Lt. Col. Max Klaar (left) Bundeswehr (retired) embraces Merrit P. Drucker, retired US Army major at a ceremony in Washington. Photo: Monica Frim.

World War Two stopped in 1945, but it did not end.

The death rate among soldiers and civilians in Germany increased. No peace treaty was signed between Germany and its former opponents. And according to many Germans, there is still no real peace either, because the country is occupied and lacks a treaty.

It is identified by the United Nations as a “Hostile State;” the propaganda which helped to start the war still goes on against Germany; the conquerors have never been called to account for the atrocities they inflicted on their German prisoners of war, or for the deaths by forced starvation of millions of German civilians. Thuggish fascists still threaten freedom of speech. Thousands of political prisoners have been sentenced to jail in Germany for expressing opinions tolerated among the conquerors.

All that has suddenly started to change because a retired US Army officer, Merrit P. Drucker, read my book entitled Other Losses, which describes in gruesome detail the dying agonies of a million German prisoners of war in American and French camps after World War Two. Drucker, who had been posted to Rheinberg in 1989,  investigated the book’s claims in archives in Germany and the USA to ascertain its veracity, and has now written a letter of apology to Max Klaar, Chairman of German Soldiers Association and formerly a lieutenant colonel in the Bundeswehr, apologizing for the fate of German prisoners of war in US Army camps in 1945.

“Starting in April, 1945, the US Army and the French army casually annihilated about one million captives, most of them in American camps,” said Army Senior Historian Col. Ernest F. Fisher (retired) in his foreword to the book.

Fisher was present on October 31 2011 at an emotional ceremony in Washington launching the new American edition of Other Losses. The book has been a world-wide best-seller for 22 years, but according to a Washington bookseller, was “deep-sixed” in the US when a small edition appeared here two decades ago.

Accepting the apology in Washington, Klaar presented a 14-point proposal to end the war both formally and prasctically. According to Klaar, Germans are today a “nation of wounded souls” constantly suffering the war-guilt and shame of a criminal past which the conquerors are constantly re-inflicting on them.

Anyone in Germany who speaks today of the crimes inflicted on Germans themselves after the war, is shouted down by the Anti-Fascist movement, which threatens violence against owners of venues where opponents are scheduled to speak out against political correctness. This fascistic Anti-Fa movement is scarcely known outside Germany but it has attained powerful control over public expression there. Many are silenced, many are arrested and many jailed for speaking out on the subject of allied atrocities which are deemed by Anti-Fa reasoning to diminish German guilt. Political correctness in Germany as in many other countries dictates that only the Germans were the criminals of World War Two; but in Germany itself, to say that they too were victimized courts violence, criminal prosecution and a jail sentence.

Drucker’s apology derives from a sense of the injustice of the US behavior, and a determination “to see this thing right,” by which he means making amends as far as possible for the horrors inflicted on the prisoners themselves and their families. I started research for the book because, by chance, working on a book about the French Resistance, I saw the silhouette of a terrific and half-known story that had to be revealed. Many times I was told by Germans who were in the allied death-camps, “Thank you. No German could have told this story.”

James Bacque contributed the essay “A Truth So Terrible” to the disinformation anthology Abuse Your Illusions.

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’.

It is unlikely that Bacon’s cipher system was ever used for the transmission of military secrets, in the seventeenth century or in the twentieth. But for roughly a century from 1850, it set the world of literature on fire.

A passion for puzzles, codes, and conspiracies fueled a widespread suspicion that Shakespeare was not the author of his plays, and professional and amateur scholars of all sorts spent extraordinary amounts of time, energy, and money combing Renaissance texts in search of signatures and other messages that would reveal the true identity of their author. Even after the recent publication of James Shapiro’s comprehensive history of the authorship controversy, Contested Will, it is difficult for us to appreciate the depth of conviction — among writers as diverse and as distinguished as Mark Twain, Walt Whitman, Sigmund Freud, Henry James, Henry Miller, and even Helen Keller — that Shakespeare’s texts contained the secret solution to what was widely considered to be “the Greatest of Literary Problems.”

Bacon became (for a while) the leading candidate, and his biliteral cipher — Renaissance England’s first and clearest statement about how to hide texts within texts — seemed to offer the “Baconians” (as his champions were known) the key that everyone was looking for.

