out such long-rumored possibilities. Ursula Matte, a geneticist in Porto Alegre, Brazil, said a series of DNA tests conducted on about 30 families since 2009 found that a specific gene in the population of Cândido Godói appears more frequently in mothers of twins than in those without. The phenomenon is compounded by a high level of inbreeding among the population, which is composed almost entirely of German-speaking immigrants, she said.

The high concentration of twins has stirred outlandish theories. Residents say Mengele moved around southern Brazil in the 1960s, posing as a veterinarian, at about the time the twin births were thought to have really taken off. An Argentine journalist suggested in a 2008 book that Mengele conducted experiments on women in Cândido Godói that resulted in a baby boom of twins, many of whom have blond hair and light-colored eyes.

I thought those days had passed, though, as the long shadow of that war gradually faded. Apparently not: Clive Anderson details the strange and continuing British fascination with the Nazis for the BBC News Magazine:

The late Alan Coren famously published a collection of humorous pieces in book form, called Golfing for Cats. And he put a swastika on the front cover. He had noticed the most popular titles in Britain in those days were about cats, golf and Nazis.

That was in 1975. Thirty-six years on – and now more than 60 years since the end of World War II – Nazi books are going stronger than ever. A staggering 850 books about the Third Reich were published in 2010, up from 350 in the year 2000.

And they mostly still have a swastika on the front cover.

The phenomenal and continuing success of books about the Nazis includes fiction, non-fiction and science fiction.

They include the occult and the Nazis, Nazi magic, Nazi weaponry and Nazi doctors. There’s the history of SS uniforms, SS staff cars, SS recruitment and propaganda.

You can read counter histories imagining Britain if the Nazis had won or post-war histories of the exploitation of Nazi scientific discoveries by America and the other Allied powers.

There is a first hand account of Himmler’s masseur. There are serious histories, adventures with the Panzer Division, and secrets of the Gestapo.

Collectible Spoons of the 3rd Reich by James Yannes is not an invention of Private Eye but a work, I suppose, of genuine scholarship. There’s even a book about the Fuhrer’s own collection of books – Hitler’s Private Library.

So what is going on here? Are British book-buyers still looking for a warning from history or are some of them attracted by the ghastly glamour of history’s most evil baddies?

Are some readers indulging some form of Nazi fetish? Some enthusiasts track down first editions of Hitler’s Mein Kampf.

Is that necessary to understand the workings of a deranged mind, or something bordering on hero worship?…

[continues in the BBC News Magazine]

Designers and design historians told me over the years that they had heard about the existence of a Nazi graphics standards manual. No one could say they actually saw it, but they knew of someone who had. So it grew into something of a Big Foot or Loch Ness Monster tale, until one day I actually saw it too – and it had been right under my nose the whole time.

I had envisioned a manual of the kind that Lester Beall did for International Paper or Paul Rand did for IBM, showing acceptable logo weights and sizes, corporate typefaces and colors. I was so familiar with these standards manuals, that it never even occurred to me they were postwar formats — and decidedly modern. Maybe the Nazis did theirs in a different way.

The policing of all things Swastika was the responsibility of Dr. Robert Ley, the head of the German Labor Front (Deutsche Arbeitsfront, DAF) and the Strength Through Joy (Kraft durch Freude, KdF). Known as much as anything for his heavy drinking, this former editor of the anti-Semitic newspaper, Westdeutsche Beobachter, was not a designer or art director, but garnered considerable power owing to his intense loyalty to Hitler. One of his most ambitious design initiatives was taking over the development of the Volkswagen (people’s car) from Porsche.

Perhaps a lesser, though significant, responsibility was developing a NSDAP handbook that detailed the organizing principles and mechanics of building the Nazi movement. It is this 550 page, red cloth-bound book titled Organizationsbuch der NSDAP, with the symbol of “Greater Germany” embossed in silver on the front, which turns out to be the elusive standards manual. The DAF was also responsible for typesetting guides and other graphic arts handbooks, but this is the graphic masterpiece of the Master Race.

Published in 1936, The Organizationsbuch der NSDAP (with subsequent annual editions), detailed all aspects of party bureaucracy, typeset tightly in German Blackletter. What interested me, however, were the over 70 full-page, full-color plates (on heavy paper) that provide examples of virtually every Nazi flag, insignia, patterns for official Nazi Party office signs, special armbands for the Reichsparteitag (Reichs Party Day), and Honor Badges. The book “over-explains the obvious” and leaves no Nazi Party organization question, regardless of how minute, unanswered.

