ISRAEL MATZAV: Hitler's bodyguard dies, wife may have been Jewish

Rochus Misch, who was one of Adolph Hitler's two bodyguards, has died at the age of 96.

YNet publishes excerpts of afascinating interview (via AP) which apparently dates to the mid-90's.

Misch and comrade Johannes Hentschel accompanied Hitler almost everywhere he went, including his Alpine retreat in Berchtesgaden and his forward "Wolf's Lair" headquarters. 

He lived between the Fuehrer's apartments in the New Reich Chancellery and the home in a working-class Berlin neighborhood that he kept until his death.
"He was a wonderful boss," Misch said. "I lived with him for five years. We were the closest people who worked with him ... we were always there. Hitler was never without us day and night."
In the last days of Hitler's life, Misch followed him to live underground, protected by the so-called Fuehrerbunker's heavily reinforced concrete ceilings and walls.
"Hentschel ran the lights, air and water and I did the telephones – there was nobody else," he said. "When someone would come downstairs we couldn't even offer them a place to sit. It was far too small."
After the Soviet assault began, Misch remembered generals and Nazi brass coming and going as they tried desperately to cobble together a defense of the capital with the ragtag remains of the German military.
He recalled that on April 22, two days before two Soviet armies completed their encirclement of the city, Hitler said: "That's it. The war is lost. Everybody can go."
"Everyone except those who still had jobs to do like us – we had to stay," Misch said. "The lights, water, telephone ... those had to be kept going but everybody else was allowed to go and almost all were gone immediately."
However, Hitler clung to a report – false, as it turned out – that the Western Allies had called upon Germany to hold Berlin for two more weeks against the Soviets so that they could battle communism together.
"He still believed in a union between West and East," Misch said. "Hitler liked England – except for (then-Prime Minister Winston) Churchill -- and didn't think that a people like the English would bind themselves with the communists to crush Germany." 

If you can stand more of this sycophant, read the whole thing. 

The New York Times adds a couple of pieces that aren't in the AP account. One is the murder of the six Goebbels children by their mother (Magda and Joseph Goebbels committed suicide shortly thereafter), and the other is this little tidbit. 

Mr. Misch’s wife, Gerda, whom he married in 1942, died in 1997. In 2009, the BBC quoted their daughter, Brigitta Jacob-Engelken, as saying that she had been told by her maternal grandmother that Gerda Misch was originally Jewish.

“He is still saying, ‘No, I won’t believe that!’ ” Ms. Jacob-Engelken, describing her father, then 92, told the BBC. “But I know it from my grandma.”

Ms. Jacob-Engelken, an architect who lives in Germany and who has long been estranged from her father, is among his survivors. According to the BBC report, Ms. Jacob-Engelken learned Hebrew and lived for a time on an Israeli kibbutz. In Germany, her work has included the restoration of local synagogues.

Hmmm.

For the record, like all good Germans of that era, Misch claims that he didn't know anything about the murder of six million Jews. Misch is probably being roasted even as you read this.... 

TABLET: Hollywood’s Creepy Love Affair With Adolf Hitler, in Explosive New Detail Uncovered: new evidence of Jewish movie moguls’ extensive collaboration with Nazis in the 1930s

Hitler and Goebbels at the UFA studios in Berlin in 1935. (Deutsches Bundesarchiv)

 