More at Cabinet Magazine

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]

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

The celebratory event took place on Tuesday evening, November 5, 1946 at the Officers’ Club of the Army War College in Washington, D.C. The occasion was to mark the disbanding of Joint Army-Navy Task Force Number One, the body that organized and oversaw the first post-war atomic tests in the Pacific. These highly publicized detonations on Bikini Atoll are remembered today, if at all, for displacing an entire indigenous population of islanders, for inspiring a revealing line of swimwear for women and for unleashing the myth that movie star Rita Hayworth’s image was once affixed to an A-bomb.

Read More on CONELRAD Adjacent

In the early morning hours of July 16, 1945, some of the greatest scientific minds of a generation gathered in the New Mexican desert to watch the results of their unprecedented, world-changing experiment: to build the most powerful weapon in the world. But when they pressed the button on their bomb, nicknamed “Gadget,” they weren’t quite sure what would happen.

The general consensus was that the bomb would yield energy equivalent to 5,000 tons of TNT (the actual result as it was finally calculated was 21,000 tons). Robert Oppenheimer, the director of the Manhattan Project, had bet ten dollars against scientist George Kistiakowsky’s wager, with his entire month’s pay, that the bomb would not work at all. Enrico Fermi offered a wager on “whether or not the bomb would ignite the atmosphere, and if so, whether it would merely destroy New Mexico or destroy the world.”

Three weeks later — sixty-five years ago on August 6 — the world’s second atomic bomb, nicknamed Little Boy, would be detonated over Hiroshima, Japan, devastating the city and killing as many as 130,000 citizens. Three days later on August 9, a third atomic bomb, Fat Man, destroyed the city of Nagasaki and killed approximately 45,000 more Japanese.

Read More: Motherboard

Winston Churchill was accused of ordering a cover-up of a Second World War encounter between a UFO and a RAF bomber because he feared public “panic” and loss of faith in religion, newly released secret files disclose.

The former Prime Minister allegedly banned reporting of the “bizarre” incident, off the east coast of England, for half a century amid fears disclosures about unidentified flying objects would create public hysteria.

He is said to have made the orders during a secret war meeting with US General Dwight Eisenhower, the then commander of the Allied Forces, at an undisclosed location in America during the latter part of the conflict.

The claims are contained in thousands of pages of declassified files on UFOs, released on Thursday online by the National Archives.

The 18 files, which cover from 1995 to 2003, are made up of more than 5,000 pages of reports, letters, and drawings drawn from correspondence with the public and questions raised in parliament.

Read More in the Guardian

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]

Both the Vatican and the Italian royal family, the Savoys, who were the guardians and owners of the shroud, feared that the German leader, who had an interest in the esoteric, might try to steal the linen cloth.

Officially this was to protect it from possible bombing (in Turin). In reality, it was moved to hide it from Hitler who was apparently obsessed by it. When he visited Italy in 1938, top-ranking Nazi aides asked unusual and insistent questions about the Shroud.

The shroud, which is supposed to have wrapped Christ’s body after he was crucified, was returned to Turin in 1946 on the orders of Italy’s last king, Umberto II. While millions of people believe the shroud to be authentic, sceptics believe it is a medieval fake.

Letters have surfaced in Germany proving that the World War Two spy who inspired the hero the the Oscar-winning film The English Patient was no womaniser but a gay man in love with a young soldier called Hans Entholt.

The correspondence also indicate the Hungarian-born adventurer Count Laszlo de Almásy did not die of a morphine overdose after suffering terrible burns and dreaming of the woman he loved, the fate the befell the fictional hero played by Ralph Fiennes in the film.

Instead Almásy succumbed to amoebic dysentery in 1951 never having once slept with a woman.

While the Imperial War Museum in London holds reports he wrote for German intelligence in WW2 under lock and key, letters written by Almásy, who worked for Rommel’s Afrika Corps, have been found in Germany, confirming the long-time rumours about his sexuality.

The Heinrich Barth Institute for African Studies in Cologne has discovered the intimate correspondence penned by him.

[Read more at the Daily Mail]

New evidence from Russian archives suggests Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg, credited with rescuing tens of thousands of Hungarian Jews during the Holocaust, was alive after Soviets reported that he had died in a Moscow prison, a Swedish magazine and U.S. researchers reported Thursday.

The fate of Wallenberg, who was arrested in Budapest in January 1945 by the Soviet army, has remained one of the great mysteries of World War II.

The Soviets claimed he was executed July 17, 1947 but never produced a reliable death certificate or his remains. Witnesses claim he was seen in Soviet prisons or labor camps many years later, although those accounts were never verified.

Now, the archives of the Russian Security Services say a man identified only as Prisoner No. 7, who was interrogated six days after the diplomat’s reported death, was “with great likelihood” Wallenberg.