JAMEL, Germany — This is a town taken over by neo-Nazis.

Wooden signposts by the main road point to Vienna, Paris, and Braunau am Inn – the birthplace of Adolf Hitler. A far-right leader runs his demolition company from home, its logo featuring a man smashing a Star of David with a sledgehammer.

Every few months, townsfolk host outdoor parties where guests sing “Hitler is my Fuehrer” to chants of “Heil” around a massive bonfire.

Jamel is the most extreme manifestation of a chilling phenomenon in the former communist East Germany: a creeping encroachment of neo-Nazism that makes Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania one of only two states where Germany’s biggest far-right party, the National Democratic Party, or NPD, sits in parliament.

The extreme-right is believed to be behind some 40 attacks in the state over the past year, including stones thrown through windows of political parties and fireworks blown up in a prosecutor’s mailbox. Last year in Jamel, witnesses say, a neo-Nazi punched a visitor and shouted his allegiance to Hitler.

The state has Germany’s highest unemployment rate outside Berlin, at 12.7 percent in December, and few industries – fueling xenophobia the neo-Nazis have capitalized on. Only 2 percent of the population is foreign born, but officials say that lack of immigrant contact itself has reinforced suspicions.

For more information, see original article.

Back in the halcyon days following George W Bush’s inauguration, detractors and opponents of many stripes referred to W and his administration as Nazi’s. Even before the days of borderline fascist government policies like the PATRIOT ACT or warrantless wiretapping and torture apologists, lefties and others handed out poorly Xeroxed pamphlets featuring W’s face with a Hitler mustache.

Now, the jack boot is on the left foot, with hard line right wing conservatives dropping the Nazi card when referring to all things not Right as some form or another of Nazism. Most recently, Fox News chief Roger Ailes called the top brass at NPR “the left wing of Nazism” and said they have a “Nazi attitude.” Allies’ comments refer to the firing of NPR news analyst Juan Williams, after he told Bill O’Reilly that Muslims make him “nervous.”

It seems somewhere along the line the word “Nazi” devolved to something of a schoolyard insult like “dork” or “geek” on the political playground. The fetish American partisan politics has for labeling the opposition party didn’t just show up around the year 2000. Clinton, George H.W. Bush and Reagan all had their detractors shouting “Nazi.”

Read the full post at Diatribe Media

A secret history of the United States government’s Nazi-hunting operation concludes that American intelligence officials created a “safe haven” in the United States for Nazis and their collaborators after World War II, and it details decades of clashes, often hidden, with other nations over war criminals here and abroad.

The 600-page report, which the Justice Department has tried to keep secret for four years, provides new evidence about more than two dozen of the most notorious Nazi cases of the last three decades.

It describes the government’s posthumous pursuit of Dr. Josef Mengele, the so-called Angel of Death at Auschwitz, part of whose scalp was kept in a Justice Department official’s drawer; the vigilante killing of a former Waffen SS soldier in New Jersey; and the government’s mistaken identification of the Treblinka concentration camp guard known as Ivan the Terrible.

The report catalogs both the successes and failures of the band of lawyers, historians and investigators at the Justice Department’s Office of Special Investigations, which was created in 1979 to deport Nazis.

Perhaps the report’s most damning disclosures come in assessing the Central Intelligence Agency’s involvement with Nazi émigrés. Scholars and previous government reports had acknowledged the C.I.A.’s use of Nazis for postwar intelligence purposes. But this report goes further in documenting the level of American complicity and deception in such operations.

The Justice Department report, describing what it calls “the government’s collaboration with persecutors,” says that O.S.I investigators learned that some of the Nazis “were indeed knowingly granted entry” to the United States, even though government officials were aware of their pasts. “America, which prided itself on being a safe haven for the persecuted, became — in some small measure — a safe haven for persecutors as well,” it said.

The report also documents divisions within the government over the effort and the legal pitfalls in relying on testimony from Holocaust survivors that was decades old. The report also concluded that the number of Nazis who made it into the United States was almost certainly much smaller than 10,000, the figure widely cited by government officials.

