http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-13565629
26 May 2011 Last updated at 16:27
Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp to get UK funding
The government is set to contribute £2.1m towards the preservation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp in Poland, it has been announced.
The joint contribution will mainly be provided by the Department for Communities and Local Government and the Foreign Office.
The Auschwitz-Birkenau Foundation will be funded over the next three years.
More than a million people were murdered by the Nazis at the Auschwitz concentration camp during World War II.
The concentration camp was the largest site for the mass murder of Jews.
In recent years a number of countries have contributed to the fund to maintain the main concentration camp, Auschwitz, and its nearby satellite camp of Birkenau.
Auschwitz and Birkenau were operated by Nazi Germany in occupied Poland during World War II, and opened as a museum in 1947.
'Destructive force'
Communities Secretary Eric Pickles said the camp, which stands as an enduring symbol of the Holocaust, was an importance place of remembrance which served to educate people about the horrors of the Holocaust.
Speaking at the Jewish Museum in London, he said: "It is our collective responsibility to ensure that Auschwitz-Birkenau stands as a perpetual reminder of the pain and destructive force of hate.
"We must ensure that the lessons from the Holocaust are taught today and to future generations."
And Foreign Secretary William Hague said Auschwitz-Birkenau underlined "the horrific consequences of intolerance".
'Racism and prejudice'
Mr Hague said he was "proud that the UK is able to play a part in commemorating the millions of victims who died there" and was helping to ensure the camp's preservation to educate future generations on "the evils of that period in history".
And Lord Greville Janner of Moleicester, who chairs the Holocaust Educational Trust, said the financial support sends a clear message that the camp should be maintained for future generations.
He said: "Through our Lessons from Auschwitz Project, the Holocaust Educational Trust gives over 3,000 British students each year the opportunity to visit Auschwitz-Birkenau.
"This announcement will ensure that when young people visit Auschwitz, they will see for themselves what can happen when racism and prejudice is allowed to go unchecked."
Friday, 27 May 2011
Wednesday, 25 May 2011
Moscow museum puts Lenin's Jewish roots on display
Moscow museum puts Lenin's Jewish roots on display
By MANSUR MIROVALEV
Associated Press
In this Wednesday, May 18, 2011 photo a visitor looks at a drawing showing Vladimir Lenin flanked by Felix Dzerzhinsky, right, and Yakov Sverdlov in Red Square, on display at the exhibition in the State History Musum in Moscow, Russia. For the first time ever, ordinary Russians can now see documents that appear to confirm long-standing rumors that Vladimir Lenin had Jewish heritage.
- Sergey Ponomarev /AP Photo
For the first time ever, ordinary Russians can now see documents that appear to confirm long-standing rumors that Vladimir Lenin had Jewish heritage.
In a country long plagued by anti-Semitism, such heritage can be a significant taint, especially for the founder of the Soviet Union who is still revered by many elderly Russians.
Among dozens of newly released documents on display at the State History Museum is a letter written by Lenin's eldest sister, Anna Ulyanova, saying that their maternal grandfather was a Ukrainian Jew who converted to Christianity to escape the Pale of Settlement and gain access to higher education.
"He came from a poor Jewish family and was, according to his baptismal certificate, the son of Moses Blank, a native of (the western Ukrainian city of) Zhitomir," Ulyanova wrote in a 1932 letter to Josef Stalin, who succeeded Lenin after his death in 1924.
"Vladimir Ilych had always thought of Jews highly," she wrote. "I am very sorry that the fact of our origin - which I had suspected before - was not known during his lifetime."
Under czarist rule, most Jews were allowed permanent residence only in a restricted area that became known as the Pale of Settlement which included much of present-day Lithuania, Belarus, Poland, Moldova, Ukraine and parts of western Russia.
Many Jews joined the Bolsheviks to fight rampant anti-Semitism in czarist Russia and some were among the leaders of the Communist Party when it took power after the 1917 Revolution. Most prominent among them was Leon Trotsky, whose real name was Bronstein.
But Lenin, who was born Vladimir Ilych Ulyanov in 1870, identified himself only as Russian. He took Lenin as his nom de guerre in 1901 while in Siberian exile near the Lena River.
A brief period of promotion of Jewish culture that began under Lenin ended in the early 1930s when Stalin orchestrated anti-Semitic purges among Communists and hatched a plan to relocate all Soviet Jews to a region on the Chinese border.
Ulyanova asked Stalin to make Lenin's Jewish heritage known to counter the rise of anti-Semitism. "I hear that in recent years anti-Semitism has been growing stronger again, even among Communists," she wrote. "It would be wrong to hide the fact from the masses."
Stalin ignored the plea and ordered her to "keep absolute silence" about her letter, according to the exhibition's curator, Tatyana Koloskova.
Lenin's official biography, written by his niece Olga Ulyanova, said his family had only Russian, German and Swedish roots.
The letter from Lenin's sister became available to Russian historians in the early 1990s, but its authenticity was fiercely disputed. It was chosen for inclusion in the exhibit by Koloskova, who as director of the State History Museum's branch dedicated to Lenin is one of the most authoritative scholars on his life.
The exhibition in the museum on Red Square, near the mausoleum where Lenin's body still lies, also discloses that he was in such misery after suffering a stroke in 1922 that he asked Stalin to bring him poison.
"He did not incidentally pick Stalin to fulfill this request," Lenin's youngest sister, Maria Ulyanova, wrote in a 1922 diary entry. "He knew Comrade Stalin as a steadfast Bolshevik, straight and devoid of any sentimentality. Who else would dare to end Lenin's life?"
Initially, Stalin promised to help Lenin, but other Politburo members decided to turn down his request, the letter says. Trotsky, whom Stalin forced out of the Soviet Union, claimed in his memoirs that Stalin had poisoned Lenin.
The 111 documents on display, many of them only recently declassified and all of them open to the public for the first time, give surprising insights into top figures of the Soviet Union. Men usually portrayed as stern and fearless are seen as sometimes whimsical, frightened and even despairing.
One of the documents contains a desperate plea that Stalin received in 1934 from an arrested Communist leader, Lev Kamenev, whose real name was Rosenfeld.
"At a time when my soul is filled with nothing but love for the party and its leadership, when, having lived through hesitations and doubts, I can boldly say that I learned to highly trust the Central Committee's every step and every decision you, Comrade Stalin, make," Kamenev wrote. "I have been arrested for my ties to people that are strange and disgusting to me."
Stalin ignored this letter, too, and Kamenev was executed in 1936.