Adolf Hitler loved American movies. Every night at about 9:00, after the Führer had tired out his listeners with his hours-long monologues, he would lead his dinner guests to his private screening room. The lights would go down, and Hitler would fall silent, probably for the first time that day. He laughed heartily at his favorites Laurel and Hardy and Mickey Mouse, and he adored Greta Garbo: Camille brought tears to the Führer’s eyes. Tarzan, on the other hand, he thought was silly.
As it turns out, Hitler’s love for American movies was reciprocated by Hollywood. A forthcoming book by the young historian Ben Urwand, to be published by Harvard University Press in October, presents explosive new evidence about the shocking extent of the partnership between the Nazis and major Hollywood producers. Urwand, a former indie rock musician and currently a member of Harvard’s prestigious Society of Fellows, takes the subject personally: His parents were Jewish refugees from Egypt and Hungary. Digging through archives in Berlin and Washington, D.C., he has unearthed proof that Hollywood worked together with the Nazis much more closely than we ever imagined.
Urwand has titled his riveting book The Collaboration: Hollywood’s Pact With Hitler, and as you turn its pages you realize with dismay that collaboration is the only fitting word for the relationship between Hitler and Hollywood in the 1930s. Using new archival discoveries, Urwand alleges that some of the Hollywood studio heads, nearly all of whom were Jewish, cast their lot with Hitler almost from the moment he took power, and that they did so eagerly—not reluctantly. What they wanted was access to German audiences. What Hitler wanted was the ability to shape the content of Hollywood movies—and he got it. During the ’30s, Georg Gyssling, Hitler’s consul in Los Angeles, was invited to preview films before they were released. If Gyssling objected to any part of a movie—and he frequently did—the offending scenes were cut. As a result, the Nazis had total veto power over the content of Hollywood movies.
What is shocking and new about Urwand’s account is its blow-by-blow description of Hollywood executives tailoring their product to meet the demands of the Nazi regime. While Hollywood’s relations with the Nazis is not a new subject, the inclination of previous historians like Thomas Doherty, author of Hollywood and Hitler, 1933-1939, who did not have access to the documents that Urwand has uncovered, has been to let the studio executives off the hook. Like most historians before Urwand, Doherty seconds Jack Warner’s self-portrait as an ardent foe of the Nazis, who stopped doing business in Germany because he was appalled by the Nazis’ treatment of Jews. But as Urwand alleges here, it wasn’t Warner who rejected the Nazis; they rejected him: Hitler dumped Warner Bros. because the studio failed to make the substantial cuts demanded by his consul Gyssling to a movie called Captured!, set in a German-run camp for foreign POWs during World War I. By July 1934, Warner Bros. had been kicked out of Berlin, and the rest of the studios were running scared. Urwand details Hollywood distribution companies faced with having to fire half of their Jewish staff members in Germany and negotiating with the Nazis so that they could hang on to other half. In 1936, all Jews associated with the American film industry in Germany were forced to leave the country. Yet even after this, the studios eagerly kept up their profitable dealings with Hitler’s regime.
Many dozens of Hollywood movies were imported into Nazi Germany each year, and they often did stunningly well at the box office. The American movies that the Nazis loved best were those that proclaimed the need for a strong leader. Nazi newspapers were ecstatic to see the “leader principle” illustrated in films like The Lives of a Bengal Lancer, Mutiny on the Bounty, Our Daily Bread, and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. They found in these blockbuster entertainments sound fascist political lessons leavened by humor—a light American touch that, Nazi reviewers lamented, German movies could never approach. (In 1939 10 Nazi newspaper editors—including the editor of the Völkischer Beobachter, the official Nazi party newspaper—were treated to a “good will tour” of the MGM studio.) No one was more wholesomely American than the warm-hearted, stammering Jimmy Stewart; but movies like Mr. Smith were welcomed in Germany because they showed that the democratic form of government was inefficient and corrupt.
A film that showed the advantages of democracy over fascism could never be made in Hollywood in the 1930s because of political pressure stemming from Hitler’s Germany, whose market was simply too lucrative for the studios to ignore. In 1936 MGM planned to adapt for the screen Sinclair Lewis’ novel about a fascist takeover of America, It Can’t Happen Here. When Louis B. Mayer called off the project shortly after it started production, the Nazis announced their pleasure with Mayer’s decision. Mayer was first tipped off to the danger of making It Can’t Happen Here by Will Hays. The Hays Office, Hollywood’s censorship bureau, enforced its Movie Production Code “to the end that vulgarity and suggestiveness may be eliminated and that good taste may be emphasized” (as the code put it). Hays admitted that It Can’t Happen Here didn’t offend according any standards of decency, but he warned that certain foreign governments—i.e., Germany—would be upset by the film.
Even before the Nazis took power, Hollywood was buckling under to German demands. In 1932 a new German regulation, inspired in part by Nazi agitation, appeared: Film producers could have their permits to show their films in Germany revoked if they screened, anywhere in the world, movies whose effect was damaging to Germany’s prestige. The intent was to curtail a flourishing genre: movies about World War I that portrayed German officers as scoundrels or sadists (and that often starred Erich von Stroheim, the Silesian Jewish genius who supplied his villainous acting roles with Teutonic growls, barks, and carpet-chewing mannerisms). When Hitler came to power a year later, he used the new law as a way to censor Hollywood movies: to control how they could depict Germans and Jews not only within Germany, but around the world.
Ironically, the man who set the pattern for German interference in American movie making was Carl Laemmle, Sr., head of Universal, who later heroically aided Jewish refugees from his native Germany (see Allison Hoffman’s recent Tablet Magazine story). In 1930, Nazis had disrupted the German premiere of Universal’s antiwar film All Quiet on the Western Front: Led by Goebbels, they set off stink bombs and let white mice loose in the theaters. After the Nazi riots, Laemmle, a Jew, put an ad in the German newspapers: “I yield to no one in my love for the Fatherland. The fact that I came to America as a boy and built my future in America has never for a moment caused any cessation of my love for the land of my birth.” Laemmle agreed to make major cuts toAll Quiet on the Western Front, not only for screenings in Germany, but worldwide. The picture was gutted—its savage attack on German militarism wound up on the cutting room floor. The same thing would happen later in the decade to MGM’s Three Comrades, again in response to German demands. Other studio heads were less sympathetic than Laemmle to the plight of their fellow Jews, but they shared his wish to keep the German market safe for American movies. Laemmle’s personal efforts to save Jews from the Nazis later on may well have been motivated by his guilt at doing the German government’s bidding as the head of a major Hollywood studio.
Hollywood’s policy of collaboration with the Nazis took more active forms as well. As Jews were systemically excluded from German life and barred from schools and professions, 20th Century Fox released The House of Rothschild (1934), starring George Arliss, the British actor who had earlier played Disraeli. The movie showed how a single Jewish family, headed by its greedy, mean-spirited patriarch Mayer Rothschild, managed to gain control over the finances of Europe and was even able to influence the decisions of governments about war and peace. It was a film that the Nazis might have commissioned themselves.
In fact, the Nazis liked The House of Rothschild so well that a scene from the movie was actually incorporated into the most notorious Nazi anti-Semitic film, Der Ewige Jude. The ADL was so disturbed by the film that it convinced the studios to avoid all mention of Jews in their future productions. And so Jewish characters, who had been featured in hundreds of movies in the 1920s, all but disappeared from the American screen after Hitler’s rise to power. Hitler’s government couldn’t have been happier: There would be no reference to the ever-more desperate plight of the Jews under the Nazi rule in any Hollywood film of the ’30s.
Incredibly, the creative collaboration between the Nazis and Hollywood only deepened throughout the 1930s as exclusionary violence against Jews increased and Hitler tightened his grip on power. In the late 1930s, Urwand claims, Paramount and 20th Century Fox produced newsreels in Germany depicting major Nazi events. Most shocking of all, Urwand maintains, in 1938 MGM invested in factories making German weapons in Austria and the Sudetenland. As Urwand put it in a recent YouTube interview, “The biggest movie studio in America was actually financing the production of German armaments immediately before World War II.” After Germany invaded Poland, MGM further consolidated its alliance with the Nazis by donating eleven of its most popular movies to the cause of German war relief.
***
In 1937, Urwand discovers, Jack Warner seems to have agreed to Gyssling’s demand that the word “Jew” not be spoken in The Life of Emile Zola, which depicted the Dreyfus case; Warner Bros. reassured the German consul that Dreyfus was not a major figure in the movie. The studios even sometimes signed their communiqués to Berlin “Heil Hitler!”: They were loyal to the Führer, even when he didn’t want their movies and in fact wanted to see them dead. Eventually, in 1939, Warner Brothers produced a B movie titled Confessions of a Nazi Spy—the first and only Hollywood criticism of Hitler Germany to be released in the six years since the Nazis took power. But the damage had already been done; the cravenness of the American film industry had made them de facto allies of the Nazis.
Hollywood’s repression of the facts about Jewish persecution continued even during the war years, after all the studios had finally been driven from Germany (MGM and Paramount remained there well into 1940) and America was at war with the Nazis. Despite the courageous efforts of screenwriter Ben Hecht to raise public awareness of the Holocaust while it was happening, there was only one reference to what was being done to the Jews in any Hollywood movie made during the war: a 5-minute sequence of a minor courtroom drama calledNone Shall Escape (1944), in which Nazis shoot a group of Jewish prisoners who fight back while they are being loaded onto a train. Five minutes was all the studio heads could give to the mass murder of their people, which by then had become common knowledge—in part as a result of Hecht’s full-page newspaper ads and his 1943 Madison Square Garden pageant, We Will Never Die.


