How the Americans Supported Bush: We All Live in America

Hitler's Record Collection Surfaces In Moscow
By Georg Bönisch and Matthias Schepp in Moscow

Part of the music collection stored at the Führerbunker, Hitler's underground shelter during World War II, has been discovered in Moscow, where it lay in the attic of a former Soviet officer for decades. The Nazi leader apparently enjoyed listening to records made by his enemies.

Hitler visited the opera almost daily. And when the going got tough, apparently he didn't mind listening to music created by Jews.

The story sounds like the fairy tale "Open Sesame!"

It's set on a mid-May day in 1945 in war-ravaged Berlin. Lev Besymenski, the captain of the military intelligence service of the First Belarusian Front, is given a mission: Together with two other officers, he is to inspect the Reich Chancellery -- stormed just a few days before -- including the underground bunker where Hitler stayed during the war and eventually committed suicide.

Besymenski is an expert, and he also speaks German. He served as an interpreter during the arrest of Field Marshal Friedrich Paulus in Stalingrad in 1943 and had only recently, on 1 May, translated the news for Stalin from German General Hans Krebs that Hitler had died. Later he will reveal to the world what the Soviets long treated as something akin to a state secret -- that they found the remains of Hitler's corpse in the garden of the Reich Chancellery.

But on this day, he is standing in the imposing building on Berlin's Wilhelmstrasse. He has meticulously searched the headquarters of the Nazi regime for several hours. Suddenly the Soviet commander responsible for the building asks him what souvenir he would like to take with him.

His comrades have already helped themselves to cutlery engraved with the initials "A. H." They have selected leather cases containing medals and other trinkets. But Besymenski is thinking of something else. He asks the officer to open several large iron doors for him that have been secured with special locks.

"We were faced with a strange sight," he would write decades later: "Several rows of sturdy wooden boxes stood in each room, numbered and packed closely together." German service staff said the boxes were packed for shipment to the Berghof, Hitler's residence in Bavaria, but the trip never took place, according to Besymenski. The boxes were filled with crockery and various household effects.

Besymenski fills a box with souvenirs for himself and later takes it back to Moscow on a special train. Forty-six years will go by before his daughter Alexandra discovers the booty by chance.

It's August 1991, a pleasant summer day in the dacha settlement Nikolina-Gora close to Moscow, where the Besymenski family owns a house. The family has visitors, and steaming blinis are placed on the veranda table at lunchtime. Then it's time to relax. Besymenski sends his daughter into the attic to get badminton rackets.

A Record Collection from the Führerhauptquartier

It's dark and cramped up there, with boxes of books standing around. "My shin hit something solid," Besymenskaya -- who is 53 today -- recounts. "It was a stack of records." They are labelled with rectangular, finely serrated stickers that make her freeze. "Führerhauptquartier," the print on the stickers reads.

She rushes downstairs excitedly with her discovery. "Daddy, what's this, and why is it lying on the attic?" she asks. "Can't you see, they're records. I switched to CDs years ago," the 70-year-old grumbles. That's all he wants to say. "I sensed how uncomfortable Lev Besymenski was about the topic," one of his guests will later remember.

The reason for his nervousness was presumably that Besymenski, who became a respected historian and a professor at the military academy in Moscow after the war, was trying to prevent people from suspecting him of being a plunderer. Nowhere in his later books about Hitler does he mention what he personally took from Berlin to Moscow in 1945: parts of the record collection at the Führer's headquarters.

While it was customary at the time for the victors to take plentiful souvenirs back home, some of them went too far and became embroiled in scandal. Take the example of Marshal Georgy Zhukov. The man who won the battles of Moscow and Stalingrad and later became the Supreme Military Commander of the Soviet Occupation Zone in Germany made off with, among other things, "55 works of classical painting, six boxes containing expensive tableware and tea sets, nine golden watches and 713 pieces of silverware," according to Moscow secret police records. The booty came from the Prussian palaces in Potsdam near Berlin.

Music lover Besymenski, on the other hand, took from the Reich Chancellery what corresponded to his personal passion. He had been a frequent guest at the Moscow Conservatory before the war. He died in June of this year, at the age of 86. And last week, his daughter Alexandra allowed SPIEGEL to view the collection of about 100 shellac records.

Most of them are stored in red and some of them in blue albums. Each album contains about a dozen records. Some records are scratched and others are broken, but most are well preserved.

Album No. 1, weather-beaten due to the dampness and the temperature shifts in the attic of the Besymenski datcha, contains nothing particularly surprising. It includes the Piano Sonatas No. 24 in F-sharp major and No. 27 in E-minor by Ludwig van Beethoven, for example, or the overture to Wagner's "Fliegender Holländer," performed by the Orchestra of the Bayreuth Festspielhaus with Heinz Tietjen (the director of the Festspielhaus between 1931 and 1944) conducting.

Hitler's second passion, after architecture, was music. He went to the opera house almost daily during his time in Vienna to listen to the music of Beethoven, Wagner, Liszt or Brahms. But to him, only German music counted. Yet Besymenski's collection astonishingly contains works by composers the Nazis considered "subhumans," including Russian composers such as Pyotr Tchaikovsky, Alexander Borodin and Sergei Rachmaninov.

