Tag: wwii

Hitler and The Two Popes

In the early 1930s, there was a concerted effort on the part of Adolf Hitler and his Nazi Party to consolidate power. The back end methods of this consolidation are well taught and well known, fear, intimidation, and street violence. However, the front part, the legitimate part, is less studied by the majority of the public.

Knowing that his radical Nazi party was in a precarious position electorally, Hitler set out to bring centrist parties into the fold. One such party was the Centre Party which had long been a bastion for political German Catholics. Hitler aimed to reduce the political power of the Catholic Church while receiving an international agreement with the Holy See. He achieved both brilliantly.

On their faces, it does not seem like the Pope and the Nazis would have much in common, and in many cases, they did not. There was one binding similarity between the two that brought them close together in the early 1930s: hatred for communism.

Both the new Nazi government in Germany as well as the Vatican in Italy were both publicly and diametrically opposed to communism. The Nazis were opposed to it for political reasons while the Catholics were opposed for religious reasons. Communism was a completely atheist system which had cracked down on Christianity in Russia and elsewhere leading to alarm in Vatican City.

(As a side note, the Papacy would remain staunchly anti-communist all the way through the Cold War.)

In 1933, Pius XI and one of his top advisors, Eugenio Pacelli who would succeed Pius XI as Pius XII, signed the Reichskonkordat with Germany. This sweeping document paved the way for Hitler to sweep the Catholic influence in Germany aside while giving him an international political victory on the world stage.

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Cold-case investigation names surprise suspect in Anne Frank’s betrayal

A six-year cold case investigation into the betrayal of Anne Frank has identified a surprising suspect in the mystery of how the Nazis found the hiding place of the famous diarist in 1944.

Anne and seven other Jews were discovered by the Nazis on Aug. 4 of that year, after they had hid for nearly two years in a secret annex above a canal-side warehouse in Amsterdam. All were deported and Anne died in the Bergen Belsen camp at age 15.

A team that included retired U.S. FBI agent Vincent Pankoke and around 20 historians, criminologists and data specialists identified a relatively unknown figure, Jewish notary Arnold van den Bergh, as a leading suspect in revealing the hideout.

Some other experts emphasised that the evidence against him was not conclusive.

Investigating team member Pieter van Twisk said the crucial piece of new evidence was an unsigned note to Anne’s father Otto found in an old post-war investigation dossier, specifically naming Van den Bergh and alleging he passed on the information.

The note said Van den Bergh had access to addresses where Jews were hiding as a member of Amsterdam’s wartime Jewish Council and had passed lists of such addresses to the Nazis to save his own family.

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80 Years After Pearl Harbor, We Now Know the Govt Knew the Attack Was Coming

On the morning of December 7, 1941, Japanese planes, launched from aircraft carriers, attacked the American fleet at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, sinking or heavily damaging 18 ships (including eight battleships), destroying 188 planes, and leaving over 2,000 servicemen killed.

The next day, President Franklin D. Roosevelt denounced this “day of infamy” before Congress, from whom he secured an avid declaration of war.

Up until then, however, Americans had overwhelmingly opposed involvement in World War II. They had been thoroughly disillusioned by the First World War:

  • although they had been told they would be fighting for “democracy” in that previous war, taxpayers learned from the postwar Graham Committee of Congress that they’d been defrauded out of some $6 billion in armaments that were never manufactured or delivered1;
  • atrocity tales about German soldiers (such as cutting the hands off thousands of Belgian children) had turned out to be fabrications;
  • the sinking of the Lusitania – the central provocation that ultimately led to the U.S. declaration of war – had been committed by Germany not to kill women and children (as propaganda claimed), but to prevent tens of tons of war munitions from reaching the European front. (Click here for a debunking of the Lusitania myth.)

When the Maine sank, the proactive Assistant Secretary of the Navy had been Teddy Roosevelt. After the 1898 Spanish-American War he became governor of New York, and by 1901 was President of the United States. When the Lusitania sank, the Assistant Secretary of the Navy was his distant cousin Franklin D. Roosevelt – who likewise went on to become governor of New York and then President.

Just as coincident: during the Lusitania affair, the head of the British Admiralty was yet another cousin of Franklin D. – Winston Churchill. And in a chilling déjà vu, as Pearl Harbor approached, these two men were now heads of their respective states.

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Files of the Nuremberg Trials published online

On the 75th anniversary of the Nuremberg trial of the major war criminals of World War II, Stanford University digitized the historical files of this trial and made them publicly available online. 

From November 20, 1945, to October 1, 1946, leading representatives of the National Socialist regime had to answer before an international military tribunal. The 24 main defendants included Hermann Göring, Rudolf Hess, Joachim von Ribbentrop, Wilhelm Keitel and Karl Dönitz.

The documents were provided by the International Court of Justice in The Hague. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington has digitized the documents. Stanford University made the files searchable using text recognition and divided them into types of documents such as charges, closing arguments, pardon, and witness lists.

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The Plutonium Files: The US Government Injected Unsuspecting Citizens With Plutonium

In the mid-1940s the US was leading the world in atomic weapons development and the understanding of radioactive materials. Just ten years after plutonium had been discovered, the Manhattan Project was already close to creating a working atomic bomb. Such advances had not been made on the safe handling of such materials, however. This lack of understanding led to researchers on the project injecting people, unwittingly, with plutonium, to study the effects.

The Manhattan Project was the name of the major US research and development program that produced working atomic weapons. It began officially began in 1942, but similar, less intensive research had been ongoing since the late 1930s. The US took the idea of atomic weapons seriously in 1939 when President Franklin D. Roosevelt received the Einstein–Szilárd letter from Hungarian physicists. This letter warned the US about the potential German development of atomic weapons and was signed by Albert Einstein.

While it’s most famous for the development of the atomic bomb, the Manhattan Project encompassed a number of different paths of research at different sites.

Much of this was related to the incredibly complex development and production of the weapons themselves, but a small priority was placed on studying the health effects of the materials involved in the project.

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