Tag: nazis

Deep in Vatican Archives, Scholar Discovers ‘Flabbergasting’ Secrets

David Kertzer put down his cappuccino, put on his backpack and went digging for more Vatican secrets.

“There’s an aspect of treasure hunting,” said Mr. Kertzer, a 74-year-old historian.

Moments later he cut through a crowd lined up to see Pope Francis, showed his credentials to the Swiss Guards and entered the archives of the former headquarters for the Holy Roman Inquisition.

Over the last few decades, Mr. Kertzer has turned the inquisitive tables on the church. Using the Vatican’s own archives, the soft-spoken Brown University professor and trustee at the American Academy in Rome has become arguably the most effective excavator of the Vatican’s hidden sins, especially those leading up to and during World War II.

The son of a rabbi who participated in the liberation of Rome as an Army chaplain, Mr. Kertzer grew up in a home that had taken in a foster child whose family was murdered in Auschwitz. That family background, and his activism in college against the Vietnam War, imbued him with a sense of moral outrage — tempered by a scholar’s caution.

The result are works that have won the Pulitzer Prize, captured the imagination of Steven Spielberg and shined a sometimes harsh light on one of earth’s most shadowy institutions.

Mr. Kertzer’s latest book, “The Pope at War,” looks at the church’s role in World War II and the Holocaust — what he considers the formative event of his own life. It documents the private decision-making that led Pope Pius XII to stay essentially silent about Hitler’s genocide and argues that the pontiff’s impact on the war is underestimated. And not in a good way.

“Part of what I hope to accomplish,” Mr. Kertzer said, “is to show how important a role Pius XII played.”

The current pope, Francis, said “the church is not afraid of history,” when in 2019 he ordered the archives of Pius XII opened. But as Francis wrestles with how forcefully to condemn a dictator, this time Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, Mr. Kertzer has unearthed some frightening evidence about the cost of keeping quiet about mass killings.

Mr. Kertzer makes the case that Pius XII’s overriding dread of Communism, his belief that the Axis powers would win the war, and his desire to protect the church’s interests all motivated him to avoid offending Hitler and Mussolini, whose ambassadors had worked to put him on the throne. The pope was also worried, the book shows, that opposing the Führer would alienate millions of German Catholics.

The book further reveals that a German prince and fervent Nazi acted as a secret back channel between Pius XII and Hitler, and that the pope’s top Vatican adviser on Jewish issues urged him in a letter not to protest a Fascist order to arrest and send to concentration camps most of Italy’s Jews.

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MI5 spy who fantasised about ‘eating children’s flesh’ escaped prosecution despite machete attack

An MI5 spy was able to leave the country whilst under investigation for having Nazi paraphernalia and threatening to kill, it emerged on Thursday night.

The informant, whose identity remains a secret after the Government won an injunction against the BBC, also escaped prosecution despite attacking his girlfriend with a machete.

As counter terror officers investigated Nazi paraphernalia and a diary in which he had written about killing “Jews” found at his home in the wake of the attack, the man moved abroad and began working for a foreign intelligence agency.

It is alleged officers had passed the allegations to MI5, who were effectively allowed to investigate one of their own.

As details emerged on Thursday night of his reign of violence and abuse against his former partners, officials were facing questions over how he got a job with MI5 and why taxpayer money was used to protect his identity.

His former girlfriend, known only as Beth, told the corporation: “I couldn’t speak out, he had men in high places who always had his back who would intervene and kill me if I ever spoke out.”

After she filmed him attacking her with a machete, she informed the police, but the case was dropped after they failed to take statements or copies of the video.

The whereabouts of the man known only as X, who is a foreign national, are currently unknown.

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BUFFALO MASS SHOOTER CITES “GREAT REPLACEMENT THEORY” IN MANIFESTO WITH AZOV’S BLACK SUN ON COVER

Aside from the manifesto that investigators are still combing through to confirm authenticity, The Buffalo News said police in 2021 were notified when Gendron threatened violence to others at his local high school.

“A school official reported that this very troubled young man had made statements indicating that he wanted to do a shooting, either at a graduation ceremony, or sometime after,” a law enforcement official familiar with the case told the local paper. 

At the time, NY State Police investigated Gendron under the section of state mental health laws, and he was referred for a mental health evaluation.

The Biden administration responded to the mass shooting, saying, “A racially motivated hate crime is abhorrent to the very fabric of this nation. Any act of domestic terrorism, including an act perpetrated in the name of a repugnant white nationalist ideology, is antithetical to everything we stand for in America. Hate must have no safe harbor. We must do everything in our power to end hate-fueled domestic terrorism.”

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Nazis Are Actually Fine Now, According to the Southern Poverty Law Center and Anti-Defamation League

If you happened to be alive during the years of 2016 to 2020, you can probably recall the routine issuance of frantic bulletins that “Nazis” were suddenly on the march in the US. Not just that some ludicrous, ragtag group of self-identified Nazis could be occasionally spotted in the wild — which had always been a somewhat regular, albeit freakish occurrence. Rather, the idea was that full-bore ideological “Nazism” had surged as a genuinely formidable political force, and everyone needed to be extremely terrified of this.