Hitler saw himself as a cinematic hero, a matinee idol who overwhelmed the adoring crowds awestruck by his power. He stepped in on occasion and edited the Nazi newsreels himself; he realized that film swayed the masses. Hitler knew he had to feed people fantasy in order to get them to follow his evil vision, and he knew that the movies had taught him how to exploit fantasy’s power: how to seduce on the grandest possible scale. The movies he found most inspiring, most magical in the spell they cast on an audience, were made in America. As Neal Gabler argued in An Empire of Their Own, the Hollywood Jews invented the America of our dreams, a place of high excitement, courage, laughs, compassion, family feeling, and true love. Hitler’s dream was different, and it found a terrible fulfillment in mass murder and war. Hollywood could have helped awaken the world to the looming danger of Nazism, but instead the Jewish dream-makers cast their lot with the world’s—and the Jews’—greatest enemy

Hitler's Food Taster Tells Of Poisoning Fears

Berlin - They were feasts of sublime asparagus — laced with fear. And for more than half a century, Margot Woelk kept her secret hidden from the world, even from her husband. Then, a few months after her 95th birthday, she revealed the truth about her wartime role: Adolf Hitler’s food taster.

Woelk, then in her mid-twenties, spent two and a half years as one of 15 young women who sampled Hitler’s food to make sure it wasn’t poisoned before it was served to the Nazi leader in his “Wolf’s Lair,” the heavily guarded command center in what is now Poland, where he spent much of his time in the final years of World War II.

“He was a vegetarian. He never ate any meat during the entire time I was there,” Woelk said of the Nazi leader. “And Hitler was so paranoid that the British would poison him — that’s why he had 15 girls taste the food before he ate it himself.”

With many Germans contending with food shortages and a bland diet as the war dragged on, sampling Hitler’s food had its advantages.

“The food was delicious, only the best vegetables, asparagus, bell peppers, everything you can imagine. And always with a side of rice or pasta,” she recalled. “But this constant fear — we knew of all those poisoning rumors and could never enjoy the food. Every day we feared it was going to be our last meal.”