For example, the item with the inventory number "Führerhauptquartier 840" contains a recording by the Electrola company labeled "Bass in Russian with Orchestra and Chorus" -- a recording of the aria "The Death of Boris Godunov" by Russian composer Modest Mussorgsky, sung by Russian bass Feodor Chaliapin.

Another album contains nothing but works by Tchaikovsky with solo performances by star violinist Bronislav Huberman, a Polish Jew. "I feel this is a sheer mockery of the millions of Slavs and Jews who had to die because of the racial ideology of the Nazis," a stirred-up Alexandra Besymenskaya remarks today.

Taking Refuge in the Music of His Enemies

As Hitler, possessed by his manic idea of conquering the world, grew increasingly solitary and seldom faced the public anymore, he apparently tried to relax by listening to records. His radio operator Rochus Misch, who is 90 years old today and is the last surviving witness from the bunker, told SPIEGEL about how Hitler once ordered his servant to play a record following an intense argument with the command of the Wehrmacht at the Werwolf headquarters in Vinnytsia, Ukraine: "Then he sat there, absorbed in thought. The Führer probably wanted to distract himself," Misch says.

In moments like that, the otherwise bigoted Hitler apparently didn't care who the music was by -- notwithstanding the fact that he had always denied that Jewish people were capable of independent cultural achievement. In "Mein Kampf," he insists there has never been such a thing as Jewish art, and that the "queen of all arts," architecture, "owes nothing original to the Jews."

As late as his last directive to the soldiers on the Eastern Front from April 15, 1945 -- one day before the Soviet Red Army crossed the Oder River and prepared to siege Berlin -- Hitler ranted against the "mortal Jewish-Bolshevik enemy" from the Führerbunker beneath the garden of the Old Reich Chancellery.

But the dictator and his minions were quite capable of appreciating the works of Jewish artists. The record collection, which was presumably stored in the air-raid shelter beneath the New Reich Chancellery, includes recordings of musicians such as Austrian Jew Artur Schnabel. Schnabel left Germany immediately after the Nazis came to power in 1933. His mother, though, stayed behind and was deported to the Theresienstadt concentration camp and murdered by the Nazis.

Besymenski, himself Jewish, was surprised by the number of famous Russian names he discovered on the records from the bunker. "They were recordings of classical music, performed by the best orchestras in Europe and Germany, with the best solo performers of the time. ... I was surprised that it also featured Russian music," the historian wrote when he was pressured by his daughter three years ago, for the sake of posterity, to leave a written testimony of how he obtained the collection.

US troops had already discovered numerous records in a cavern in the Berghof in 1945 -- a different part of the musical collection that was compiled for Hitler and other high-ranking Nazis. Historian Philipp Gassert of Heidelberg University had access to some of these records when he was doing research in the United States. Like the records now rediscovered in Moscow, those examined by Gassert had small serrated labels.

Lev Besymenski sometimes listened to the Nazi records together with his best friends. Sometimes, he wrote, he also lent them to musicians -- included conductor Kiril Kondrashin and famous pianists Emil Gilels and Jakow Sak.

His daughter Alexandra says she will think calmly about what she wants to do with her father's collection, "over a glass of wine." That's the name of a cheeky soldier's song set to music by the court chapel master of Braunschweig, Franz Abt, in the 19th century. The number of the record is "Führerhauptquartier 779."





Hitler and Stalin were possessed by the Devil, says Vatican exorcist
By NICK PISA


Adolf Hitler and Russian leader Stalin were possessed by the Devil, the Vatican's chief exorcist has claimed.

Father Gabriele Amorth who is Pope Benedict XVI's 'caster out of demons' made his comments during an interview with Vatican Radio.

Father Amorth said: "Of course the Devil exists and he can not only possess a single person but also groups and entire populations.

"I am convinced that the Nazis were all possessed. All you have to do is think about what Hitler - and Stalin did. Almost certainly they were possessed by the Devil.

"You can tell by their behaviour and their actions, from the horrors they committed and the atrocities that were committed on their orders. That's why we need to defend society from demons."

According to secret Vatican documents recently released wartime pontiff Pope Pius XII attempted a "long distance" exorcism of Hitler which failed to have any effect.

Father Amorth said: "It's very rare that praying and attempting to carry out an exorcism from distance works.

"Of course you can pray for someone from a distance but in this case it would not have any effect.

"One of the key requirements for an exorcism is to be present in front of the possessed person and that person also has to be consenting and willing.

"Therefore trying to carry out an exorcism on someone who is not present, or consenting and willing would prove very difficult.

"However I have no doubt that Hitler was possessed and so it does not surprise me that Pope Pius XII tried a long distance exorcism."

In the past Father Amorth has also spoken out against the Harry Potter books, claiming that reading the novels of the teen wizard open children's minds to dabbling with the occult and black magic.

Father Amorth, who is president of the International Association of Exorcists, said of the JK Rowling books:"Behind Harry Potter hides the signature of the king of the darkness, the devil."

He said that Rowling's books contain innumerable positive references to magic, "the satanic art" and added the books attempt to make a false distinction between black and white magic, when in fact, the distinction "does not exist, because magic is always a turn to the devil."

Father Amorth is said to have carried out more than 30,000 exorcisms in his career and his favourite film is, according to Italian newspapers The Exorcist.


