Who bankrolled Hitler's rise to power?

 

So who bankrolled Hitler’s march to power in 1930s Germany? The answer is – the filthy rich.

In the early 1930s, the Nazis were facing financial ruin, with Goebbels saying their situation was ‘hopeless’. Then in stepped the bosses of two leading industrial companies - arms manufacturer Krupp and I G Farben, which would make the poison gas used in the Nazi gas chambers. They appear to have been impressed by Hitler’s promise to get rid of trade unions and communists.

Together they raised 3 million Deutschmarks (worth about £22 million today) for the Nazis, and by the end of 1933, Hitler was Chancellor and I G Farben alone had donated about 4.5 million DM (c £33 million). Leading figures in both companies would be tried at Nuremburg and convicted of using slave labour among other crimes.

Hitler was quite keen on building up a personal fortune. As early as 1925 he used party funds to buy himself a luxury Mercedes, with a personal chauffeur. He made a lot of money from his book Mein Kampf, helped by Germany’s practice of giving it to newly married couples as a wedding present, but the Fuhrer was not enthusiastic about paying taxes, and quickly got himself declared exempt.

Europe: stay or leave? Focus on fact - 8.

The proof that John Major is right. The Brexit campaign has become squalid and deceitful.

Today's fact: Boris Johnson says the EU is like Hitler, but actually the Nazis support Boris, Gove and Brexit.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3625503/The-neo-Nazi-swastika-breast-Vote-Leave-badge-vest-Holocaust-deniers-EDL-fascists-posing-Kray-twins-grave-violent-thugs-racists-hijacking-Brexit-campaign.html

This is what happens when you run a mendacious campaign, promising the impossible, stirring up fears and pandering to people's worst instincts.

World War Two - last war crimes trial?

In what may turn out to be the last World War Two war crimes trial, 91 year old John Demjanjuk has been found guilty of helping to murder more than 28,000 Jews at the Nazi death camp of Sobibor in what is now Poland.     He was sentenced to five years in prison, but will be released pending appeal.   

Demjanjuk told the court in Munich that he had not served as a guard at the camp, and that he was a prisoner of war.   The case turned on an SS identity card, which the defence claimed was a fake.   In all, an estimated 250,000 people were killed at Sobibor.

In the 1980’s, an Israeli court indentified Demjanjuk as ‘Ivan the Terrible’, a notorious guard at the Treblinka death camp, and sentenced him to death, but the country’s supreme court overturned the verdict after new evidence emerged.

Some of the relatives of those who died at Sobibor said the verdict on Demjanjuk was not the most important thing.    They were satisfied that a court in the city where the Nazi party was born had had to listen to the details of the industrialised murder machine that Hitler’s regime created.    (See also my blog of Nov 30, 2009.)

D-Day - civilian casualties

I’ve been reading Anthony Beevor’s impressive tome, D-Day. Beevor puts the number of French civilians killed in the months leading up to the 1944 Allied landings in Normandy at 15,000.

The Allies’ trump card was their air supremacy, but Churchill had mooted the idea of setting a ceiling of 10,000 for the number of French civilian casualties during the campaign. After that bombing would have to cease. The suggestion was rejected.

About 3,000 French people were killed in the first 24 hours of the operation, double the number of US service personnel who died. Among the places that suffered particularly heavy casualties during the invasion were Saint-Lo where about 300 died, and Caen, where the death toll was over 800.

The Germans, meanwhile, continued their systematic murder of French civilians. On June 8, 1944 they hanged 98 citizens of Tulle from the town’s trees. Two days later, in the most notorious massacre of all, they descended on Oradour-sur-Glane, shooting all the men, then herding the women and children into the church, which they set on fire. A total of 642 died, and the Nazis had got the wrong village. They were supposed to be taking revenge for an attack by the Resistance at Oradour-sur-Vayres, 15 miles away. Altogether, nearly 20,000 French civilians perished during the campaign.

The final trial?

What may turn out to be the last war crimes trial of World War Two is due to open today in Munich. 89 year old retired US car worker John Demjanjuk is accused of helping to murder more than 27,000 Jews at the Nazi death camp of Sobibor in what is now Poland.

Demnjanjuk, who was born in the Ukraine, was captured by the Nazis while fighting against them in the Soviet army. He denies even being at Sobibor. In the 1980’s he was accused of being “Ivan the Terrible” – a notorious guard at the Sobibor and Treblinka extermination camps, and sentenced to death in Israel, but the conviction was overturned as unsafe by the Israeli supreme court.

The first World War Two war crimes trials started as early as 1943 when the tide of war in the east turned, and the Soviets began to drive back the German army. The Allies set up a War Crimes Commission in October of that year hoping that it might cause the Nazis to hesitate over their mass murder project, but it did not.

The most famous of the war crimes trials began at Nuremberg in November 1945. Goering managed to cheat the hangman by swallowing poison in his cell, but another ten defendants were executed.

Katyn

Just seen Andrzej Wajda’s film Katyn, telling the story of the notorious massacre of up to 22,000 Polish officers and others seen as part of the country’s elite, during World War Two. It happened after those two champion mass murderers, Hitler and Stalin, teamed up to partition Poland. The film is a gripping but dignified portrayal of the ordeal of those who were killed, and of their loved ones left ignorant of their fate.