The petite widow’s story is a tale of the horror, pain and dislocation endured by people of all sides who survived World War II.

Only now in the sunset of her life has she been willing to relate her experiences, which she had buried because of shame and the fear of prosecution for having worked with the Nazis, although she insists she was never a party member. She told her story to The Associated Press as she flipped through a photo album with pictures of her as a young woman, in the same Berlin apartment where she was born in 1917.

Woelk says her association with Hitler began after she fled Berlin to escape Allied air attacks. With her husband gone and serving in the German army, she moved in with relatives about 435 miles (700 kilometers) to the east in Rastenburg, then part of Germany; now it is Ketrzyn, in what became Poland after the war.

FILE - This undated file picture shows the German Fuehrer Adolf Hitler and his mistress Eva Braun while dining. A German woman named Margot Woelk was one of 15 young women who sampled Hitler's food to make sure it wasn’t poisoned before it was served to the Nazi leader in his "Wolf's Lair," the heavily guarded command center in what is now Poland, where he spent much of his time in the final years of World War II. Margot Woelk kept her secret hidden from the world, even from her husband then, a few months after her 95th birthday, she revealed the truth about her wartime role. (AP Photo/US Army Signal Corps from Eva Braun's album, File)

There she was drafted into civilian service and assigned for the next two and a half years as a food taster and kitchen bookkeeper at the Wolf’s Lair complex, located a few miles (kilometers) outside the town. Hitler was secretive, even in the relative safety of his headquarters, that she never saw him in person — only his German shepherd Blondie and his SS guards, who chatted with the women.

Hitler’s security fears were not unfounded. On July 20, 1944, a trusted colonel detonated a bomb in the Wolf’s Lair in an attempt to kill Hitler. He survived, but nearly 5,000 people were executed following the assassination attempt, including the bomber.

“We were sitting on wooden benches when we heard and felt an incredible big bang,” she said of the 1944 bombing. “We fell off the benches, and I heard someone shouting ‘Hitler is dead!’ But he wasn’t. “

Following the blast, tension rose around the headquarters. Woelk said the Nazis ordered her to leave her relatives’ home and move into an abandoned school closer to the compound.

Margot Woelk, one of the food testers of Adolf Hitler, shows an old photo album and points to a picture taken prior to the WWII and showing the way to the later built Fuehrer Headquarters "Wolf's Lair", during an interview with The Associated Press in Berlin, Thursday, April 25, 2013. Margot Woelk was one of 15 young women who sampled Hitler's food to make sure it wasn’t poisoned before it was served to the Nazi leader in his "Wolf's Lair," the heavily guarded command center in what is now Poland, where he spent much of his time in the final years of World War II. Margot Woelk kept her secret hidden from the world, even from her husband then, a few months after her 95th birthday, she revealed the truth about her wartime role. (AP Photo/Markus Schreiber)

With the Soviet army on the offensive and the war going badly for Germany, one of her SS friends advised her to leave the Wolf’s Lair.

She said she returned by train to Berlin and went into hiding.

Woelk said the other women on the food tasting team decided to remain in Rastenburg since their families were all there and it was their home.

“Later, I found out that the Russians shot all of the 14 other girls,” she said. It was after Soviet troops overran the headquarters in January 1945.

When she returned to Berlin, she found a city facing complete destruction. Round-the-clock bombing by U.S. and British planes was grinding the city center to rubble. 

On April 20, 1945, Soviet artillery began shelling the outskirts of Berlin and ground forces pushed through toward the heart of the capital against strong resistance by die-hard SS and Hitler Youth fighters.

After about two weeks of heavy fighting, the city surrendered on May 2 — after Hitler, who had abandoned the Wolf’s Lair about five months before, had committed suicide. His successor surrendered a week later, ending the war in Europe.

For many Berlin civilians — their homes destroyed, family members missing or dead and food almost gone — the horror did not end with capitulation.

“The Russians then came to Berlin and got me, too,” Woelk said. “They took me to a doctor’s apartment and raped me for 14 consecutive days. That’s why I could never have children. They destroyed everything.”

Like millions of Germans and other Europeans, Woelk began rebuilding her life and trying to forget as best she could her bitter memories and the shame of her association with a criminal regime that had destroyed much of Europe.

She worked in a variety of jobs, mostly as a secretary or administrative assistant. Her husband returned from the war but died 23 years ago, she said.

With the frailty of advanced age and the lack of an elevator in her building, she has not left her apartment for the past eight years. Nurses visit several times a day, and a niece stops by frequently, she said.

Now at the end of her life, she feels the need to purge the memories by talking about her story.

“For decades, I tried to shake off those memories,” she said. “But they always came back to haunt me at night.” 

A few notable anniversaries on the Palestinians' big day

With the nations of Europe and the rest of the world lining up to support the PLO bid to receive non-member state status at the UN General Assembly, it is worth noting two anniversaries of related but forgotten events.