A slightly more humorous - but no less macabre - aspect of the exhibition is caricatures drawn by Politburo members.
Nikolai Bukharin, a leading Communist ideologue, depicts Stalin with a giant, exaggerated nose and his trademark pipe. His portrayal of other Communists is also unflattering - one is shown as a White Army officer. The anti-Communist White Army, which was backed by Western powers, unsuccessfully fought Lenin's Red Army in a civil war from 1917-23.
Prominent economist Valery Mezhlauk ridicules Trotsky as a Wandering Jew and depicts a finance minister hanging in an awkward position. In a handwritten note under the latter caricature, Stalin recommends that the minister be hanged by his testicles.
The minister and both cartoonists were arrested and executed in 1938.
The exhibition, which opened last week, runs through July 3.
© 2011 TheState.com and wire service sources. All Rights Reserved. http://www.thestate.com
By MANSUR MIROVALEV
Associated Press
In this Wednesday, May 18, 2011 photo a visitor looks at a drawing showing Vladimir Lenin flanked by Felix Dzerzhinsky, right, and Yakov Sverdlov in Red Square, on display at the exhibition in the State History Musum in Moscow, Russia. For the first time ever, ordinary Russians can now see documents that appear to confirm long-standing rumors that Vladimir Lenin had Jewish heritage.
- Sergey Ponomarev /AP Photo
For the first time ever, ordinary Russians can now see documents that appear to confirm long-standing rumors that Vladimir Lenin had Jewish heritage.
In a country long plagued by anti-Semitism, such heritage can be a significant taint, especially for the founder of the Soviet Union who is still revered by many elderly Russians.
Among dozens of newly released documents on display at the State History Museum is a letter written by Lenin's eldest sister, Anna Ulyanova, saying that their maternal grandfather was a Ukrainian Jew who converted to Christianity to escape the Pale of Settlement and gain access to higher education.
"He came from a poor Jewish family and was, according to his baptismal certificate, the son of Moses Blank, a native of (the western Ukrainian city of) Zhitomir," Ulyanova wrote in a 1932 letter to Josef Stalin, who succeeded Lenin after his death in 1924.
"Vladimir Ilych had always thought of Jews highly," she wrote. "I am very sorry that the fact of our origin - which I had suspected before - was not known during his lifetime."
Under czarist rule, most Jews were allowed permanent residence only in a restricted area that became known as the Pale of Settlement which included much of present-day Lithuania, Belarus, Poland, Moldova, Ukraine and parts of western Russia.
Many Jews joined the Bolsheviks to fight rampant anti-Semitism in czarist Russia and some were among the leaders of the Communist Party when it took power after the 1917 Revolution. Most prominent among them was Leon Trotsky, whose real name was Bronstein.
But Lenin, who was born Vladimir Ilych Ulyanov in 1870, identified himself only as Russian. He took Lenin as his nom de guerre in 1901 while in Siberian exile near the Lena River.
A brief period of promotion of Jewish culture that began under Lenin ended in the early 1930s when Stalin orchestrated anti-Semitic purges among Communists and hatched a plan to relocate all Soviet Jews to a region on the Chinese border.
Ulyanova asked Stalin to make Lenin's Jewish heritage known to counter the rise of anti-Semitism. "I hear that in recent years anti-Semitism has been growing stronger again, even among Communists," she wrote. "It would be wrong to hide the fact from the masses."
Stalin ignored the plea and ordered her to "keep absolute silence" about her letter, according to the exhibition's curator, Tatyana Koloskova.
Lenin's official biography, written by his niece Olga Ulyanova, said his family had only Russian, German and Swedish roots.
The letter from Lenin's sister became available to Russian historians in the early 1990s, but its authenticity was fiercely disputed. It was chosen for inclusion in the exhibit by Koloskova, who as director of the State History Museum's branch dedicated to Lenin is one of the most authoritative scholars on his life.
The exhibition in the museum on Red Square, near the mausoleum where Lenin's body still lies, also discloses that he was in such misery after suffering a stroke in 1922 that he asked Stalin to bring him poison.
"He did not incidentally pick Stalin to fulfill this request," Lenin's youngest sister, Maria Ulyanova, wrote in a 1922 diary entry. "He knew Comrade Stalin as a steadfast Bolshevik, straight and devoid of any sentimentality. Who else would dare to end Lenin's life?"
Initially, Stalin promised to help Lenin, but other Politburo members decided to turn down his request, the letter says. Trotsky, whom Stalin forced out of the Soviet Union, claimed in his memoirs that Stalin had poisoned Lenin.
The 111 documents on display, many of them only recently declassified and all of them open to the public for the first time, give surprising insights into top figures of the Soviet Union. Men usually portrayed as stern and fearless are seen as sometimes whimsical, frightened and even despairing.
One of the documents contains a desperate plea that Stalin received in 1934 from an arrested Communist leader, Lev Kamenev, whose real name was Rosenfeld.
"At a time when my soul is filled with nothing but love for the party and its leadership, when, having lived through hesitations and doubts, I can boldly say that I learned to highly trust the Central Committee's every step and every decision you, Comrade Stalin, make," Kamenev wrote. "I have been arrested for my ties to people that are strange and disgusting to me."
Stalin ignored this letter, too, and Kamenev was executed in 1936.
A slightly more humorous - but no less macabre - aspect of the exhibition is caricatures drawn by Politburo members.
Nikolai Bukharin, a leading Communist ideologue, depicts Stalin with a giant, exaggerated nose and his trademark pipe. His portrayal of other Communists is also unflattering - one is shown as a White Army officer. The anti-Communist White Army, which was backed by Western powers, unsuccessfully fought Lenin's Red Army in a civil war from 1917-23.
Prominent economist Valery Mezhlauk ridicules Trotsky as a Wandering Jew and depicts a finance minister hanging in an awkward position. In a handwritten note under the latter caricature, Stalin recommends that the minister be hanged by his testicles.
The minister and both cartoonists were arrested and executed in 1938.
The exhibition, which opened last week, runs through July 3.
© 2011 TheState.com and wire service sources. All Rights Reserved. http://www.thestate.com
Moscow museum puts Lenin's Jewish roots on display
Moscow museum puts Lenin's Jewish roots on display
By MANSUR MIROVALEV
Associated Press
In this Wednesday, May 18, 2011 photo a visitor looks at a drawing showing Vladimir Lenin flanked by Felix Dzerzhinsky, right, and Yakov Sverdlov in Red Square, on display at the exhibition in the State History Musum in Moscow, Russia. For the first time ever, ordinary Russians can now see documents that appear to confirm long-standing rumors that Vladimir Lenin had Jewish heritage.