Why Germans Supported Hitler

By Jacob G. Hornberger

07/23/07 "FFF" --- - -It has long intrigued me why the German people supported Adolf Hitler and his Nazi regime. After all, every schoolchild in America is taught that Hitler and his Nazi cohorts were the very epitome of evil. How could ordinary German citizens support people who were so obviously monstrous in nature?

Standing against the Nazi tide was a remarkable group of young people known as the White Rose. Led by Hans and Sophie Scholl, a German brother and sister who were students at the University of Munich, the White Rose consisted of college students and a college professor who risked their lives to circulate anti-government pamphlets in the midst of World War II. Their arrest and trial was depicted in the German movie Sophie Scholl: The Final Days, which was recently released on DVD in the United States.

Of all the essays on liberty I have written in the past 20 years, my favorite is “The White Rose: A Lesson in Dissent”, which I am pleased to say was later reprinted in Voices of the Holocaust, an anthology on the Holocaust for high-school students. The story of the White Rose is the most remarkable case of courage I have ever come across. It even inspired me to visit the University of Munich a few years ago, where portions of the White Rose pamphlets have been permanently enshrined on bricks laid into a plaza at the entrance to the school.

A contrast to the Scholl movie is another recent German movie, Downfall, which details Hitler’s final days in the bunker, where he committed suicide near the end of the war. Among the people around Hitler was 22-year-old Traudl Junge, who became his secretary in 1942 and who faithfully served him in that capacity until the end. For me, the most stunning part of the film occurred at the end, when the real Traudl Junge (that is, not the actress who portrays her in the film) says,

All these horrors I’ve heard of ... I assured myself with the thought of not being personally guilty. And that I didn’t know anything about the enormous scale of it. But one day I walked by a memorial plate of Sophie Scholl in the Franz-Joseph-Strasse.... And at that moment I actually realized ... that it might have been But to get to know things.
So here were two separate roads taken by German citizens. Most Germans took the road that Traudl Junge took — supporting their government in time of deep crisis. A few Germans took the road that Hans and Sophie Scholl took — opposing their government despite the deep crisis facing their nation.

Why the difference? Why did some Germans support the Hitler regime while others opposed it?

Each American should first ask himself what he would have done if he had been a German citizen during the Hitler regime. Would you have supported your government or would you have opposed it, not only during the 1930s but also after the outbreak of World War II?

After all, it’s one thing to look at Nazi Germany retrospectively and from the vantage point of an outside citizen who has heard since childhood about the death camps and of Hitler’s monstrous nature. We look at those grainy films of Hitler delivering his bombastic speeches and our automatic reaction is that we would have never supported the man and his political party. But it’s quite another thing to place one’s self in the shoes of an ordinary German citizen and ask, “What would I have done?”

What we often forget is that many Germans did not support Hitler and the Nazis at the start of the 1930s. Keep in mind that in the 1932 presidential election, Hitler received only 30.1 percent of the national vote. In the subsequent run-off election, he received only 36.8 percent of the vote. It wasn’t until President Hindenburg appointed him as chancellor in 1933 that Hitler began consolidating power.

Among the major factors that motivated Germans to support Hitler during the 1930s was the tremendous economic crisis known as the Great Depression, which had struck Germany as hard as it had the United States and other parts of the world. What did many Germans do in response to the Great Depression? They did the same thing that many Americans did — they looked for a strong leader to get them out of the economic crisis.


Hitler and Franklin Roosevelt

In fact, there is a remarkable similarity between the economic policies that Hitler implemented and those that Franklin Roosevelt enacted. Keep in mind, first of all, that the German National Socialists were strong believers in Social Security, which Roosevelt introduced to the United States as part of his New Deal. Keep in mind also that the Nazis were strong believers in such other socialist schemes as public (i.e., government) schooling and national health care. In fact, my hunch is that very few Americans realize that Social Security, public schooling, Medicare, and Medicaid have their ideological roots in German socialism.

Hitler and Roosevelt also shared a common commitment to such programs as government-business partnerships. In fact, until the Supreme Court declared it unconstitutional, Roosevelt’s National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA), which cartelized American industry, along with his “Blue Eagle” propaganda campaign, was the type of economic fascism that Hitler himself was embracing in Germany (as fascist ruler Benito Mussolini was also doing in Italy).

As John Toland points out in his book Adolf Hitler, “Hitler had genuine admiration for the decisive manner in which the President had taken over the reins of government. ‘I have sympathy for Mr. Roosevelt,’ he told a correspondent of the New York Times two months later, ‘because he marches straight toward his objectives over Congress, lobbies and bureaucracy.’ Hitler went on to note that he was the sole leader in Europe who expressed ‘understanding of the methods and motives of President Roosevelt.’”

As Srdja Trifkovic, foreign-affairs editor for Chronicles magazine, stated in his article “FDR and Mussolini: A Tale of Two Fascists”, Roosevelt and his ‘Brain Trust,’ the architects of the New Deal, were fascinated by Italy’s fascism — a term which was not pejorative at the time. In America, it was seen as a form of economic nationalism built around consensus planning by the established elites in government, business, and labor.