Of course, everyone knows the obvious anniversary - Nov. 29, 1947 was the day the UN General Assembly passed the plan to recommend the partition the British Mandate of Palestine into a Jewish state and an Arab state. The Jews accepted the plan. The Arabs -- both local and regional - rejected it. The local Arabs who 25 years later became known as "Palestinians," responded to the passage of UNGA resolution 181 by launching a terror war against the Jews. Their war was commanded by Iraqi and Lebanese terror masters and supported by the British military and its Arab Legion from Transjordan.

On May 15, 1948 five foreign Arab armies invaded the just-declared Jewish state with the declared aim of annihilating all the Jews.

Now for a couple less known anniversaries

On November 28, 1941 the religious and political leader of the Palestinian Arabs and one of the most influential leaders of the Arab world Haj Amin el Husseini met with Adolf Hitler in Berlin. Husseini had courted the Nazis since just after the Nazis rose to power in 1933. Husseini was forced to flee the British Mandate in 1937 when he expanded his fourth terror war against the Jews, that he began in 1936 to include the British as well.

He fled to Lebanon, and then in October 1939 he fled to Iraq. In April 1941 he fomented a pro-Nazi coup in Iraq. As the British -- with massive unheralded assistance from the Jews from the land of Israel -- were poised to enter Baghdad and restore the pro-British government, Husseini incited the Farhud, a 3-day pogrom against the Jews of Baghdad that took place over the festival of Shavuot. 150 Jews were murdered. A thousand were wounded and 900 Jewish homes were destroyed. 

With the coup defeated and the Jews murdered, Husseini escaped to then pro-Nazi Iran and then in October to Germany by way of Italy. (He was flown out of Iran on an Italian Air Force plane, and feted by Mussolini when he landed in Rome). 

He arrived in Berlin and two and a half weeks later he had a prolonged private meeting with Hitler. There, on November 28, 1941, two months before the Wannssee Conference, where the German high command received its first orders to annihilate European Jewry, Hitler told Husseini that he intended to eradicate the Jewish people from the face of Europe.

Husseini remained in Berlin through the end of the war and served as a Nazi agent. In Berlin he broadcast daily diatribes to the Arab world on German shortwave radio in Arabic. Specifically Husseini exhorted them to kill the Jews in the name of Allah and make common cause with the Nazis who would deliver them from the Jews, the British and the Americans. 

In 1943 Husseini organized the Hazhar SS Division of Bosnian Muslims. His division carried out the massacre of 90 percent of the Bosnian Jewish community of 12,000. 

In 1920 Husseini personally invented what later became known as the Palestinian national movement. He shaped its identity around the sole cause of destroying the Jewish presence in the land of Israel. 

During the war Husseini used his broadcasts to shape the political and religious  consciousness of the Muslim world by fusing Islamic Jew hatred with annihilationist Nazi anti-Semitism. Whereas much of the Nazi anti-Semitic ideology was discredited in postwar Europe, it has remained the single most resonant theme of Arab politics since World War II. 

In 1946, as his fellow Nazi war criminals were being tried in Nuremberg, Husseini made a triumphant return to Egypt where he was welcomed as a war hero by King Farouk, the Muslim Brotherhood and the young officers in the Egyptian army who fused Nazi national socialism with the Islamism of the Muslim Brotherhood and took over Egypt after deposing Farouk in 1951.

The founder of Palestinian nationalism's singleminded dedication to the genocide of Jewry brings us to the second notable but forgotten anniversary we passed over this month.

 

On Nov. 12 1942 the British led forces  -- with the massive and unreported support of Jewish commando and engineering units from the land of Israel -- defeated Germany's Afrika Corps led by Gen. Rommel in the second Battle of Alamein. With the German defeat, the specter of a German occupation of the Middle East was removed. Husseini and Himmler had planned that under German occupation, the Arabs would expand the Holocaust to the 800,000 Jews of the Arab world and the 450,000 Jews in the land of Israel. To this end, the Germans had organized the Einzatzgruppen Afrika unit attached to Rommel's army. Under the command of SS LTC Walter Rauff, it was tasked with murdering Jews located in the areas that were to come under German occupation.

It is fitting that yesterday, on the anniversary of Hitler's meeting with Husseini, Germany announced that it would not oppose Husseini's heirs' bid to receive UN recognition of a Palestinian state that seeks Israel's destruction.

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

The more things change, the more they remain the same. 

Shouldn't he be hiding in the bunker? Shock as saluting Adolf Hitler statue is installed on crazy golf course; Bizarre obstacle shrieks 'No No No', every time a ball passes underneath

A crazy golf course has sparked controversy by featuring a model Adolf Hitler which gives a Nazi salute whenever a player hits a shot on target.

Visitors to the Grundy art gallery in Blackpool have been left stunned at the brown-shirted statue which raises its right arm and shrieks 'No, No, No,' every time a ball passes underneath.

The Hitler obstacle, which was created by visual artists Jake and Dinos Chapman, is part of a playable nine-hole crazy golf installation with each hole designed by a different artist.