- Sergey Ponomarev /AP Photo
For the first time ever, ordinary Russians can now see documents that appear to confirm long-standing rumors that Vladimir Lenin had Jewish heritage.
In a country long plagued by anti-Semitism, such heritage can be a significant taint, especially for the founder of the Soviet Union who is still revered by many elderly Russians.
Among dozens of newly released documents on display at the State History Museum is a letter written by Lenin's eldest sister, Anna Ulyanova, saying that their maternal grandfather was a Ukrainian Jew who converted to Christianity to escape the Pale of Settlement and gain access to higher education.
"He came from a poor Jewish family and was, according to his baptismal certificate, the son of Moses Blank, a native of (the western Ukrainian city of) Zhitomir," Ulyanova wrote in a 1932 letter to Josef Stalin, who succeeded Lenin after his death in 1924.
"Vladimir Ilych had always thought of Jews highly," she wrote. "I am very sorry that the fact of our origin - which I had suspected before - was not known during his lifetime."
Under czarist rule, most Jews were allowed permanent residence only in a restricted area that became known as the Pale of Settlement which included much of present-day Lithuania, Belarus, Poland, Moldova, Ukraine and parts of western Russia.
Many Jews joined the Bolsheviks to fight rampant anti-Semitism in czarist Russia and some were among the leaders of the Communist Party when it took power after the 1917 Revolution. Most prominent among them was Leon Trotsky, whose real name was Bronstein.
But Lenin, who was born Vladimir Ilych Ulyanov in 1870, identified himself only as Russian. He took Lenin as his nom de guerre in 1901 while in Siberian exile near the Lena River.
A brief period of promotion of Jewish culture that began under Lenin ended in the early 1930s when Stalin orchestrated anti-Semitic purges among Communists and hatched a plan to relocate all Soviet Jews to a region on the Chinese border.
Ulyanova asked Stalin to make Lenin's Jewish heritage known to counter the rise of anti-Semitism. "I hear that in recent years anti-Semitism has been growing stronger again, even among Communists," she wrote. "It would be wrong to hide the fact from the masses."
Stalin ignored the plea and ordered her to "keep absolute silence" about her letter, according to the exhibition's curator, Tatyana Koloskova.
Lenin's official biography, written by his niece Olga Ulyanova, said his family had only Russian, German and Swedish roots.
The letter from Lenin's sister became available to Russian historians in the early 1990s, but its authenticity was fiercely disputed. It was chosen for inclusion in the exhibit by Koloskova, who as director of the State History Museum's branch dedicated to Lenin is one of the most authoritative scholars on his life.
The exhibition in the museum on Red Square, near the mausoleum where Lenin's body still lies, also discloses that he was in such misery after suffering a stroke in 1922 that he asked Stalin to bring him poison.
"He did not incidentally pick Stalin to fulfill this request," Lenin's youngest sister, Maria Ulyanova, wrote in a 1922 diary entry. "He knew Comrade Stalin as a steadfast Bolshevik, straight and devoid of any sentimentality. Who else would dare to end Lenin's life?"
Initially, Stalin promised to help Lenin, but other Politburo members decided to turn down his request, the letter says. Trotsky, whom Stalin forced out of the Soviet Union, claimed in his memoirs that Stalin had poisoned Lenin.
The 111 documents on display, many of them only recently declassified and all of them open to the public for the first time, give surprising insights into top figures of the Soviet Union. Men usually portrayed as stern and fearless are seen as sometimes whimsical, frightened and even despairing.
One of the documents contains a desperate plea that Stalin received in 1934 from an arrested Communist leader, Lev Kamenev, whose real name was Rosenfeld.
"At a time when my soul is filled with nothing but love for the party and its leadership, when, having lived through hesitations and doubts, I can boldly say that I learned to highly trust the Central Committee's every step and every decision you, Comrade Stalin, make," Kamenev wrote. "I have been arrested for my ties to people that are strange and disgusting to me."
Stalin ignored this letter, too, and Kamenev was executed in 1936.
A slightly more humorous - but no less macabre - aspect of the exhibition is caricatures drawn by Politburo members.
Nikolai Bukharin, a leading Communist ideologue, depicts Stalin with a giant, exaggerated nose and his trademark pipe. His portrayal of other Communists is also unflattering - one is shown as a White Army officer. The anti-Communist White Army, which was backed by Western powers, unsuccessfully fought Lenin's Red Army in a civil war from 1917-23.
Prominent economist Valery Mezhlauk ridicules Trotsky as a Wandering Jew and depicts a finance minister hanging in an awkward position. In a handwritten note under the latter caricature, Stalin recommends that the minister be hanged by his testicles.
The minister and both cartoonists were arrested and executed in 1938.
The exhibition, which opened last week, runs through July 3.
© 2011 TheState.com and wire service sources. All Rights Reserved. http://www.thestate.com
By MANSUR MIROVALEV
Associated Press
In this Wednesday, May 18, 2011 photo a visitor looks at a drawing showing Vladimir Lenin flanked by Felix Dzerzhinsky, right, and Yakov Sverdlov in Red Square, on display at the exhibition in the State History Musum in Moscow, Russia. For the first time ever, ordinary Russians can now see documents that appear to confirm long-standing rumors that Vladimir Lenin had Jewish heritage.
- Sergey Ponomarev /AP Photo
For the first time ever, ordinary Russians can now see documents that appear to confirm long-standing rumors that Vladimir Lenin had Jewish heritage.
In a country long plagued by anti-Semitism, such heritage can be a significant taint, especially for the founder of the Soviet Union who is still revered by many elderly Russians.
Among dozens of newly released documents on display at the State History Museum is a letter written by Lenin's eldest sister, Anna Ulyanova, saying that their maternal grandfather was a Ukrainian Jew who converted to Christianity to escape the Pale of Settlement and gain access to higher education.
"He came from a poor Jewish family and was, according to his baptismal certificate, the son of Moses Blank, a native of (the western Ukrainian city of) Zhitomir," Ulyanova wrote in a 1932 letter to Josef Stalin, who succeeded Lenin after his death in 1924.
"Vladimir Ilych had always thought of Jews highly," she wrote. "I am very sorry that the fact of our origin - which I had suspected before - was not known during his lifetime."
Under czarist rule, most Jews were allowed permanent residence only in a restricted area that became known as the Pale of Settlement which included much of present-day Lithuania, Belarus, Poland, Moldova, Ukraine and parts of western Russia.