Both Hitler and Roosevelt also believed in massive injections of government spending in both the social-welfare sector and the military-industrial sector as a way to bring economic prosperity to their respective nations. As the famed economist John Kenneth Galbraith put it,

Hitler also anticipated modern economic policy ... by recognizing that a rapid approach to full employment was only possible if it was combined with wage and price controls. That a nation oppressed by economic fear would respond to Hitler as Americans did to F.D.R. is not surprising.
One of Hitler’s proudest accomplishments was the construction of the national autobahn system, a massive socialist public-works project that ultimately became the model for the interstate highway system in the United States.

By the latter part of the 1930s, many Germans had the same perception about Hitler that many Americans had about Roosevelt. They honestly believed that Hitler was bringing Germany out of the Depression. For the first time since the Treaty of Versailles, the treaty that had ended World War I with humiliating terms for Germany, the German people were regaining a sense of pride in themselves and in their nation, and they were giving the credit to Hitler’s strong leadership in time of deep national crisis.

Toland points out in his Hitler biography that Germans weren’t the only ones who admired Hitler during the 1930s:

Churchill had once paid a grudging compliment to the Führer in a letter to the Times: “I have always said that I hoped if Great Britain were beaten in a war we should find a Hitler who would lead us back to our rightful place among nations.”
Hitler was a strong believer in national service, especially for German young people. That was what the Hitler Youth was all about — inculcating in young people the notion that they owed a duty to devote at least part of their lives to society. It was an idea also resonating in the collectivist atmosphere that was permeating the United States during the 1930s.


Hitler and anti-Semitism

While U.S. officials today never cease to remind us that Hitler was evil incarnate, the question is: Was he so easily recognized as such during the 1930s, not only by German citizens but also by other people around the world, especially those who believed in the idea of a strong political leader in times of crisis? Keep in mind that while Hitler and his cohorts were harassing, abusing, and periodically arresting German Jews as the 1930s progressed, culminating in Kristallnacht, the “night of the broken glass,” when tens of thousands of Jews were beaten and taken to concentration camps, it was not exactly the type of thing that aroused major moral outrage among U.S. officials, many of whom themselves had a strong sense of anti-Semitism.

For example, when Hitler offered to let German Jews leave Germany, the U.S. government used immigration controls to keep them from immigrating here. In fact, as Arthur D. Morse pointed out in his book While Six Million Died: A Chronicle of American Apathy, five days after Kristallnacht, which occurred in November 1938, at a White House press conference, a reporter asked Roosevelt, “Would you recommend a relaxation of our immigration restrictions so that the Jewish refugees could be received in this country?” The president replied, “This is not in contemplation. We have the quota system.”

Let’s also not forget the infamous 1939 (i.e., after Kristallnacht) “voyage of the damned,” in which U.S. officials refused to permit German Jews to disembark at Miami Harbor from the German ship the SS St. Louis, knowing that they would be returned to Hitler’s clutches in Nazi Germany.

(The Holocaust Museum in Washington, to its credit, has an excellent exhibition on U.S. government indifference to the plight of the Jews under Hitler’s control, a dark period in American history to which all too many Americans are never exposed in their public-school training. See also my June 1991 Freedom Daily article “Locking Out the Immigrant” .)

Check out this interesting website, which details a very nice pictorial description of Hitler’s summer home in Bavaria published by a prominent English magazine named Home and Gardens in November 1938 Now, ask yourself: If it was so obvious that Hitler was evil incarnate during the 1930s, would a prominent English magazine have been risking its readership by publishing such a profile? And let’s also not forget that it was Hitler’s Germany that hosted the worldwide Olympics in 1936, games in which the United States, Great Britain, and many other countries participated. Ask yourself: Why would they have done that?

The Great Depression was not the only factor that was leading people to support Hitler. There was also the ever-present fear of communism among the German people. In fact, throughout the 1930s it could be said that Germany was facing the same type of Cold War against the Soviet Union that the United States faced from 1945 to 1989. Ever since the chaos of World War I had given rise to the Russian Revolution, Germany faced the distinct possibility of being taken over by the communists (a threat that materialized into reality for East Germans at the end of World War II). It was a threat that Hitler, like later American presidents, used as a justification for ever-increasing spending on the military-industrial complex. The ever-present danger of Soviet communism led many Germans to gravitate to the support of their government, just as it later moved many Americans to support big government and a strong military-industrial complex in their country throughout the Cold War.

Hitler’s war on terrorism

One of the most searing events in German history occurred soon after Hitler took office. On February 27, 1933, in what easily could be termed the 9/11 terrorist attack of that time, German terrorists fire-bombed the German parliament building. It shouldn’t surprise anyone that Adolf Hitler, one of the strongest political leaders in history, would declare war on terrorism and ask the German parliament (the Reichstag) to give him temporary emergency powers to fight the terrorists. Passionately claiming that such powers were necessary to protect the freedom and well-being of the German people, Hitler persuaded the German legislators to give him the emergency powers he needed to confront the terrorist crisis. What became known as the Enabling Act allowed Hitler to suspend civil liberties “temporarily,” that is, until the crisis had passed. Not surprisingly, however, the threat of terrorism never subsided and Hitler’s “temporary” emergency powers, which were periodically renewed by the Reichstag, were still in effect when he took his own life some 12 years later.

Is it so surprising that ordinary German citizens were willing to support their government’s suspension of civil liberties in response to the threat of terrorism, especially after the terrorist strike on the Reichstag?