Principally responsible for the alleged outbreak of pro-Nazi fervor, or so the prevailing theory went, was Donald Trump. He had either tacitly or deliberately fueled the Nazis’ rise, because associating himself with Nazis would definitely be a huge boon to his electoral fortunes. MSNBC anchor Joy Reid encapsulated this view when she warned in 2017 that “resurgent Neo-Nazism” had gripped the US under Trump’s rule. Reams of academic articles were published on the subject, wondering whether Trump was the new “American Führer”; it was a commonly-held belief that “Literal Nazis” had taken power. (As opposed to figurative Nazis). Evidence for the theory ranged from the individual emotional turmoil experienced by journalists, to Twitter trolls with cartoon frogs as their profile pictures, to allusive suggestions — including by former apparatchiks of the National Security State — that the existence of immigrant detention centers was proof a Nazi regime had seized the reins of state.

This fearful narrative was propelled by episodes which may now appear somewhat farcical in hindsight, but at the time were taken deadly seriously. One example was an alleged spate of anti-semitic hate crimes that occurred in 2017 — a series of “bomb threat” phone calls were placed to Jewish Community Centers. Even before any details had surfaced about the identity of the suspects, an outfit called the “Anne Frank Center” hysterically attributed personal responsibility for the incidents to Trump. Fans of dark humor were no doubt thrilled when it later emerged that the bomb threats had in fact been called in by a teenager in Israel, as well as a deranged former Intercept journalist — and not some MAGA-hat guy sitting in a corrugated shack in the backwoods of Arkansas. (The “Anne Frank Center” was being run at the time by a hardcore partisan Democratic operative in New Jersey, whom I personally met years ago when he was running a pro-LGBT group. Let’s just say the individual is a tad… excitable. Still, this individual’s bombastic anti-Trump screeds were credulously portrayed by media outlets as carrying the solemn moral weight of the fabled Holocaust victim.)

And so the ever-present specter of Actual Nazis running rampant, taking their direction from Führer Trump, loomed large over the American political scene. This understandably generated lots of fear and stress, most of which tended to be conveniently funneled into boosting the political prospects of Democrats. Even figures as milquetoast as former Maryland governor and 2016 presidential candidate Martin O’Malley, hardly anyone’s idea of an envelope-pushing thinker, proclaimed that the conditions in the US circa 2017 were reminiscent of the conditions in Germany circa 1933. Thus, all responsible citizens were obligated to heed the call for unshakeable “Resistance.” O’Malley typified the trend whereby standard-fare Democrats became incredibly radicalized in their style of rhetoric, even if their policy prescriptions remained relatively static. Always top of the agenda for ambitious liberals was to compete amongst themselves for who could express their Trump-related anxieties in the most apocalyptic terms. Which, of course, included the belief that Trump was governing on behalf of Nazis and/or was himself a Nazi.

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Journo: Is It Coincidence That Some CIA Torture Techniques are so Popular With Ukrainian Neo-Nazis?

While the US rushed to vilify Russia’s latest UN Security Council Arria-Formula summit on Kiev’s human rights violations, one might wonder as to why Ukrainian neo-Nazi torture sites have so much in common with CIA secret prisons, says Dutch journalist Sonja van den Ende.

“I participated in the UN Security Council Arria-Formula meeting on 6 May 2022″, says Sonja van den Ende, an independent journalist from Rotterdam, Netherlands. “The goal of this meeting was to present to the United Nations (UN) members evidence about war crimes committed by the Ukrainian Army in cooperation with the Azov Battalion which was provided by us, journalists on the ground, in Donbass. The evidence was presented in the form of videos and oral testimonies, from residents of the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics, especially Mariupol, Volnovakha and Melitiopol”.

However, the Western UN members, especially representatives from the US, the UK, Norway, Albania, and France, paid little if any attention to the Donbass people’s stories, according to the Dutch journalist. Furthermore, they behaved in an arrogant way, she adds.

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The Nazi Evil Behind Germany’s Wealthiest Companies

Supplying uniforms to the German empire, textile magnate Gunther Quandt made millions during World War I.  Shortly after, when electrification was booming worldwide, he gained control of one of the world’s largest battery-makers.  He soon acquired one of Germany’s primary arms and ammo manufacturers.  This was just the beginning.  He went on to gain stupendous wealth and power through deals with the Nazis.  The story of Quandt, as told in David de Jong’s Nazi Billionaires: The Dark History of Germany’s Wealthiest Dynasties, evokes awe and dread.  For it is about soulless profiteering and participation without any qualms in the enslavement and massacre of millions of Jews.

It is well known that many dynastic German companies owe their standing to their complicity — even willful participation — in Nazi evil.  De Jong investigated five key industrialists who funded Adolf Hitler’s rise to power, were complicit in horrendous crimes, and reaped billions from that cold-blooded investment: Quandt, automaker Ferdinand Porsche, Richard Kaselowsky of the Dr. Oetker Group, financier August von Finck, and industrialist Frederick Flick.  His book details their deals and post-war cover-ups.  It also tells how they were virtually absolved of all wrongdoing because the West needed Germany as a bulwark against Russia and its East European satellites.