Many Jews joined the Bolsheviks to fight rampant anti-Semitism in czarist Russia and some were among the leaders of the Communist Party when it took power after the 1917 Revolution. Most prominent among them was Leon Trotsky, whose real name was Bronstein.
But Lenin, who was born Vladimir Ilych Ulyanov in 1870, identified himself only as Russian. He took Lenin as his nom de guerre in 1901 while in Siberian exile near the Lena River.
A brief period of promotion of Jewish culture that began under Lenin ended in the early 1930s when Stalin orchestrated anti-Semitic purges among Communists and hatched a plan to relocate all Soviet Jews to a region on the Chinese border.
Ulyanova asked Stalin to make Lenin's Jewish heritage known to counter the rise of anti-Semitism. "I hear that in recent years anti-Semitism has been growing stronger again, even among Communists," she wrote. "It would be wrong to hide the fact from the masses."
Stalin ignored the plea and ordered her to "keep absolute silence" about her letter, according to the exhibition's curator, Tatyana Koloskova.
Lenin's official biography, written by his niece Olga Ulyanova, said his family had only Russian, German and Swedish roots.
The letter from Lenin's sister became available to Russian historians in the early 1990s, but its authenticity was fiercely disputed. It was chosen for inclusion in the exhibit by Koloskova, who as director of the State History Museum's branch dedicated to Lenin is one of the most authoritative scholars on his life.
The exhibition in the museum on Red Square, near the mausoleum where Lenin's body still lies, also discloses that he was in such misery after suffering a stroke in 1922 that he asked Stalin to bring him poison.
"He did not incidentally pick Stalin to fulfill this request," Lenin's youngest sister, Maria Ulyanova, wrote in a 1922 diary entry. "He knew Comrade Stalin as a steadfast Bolshevik, straight and devoid of any sentimentality. Who else would dare to end Lenin's life?"
Initially, Stalin promised to help Lenin, but other Politburo members decided to turn down his request, the letter says. Trotsky, whom Stalin forced out of the Soviet Union, claimed in his memoirs that Stalin had poisoned Lenin.
The 111 documents on display, many of them only recently declassified and all of them open to the public for the first time, give surprising insights into top figures of the Soviet Union. Men usually portrayed as stern and fearless are seen as sometimes whimsical, frightened and even despairing.
One of the documents contains a desperate plea that Stalin received in 1934 from an arrested Communist leader, Lev Kamenev, whose real name was Rosenfeld.
"At a time when my soul is filled with nothing but love for the party and its leadership, when, having lived through hesitations and doubts, I can boldly say that I learned to highly trust the Central Committee's every step and every decision you, Comrade Stalin, make," Kamenev wrote. "I have been arrested for my ties to people that are strange and disgusting to me."
Stalin ignored this letter, too, and Kamenev was executed in 1936.
A slightly more humorous - but no less macabre - aspect of the exhibition is caricatures drawn by Politburo members.
Nikolai Bukharin, a leading Communist ideologue, depicts Stalin with a giant, exaggerated nose and his trademark pipe. His portrayal of other Communists is also unflattering - one is shown as a White Army officer. The anti-Communist White Army, which was backed by Western powers, unsuccessfully fought Lenin's Red Army in a civil war from 1917-23.
Prominent economist Valery Mezhlauk ridicules Trotsky as a Wandering Jew and depicts a finance minister hanging in an awkward position. In a handwritten note under the latter caricature, Stalin recommends that the minister be hanged by his testicles.
The minister and both cartoonists were arrested and executed in 1938.
The exhibition, which opened last week, runs through July 3.
© 2011 TheState.com and wire service sources. All Rights Reserved. http://www.thestate.com
Monday, 23 May 2011
Early Gassing Story
Subject: Gassing Jews--in the year 38 AD!
For the whole account, see:
http://cornerstonepublications.org/Philo/Philo_Flaccus.html
Here is certainly the earliest recorded incident of the gassing to death of Jews. In the year 38, the Roman viceroy of Alexandria was A. A. Flaccus. The city had a considerable population of Jews, many of whom resented Roman rule. To quell periodic uprisings, Flaccus rescinded their rights and initiated a pogrom. He then confined them to one quarter of the city, effectively creating the first Jewish ghetto in history. Once concentrated, they were sitting ducks for the local mob. Flaccus (according to the Jewish historian Philo) "allowed anyone who was inclined to proceed to exterminate the Jews as prisoners of war."
In a lengthy passage of his work Flaccus, Philo describes, in the best Holocaust style, the atrocities inflicted on the Jews. In the middle of his account we find this:
"Some persons even, going still great and greater lengths in the iniquity and license of their barbarity, disdained all blunter weapons, and took up the most efficacious arms of all, fire and iron, and slew many with the sword, and destroyed not a few with flames. And the most merciless of all their persecutors in some instances burnt whole families, husbands with their wives, and infant children with their parents, in the middle of the city, sparing neither age nor youth, nor the innocent helplessness of infants. And when they had a scarcity of fuel, they collected faggots of green wood, and slew them by the smoke rather than by fire…" (IX, 68)
One wonders how exactly this happened—in "smoke chambers"? Open air? Enclosed chariots? In any case, the Nazis evidently had a good role model in the Romans.
For the whole account, see:
http://cornerstonepublications.org/Philo/Philo_Flaccus.html
For the whole account, see:
http://cornerstonepublications.org/Philo/Philo_Flaccus.html
Here is certainly the earliest recorded incident of the gassing to death of Jews. In the year 38, the Roman viceroy of Alexandria was A. A. Flaccus. The city had a considerable population of Jews, many of whom resented Roman rule. To quell periodic uprisings, Flaccus rescinded their rights and initiated a pogrom. He then confined them to one quarter of the city, effectively creating the first Jewish ghetto in history. Once concentrated, they were sitting ducks for the local mob. Flaccus (according to the Jewish historian Philo) "allowed anyone who was inclined to proceed to exterminate the Jews as prisoners of war."
In a lengthy passage of his work Flaccus, Philo describes, in the best Holocaust style, the atrocities inflicted on the Jews. In the middle of his account we find this:
"Some persons even, going still great and greater lengths in the iniquity and license of their barbarity, disdained all blunter weapons, and took up the most efficacious arms of all, fire and iron, and slew many with the sword, and destroyed not a few with flames. And the most merciless of all their persecutors in some instances burnt whole families, husbands with their wives, and infant children with their parents, in the middle of the city, sparing neither age nor youth, nor the innocent helplessness of infants. And when they had a scarcity of fuel, they collected faggots of green wood, and slew them by the smoke rather than by fire…" (IX, 68)
One wonders how exactly this happened—in "smoke chambers"? Open air? Enclosed chariots? In any case, the Nazis evidently had a good role model in the Romans.