During the 1930s, the United States faced the Great Depression, and many Americans were willing to accede to Roosevelt’s assumption of massive emergency powers, including the power to control economic activity and also to nationalize and confiscate people’s gold.

During the Cold War, the fear of communism induced Americans to permit their government to collect massive amounts of income taxes to fund the military-industrial complex and to let U.S. officials send more than 100,000 American soldiers to their deaths in undeclared wars in Korea and Vietnam.

Since the 9/11 attacks, Americans have been more than willing for their government to infringe on vital civil liberties, including habeas corpus, involve the nation in an undeclared and unprovoked war on Iraq, and spend ever-growing amounts of money on the military-industrial complex, all in the name of the “war on terrorism.”


Crises versus liberty

While the American people faced these three crises — the Great Depression, the communist threat, and the war on terrorism at three separate times, the German people during the Hitler regime faced the same three crises all within a short span of time. Given that, why would it surprise anyone that many Germans would gravitate toward the support of their government just as many Americans gravitated toward the support of their government during each of those crises?

Even Sophie Scholl and her brother Hans eagerly joined the Hitler Youth when they were in high school. In the ever-growing crisis environment of the 1930s, millions of other ordinary Germans also came to support their government, enthusiastically cheering their leaders, supporting their policies, and sending their children into national service and looking the other way when the government became abusive. Among the few who resisted were Robert and Magdalena Scholl, the parents of Hans and Sophie, who gradually opened the minds of their children to the truth.

The three major crises faced by Germany in the 1930s — economic depression, communism, and terrorism — pale to relative insignificance compared with the crisis that Germany faced during the 1940s — World War II, the crisis that threatened, at least in the minds of Hitler and his cohorts, the very existence of Germany. That Hans and Sophie Scholl and other German students began circulating leaflets calling on Germans to oppose their government in the midst of a major war, when German soldiers were dying on two fronts, makes the story of the White Rose even more remarkable and perhaps even a bit discomforting for some Americans.

The most remarkable part of the movie Sophie Scholl: The Final Days is the courtroom scene, which is based on recently discovered German archives. Sophie and her brother Hans, along with their friend Christoph Probst, stand before the infamous Roland Freisler, presiding judge of the People’s Court, whom Hitler had immediately sent to Munich after the Gestapo’s arrest of the Scholls and Probst.

The People’s Court had been established by Hitler as part of the government’s war on terrorism after the terrorist firebombing of the German parliament building. Displeased with the independence of the judiciary in the trials of the suspected Reichstag terrorists, Hitler had set up the People’s Court to ensure that terrorists and traitors would receive the “proper” verdict and punishment. Judicial proceedings were conducted in secret for reasons of national security, which is why Freisler threw Hans’s and Sophie’s parents out of the courtroom when they tried to enter.

At the trial, Freisler railed at the three young people before him, accusing them of being ungrateful traitors for having opposed their government in the midst of the war. His rant went to the core of why many Germans supported Hitler during World War II.

From the first grade in public (i.e., government) schools, it was ingrained in German children that, during times of war, it was the duty of every German to come to the support of his country, which, in the minds of the German officials, was synonymous with the German government. Once a war was under way, the time for discussion and debate was over, at least until the war was over. Opposition to the war would demoralize the troops, it was said, and, therefore, hurt the war effort. Opposing the government (and the troops) in wartime, therefore, was considered treasonous.

Keep in mind that at the time the Scholls were caught distributing their anti-war and anti-government leaflets — 1943 — Germany was fighting a war for its survival on two fronts: the Eastern front against the Soviet Union and the Western front against Britain and the United States. Thousands of German soldiers were dying on the battlefield, especially in the Soviet Union. Whether they agreed with the war effort or not, the German people were expected to support the troops, which meant supporting the war effort.


Lies and wars of aggression

One might object that, since Germany was the aggressor in the conflict, the German people should have refused to support the war. That objection, however, ignores an important point: that in the minds of many Germans, Germany was not the aggressor in World War II but rather the defending nation. After all, that’s what they had been told by their government officials.

An aggressor nation will inevitably try to manipulate events so as to appear to be the victimized nation — that is, the nation that is defending itself against aggression. In that way, government officials can tell the citizenry, “We are innocent! We were just minding our own business when our nation was attacked.” Naturally, the citizenry can then assume that there was nothing that could have been done to prevent the war and will be more willing to defend their nation against the attackers.

That is exactly what happened in Germany’s invasion of Poland, which precipitated World War II. After several weeks in which tensions between the two nations were heightened, German soldiers on the Polish-German border were attacked by Polish troops. Hitler followed the time-honored script by dramatically announcing that Germany had been attacked by Poland, requiring Germany to defend herself with a counterattack and an invasion of Poland.

There was one big problem, however — one that the German people were unaware of: the Polish troops who had done the attacking were actually German troops dressed up in Polish uniforms. In other words, German officials had lied about the cause of the war.

Now, some might argue that Germans should not have automatically believed Hitler, especially knowing that throughout history rulers had lied about matters relating to war. But Germans took the position that they had the right and the duty to place their trust in their government officials. After all, Germans felt, their government officials had access to information that the people did not have. Many Germans felt that their government would never lie to them about a matter as important as war.