The crime began to come to light after the tyrants fell out, and the Soviet Union found itself conscripted to the allied side by Hitler’s invasion. The Polish government in exile in London agreed to co-operate with Stalin, but when a Polish general asked for 15,000 p.o.w.’s to be transferred to his command, the Russians replied that most of them had escaped to Manchuria, and could not be found.

In 1943, the Germans announced that they had found the mass graves of nearly 4,500 Polish officers in the Katyn forest, near Smolensk in the USSR. The victims had apparently all been shot from behind. In a dramatic change of story, the Russians now said the Poles had been working in the area, and had been killed by the invading Germans in August 1941. A Red Cross investigation, though, produced evidence that the massacre had happened early in 1940 when the area was under Soviet control.

Still, the Soviet lie remained the official version of the story in Poland throughout the time the Communists held power. After they fell, the fiction was no longer maintained, and in 1990, President Gorbachev admitted that the Soviet secret police had been responsible. Wajda’s own father was killed in the massacre.

The holocaust in context

Just back from Berlin, where I visited the Jewish Museum for the first time. Not to be missed. The holocaust, of course, provides the prism through which you view every exhibit, and the red thread that guides you through the collection moves relentlessly towards it, but there is more, much more.

We know Jews settled in Germany as early as Roman times. Routinely, they faced discrimination. They were banned from craftsmen’s guilds, and there were professions they could not enter. Handily, though, they could lend money at interest which, for a long time, Christians were not allowed to do. Now there was always plenty of demand for borrowed money, especially among ambitious or improvident princes, so, not surprisingly, many Jews did become moneylenders , and, in the grand old tradition of “blame the victim”, were stigmatised for it.

Three German cities – Mainz, Speyer and Worms – became Europe’s centres for Jewish erudition in the Middle Ages. Persecution and murder, though, really began to take off around the time of the Crusades. Then the Jews got the blame for the Black Death in the fourteenth century (see my blog of March 31), and suffered more massacres.

When the German Empire was founded in 1871, Jews notionally became full and equal citizens, but anti-Semitism remained a powerful force. Twelve thousand Jews died fighting for Germany in World War One. (It was, incidentally, a Jewish officer who recommended Adolf Hitler for the Iron Cross.) That, though, counted for nothing when roaring inflation and mass unemployment swept the Nazis to power.

About half of Germany’s Jewish population managed to escape, but the Nazis murdered 200,000. After World War Two, around 20,000 Jews settled in Germany, and today there are more than 100,000 – many of them recent arrivals from the Soviet Union.

Palestine - a scandal ignored

The western media is devoting lots of space to the shenanigans over who is going to be Israel’s next Prime Minister, but suppresses news of how Israel continues to oppress the Palestinians in the territories it illegally occupies. People like the BBC present Benjamin Netanyahu as the right-wing Israeli candidate, with Tzipi Livni as the “centrist”! (Yes, that is the same Tzipi Livni who just a few short weeks ago massacred 1,300 Palestinians.)

What you can be sure of is that the outcome in Tel Aviv will make no difference to life for the millions of Palestinians living under an occupation that has now gone for 10 times as long as the Nazi occupation of France during World War Two. If you listen to those who support and bankroll the Israelis – Barrack Obama, Britain’s Labour government, the European Union – you will hear the refrain that if the Palestinians would just bow down to the Israelis, like Fatah has done in the West Bank, rather than resisting them, like Hamas is doing in Gaza, everything would be o.k.

Events on the ground constantly give the lie to that, but fortunately for our leaders, our media largely ignores them. Last week, Israeli troops invaded a West Bank village called Jayyous. They did the kind of things they did in the parts of Gaza they managed to penetrate – vandalising homes and schools, beating up local people, looting. They also kidnapped up to 90 people, to join more than 11,000 Palestinians they have already interned. These kidnappings go on the whole time. Last week the Israelis also abducted people from Jenin, Nablus, Ramallah and two other West Bank towns.

The reason for the assault on Jayyous appears to have been that local people had dared to mount peaceful protests against Israel’s Berlin-style wall which has robbed the village of thousands of olive and fruit trees in addition to a crucial part of its water supply. The Israelis are reportedly planning to use some of the land they have stolen to expand one of their settlements.

Two related anniversaries

On this day......76 years ago, Adolf Hitler was sworn in as Chancellor of Germany. In the dying months of the First World War, Hitler had been awarded the Iron Cross (the officer who recommended him for the decoration was Captain Hugo Guttman, a Jew). After the war, his dream of becoming an artist never came true, and he went off to run the propaganda operation of the National Socialist (Nazi) party.

After an abortive Nazi coup, he spent nine months in prison, and used the time to write the first volume of Mein Kampf in which he denounced Communism and the Jews. During the 1920’s the Nazis never managed to poll more than 6.5% in Reichstag elections, but then came Hitler’s big break – the Great Depression. Terrified by the spectre of Communism, big business began bankrolling him, and the rest is disaster history. The Nazis were setting up concentration camps within weeks, and through murder, forced labour, starvation, medical experiments etc, they killed perhaps 20 million people.

On the 12th anniversary of Hitler’s coming to power, on January 30, 1945, a ship named the Wilhelm Gustloff was carrying German refugees along with soldiers and sailors across the Baltic away from the advancing Russian forces. There were up to 10,500 people on board when she was hit by a torpedo from a Soviet submarine. It is believed that not more than 1,000 survived, making this the worst shipwreck in history.