For the whole account, see:
http://cornerstonepublications.org/Philo/Philo_Flaccus.html
Monday, 16 May 2011
Freedom of Information Act Reveals Files Suggesting FDR’s Role in Pearl Harbor
Pearl Harbor was a an exact prequel to 9-11: The reason why FDR provoked Japan into attacking the USA was to get us into the European War. Japan and Germany were allies. The Germans were kicking the hell out of the Russians and the only way FDR could save Stalin and his bolshevik friends was to get the USA into war with Japan. That would the USA into the war by the back door, and that is exactly what happened.
http://www.activistpost.com/2011/04/freedom-of-information-act-reveals.html
Friday, April 22, 2011
Freedom of Information Act Reveals Files Suggesting FDR’s Role in Pearl Harbor
Alexis Bonari
September 11th is hardly the first “day of infamy” to undergo public scrutiny and accusations of government conspiracy. President Franklin D. Roosevelt coined the phrase on December 7th after the Japanese “surprise” attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. The attack, according to author and WWII Navy veteran, Robert B. Stinnett, however, had been no surprise at all for Roosevelt.
It was only at the author’s insistent calls on the Freedom of Information Act that the U.S. Navy at last released formerly hidden evidence that led Stinnett to conclude: FDR knew and had the power to avert disaster on December 7th.
Interview with Stinnett
The government’s claims that Japan’s codes had yet to be broken in the months leading up to Pearl Harbor have been met with questions and skepticism since 1945’s September issue of Life magazine. Stinnett himself, in an interview featured on The Independent Institute’s website, says that he believed the article to be an anti-Roosevelt tract at the time. After reading At Dawn We Slept by Professor Prange in 1982, however, and learning about the US Navy monitoring station at Pearl Harbor, he changed his mind. This was the beginning of Day of Deceit.
Day of Deceit
The likes of Gore Vidal and John Toland, Pulitzer Prize-winner and author of Infamy, have praised Stinnett’s heavily researched book, Day of Deceit. In it, he writes at length about the Roosevelt administration’s plan to provoke Japan in an “overt act of war,” a plan that he adopted in October 7, 1940.
Because the American public still ached from the appalling death toll of the First World War (and because FDR had already promised his people, “Your boys are not going to be sent into ay foreign wars”), FDR focused most of his energy on coming up with a reason for the nation to change its mind. In November 1941, all US military commanders received the order: “The United States desires that Japan commit the first overt act.” That would explain why, according to Lynne Olson’s research published in Citizens of London, Churchill and Governor John G. Winant practically danced at the news in December that America would be joining the European campaign, forgetting that over 2,000 Americans were already dead.
Cracking the Code
According to Stinnett’s research, the US Navy had in fact cracked Japanese naval codes and even intercepted eighty-three messages from Admiral Yamamoto to his warships. A message from November 25 read:
…the task force, keeping its movements strictly secret and maintaining close guard against submarines and aircraft, shall advance into Hawaiian waters, and upon the very opening of hostilities shall attack the main force of the United States fleet in Hawaii and deal it a mortal blow.
Even Thomas Dewey, Roosevelt’s competitor in the 1944 presidential elections, had heard whispers of FDR’s role in arranging the massacre. Although Dewey planned speeches to charge FDR with foreknowledge of the attack, General George Marshall (Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff) convinced Dewey that he would risk American security in doing so, since Japan’s navy had yet to realize their codes had been cracked. Dewey kept his silence, and nearly everyone else has since, too—until Stinnett.
Day of Deceit has received much criticism (predictably) from conventional historians and readers as well as notable acclaim from revisionists. Still others disapprove of Stinnett’s ubiquitous tone that suggests throughout the book that FDR had no choice but to arrange for the deaths of over 2,000 Americans at Pearl Harbor. Stinnet most notably fails to mention FDR’s refusal to meet Prime Minister Konoye for peace talks in late 1941.
Stinnett seems to have broken ground, but it is still only the surface.
Alexis Bonari is a freelance writer and researcher for College Scholarships, where recently she’s been researching nurse anesthetist scholarships as well as nursing midwives scholarships. In her spare time, she enjoys square-foot gardening, swimming, and avoiding her laptop.
Freedom of Information Act Reveals Files Suggesting FDR’s Role in Pearl Harbor
5 comments:
Anonymous said...
The Japanese crypto machine was a modified version of the German Enigma machine. It used much more reliable rotary telephone switches instead of the German Enigma rotors. What most people do not realize, even today, is that the entire Enigma rotor concept is insecure. A Polish mathematician named Marian Rejewski, pronounced Ray EFF ski, used the branch of math called "group theory" to show how the rotor connections can be recovered, given enough data. To this day, most people believe, and report as fact, that the rotor connections were stolen. WRONG. The rotor connections were not stolen from the Germans and they did not need to be stolen from the Japanese, very difficult for any white faces to accomplish. The US Navy crypto people knew very well what Rejewski had discovered. We know the complete story of the German Enigma cipher and how it was broken but to this day the US Navy's breaking of the Japanese codes has not been made public in comparable detail. The book "Enigma" by Wladyslaw Kozaczuk (1984) has the critical German Enigma information in an appendix. The point: there is no reason to keep WWII code breaking a secret unless to cover up advanced knowledge of Pearl Harbor. See also Wikipedia Enigma article.
April 22, 2011 10:43 AM
Anonymous said...
so maybe 70years from now we will find out that bush knew and keep it to himself and the cia to go to work for oil and still never got any of it.
April 22, 2011 12:41 PM
http://www.activistpost.com/2011/04/freedom-of-information-act-reveals.html
Friday, April 22, 2011
Freedom of Information Act Reveals Files Suggesting FDR’s Role in Pearl Harbor
Alexis Bonari
September 11th is hardly the first “day of infamy” to undergo public scrutiny and accusations of government conspiracy. President Franklin D. Roosevelt coined the phrase on December 7th after the Japanese “surprise” attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. The attack, according to author and WWII Navy veteran, Robert B. Stinnett, however, had been no surprise at all for Roosevelt.
It was only at the author’s insistent calls on the Freedom of Information Act that the U.S. Navy at last released formerly hidden evidence that led Stinnett to conclude: FDR knew and had the power to avert disaster on December 7th.