Also, keep in mind that under the Nazi system Hitler had the sole prerogative of deciding whether to send the nation into war. While he might consult with the Reichstag or advise it of his plans, he did not need its consent to declare and wage war against another nation. He — and he alone — had the power to decide whether to go to war. Therefore, given that Hitler was not required to secure a declaration of war from the Reichstag before going to war against Poland, there was no real way to test whether his claims of a Polish attack were in fact true.

After the German “counterattack” against Poland, England and France declared war on Germany. (Oddly, neither country declared war on the Soviet Union, which also invaded Poland soon after Germany did.) Thus, in the minds of the German people, England and France were coming to the aid of the aggressor — Poland — necessitating Germany’s defending itself against all three nations.


Loyalty and obeying orders

German soldiers, of course, were also expected to do their duty and follow the orders of their commander in chief. Under Germany’s system, it was not up to the individual soldier to reach his own independent judgment about whether Germany was the aggressor in the conflict or whether Hitler had lied about the reasons for going to war. Thus, German soldiers, both Protestant and Catholic, understood that they could kill Polish soldiers with a clear conscience because, again, it was not up to the individual soldier to decide on the justice of the war. He could entrust that decision to his superior officers and political leaders and simply assume that the order to invade was morally and legally justified.

Once troops were committed to battle, most German civilians understood their duty — support the troops who were now fighting and dying on the battlefield for their country, for the fatherland. The time for debating and discussing the causes of the war would have to wait until the war’s end. What mattered, once the war was under way, was winning.

Hermann Goering, founder of the Gestapo, explained the strategy:

Why, of course, the people don’t want war.... Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece? Naturally, the common people don’t want war; neither in Russia nor in England nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or a Communist dictatorship....

Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.

Recognizing and opposing evil

Some might argue that Germans, unlike people in other nations, should not have trusted and supported their government officials during the war because it was obvious that Hitler and his henchmen were evil. The problem with that argument, however, is that throughout the 1930s many Germans and many foreigners did not automatically come to the conclusion that Hitler was evil. On the contrary, as we saw in part one of this article, many of them saw Hitler as exercising the same kind of strong leadership that Franklin Roosevelt was exercising to bring the United States out of the Great Depression and, in fact, as implementing many of the same kinds of programs that Roosevelt was implementing in the United States. (For more on this point, see the excellent book published last year Three New Deals: Reflections on Roosevelt’s America, Mussolini’s Italy, and Hitler’s Germany, 1933–1939, by Wolfgang Schivelbusch.)

Moreover, while it’s true that throughout the 1930s Hitler was harassing, abusing, and mistreating German Jews, many people all over the world didn’t care, because anti-Semitism was not limited to Germany but instead extended to many parts of the globe.

Don’t forget, for example, about how the Roosevelt administration used immigration controls to prevent German Jews from immigrating to the United States.

Even as late as 1938 U.S. officials refused to let German Jews disembark at Miami Harbor from the SS St. Louis, knowing that they would have to be returned to Hitler’s Germany.

Even after the outbreak of the war, when the severity of the Nazi threat to Jews skyrocketed, the constantly shifting maze of U.S. immigration rules and regulations prevented Anne Frank and her family, along with lots of other Jewish families, from immigrating to the United States.

Some might say that the German people should have ceased supporting their government once the Holocaust began. There are two big problems with that argument, however. First, the German people didn’t know what was going on in the death camps and, second, they didn’t want to know. After all, the death camps and the Holocaust didn’t get established until after the war was well under way and when Hitler’s power over the German people was absolute — and brutal.

How was the average German supposed to know about what was going on inside the death camps? Suppose a German walked up to a concentration camp, knocked on the gates, and said, “I have heard that you are doing bad things to people inside this camp. I would like to come in and inspect the premises.” What do you think would have been the answer? Most likely, he would have been invited inside the compound, as a permanent guest with a very shortened life span.

After all, what government is going to permit its citizens to know its most secret operations, especially during times of war? Not even the U.S. government does that.

For example, what do you think would happen if an American citizen today discovered the location of one of the CIA’s secret overseas detention facilities and then knocked on the front door, saying, “I’ve heard rumors that you are torturing people here. I would like to come in and inspect the premises to see whether those rumors are true.”

Does anyone honestly think that the CIA would let the person inside those supersecret facilities? Now, imagine a situation in which the United States is fighting a major war for its survival against, say, China on one side, and an alliance of Middle East countries on the other. Suppose also that the United States is almost certain to lose the war and that foreign troops are slowly but surely closing in on the U.S. president and his cabinet. What are the chances that the CIA would permit an American citizen to inspect the insides of its prisoner facilities under those circumstances? Indeed, what are the chances that any American is going to make such a demand under those circumstances?

Most Germans did not want to know what was going on inside the concentration camps. If they knew that bad things were occurring, their consciences might start bothering them, which might motivate them to take action to bring the wrongdoing to a stop, which could be dangerous. It was easier — and safer — to look the other way and simply entrust such important matters to their government officials. In that way, it was believed, the government, rather than the individual citizen, would bear the legal and moral consequences for wrongful acts that the government was committing secretly.