Bogeyman: The Saluting Adolf Hitler crazy golf obstacle is shown to members of the public before being installed at Blackpool's Grundy art gallery

It was unveiled to the public on Saturday and a spokesman for the Gallery said it has received a great reception.

 He said: 'Everyone who has seen it has thought it was great fun and has enjoyed playing on it.

'When we were thinking about installing it we contacted the local ex-servicemen's committee because we were concerned about causing any offence.

'They said they were happy if we went ahead with it and we haven't received any complaints.'

Teed off: A young crazy golfer gives the Hitler statue a piece of his mind

The installation aims to show off various parts of Britain's political history and culture. One hole features a builder's bum while another depicts a library.

Among the other obstacles is a statue of Saddam Hussein which topples over when a ball drops into the hole.      

One visitor, six-year-old Kai Nouteboom, was given a fright when the Hitler statue yelled at him.

He told the Sun newspaper: 'It frightened me. I didn’t expect that to happen.'

Nazi Secrets Hitlers Desert Fox

Offensive Wine Bottles With Hitler Image Surface In Italy

Garda, Italy - American lawyer Michael Hirsch was flabbergasted when he discovered a local supermarket stocking wine bottles portraying images of Adolf Hitler on the labels, while visiting northern Italy with his wife Cindy.

“It is very shocking and startling to us,” Mr. Hirsch told the UK’s Daily Telegraph on Wednesday. “We would think of it as neo-Nazism. It makes you wonder about the sympathies of the local people.”

Mrs. Hirsch echoed similar sentiments, adding that the anti-Semitic images were not only offensive to Jews. “It is not only an affront to Jews, even if my husband and I are Jewish. It is an affront to humanity as a whole,” she stated.

One bottle displays the German dictator with his arm raised in a Nazi salute, while another labeled ‘Mein Kampf” is named after Hitler’s infamous anti-Semitic book. Another Nazi slogan, “Ein volk, ein Reich, ein Fuhrer” (one people, one empire, one Fuhrer), was also featured on a wine bottle. Hirsch noticed the racist bottle labels while he was purchasing items at the supermarket and complained to a store employee.

“He told me ‘It’s just history, like Mussolini like Che Guevara.’ I put the bottle down on the counter and left the store,” reported Mr. Hirsch. Mrs. Hirsch’s father was born in Czechoslovakia and is a Holocaust survivor. Her aunt, grandparents, and other family members were murdered in Auschwitz.

Local Italian prosecutors claim that they have opened an inquiry into the sale of the offending wine bottles. “The only crime that could be currently attributable to this is that of apologising for fascism,” prosecutor Mario Giulio Schinaia told Italian news agency ANSA. “At this point though it would be opportune to invent the crime of human stupidity”.

The Italian government condemned the anti-Semitic images as well. “I want to reassure our American friends who visit our country that our Constitution and our culture rejects racism, anti-Semitism and Nazi fascism,” guaranteed Andrea Riccardi, the Italian Minister for International Cooperation. “This offends the memory of millions of people and risks compromising the image of Italy abroad.”

Content provided as courtesy of Algemeiner

Unsolved History- Killing Hitler

Mission to Murder Hitler

Hitler? There’s an App for That Developers are creating Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini iPhone apps that offer little more than propaganda. And Apple’s gatekeepers approve them.

Like anyone with an iPhone, I recently downloaded a new app. It was called “iStalin,” and it had an ugly, monochromatic design—a headshot of the brutal man in Apple’s trademark rounded-corners square—but within moments, it transformed my apartment into Nov. 7, 1941. I listened to Stalin expounding against the barbarian German invaders. My four Soviet grandparents likely heard this same speech decades ago, but now there were no Nazis, and my 2-year-old was sleeping down the hall. Instead, I was left with chills, as if my phone, normally so faithful and reassuring, had betrayed me.

A few more taps and swipes to download a different app, and I could listen to over 100 speeches from il Duce. Since I don’t know Italian, I opted for the “songs of Fascism” section, where I read the lyrics to the hymn “Battaglioni M” in English accompanied by an Italian recording: “Duce’s battalions/ Death’s created for life battalions/ … Without hatred there’s no love around.” “Adolf Hitler ST,” an encyclopedia of Hitler’s life, presented me with categories that included Architecture, The Occult, Hitler’s Women, and Dead [sic]. The Holocaust was not listed. The app was available in English and German, at a cost of 99 cents. It was filed under Education.

On the Internet, there are plenty of satirical Tumblrs and comedy sketches, but to date no comparable iPhone apps for the Osama Bin Ladens or the Kim Jong-ils. (Someone has already developed an interactive version of Muammar Qaddafi’s influential Green Book, the 1975 collection of his views.) If nothing else, information moves more swiftly than it did for our grandparents. But as it turns out, in the public square owned by Apple, a fiercely private company, is a tiny, overlooked, corner devoted to a strange subset of app—let’s call it the dictator app. The offerings are an unexpected twist on the “there’s an app for that” ethos, the same one that allows us to share photos of our kids, track our weight loss, and do our banking. This was not how our grandparents interacted with the figures who determined the unfolding of their lives. This is not—at least not yet, despite the so-called Twitter revolutions—how the world interacts with its dictators and madmen.