Interview with Stinnett
The government’s claims that Japan’s codes had yet to be broken in the months leading up to Pearl Harbor have been met with questions and skepticism since 1945’s September issue of Life magazine. Stinnett himself, in an interview featured on The Independent Institute’s website, says that he believed the article to be an anti-Roosevelt tract at the time. After reading At Dawn We Slept by Professor Prange in 1982, however, and learning about the US Navy monitoring station at Pearl Harbor, he changed his mind. This was the beginning of Day of Deceit.
Day of Deceit
The likes of Gore Vidal and John Toland, Pulitzer Prize-winner and author of Infamy, have praised Stinnett’s heavily researched book, Day of Deceit. In it, he writes at length about the Roosevelt administration’s plan to provoke Japan in an “overt act of war,” a plan that he adopted in October 7, 1940.
Because the American public still ached from the appalling death toll of the First World War (and because FDR had already promised his people, “Your boys are not going to be sent into ay foreign wars”), FDR focused most of his energy on coming up with a reason for the nation to change its mind. In November 1941, all US military commanders received the order: “The United States desires that Japan commit the first overt act.” That would explain why, according to Lynne Olson’s research published in Citizens of London, Churchill and Governor John G. Winant practically danced at the news in December that America would be joining the European campaign, forgetting that over 2,000 Americans were already dead.
Cracking the Code
According to Stinnett’s research, the US Navy had in fact cracked Japanese naval codes and even intercepted eighty-three messages from Admiral Yamamoto to his warships. A message from November 25 read:
…the task force, keeping its movements strictly secret and maintaining close guard against submarines and aircraft, shall advance into Hawaiian waters, and upon the very opening of hostilities shall attack the main force of the United States fleet in Hawaii and deal it a mortal blow.
Even Thomas Dewey, Roosevelt’s competitor in the 1944 presidential elections, had heard whispers of FDR’s role in arranging the massacre. Although Dewey planned speeches to charge FDR with foreknowledge of the attack, General George Marshall (Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff) convinced Dewey that he would risk American security in doing so, since Japan’s navy had yet to realize their codes had been cracked. Dewey kept his silence, and nearly everyone else has since, too—until Stinnett.
Day of Deceit has received much criticism (predictably) from conventional historians and readers as well as notable acclaim from revisionists. Still others disapprove of Stinnett’s ubiquitous tone that suggests throughout the book that FDR had no choice but to arrange for the deaths of over 2,000 Americans at Pearl Harbor. Stinnet most notably fails to mention FDR’s refusal to meet Prime Minister Konoye for peace talks in late 1941.
Stinnett seems to have broken ground, but it is still only the surface.
Alexis Bonari is a freelance writer and researcher for College Scholarships, where recently she’s been researching nurse anesthetist scholarships as well as nursing midwives scholarships. In her spare time, she enjoys square-foot gardening, swimming, and avoiding her laptop.
Freedom of Information Act Reveals Files Suggesting FDR’s Role in Pearl Harbor
5 comments:
Anonymous said...
The Japanese crypto machine was a modified version of the German Enigma machine. It used much more reliable rotary telephone switches instead of the German Enigma rotors. What most people do not realize, even today, is that the entire Enigma rotor concept is insecure. A Polish mathematician named Marian Rejewski, pronounced Ray EFF ski, used the branch of math called "group theory" to show how the rotor connections can be recovered, given enough data. To this day, most people believe, and report as fact, that the rotor connections were stolen. WRONG. The rotor connections were not stolen from the Germans and they did not need to be stolen from the Japanese, very difficult for any white faces to accomplish. The US Navy crypto people knew very well what Rejewski had discovered. We know the complete story of the German Enigma cipher and how it was broken but to this day the US Navy's breaking of the Japanese codes has not been made public in comparable detail. The book "Enigma" by Wladyslaw Kozaczuk (1984) has the critical German Enigma information in an appendix. The point: there is no reason to keep WWII code breaking a secret unless to cover up advanced knowledge of Pearl Harbor. See also Wikipedia Enigma article.
April 22, 2011 10:43 AM
Anonymous said...
so maybe 70years from now we will find out that bush knew and keep it to himself and the cia to go to work for oil and still never got any of it.
April 22, 2011 12:41 PM
Creeping Internet Control Article #1,346
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/05/protect-act/
Creeping Internet Control Article #1,346
It’s really weird; every day there is some article about how economic collapse, or in this case totalitarian government control of the internet, or something equally bad is creeping closer and closer, but it never seems actually to get here. The process is so slow that the American people, such as remains of them, don’t even notice or care. It’s like the old story of a frog being slowly boiled to death in water over a fire; the increase in heat is so gradual that no one notices.
Wired.com reports: “Senate antipiracy legislation introduced Thursday would dramatically increase the government’s legal power to disrupt and shutter websites dedicated to infringing activities.”
(However the regime defines “infringing activities.”)
“A major feature of the Protect IP Act, introduced by 11 senators of all stripes, would grant the government the authority to bring lawsuits against these websites, and obtain court orders requiring search engines like Google to stop displaying links to them. The proposal is an offshoot to the Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act introduced last year. It was scrapped by its authors in exchange for the Protect IP Act in a bid to win Senate passage.
“Under the old COICA draft, the government was authorized to obtain court orders to seize so-called generic top-level domains ending in .com, .org and .net. The new legislation, with the same sponsors, narrows that somewhat. Instead of allowing for the seizure of domains, it allows the Justice Department to obtain court orders demanding American ISPs stop rendering the DNS for a particular website — meaning the sites would still be accessible outside the United States. Either way, though, the legislation amounts to the holy grail of intellectual-property enforcement that the recording industry, movie studios and their union and guild workforces have been clamoring for since the George W. Bush administration.”
[Long blah blah bah statement from Hollywood glitterati redacted. Basically, file-sharing and movie piracy hits lefty liberals in their wallets, and that’s a no-no.]
Wired.com: “The new bill also gives content owners more rights than the old bill. It would allow rights holders to seek court orders instructing online ad services and credit card companies from partnering with the infringing sites — a power the government is granted in either legislative version.”
(Thus providing yet another endless fountain of revenue for lawyers.)
“Only the government gets the DNS blocking powers. And the Digital Millennium Copyright Act already grants rights holders the ability to demand search engines to stop displaying search results linking to infringing sites. Despite the new bill watering down the United States’ reach, the government has been invoking an asset-forfeiture law to seize generic top-level domains of infringing websites under a program called Operation in Our Sites. It began last year, and the Department of Homeland Security has targeted 120 sites.”
Okay, cutting to the chase: “infringement” can mean whatever the government wants it to mean, For example, technically speaking, I am “infringing” on Wired.com’s copyright simply by quoting from and analyzing this article.