Of course, government officials encouraged that mindset of conscious indifference. Don’t concern yourselves with such things, they suggested; just leave them to us — after all, we are at war and these are things that are best left to your government officials.

No doubt that by the time World War II was well under way some Germans were thinking that the time for protesting had been during the 1930s, when Germans were reaching out for a “strong leader” to get them out of “crises” and “emergencies,” and when protests against the government were much less dangerous.


Patriotism and courage

All this, obviously, places Hans and Sophie Scholl and the other members of the White Rose in a remarkable light, one that even many Americans might find discomforting. After all, it’s easy for an American to look at Nazi Germany from the perspective of an outsider and one who has the benefit of historical knowledge, especially about the Holocaust. The interesting question, however, is, What would Americans have done if they had been German citizens during World War II? Would they have opposed their government, as the members of the White Rose did, or would they have supported their government, especially knowing that the troops were fighting and dying on the battlefield?

In one of their leaflets, the members of the White Rose wrote, “We are your bad conscience.” They were asking Germans to rise above the old, degenerate concept of patriotism that entailed blindly supporting one’s government in time of war. They were asking German soldiers to rise above the old, degenerate concept of blind obedience to orders. They were asking Germans to confront openly the rumors of what German officials were doing to the Jews in the concentration camps. They were asking German citizens, both civilian and military, to make an independent judgment on both the Hitler regime and the war, to judge both the government and the war as immoral and illegitimate, and to take the necessary steps to put a stop to both.

They were asking Germans to embrace a different and higher concept of patriotism — one that involves a devotion to a set of moral principles and values rather than blind allegiance to one’s government in time of war. It was a type of patriotism that involved opposition to one’s own government, especially in time of war, when government is engaged in conduct that violates moral principles and values.

The story of the White Rose is one of the most remarkable stories of courage in history. At the trial, Christoph Probst asked Freisler to spare his life, an understandable request given that his wife had recently given birth to their third child. Neither Sophie nor her brother Hans flinched. Sophie bluntly told Friesler that the war was lost and that German soldiers were being sacrificed for nothing, a statement that, from the looks on the faces of the military brass attending the trial in the film, momentarily hit home. She said that one day Freisler and his ilk would be sitting in the dock being judged by others for their crimes. She bluntly told him, “Somebody, after all, had to make a start. What we wrote and said is also believed by many others. They just don’t dare express themselves as we did.”

Freisler quickly issued the preordained verdict — Guilty — and sentenced the defendants to death, a sentence that was carried out at the guillotine three days after they had been arrested. After all, as Freisler declared, Hans and Sophie Scholl and their friend Christoph Probst had opposed their government during time of war. In Freisler’s mind — indeed, in the minds of many Germans — what better evidence of treason than that?

Jacob Hornberger is founder and president of The Future of Freedom Foundation.


EndWorld Report SecretBases




We'll go no more a-Rove-ing:
Rat-Fuckers Rule as Roaches Swarm

The country takes leave of the political serial killer who tried to forge a one-party state. But don't expect the Mayberry Machiavelli to pay for his civic sins.

By Sidney Blumenthal
Aug. 13, 2007

With the departure of Karl Rove the Bush administration now enters its last throes. As a legacy for his patron, Rove has designed the public relations offensive for the fall presidential campaign to attempt to corner congressional Democrats through a combination of Gen. David Petraeus' forthcoming report on the "surge" in Iraq and presidential budget vetoes; but once those tactics are played the political string runs out. President Bush will be left with the unalloyed counsel of Vice President Dick Cheney, whose endgame transcends Rove's machinations. "I don't worry about the polls," Cheney said on CNN's "Larry King Live" on July 31. One more hypothetical restraint on Cheney has been removed.

Rove's resignation marks a tacit recognition of the failure of his theory of political realignment, though hardly of its consequences. Trailing him out of the West Wing is the cloud of a subpoena from the Senate Judiciary Committee that seeks his testimony about his primary role in purging U.S. attorneys for partisan purposes. But even when Rove leaves government service at the end of August, Bush will extend the protective cover of executive privilege.

Rove's merger of politics and policy was an effort to forge a total one-party state. While he is acclaimed as a political strategist, his true innovation was in governing. He sought to subordinate the entire federal government to his goal of creating a permanent Republican majority. Every department and agency has been subject to an intense and thorough politicization. Indeed, Rove's ambitious plan was tantamount to a proto-Sovietization. Even science has been suppressed in the name of the party line, recalling the Lysenko episode. Cheney and Rove acted as the pincers of the unitary executive. While Cheney sought to concentrate unaccountable power in the presidency, Rove brought down the anvil of politics on the professional career staff.

Rove's radicalization of government was early described by the first member of the administration to quit in disgust, John DiIulio, a University of Pennsylvania professor and the first director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives. He discovered that "compassionate conservatism," Rove's slogan for Bush's 2000 campaign, was little more than a sham. "What you've got is everything -- and I mean everything -- being run by the political arm. It's the reign of the Mayberry Machiavellis," said DiIulio.