Technology flattens out differences, and no more so than on an iPhone where “iStalin” takes up the same square of real estate as a bill reminder and Dr. Seuss. But does such material belong on our phones, tucked away in our pockets for instant, effortless access? And if not, then where does it belong in a digital age, and who gets to distribute it? If Stalin’s speeches were being piped through the intercom at the local Barnes & Noble café, we’d know exactly what to do. But when it comes to our haloed iPhones, we’ve lost our certainty about the line between propaganda and history. After all, isn’t unfettered access to information supposed to be a democratic right?

“iHitler,” an encyclopedic offering, didn’t make it through Apple’s vaunted approval process (it’s now called, simply, “Hitler”); but apps named “iStalin” and “iMussolini” did. There are a number of game and other mocking apps featuring the likes of Hitler and Stalin (as well asPutin and Kim Jong-il) in the app store, but the kind of app under review here is not a game, but rather a fleet propaganda delivery system, with speeches, images, films, writing, and some biographical information, packaged as history. (It’s worth noting that Apple banned a Dalai Lama app at China’s behest.) Words like “great,” “powerful,” and “emblematic” appear often in the descriptions of the eponymous figures. Words like “dictator,” “terror,” and “genocide” are glaringly absent.

Add in the language of new media, with its emphasis on sharing and convenience, and these apps offer a platform for a twisted mash-up of past and present. Take the app “Stalin,” which introduces its material, “drawn from Wikipedia,” like so:

Joseph Stalin was one of the most influential leaders of the Soviet Union. His actions defined its development and made a tremendous impact on the world stage. Read all about him with this Joseph Stalin eBook. It provides you with a truly remarkable account of this interesting man’s life. … Reading the book is a snap. It is organized into chapters so you can read about the specific part of Stalin’s life that you are interested in.

Similarly, the app “Adolf Hitler ST” announces in stilted English to potential buyers:

[I]nside this Encyclopedia: You can copy full text and full pictures, to paste and send by eMail or to paste to any document inside your device to share or study later. You can zoom (in/out) all text and graphics, using two fingers to enlarge or double TAP to zoom out. This encyclopedia of Adolf Hitler digital studio can be used for university, college, or within the family and extend our knowledge. … This is one of many low price encyclopedic applications on a great repertoire. And of course your comments and emails are always welcome for updates, suggestions and provide a better service for you.

We expect the non-jokey version of hate speech to be relegated to the Web’s dark holes, its neo-Nazi and conspiracy sites. The app store is where apps go to get legitimized. But aside from “iMussolini,” which was covered as a novelty in the Italian press, none of the dictator apps have received much notice.

As jarring as the apps may seem to U.S. audiences, they are hardly out of place in a broader debate on historical revisionism taking place in Europe, especially across the post-Soviet world. Ellen Rutten, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Bergen in Norway who is part of the group of researchers behind Web Wars, documenting how the Soviet era, particularly Soviet trauma, is reflected online in blogs and social media, sees lots of nonchalance toward factual truth and a tendency to glorify the Stalinist era, ideas that are given greater currency with the spread of mobile devices.

“People create popular history online that’s more fractured and doesn’t have a lot of truth to it,” she said. “But people aren’t really interested in history—they’re trying to create an identity about themselves, their politics. Public space in Russia is still semi-authoritarian, so people find space online.” Without other outlets for processing memory and trauma, she said, the Stalin apps make a lot of sense.

The experience of “iMussolini” is instructive. When it was first released in the Italian iTunes store, it became the country’s second-most popular app, reaching 1,000 daily downloads. Jewish groups, Holocaust survivors, and the Young Italian Communists were quick to protest. The 25-year-old who developed the app was quoted defending free speech in a smattering of news stories, and the app was pulled, ostensibly for copyright violations. But within a few weeks, it was re-approved and forgotten. That was two years ago. Just a few weeks ago, I downloaded “iMussolini” in under two minutes, for 99 cents.

A commenter in La Reppublica best captured the confused response to the apps, writing, “This is really a flabbergasting phenomenon, especially when you consider that the iPhone has gained cult status for the Facebook and Web 2.0 generation. These aren’t nostalgic old people and historians of the fascist era but kids and young adults who spend time and money on the Internet and get their information from it.”

All this raises uncomfortable questions about our relationship with the Apple Mothership—the private company that’s increasingly replacing, or mediating, our public spaces and mundane daily transactions. When controversy arises, it’s an ugly reminder that we are consumers, not citizens. (Apple did not respond to interview requests.) And it’s also a reminder of the immediacy of new technology and its consequences. After all, we’ve had 65 years to discuss whether Mein Kampf should be on the library shelf.