This law gives the government the power to seize the domain name and permanently silence any web site that “infringes,” like for example quoting an Obama speech or, like one popular weekly racial podcast, by playing musical interludes. With a little effort almost anything can be legally considered to be “infringement” on someone else’s “intellectual property” and used as yet another fig leaf to achieve political censorship of thought, which is what the Democrats have been after for the past 50 years.
Republicans, to give them what little credit is due to them, honestly don’t seem to care too much about criticism; they simply ignore it and do whatever the hell they want. Liberal Democrats hate criticism and seek to silence it, but both parties want to control and silence the internet because it is a form of lateral communication, directly between people, not top-down communication, and the internet is not filtered by the liberal news media.
Creeping Internet Control Article #1,346
It’s really weird; every day there is some article about how economic collapse, or in this case totalitarian government control of the internet, or something equally bad is creeping closer and closer, but it never seems actually to get here. The process is so slow that the American people, such as remains of them, don’t even notice or care. It’s like the old story of a frog being slowly boiled to death in water over a fire; the increase in heat is so gradual that no one notices.
Wired.com reports: “Senate antipiracy legislation introduced Thursday would dramatically increase the government’s legal power to disrupt and shutter websites dedicated to infringing activities.”
(However the regime defines “infringing activities.”)
“A major feature of the Protect IP Act, introduced by 11 senators of all stripes, would grant the government the authority to bring lawsuits against these websites, and obtain court orders requiring search engines like Google to stop displaying links to them. The proposal is an offshoot to the Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act introduced last year. It was scrapped by its authors in exchange for the Protect IP Act in a bid to win Senate passage.
“Under the old COICA draft, the government was authorized to obtain court orders to seize so-called generic top-level domains ending in .com, .org and .net. The new legislation, with the same sponsors, narrows that somewhat. Instead of allowing for the seizure of domains, it allows the Justice Department to obtain court orders demanding American ISPs stop rendering the DNS for a particular website — meaning the sites would still be accessible outside the United States. Either way, though, the legislation amounts to the holy grail of intellectual-property enforcement that the recording industry, movie studios and their union and guild workforces have been clamoring for since the George W. Bush administration.”
[Long blah blah bah statement from Hollywood glitterati redacted. Basically, file-sharing and movie piracy hits lefty liberals in their wallets, and that’s a no-no.]
Wired.com: “The new bill also gives content owners more rights than the old bill. It would allow rights holders to seek court orders instructing online ad services and credit card companies from partnering with the infringing sites — a power the government is granted in either legislative version.”
(Thus providing yet another endless fountain of revenue for lawyers.)
“Only the government gets the DNS blocking powers. And the Digital Millennium Copyright Act already grants rights holders the ability to demand search engines to stop displaying search results linking to infringing sites. Despite the new bill watering down the United States’ reach, the government has been invoking an asset-forfeiture law to seize generic top-level domains of infringing websites under a program called Operation in Our Sites. It began last year, and the Department of Homeland Security has targeted 120 sites.”
Okay, cutting to the chase: “infringement” can mean whatever the government wants it to mean, For example, technically speaking, I am “infringing” on Wired.com’s copyright simply by quoting from and analyzing this article.
This law gives the government the power to seize the domain name and permanently silence any web site that “infringes,” like for example quoting an Obama speech or, like one popular weekly racial podcast, by playing musical interludes. With a little effort almost anything can be legally considered to be “infringement” on someone else’s “intellectual property” and used as yet another fig leaf to achieve political censorship of thought, which is what the Democrats have been after for the past 50 years.
Republicans, to give them what little credit is due to them, honestly don’t seem to care too much about criticism; they simply ignore it and do whatever the hell they want. Liberal Democrats hate criticism and seek to silence it, but both parties want to control and silence the internet because it is a form of lateral communication, directly between people, not top-down communication, and the internet is not filtered by the liberal news media.
Sunday, 15 May 2011
The Persecution of John Demjanjuk
The Persecution of John Demjanjuk
By PATRICK J. BUCHANAN
“John Demjanjuk Guilty of Nazi Death Camp Murders,” ran the headline on
the BBC. The lead began:
“A German court has found John Demjanjuk guilty of helping to murder more
than 28,000 Jews at a Nazi death camp in Poland.”
Not until paragraph 17 does one find this jolting fact: “No evidence was produced
that he committed a specific crime.”
That is correct. No evidence was produced, no witness came forward to testify he
ever saw Demjanjuk injure anyone. And the critical evidence that put Demjanjuk
at Sobibor came — from the KGB.
First was a KGB summary of an alleged interview with one Ignat Danilchenko,
who claimed he was a guard at Sobibor and knew Demjanjuk. Second was the
Soviet-supplied ID card from the Trawniki camp that trained guards.
There are major problems with both pieces of “evidence.”
First, Danilchenko has been dead for a quarter of a century, no one in the West
ever interviewed him, and Moscow stonewalled defense requests for access to
the full Danilchenko file. His very existence raises a question.
How could a Red Army soldier who turned collaborator and Nazi camp guard
survive Operation Keelhaul, which sent all Soviet POWs back to Joseph Stalin,
where they were either murdered or sent to the Gulag?
As for the ID card from Trawniki, just last month there was unearthed at the
National Archives in College Park, Md., a 1985 report from the Cleveland office
of the FBI, which, after studying the card, concluded it was “quite likely” a
KGB forgery.
“Justice is ill-served in the prosecution of an American citizen on evidence which
is not only normally inadmissible in a court of law, but based on evidence and
allegations quite likely fabricated by the KGB.”
This FBI report, never made public, was done just as Demjanjuk was being
deported to Israel to stand trial as “Ivan the Terrible,” the murderer of Treblinka.
In a sensational trial covered by the world’s press, Demjanjuk was convicted
and sentenced to hang.
But after five years on death row, new evidence turned up when the Soviet Union
collapsed and Russia opened up. That evidence wholly validated the claims of
Demjanjuk’s defenders.
Not only had Demjanjuk never even been at Treblinka, the Soviet files contained
a photograph of the real “Ivan” — a larger and older man.
To its eternal credit, the Israeli Supreme Court reversed the conviction, rejected
a request to retry Demjanjuk as a camp guard elsewhere in Poland, freed him
and sent him home to America.
Exposed as a laughing stock, and denounced for fraud by Ohio district and
appellate courts, the Office of Special Investigations began crafting a new case,
John Demjanjuk of Sobibor, to deport and try again the old man whose defense
attorneys had made fools of them.