The Justice Department has resisted making the report public since 2006. Under the threat of a lawsuit, it turned over a heavily redacted version last month to a private research group, the National Security Archive, but even then many of the most legally and diplomatically sensitive portions were omitted. A complete version was obtained by The New York Times.

The Justice Department said the report, the product of six years of work, was never formally completed and did not represent its official findings. It cited “numerous factual errors and omissions,” but declined to say what they were.

More than 300 Nazi persecutors have been deported, stripped of citizenship or blocked from entering the United States since the creation of the O.S.I., which was merged with another unit this year…

[continues in the New York Times]

Military psy ops aren’t limited to leaflets, propaganda broadcasts, and Korean pop music. In the past, the US military has played on their opponent superstitions of vampires, ghosts, and astrology. Here are some strange examples.

In World War II, US forces exploited the Nazi’s predilection to put stock in superstitions and the occult. The Rand Corporation’s 1950 memorandum “The Exploitation of Superstitions for Purposes of Psychological Warfare” details how pseudoscience connoisseur Joseph Goebbels counteracted Allied attempts to strike fear into the superstitious strata of the German population.

Another curious incident noted in the Rand document occurs in Italy, where British military created a giant manikin to scare rural residents. A large, shambling creature was assembled to freak out superstitious locals…

Read More from Cyriaque Lamar on io9.com

Rich Iott, second from right, in a Nazi SS Waffen uniform.

First saw this on Bill Maher’s show over the weekend, he was discussing this story from Joshua Green on the Atlantic:

An election year already notable for its menagerie of extreme and unusual candidates can add another one: Rich Iott, the Republican nominee for Congress from Ohio’s 9th District, and a Tea Party favorite, who for years donned a German Waffen SS uniform and participated in Nazi re-enactments.

Iott, whose district lies in Northwest Ohio, was involved with a group that calls itself Wiking, whose members are devoted to re-enacting the exploits of an actual Nazi division, the 5th SS Panzer Division Wiking, which fought mainly on the Eastern Front during World War II. Iott’s participation in the Wiking group is not mentioned on his campaign’s website, and his name and photographs were removed from the Wiking website.

When contacted by The Atlantic, Iott confirmed his involvement with the group over a number of years, but said his interest in Nazi Germany was historical and he does not subscribe to the tenets of Nazism. “No, absolutely not,” he said. “In fact, there’s a disclaimer on the [Wiking] website. And you’ll find that on almost any reenactment website. It’s purely historical interest in World War II.”

Read More on the Atlantic

Alice Miller compares the rules of an abusive family with those of Nazi Germany and comes to some interesting, though not really surprising, conclusions:

The Führer once told his secretary that during one of the regular beatings given him by his father he was able to stop crying, to feel nothing, and even to count the thirty-two blows he received.

In this way, by totally denying his pain, his feelings of powerlessness, and his despair- in other words, by denying the truth – Hitler made himself into a master of violence and of contempt for human beings. The result was a very primitive person, incapable of any empathy for other people. He was mercilessly and constantly driven to new destructive acts by his latent feelings of hatred and revenge. After millions had been forced to die for this reason, those feelings still haunted him in his sleep. Hermann Rauschning reports nocturnal paroxysms of screaming on the Führer’s part, along with “inexplicable counting”, which I trace back to the counting he did during the beatings of his childhood. Hitler did not invent fascism; he found it, like so many of his contemporaries) prefigured in the totalitarian regime of his family. The National Socialist version of fascism, however, does bear unmistakable traces of Hitler’s childhood. But his early experience was by no means an exception. Thus, neither Gerhart Hauptmann nor Martin Heidegger nor many other celebrated intellects of the day were able to see through Hitler’s madness. To do so, they would have had to be able to see through the madness of their own upbringing.

Hitler could make Europe and the world into the battlefield of his childhood because in the Germany of that time there were millions of people who had experienced the same kind of upbringing he had. Although not necessarily conscious of the fact, they took the following principles to be self-evident:

1. Not life but order and obedience are the highest values.
2. Only by means of violence can order be created and preserved.
3. Creativity (embodied in the child) represents a danger for the adult and must be destroyed.
4. Obeying one’s father absolutely is the highest law.
5. Disobedience and criticism are unthinkable because they are punished with beatings or the threat of death.
6. The living, vital child must be turned as early as possible into an obedient robot, a slave.
7. Undesirable feelings and real needs must therefore be suppressed as vigorously as possible.
8. Mothers must never protect their children from punishment by the father but after each incidence of torture must preach to them to honor and love their parents.