The security services reported the find last November to Susanne Berger and Vadim Birstein, two members of a research team that conducted a 10-year investigation into Wallenberg’s disappearance in the 1990s.

The researchers informed Wallenberg’s relatives in a letter released for publication Thursday. The findings also were reported in the Swedish magazine Fokus.

The information still has to undergo in-depth verification, Berger wrote in the letter, “but if indeed confirmed, the news is the most interesting to come out of Russian archives in over 50 years.”

[Read more at Yahoo News]

Here is another (controversial) chapter from my book 50 Things You’re Not Supposed to Know, published in 2003.

For more on me, look at The Memory Hole.

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The tattooed numbers on the forearms of people held and killed in Nazi concentration camps have become a chilling symbol of hatred. Victims were stamped with the indelible number in a dehumanizing effort to keep track of them like widgets in the supply chain.

These numbers obviously weren’t chosen at random. They were part of a coded system, with each number tracked as the unlucky person who bore it was moved through the system.

Edwin Black made headlines in 2001 when his painstakingly researched book, IBM and the Holocaust, showed that IBM machines were used to automate the “Final Solution” and the jackbooted takeover of Europe. Worse, he showed that the top levels of the company either knew or willfully turned a blind eye.

A year and a half after that book gave Big Blue a black eye, the author made more startling discoveries. IBM equipment was on-site at the Auschwitz concentration camp. Furthermore:

Thanks to the new discoveries, researchers can now trace how Hollerith numbers assigned to inmates evolved into the horrific tattooed numbers so symbolic of the Nazi era. (Herman Hollerith was the German American who first automated US census information in the late 19th century and founded the company that became IBM. Hollerith’s name became synonymous with the machines and the Nazi “departments” that operated them.) In one case, records show, a timber merchant from Bendzin, Poland, arrived at Auschwitz in August 1943 and was assigned a characteristic five digit IBM Hollerith number, 44673. The number was part of a custom punch-card system devised by IBM to track prisoners in all Nazi concentration camps, including the slave labor at Auschwitz. Later in the summer of 1943, the Polish timber merchant’s same five-digit Hollerith number, 44673, was tattooed on his forearm. Eventually, during the summer of 1943, all non- Germans at Auschwitz were similarly tattooed.

The Hollerith numbering system was soon scrapped at Auschwitz because so many inmates
died. Eventually, the Nazis developed their own haphazard system.

Reference: Black, Edwin. “The IBM Link to Auschwitz.” Village Voice, 9 Oct 2002.

_____________________________________

Look for more 50 Things You’re Not Supposed to Know in the next 50 days
under the tag “50 Things” on disinfo.com.

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.

The Imperial Japanese Army’s notorious medical research team carried out secret human experiments regarded as some of the worst war crimes in history.

Its scientists subjected more than 10,000 people per year to grotesque Josef Mengele-style torture in the name of science, including captured Russian soldiers and downed American aircrews. The experiments included hanging people upside down until they choked, burying them alive, injecting air into their veins and placing them in high-pressure chambers.

Now new detail about their victims’ suffering could be revealed after the authorities in Tokyo announced plans to open an investigation into human bones thought to have come from the unit. A new search is also due to be carried out for mass graves that may contain more victims of human experiments.

Read More: Telegraph

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]

The only person officially recognized as a survivor of both the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombings at the end of World War II, Yamaguchi was in Hiroshima on a business trip on Aug. 6, 1945, when a U.S. B-29 dropped an atom bomb. He suffered serious burns to his upper body and spent the night in the city.

He then returned to his hometown of Nagasaki, about 190 miles [away], which suffered the second U.S. atomic bomb attack three days later.

Immediately after the war, Yamaguchi worked as a translator for American forces in Nagasaki and later as a junior high school teacher.

At 11:00 a.m. on August 9th, 1945, just a minute before the second atomic bomb in the space of three days was dropped on Japan, a B-29 bomber named The Great Artiste quietly dropped three canisters from the sky. Inside each of the canisters, alongside a shockwave gauge designed by American physicist Luis Alvarez, was an unsigned copy of the following letter.

The letter, written by Alvarez and two fellow scientists, was addressed to Japanese nuclear physicist Ryokichi Sagane —a man with whom Alvarez had previously worked at Berkeley — and pleaded with him to inform his ‘leaders’ of the impending ‘total annihilation’ of their cities.

The letter reached Sagane a month later after being found 50km from the centre of devastation: Nagasaki.

Alvarez and Sagane met again 4 years later, at which point the letter was finally signed.