Thus the Sobibor story and Demjanjuk’s supposed complicity in the murder
of 28,000 Jews — though, as the BBC notes, no one testified at the trial that they
ever saw John Demjanjuk injure anyone.
Consider the life this tormented American has lived.
Born in Ukraine in 1920, as a boy he endured the Holodomor — the famine
imposed on his people in 1932 and 1933 by Stalin and his hated henchman
Lazar Kaganovich, which resulted in the starvation and death of somewhere
between 5 million and 9 million Ukrainians.
It has been called by historians the “forgotten Holocaust.”
Conscripted into the Red Army, Demjanjuk was captured in the German
blitzkrieg. Not only did Demjanjuk survive, he managed to evade the Allied order,
under Keelhaul, for all Red Army POWs to be repatriated to Stalin, which was the
Soviet dictator’s demand before he would return the U.S. and British POWs his
troops liberated in the march to Berlin.
In the war’s aftermath, Demjanjuk married his wife Vera, who had been
conscripted in the Ukraine and brought forcibly west to work in the German
economy.
Thence he moved to Cleveland, became an autoworker, raised a family and
practiced his Christian faith. But he made a mistake.
He sent his wife to Ukraine to tell his aged mother that he had survived the war
and was living in the great United States of America.
Word got around the village. The KGB came calling. Swiftly, the payments his
mother had been receiving for her war hero son were halted, and suddenly, there
turned up an ID card that said John Demjanjuk had been trained at Trawniki
to be a Nazi camp guard.
The KGB began feeding OSI from its “files,” as OSI began a manic persecution
of Demjanjuk that has lasted 30 years.
Stalin died in bed in 1953. Kaganovich died with his family around him in
Moscow in 1991. And John Demjanjuk, 91, after spending five years on death row
for a crime he did not commit in a place he never was, is stateless and homeless in
a Germany where veterans of the SS walk free.
That is justice — in our world.
May 13, 2011
http://buchanan.org/blog/the-persecution-of-john-demjanjuk-4743
By PATRICK J. BUCHANAN
“John Demjanjuk Guilty of Nazi Death Camp Murders,” ran the headline on
the BBC. The lead began:
“A German court has found John Demjanjuk guilty of helping to murder more
than 28,000 Jews at a Nazi death camp in Poland.”
Not until paragraph 17 does one find this jolting fact: “No evidence was produced
that he committed a specific crime.”
That is correct. No evidence was produced, no witness came forward to testify he
ever saw Demjanjuk injure anyone. And the critical evidence that put Demjanjuk
at Sobibor came — from the KGB.
First was a KGB summary of an alleged interview with one Ignat Danilchenko,
who claimed he was a guard at Sobibor and knew Demjanjuk. Second was the
Soviet-supplied ID card from the Trawniki camp that trained guards.
There are major problems with both pieces of “evidence.”
First, Danilchenko has been dead for a quarter of a century, no one in the West
ever interviewed him, and Moscow stonewalled defense requests for access to
the full Danilchenko file. His very existence raises a question.
How could a Red Army soldier who turned collaborator and Nazi camp guard
survive Operation Keelhaul, which sent all Soviet POWs back to Joseph Stalin,
where they were either murdered or sent to the Gulag?
As for the ID card from Trawniki, just last month there was unearthed at the
National Archives in College Park, Md., a 1985 report from the Cleveland office
of the FBI, which, after studying the card, concluded it was “quite likely” a
KGB forgery.
“Justice is ill-served in the prosecution of an American citizen on evidence which
is not only normally inadmissible in a court of law, but based on evidence and
allegations quite likely fabricated by the KGB.”
This FBI report, never made public, was done just as Demjanjuk was being
deported to Israel to stand trial as “Ivan the Terrible,” the murderer of Treblinka.
In a sensational trial covered by the world’s press, Demjanjuk was convicted
and sentenced to hang.
But after five years on death row, new evidence turned up when the Soviet Union
collapsed and Russia opened up. That evidence wholly validated the claims of
Demjanjuk’s defenders.
Not only had Demjanjuk never even been at Treblinka, the Soviet files contained
a photograph of the real “Ivan” — a larger and older man.
To its eternal credit, the Israeli Supreme Court reversed the conviction, rejected
a request to retry Demjanjuk as a camp guard elsewhere in Poland, freed him
and sent him home to America.
Exposed as a laughing stock, and denounced for fraud by Ohio district and
appellate courts, the Office of Special Investigations began crafting a new case,
John Demjanjuk of Sobibor, to deport and try again the old man whose defense
attorneys had made fools of them.
Thus the Sobibor story and Demjanjuk’s supposed complicity in the murder
of 28,000 Jews — though, as the BBC notes, no one testified at the trial that they
ever saw John Demjanjuk injure anyone.
Consider the life this tormented American has lived.
Born in Ukraine in 1920, as a boy he endured the Holodomor — the famine
imposed on his people in 1932 and 1933 by Stalin and his hated henchman
Lazar Kaganovich, which resulted in the starvation and death of somewhere
between 5 million and 9 million Ukrainians.
It has been called by historians the “forgotten Holocaust.”
Conscripted into the Red Army, Demjanjuk was captured in the German
blitzkrieg. Not only did Demjanjuk survive, he managed to evade the Allied order,
under Keelhaul, for all Red Army POWs to be repatriated to Stalin, which was the
Soviet dictator’s demand before he would return the U.S. and British POWs his
troops liberated in the march to Berlin.
In the war’s aftermath, Demjanjuk married his wife Vera, who had been
conscripted in the Ukraine and brought forcibly west to work in the German
economy.
Thence he moved to Cleveland, became an autoworker, raised a family and
practiced his Christian faith. But he made a mistake.
He sent his wife to Ukraine to tell his aged mother that he had survived the war
and was living in the great United States of America.
Word got around the village. The KGB came calling. Swiftly, the payments his
mother had been receiving for her war hero son were halted, and suddenly, there
turned up an ID card that said John Demjanjuk had been trained at Trawniki
to be a Nazi camp guard.
The KGB began feeding OSI from its “files,” as OSI began a manic persecution
of Demjanjuk that has lasted 30 years.
Stalin died in bed in 1953. Kaganovich died with his family around him in
Moscow in 1991. And John Demjanjuk, 91, after spending five years on death row
for a crime he did not commit in a place he never was, is stateless and homeless in
a Germany where veterans of the SS walk free.
That is justice — in our world.
May 13, 2011
http://buchanan.org/blog/the-persecution-of-john-demjanjuk-4743
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