In the smartphone world, our librarians and academics have been replaced by developers, who may lack doctorates but have plenty of coding know-how and access to Wikipedia. The result is that we can now simply download “Stalin” and begin reading his body of work. And the apps reveal a smorgasbord of interests, from dictators to yoga. Take the developer of “HD Adolf Hitler,” whose 32 other encyclopedic apps include “Life to Jesus,” “HDnostrodamus,” “HD Pearl Harbor,” “Biological Warfare HX,” as well as offerings on nail disease, sharks, obesity, and one called, instructively, “Kinds of Birds.”

In interviews, Luigi Marino, who developed “iMussolini,” has said of his controversial subject: “It’s a delicate page in our history that should never be forgotten. … The app does not intend to encourage violence in any way.” You can almost hear the shrug. At best, perhaps he’s just too naive to understand why people might take issue; at worst, he seems cavalier about the protests of Holocaust survivors whose objections he doesn’t even acknowledge. Though he did later release “iGandhi” as a sign, he said, of goodwill, it was followed by “Hitler” and “iStalin,” and more recently, “iSilvio!” poking fun at Italy’s former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi.

“iMussolini” sits now at about 200 monthly downloads, and Marino’s other apps, which are free, generate a couple hundred daily. He now claims that he continued developing his dictator line of apps, rather than for Gandhi and his ilk, because “these characters are interesting from a historical perspective.” The controversy and resulting attention probably didn’t hurt his sales.

Disney '42 - Stop That Tank!

This film, made for Canada, begins with an interesting cartoon showing Hitler (depicted as a ranting madman speaking in phony German) and an armada of tanks trying to invade a peaceful-looking village, only to be fought off by a barrage of gunfire from anti-tank guns, so much so that it sends Hitler to Hell. The rest of this short is a dry and technical explanation and description of the Boys Anti-Tank Rifle. Just like the previous short, animation is limited.

Heil Hollywood: The Los Angeles bunker from which Hitler planned to run Nazi empire after the war

It sounds like the bizzare script of a Hollywood B-movie.

In a parallel universe the Nazis have won the war, Adolf Hitler moves to LA where he mingles with the stars of the silver screen while running his evil empire from a luxurious ranch deep in the LA hills.

But during the 1930s, American sympathisers were so confident this exact scenario was actually going happen they spent millions building a deluxe compound ready for their fuhrer's imminent  arrival.

Hitler U.S. HQ: The ruins of the compound from where American Nazis hoped their leader would one day rule the world lies tucked away in the Los Angeles hills

Leader: Hitler's American followers the Silver Shirts were so confident that he would triumph they spent millions building the deluxe compound ready for his imminent arrival

Equipped with a diesel power plant, 375,000 gallon concrete water tank , giant meat locker, 22 bedrooms and even a bomb shelter, the heavily guarded estate was home to a community of Hollywood fascists who hoped to ride out the war there.

 

More...

• This was our finest EAR: How Winston Churchill managed to maintain his afternoon naps even at the height of WWII
• Flight from Colditz: British PoWs' daring glider escape takes to sky, 67 years late
• Pictured for the first time: The cabin in which Hitler's deputy Rudolph Hess was claimed to have hanged himself as secret dossier deepens mystery over monster's death

There were further plans to build five libraries, a swimming pool, several dining rooms and a gymnasium with money from Germany.

But on the day after Pearl Harbour, as America entered World War Two, police raided the premises and rounded up the the 50 or so American fascists who were living there.

The remnants of the huge concrete water tank on the Murphy Ranch where which was built in the 1930s by the Silver Shirts group of American fascists

Today the eerie landmark lies in ruins, daubed with graffitti, and awaiting the bulldozers so it can be turned into a picnic area for hikers - a soon-to-be forgotten slice of American history.

Close to the homes of actors and directors such as Stephen Spielberg, the site has been a magnet for historians, curiosity-seekers and modern-day nazis.

At one point after the war it became an artists colony and was home to the novelist Henry Miller.

Self- sufficient: The estate's vegetable garden. Around 50 or so followers planned to ride out the war there until Hitler's triumph

History: The 55-acre ranch, was sold to mining fortune heiress Jessie Murphy in 1933 by screen cowboy Will Rogers

The compound was equipped with a diesel power plant, 375,000 gallon concrete water tank , giant meat locker, 22 bedrooms and even a bomb shelter

It was built by the Silver Shirts, a sinister group of 1930s fascists who took their name from Hitler's Brown Shirts grass roots organisation.

Fascism had been on the rise in the wake of the Great Depression and the Silver Shirts were one of the most fanatical organisations.

The 55-acre ranch, was sold to mining fortune heiress Jessie Murphy in 1933 by screen cowboy Will Rogers.

Plans: The site is scheduled to be bulldozed to make way for a hikers' picnic spot

In the next few years, Murphy struck up a relationship with a German man known only as Herr Schmidt. Unbeknown to her Schmidt was Hitler's agent in America.

He persuaded her to invest $4million ($66 million today) to transform the property into a nazi stronghold fit for Hitler.

Historian Randy Young told the Sunday Express: 'This was supposed to be the seat of American fascism from where Hitler would one day run the United States.

'The neighbours were a little freaked out by the construction and weird happenings, but until war broke out, they thought they were just eccentric people.'