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The US Could’ve Prevented This War Just By Protecting Kyiv From Nazis

As we hydroplane toward the brink of nuclear armageddon while Bono and the Edge play U2 songs in Kyiv, it’s probably worth taking a moment to highlight the fact that this entire war could have been avoided if the US had simply pledged military protection for Zelensky against the far right extremists who were threatening to lynch him if he enacted the peacemaking policies he was elected to enact.

To be clear, what we are indulging in here is entirely an act of fantasy. In imagining what would have happened if the US had pledged to protect the Ukrainian government from an undemocratic violent overthrow at the hands of fascists instead of waging a horrific proxy war, we are imagining a world in which the US government acts in the highest interest of all instead of working continuously to dominate the planet no matter how much madness and cruelty it needs to inflict upon humanity. A world in which the US hadn’t been taking steps toward the orchestration of this proxy war for many years.

With that out of the way, it’s just a simple fact that for a fraction of the military firepower the US is pouring into Ukraine right now, it could have prevented the entire war by simply protecting Ukrainian democracy from the undemocratic impulses of the worst people in that country.

When he was asked by The Nation’s Katrina vanden Heuvel last month what he thinks is preventing Kyiv from signing a peace agreement with Russia, John Mearsheimer, whose analysis of this conflict has been prophetic for many years, replied as follows:

I think that when Zelensky ran for president he made it very clear that he wanted to work out an arrangement with Russia that ended the crisis in Ukraine, and he won. And what he then tried to do was move toward implementing the Minsk II agreement. If you were going to shut down the conflict in Ukraine, you had to implement Minsk II. And Minsk II meant giving the Russian-speaking and the ethnic Russian population in the easternmost part of Ukraine, the Donbas region, a significant amount of autonomy, and you had to make the Russian language an official language of Ukraine.

 

I think Zelensky found out very quickly that because of the Ukrainian right, it was impossible to implement Minsk II. Therefore even though the French and the Germans, and of course the Russians were very interested in making Minsk II work, because they wanted to shut down the crisis, they couldn’t do it. In other words, the Ukrainian right was able to stymie Zelensky on that front.

When Mearsheimer says that the Ukrainian right was able to stymie Zelensky, he doesn’t mean by votes or by democratic processes, he means by threats and violence. In an article last month titled “Siding with Ukraine’s far-right, US sabotaged Zelensky’s mandate for peace,” journalist Aaron Maté wrote the following:

In April 2019, Zelensky was elected with an overwhelming 73% of the vote on a promise to turn the tide. In his inaugural address the next month, Zelensky declared that he was “not afraid to lose my own popularity, my ratings,” and was “prepared to give up my own position – as long as peace arrives.”

 

But Ukraine’s powerful far-right and neo-Nazi militias made clear to Zelensky that reaching peace in the Donbas would have a much higher cost.

 

“No, he would lose his life,” Right Sector co-founder Dmytro Anatoliyovych Yarosh, then the commander of the Ukrainian Volunteer Army, responded one week after Zelensky’s inaugural speech. “He will hang on some tree on Khreshchatyk – if he betrays Ukraine and those people who died in the Revolution and the War.”

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OKC Bombing Anniversary: Ex Neo-Nazi With Plot Knowledge Sits in Female Prison

On the 27th anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing, the deadliest domestic terror attack in U.S. history, an inmate believed to have knowledge about potential co-conspirators in that bombing languishes in a Texas prison awaiting a sex change.

Prison staff are in the process of retaining surgeons to perform the operation for the inmate, who now goes by the name Donna Langan.

Some 30 years ago, white supremacist Pete Langan was terrorizing the Midwest with a series of bank robberies he committed with the Aryan Republican Army (ARA)—hiding his secret life as transgender “Donna McClure” all the while.

According to Utah attorney Jesse Trentadue, Langan holds a much graver secret to this day.

Attorneys for the former Aryan bank robber, who has reportedly disavowed white supremacism, did not respond to interview requests. But Trentadue provided The Epoch Times with a sworn declaration from Langan, where he talks about his fellow ARA members sharing responsibility for the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City that killed 168 people, including 19 children on April 19, 1995.

According to Langan’s 2007 sworn declaration, filed for a separate lawsuit Trentadue was pursuing against the FBI, some of his ARA cohorts were involved in the Oklahoma City attack. Langan said he first told the FBI of this in January 1996, when he was arrested in relation to the ARA’s numerous bank robberies, and after agents said his friends had betrayed him.

“When [FBI Special Agent Ed] Woods taunted me with the inference that my associates had betrayed me and would testify against me, I had had enough. I told him, ‘You’re going to have problems with your witnesses, because they have the blood of Oklahoma City on their hands,’” Langan said in the declaration.

“Subsequently, my attorney informed me that the government wanted to talk to me about the Oklahoma City bombing.”

At that time, the FBI was already investigating possible links between the ARA and the OKC bombing. Among many other clues, McVeigh’s sister Jennifer had disclosed that he sent her proceeds of bank robberies, which McVeigh said he committed with like-minded crusaders who were “at war with the system.”

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