Read the letter and transcript on Letters of Note

The Sisterhood of the Rose Will Save The World @disinfo #books #FreeFriday #Sisterhood http://bit.ly/70s4p0

And yes, the more you tweet this, the greater your chance is of receiving a free book.

For more information about The Sisterhood, please check out the companion website, www.SisterhoodoftheRose.org, and read this special message from the author.

Here’s a trailer we made the book:

Jim Marrs will be doing some radio interviews where he’ll discuss his new book, we’ll definitely keep you posted. He’ll be on Coast to Coast AM on Saturday, December 19th. In the meantime, the first FIVE chapters are available on Scribd for your reading pleasure. Enjoy!

When I announced to my publishers that my next book would be a novel, titled The Sisterhood of the Rose, I knew for sure that they were taken aback. As a well-known “conspiracy” writer, I’ve spent nearly fifty years chronicling the “unreality” of reality, whether it involved the still unanswered questions surrounding the JFK assassination, elite powers that influence world events right under our noses, or even the vast underreported evidence for extraterrestrial contact since we detonated the atomic bomb.

So why would I make it easier for the skeptics out there by venturing into a fictional realm, considering that my journalistic work has been a hard pill for these folks to swallow?

The Sisterhood of the Rose began when I met Celeste Levesque, whose remembrance of a past life was the result of her near-death experience in the 1980s. I was very fortunate that Celeste unwaveringly supported my efforts to translate her story of a previous life as Giselle Tchaikovsky, a wealthy American ballerina who created an international Sisterhood during World War II, into a coherent book. Together, we traveled to the Languedoc region of southern France, visiting the mysterious village of Rennes-le-Château and the Cathar stronghold at Montségur, searching for evidence of this Sisterhood. I have to say that I was surprised to meet several people over there that did say that they shared memories of the Sisterhood’s existence.

However, the journalist in me had to wrestle with “history” in multiple forms: the accepted historical record; the oral traditions that have been passed down to us today; and Celeste’s own recollections of her experiences in the 1930s and ’40s. These forms are usually not in complete agreement. As has been said many times: “History is written by the victors.” However, it still would be difficult to dispute certain events based on the overwhelming evidence and number of observers. For instance, the Soviet Union was attacked by Germany on June 22, 1941, and the Allies invaded Normandy on June 6, 1944. Certain historical persons and dates are deeply etched in our collective memory and are not subject to question.

The Sisterhood of the Rose turned out to be, without doubt, one of the toughest writing tasks I have ever taken on, and that’s saying a lot due to a long writing career that my faithful readers are well aware of (and I thank them for that!)

Reconciling Celeste’s account of Giselle Tchaikovsky and her Sisterhood with the published details of history was a real challenge, although a truly fascinating one. I deliberately chose to publish this project as a novel to allow myself the opportunity to convey information that I knew would be difficult to present in non-fiction format. As my fellow critical minds and readers know, conspiracies are rarely recorded or photographed.

In writing The Sisterhood of the Rose I was given an opportunity to pull back the curtain and reveal some of the hidden aspects of World War II, including the role of British Intelligence in orchestrating the flight of Deputy Führer Rudolf Hess; the still understated fact that Stalin was preparing to invade Europe which precipitated Germany’s “pre-emptive” attack known as Operation Barbarossa; and the shocking capture by Nazi forces of Solomon’s Treasure, the world’s greatest collection of wealth and ancient knowledge.

It was in fact this incredible treasure, coupled with the stolen loot gained from their European onslaught, which allowed top Nazis to escape to both North and South America and to continue their insane plans for world domination. In my previous book, The Rise of the Fourth Reich, I documented in great detail the creation, as well as absorption, of hundreds of corporations that today have evolved into the few dozen that dominate the economies of both America and Europe. In March 2009, President Obama mingled the regulation of the U.S. economy with the Financial Stability Board, a component of the Bank for International Settlements, which originally was a Nazi-controlled institution. As difficult as this is to accept, major financial players that have deep ties to the Nazi Germany of World War II do operate in the world today.

I also sincerely hope that The Sisterhood of the Rose clearly illustrates the bravery and ingenuity of men and women, both young and old, in opposing the Nazi war machines and technology which appeared at the time to be unconquerable. It’s when things look the darkest that it’s most important to realize certain men and women will come forward, even at the risk of their lives and fortune, under a shared desire of freedom for all. Anything a human being can make, another will break. But what is made can be repaired, by people we may never know…

Humanity is an incredibly ingenious and creative life force. If more of us would embrace this and follow their hearts rather than seek power over others, the world actually would be a better place. We could all take a lesson from Giselle and her Sisterhood of the Rose.