Rove's saga is a rags-to-riches success story of a political serial killer. His first involvement in a political campaign was to conduct a dirty trick against a candidate running for Illinois state treasurer. After Rove dropped out of the University of Utah, his promise was recognized and he was appointed executive director of the College Republicans. Donald Segretti, ringmaster for the Committee to Reelect the President of a gang of dirty tricksters engaged in what he called "ratfucking," recruited Rove. Rove conducted one session training young Republicans to sift through the garbage of opponents. In the Watergate scandal, Segretti was sentenced to prison for forging campaign literature. The FBI questioned Rove, but dropped its investigation of the small fry. Yet he would become the greatest rat fucker of them all. The new chairman of the Republican National Committee, George H.W. Bush, named Rove chairman of the College Republicans and, even more fortuitously, appointed him as a handler of his obstreperous older son. It was love at first sight, at least from the nerdy Rove's point of view. "Huge amounts of charisma, swagger, cowboy boots, flight jacket, wonderful smile, just charisma -- you know, wow," he said later.

Rove weathered rough storms, including being fired in 1992 from the Bush for President campaign by the candidate himself for leaking damaging information to conservative columnist Robert Novak about the elder Bush's close friend and top fundraiser Robert Mosbacher.

In 1981, Rove established a direct-mail firm, Karl Rove & Co., in Austin, Texas, which became his cockpit for the destruction of the state Democratic Party. Over more than the next decade, he was involved in dozens of campaigns marked by dirty tricks, sexual innuendo and the use of friendly FBI agents and prosecutors to harass Democrats. In Texas and elsewhere, he laid the groundwork for his later efforts. The whispering campaign in 1994 against Gov. Ann Richards claiming that she was a lesbian and the rumor-mongering that an esteemed Alabama state judge was really a secret pedophile were harbingers of the smear campaign against Sen. John McCain in the South Carolina primary in 2000. Rove's exploitation of prosecutors pioneered his later politicization of U.S. attorneys.

Rove promoted the Bush campaign for president in 2000 as a national extension of his realignment of Texas politics. He cast Bush as William McKinley and by inference himself as the political boss Mark Hanna. Rove's historical analogy was either the autodidact's self-inflated misreading of history or a shrewd manipulation of a gullible and careerist press corps, or both. Whatever Rove's pretension, Bush lost the 2000 election, unlike McKinley in 1896, which was a major victory of the Republican Party. There was no parallel except in the name of the party: One election marked a genuine realignment of Republican support, firmly consolidating its uncertain majority since the Civil War. The other was a gift handed to the loser of the popular majority in a decision not so contrived since Dred Scott. George W. Bush is less William McKinley than Rutherford B. Hayes.

Nonetheless, Bush began governing as if he had a mandate for the most radical presidency ever. The story is told that before the inauguration Bush pollster Matthew Dowd (now another disillusioned and lost soul) wrote a memo to Rove explaining that there was no middle in American politics and that only those who turned out their maximum base through polarization would win. Yet, Dowd memo or not, Bush, Cheney and Rove were prepared to govern as radicals. The theory helped justify what had been decided already.



Devil on the Warpath

Spiralling in sparkling glitter
starry with gold and neon
from Sin City's flashing strip
out to the edges of extinction

Billions of blinking baboon brains
attuned to telly tubes twirling
wheels spinning a world's prize money
flickering flames of posh distinction

Blinging and banging with super style
diamonds swinging champagne swirling
high above traffic in penthouse suite
living luxuriously milk and honey

Beyond the Mirage and desert heat
borders barbed wire baked bones
bomb silos beamships burning atoms
blazed into the world's mind afire

Reflecting through tinted towers
on Lucifer's lenses and death's desire
lucky Hellions who afford the armor
arch angels above who own our eyes

Root for the troops trigger the tanks
make way a parade for Lord of the Flies
snaking of funerals flapping of flags
polished coffins prayers and flames

War lovely war and plunder
demons take flight raising Hell
blasting now global fire and thunder
as ice and dice clink in Liar games

Devils love God to let loose blood
while it flows so power snakes in
with a flick and a click of pleasure
infernal twists of wicked wonder

God the TV cries wants evil dead
our side's goodness brings treasure
Buy! they say these powerful things
Old Angel pours a bottle of broken dreams

War is a holiday for maggots and kings
another bloody sequel for your Lord's Rings
while the Fiend munches skin rinds
tweaking hateful knobs by their blunder

BeeZeeB Irregular Unit
http://BombShelter.org

Mauna Kea MotherShip


Fame & Fortune Fiddle while the World Burns

Gold chips held out to the crowd from the neon desert
here pretty piggy you too can be readied for the feast
candy apples & endless buffets while cameras flash
it can all be yours for a deal with our diesel devils

behind the shimmering curtains & stacks of cash
machinery digs into the planet grinding & burning
lakes of pure water siphoned into flushing cesspools
poisonous nozzles kill everything around the edges

every dollar a contract promising presidential power
guarded by battalions of bullyboys & terrible tanks
while the TVs flicker figments of drama & delight
attracting a world's eyes to outrageous fortunes

we will be remembered with contempt
for wasting an entire planet in a lifetime
living our lies & excesses without care
betting it all on a carnival of trivial hype

in the end what fame & riches amount to
flowery funerals for the fortunate perhaps
yellowing smiles & peeling plastic pictures
betraying the celebrated icons of our time

just don't buy it kids if you will survive
listen to instinct & feel your primateness
run away from your city follow the rain
hands on Earth & the forest be with you

B.Z. Bywydd http://CosmoCorps.org