Fortunately, there were persons now and again with whom a child could find refuge from this totalitarian regime, and perhaps even experience love, respect, and protection. On the basis of these good experiences, even simply on the basis of the comparison they provided, a child could at least pass inward judgment on the cruelty endured and not want to inflict it in turn later on. But when there were no witnesses to come to the rescue, the child had no choice in this bizarre scenario but to stifle every natural reflex such as anger or even laughter, and to practice absolute obedience daily in order to keep the father’s menacing behavior within bearable limits. It was this kind of early character training that Hitler was later able to exploit. In strict accordance with this system of child-rearing he then developed his Nazi ideology, which had the following practical consequences:

1. The will of the Führer is the highest law.
2. The Führer will forcibly create order and make Germany into the paradise of the Aryans, the master race.
3. Those who submit like robots to his orders will be rewarded.
4. Whoever dares to offer criticism will be sent to a concentration camp.
5. Jews and gypsies must be annihilated – men, women and children.
6. The disabled and mentally ill are likewise to be put to death.
7. Poles and Russians are fit to become useful slaves.
8. Free art is dangerous and “degenerate”; like every other form of free creativity, It must be persecuted.

Without the numerous documentary films that attest to the frenzied acclaim Hitler received, no one today would believe that a madman with this ideology of contempt for human beings could generate so much enthusiasm. How was it at all possible that Hitler found such an immense number of followers? By promising his people a solution to all their problems and by offering them a scapegoat? Certainly. But that alone would not have been enough. In order to use untold numbers of people as marionettes, he had to make his promises in the style of the domineering, violent father most of his followers knew, feared, and admired.

Read more here.

In a French-themed café a block from the teeming beach, producer Noemi Schory explained why her new Holocaust documentary, “An Unfinished Film,” did not deserve the R rating that the MPAA handed down last week after a final appeal.

Yes, she said, the film has shocking images: corpses on the streets of the Warsaw Ghetto, starving children, a mass grave. And some nudity: naked men, and then women, entering a ritual bath.

It is a harsh film, even a brutal one. But it is also an historical document that until now has been unseen by the public, and whose purpose remains a mystery.

“I am upset about (the rating) theoretically, and practically this will create difficulties,” she said, ignoring an iced lemonade. “It puts up another obstacle to seeing it. “

With whichever rating, ‘An Unfinished Film’ is not a typical Holocaust documentary. Instead it investigates a mysterious Nazi movie production, a 30-day shoot inside the Warsaw Ghetto conducted by three Nazi film crews, shortly before it was liquidated in 1942.

The film is far too elaborate to have been a mere newsreel propaganda exercise.

There were many staged scenes of “wealthy” Jews living opulently inside the ghetto, juxtaposed with the degradation of the poor Jews there dying of starvation and disease…

[continues at WaxWord]

A new strain of Nazism has found an unlikely home: Mongolia.

Once again, ultra-nationalists have emerged from an impoverished economy and turned upon outsiders. This time the main targets come from China, the rising power to the south.

Groups such as Tsagaan Khass, or White Swastika, portray themselves as patriots standing up for ordinary citizens in the face of foreign crime, rampant inequality, political indifference and corruption.

Dayar Mongol threatened to shave the heads of women who sleep with Chinese men. Three years ago, the leader of Blue Mongol was convicted of murdering his daughter’s boyfriend, reportedly because the young man had studied in China.

Though Tsagaan Khass leaders say they do not support violence, they are self-proclaimed Nazis. “Adolf Hitler was someone we respect. He taught us how to preserve national identity,” said the 41-year-old co-founder, who calls himself Big Brother.

“We don’t agree with his extremism and starting the second world war. We are against all those killings, but we support his ideology. We support nationalism rather than fascism.”

It is, by any standards, an extraordinary choice. Under Hitler, Soviet prisoners of war who appeared Mongolian were singled out for execution. More recently, far-right groups in Europe have attacked Mongolian migrants.