Who knows? War is still raging in our times and the great work is still unfolding. Depending upon your critiques and realizations, I contend that Giselle and her Sisterhood will continue their adventures in our times.

—Jim Marrs, December 2009

About the Author: A native of Fort Worth, Texas, Jim Marrs has worked as an investigative reporter for several newspapers, including the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.

Marrs’ in-depth investigation of UFOs, Alien Agenda, is the bestselling UFO book ever; Crossfire: The Plot That Killed Kennedy was a basis for the Oliver Stone film JFK and a New York Times bestseller, as were Rule By Secrecy and The Rise of the Fourth Reich.

When millions would have done anything to get out, one remarkable British soldier smuggled himself into Auschwitz to witness the horror so he could tell others the truth.

Denis Avey is a remarkable man by any measure. A courageous and determined soldier in World War II, he was captured by the Germans and imprisoned in a camp connected to the Germans’ largest concentration camp, Auschwitz.

But his actions while in the camp — which he has never spoken about until now — are truly extraordinary. When millions would have done anything to get out, Mr Avey repeatedly smuggled himself into the camp.

Now 91 and living in Derbyshire, he says he wanted to witness what was going on inside and find out the truth about the gas chambers, so he could tell others. He knows he took “a hell of a chance”.

More on BBC News

In December of 1944, whilst behind enemy lines during the Rhineland Campaign, Private Kurt Vonnegut was captured by Wehrmacht troops and subsequently became a prisoner of war. A month later, Vonnegut and his fellow POWs reached a Dresden work camp where they were imprisoned in an underground slaughterhouse known by German soldiers as Schlachthof Fünf (Slaughterhouse Five). The next month — February — the subterranean nature of the prison saved their lives during the highly controversial and devastating bombing of Dresden, the aftermath of which Vonnegut and the remaining survivors helped to clear up.

Vonnegut released the book Slaughterhouse-Five in 1969.

Below is a letter he wrote to his family that May from a repatriation camp, in which he informs them of his capture and survival:

Read the full letter (and transcript) on Letters of Note

NEW MUNICH—The new Sci-Fi Channel series Fallen Axis, which eerily depicts a world in which Germany actually lost the Second World War, premiered Tuesday evening to high ratings in an alternate universe to our own.

The much-anticipated television event is said to be the most ambitious ever produced by the science-fiction-themed network, which is a subsidiary of the Aryan Broadcasting Company. According to the early response, audiences in the alternate realm have been riveted by the show’s vision of an inverted existence wherein a defeated Germany has been completely neutered by the Allied powers.

“Imagine, if you will, a world in which Hitler’s glorious master plan had instead ended in ignominious failure, and the Allies had somehow emerged the victors,” the show’s creator, Leonhardt Riefenstahl, said during an appearance on Entertainment Heute Nacht. “It would be as if everything we know to be true — the fall of Russia, the invasion and surrender of the American continents, Heinrich Braun-Hitler’s consolidation of the various conquered states in 1973 — had never even happened.”

More on The Onion

Darges was the last surviving member of Hitler’s inner circle and was present for all major conferences, social engagements and policy announcements for four years of the war.

Much of his time after 1942 was either spent at Hitler’s eastern headquarters the ‘Wolf’s Lair’ at Rastenburg, East Prussia, or at his holiday home, the Berghof, on a mountain in Berchtesgaden, Bavaria.

“We all dreamed of a greater German empire,” he said. “That is why I served him and would do it all again now,” said the man who had a career after the war selling cars.

AACHEN, Germany — An 88-year-old former member of Adolf Hitler’s Waffen SS went on trial Wednesday for the wartime hit-style killings of three civilians in the Netherlands.

While in captivity after the war, Heinrich Boere admitted to the killings to Dutch authorities. But he has managed to avoid prosecution for decades — first escaping from the Netherlands before he could be brought to trial, then successfully eluding the courts in Germany.

Teun de Groot, the son of one of Mr. Boere’s victims and a co-plaintiff, said before the trial he hoped Mr. Boere would be convicted on the three counts of murder.

“I feel like it will go to a good result,” he said.

Inside the court, cries of “Nazis get out, no fascists here” broke out as two skinheads wearing black neo-Nazi-styled garb took seats in the back.

Mr. Boere faces the possibility of life in prison if convicted of the 1944 killings of a bicycle-shop owner, a pharmacist and another civilian while part of an SS death squad codenamed “Silbertanne,” or “Silver Pine.” …