Source: U.S. Army Europe, via Flickr

This weekend marks the 65th anniversary of V-E Day, the end of the Second World War in Europe. In Russia, and other countries of the former Soviet Union, May 9 marks the capitulation of Nazi Germany. Victory Day (День Победы) is a major public holiday there, vested with almost sacred meaning.

But this year’s military parade in Red Square is particularly unusual: It’s the first time active-duty U.S. troops have been invited to march in the ceremony. Pictured here are soldiers of Co. C, 2nd Battalion, 18th Infantry Regiment, part of the 170th Brigade Combat Team, in front of St. Basil’s Cathedral in Moscow. They took part in the parade as part of a contingent of troops from the nations that defeated Hitler.

[Read more at Wired]

Paul Schaefer, 89, a German-born evangelical preacher who was convicted of sexually abusing 25 children while leading one of the world’s most notorious anti-Semitic and apocalyptic sects, died April 24 of a heart ailment at a prison hospital in Chile.

His enclave in southern Chile, Colonia Dignidad…doubled during the 1970s and ’80s as a detention and torture center for opponents of right-wing dictator Gen. Augusto Pinochet.

At the time of his death, Mr. Schaefer was still under investigation in the 1985 disappearance of mathematician Boris Weisfeiler, an American citizen who went missing while hiking near Colonia Dignidad.

Mr. Schaefer turned to preaching after serving in the German military during World War II. He traveled the German countryside with an acoustic guitar and a message of salvation through sexual abstinence. Armed with powerful charisma and a gift for public speaking, he collected hundreds of followers before eventually establishing an orphanage near Bonn.

Accused of molesting two boys at the orphanage, he fled to Chile in 1961 and started his commune on a picturesque ranch 225 miles south of Santiago. The enclave boasted its own landing strip, television station and power plant, as well as lumber, honey and brick-making businesses. Mr. Schaefer built a school and a hospital, winning over some local citizens by offering them free education and health care.

However, Colonia Dignidad’s darker side soon emerged. Former members of the sect told reporters and Chilean and German officials of Mr. Schaefer’s unsavory tendencies. He was always accompanied by a handpicked coterie of boys who ran his errands, brushed his hair and tied his shoes. He maintained total control over the lives of his followers, the former members said, forbidding contact with the outside world and using electric shocks and tranquilizers to punish those who broke his rules.

Babies were taken from their mothers at birth and raised in a communal nursery. All adults were known as “uncle” or “aunt”; Mr. Schaefer was called “permanent uncle.”

Mr. Schaefer avoided arrest for decades, largely because of his close relationships with political and military leaders — including Pinochet, who was brought to power by a 1973 coup d’etat. Thousands of political dissidents disappeared or were killed during Pinochet’s rule, and human rights groups say that many were taken to Colonia Dignidad, or Dignity Colony, where they were tortured in underground chambers.

In the history of the cinema, the German director Veit Harlan occupies an especially ignominious position. It is his name that is attached to “Jew Süss,” perhaps the most notoriously anti-Semitic movie ever made, a box office success in Nazi Germany in 1940 that was so effective that it was made required viewing for all members of the SS.

But what motivated Harlan to write and direct such a film? Was he a Nazi true believer, an opportunistic careerist or just a filmmaker too fearful of retribution to say no to Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi propaganda chief? Those are some of the questions that another German director, Felix Moeller, asks in “Harlan: In the Shadow of Jew Süss,” a documentary that opens a two-week engagement Wednesday at Film Forum in Manhattan.

“Harlan may be forgotten, but he was an influential figure, frequently mentioned in Nazi documents and in Goebbels’s diary,” Mr. Moeller said. “That interested me as a historian, but I also wanted to know what the younger generation thinks of this. We think we know everything, but when you ask what your grandfather did on the Eastern Front, what went on in your own family, it’s a different matter, and that story is important to me.”

Mr. Moeller’s film includes some snippets from “Jew Süss,” whose commercial exhibition or sale as a DVD is still prohibited in Germany and several other European countries. Set in the 18th century, it claims to be a dramatization of the true story of how a sinister, cunning Jewish financier, Joseph Süss Oppenheimer, took control of the duchy of Wurttemberg while preying sexually on a pure Aryan maiden, played by Harlan’s wife, Kristina Söderbaum…

[continues in the New York Times]

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UNBELIEVABLE! That’s all we can say about having Jim Marrs on this episode of The Black Fridays Podcast!

Our time was too short, but Jim graciously spoke with us about his book Crossfire, socialism in America, white gold, and his first novel, The Sisterhood of the Rose.

Jim is an American former newspaper journalist and author of books and articles on a wide range of alleged cover ups and conspiracies. Marrs is a prominent figure in the JFK conspiracy press and his book Crossfire was a source for Oliver Stone’s film JFK.

He has also written books asserting the existence of government conspiracies regarding aliens, 9/11, telepathy, and secret societies. He was a news reporter in the Dallas–Fort Worth area and has taught a class on the Kennedy Assassination at University of Texas at Arlington. Marrs is a member of the Scholars for 9/11 Truth.

The companion article was titled “Now the U.S. Must Fight for Its Life” and intended to make readers consider the possibility of the United States losing World War II and falling under Nazi control. Thankfully, these are maps of a history that never occurred.

Undoubtedly, one of the prime reasons why Dick attracted attention from the FBI was a series of bizarre letters he penned to the Bureau in the early 1970s, in which he described his personal knowledge of an alleged underground Nazi cabal that was attempting to covertly manipulate science fiction writers to further advance its hidden cause.

And the nature of that cause was even more bizarre: to initiate a Third World War by infecting the American population with syphilis. On 28 October 1972, Dick wrote to the FBI and outlined his distinctly odd beliefs:

“I am a well-known author of science fiction novels, one of which dealt with Nazi Germany (called MAN IN THE HIGH CASTLE, it described an ‘alternate world’ in which the Germans and Japanese won World War Two and jointly occupied the United States).

“This novel, published in 1962 by Putnam and Co., won the Hugo Award for Best Novel of the Year and hence was widely read both here and abroad; for example, a Japanese edition printed in Tokyo ran into several editions. I bring this to your attention because several months ago I was approached by an individual who I have reason to believe belonged to a covert organization involved in politics, illegal weapons, etc., who put great pressure on me to place coded information in future novels ‘to be read by the right people here and there’, as he phrased it. I refused to do this.”

Read Nick Redfern’s “The Strange Tale of Solarcon-6″ in Fortean Times

For decades she has been seen as a decorative companion to Adolf Hitler, an apolitical “dumb blonde” whose attentions served as an occasional diversion for the Führer. But the first academic biography of Eva Braun draws a different picture of the dictator’s long-standing girlfriend, claiming historians have hugely underestimated the role she played in his life.

Berlin historian Heike Görtemaker reveals her as a politically committed woman who won Hitler’s affections, enjoyed a healthy sex life with him, sympathised with Nazi politics and gave him psychological support. Görtemaker spent three years researching her book, Eva Braun: Life With Hitler, due out this month from the prestigious CH Beck publishing house. She was able to draw on previously unseen or little-known documents, letters, diary entries and photographs.

“Eva Braun features in films, plays, novels and historical memoirs,” Görtemaker told the Observer, “but is always portrayed as the dumb blonde who had the misfortune to fall in love with a devil, and this is an image that needs to be corrected. She was capricious, an uncompromising advocate of unconditional loyalty towards the dictator who went so far as to die with him, and he adored her.”

Read More: Guardian

The recording was made on October 25 1956 in a courtroom in Berchtesgaden, site of the Fuehrer’s mountaintop home in Bavaria. The court was convened to officially declare the former leader of Nazi Germany dead so that his fortune and rights to his book “Mein Kampf” could be seized by the state government.

Among those giving evidence that day were Otto Guensche, an SS officer, and Heinz Linge, a valet, who first discovered the corpses of Hitler and his new bride Eva Braun.

On the recording, discovered by researchers for the German Spiegel TV channel, the men speak under oath of entering the Fuehrer’s study after hearing shots ring out on April 30 1945.

“When I entered to my left I saw Hitler on the sofa,” said Linge, who died in 1980.

“Hitler had his head bent forward somewhat and I could see a bullethole approximately the size of a penny on the right side of the temple.”

Guensche, who went to his death in 1983 refusing to give details about the dictator’s end, said: “Hitler sat on the arm of the sofa with his head hanging down on the right shoulder which was itself hanging limp over the back of the sofa. On the right side was the bullethole.”

Martin Bormann, Hitler’s secretary, was with them when they first entered Hitler’s study, the pair testified…

[continues in the Telegraph]