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(Born 1914) A courier for the Polish underground who in November 1942 brought information to London reporting the deportation and mass murder of Jews. He met with Allied leaders and delivered a message from Jewish underground sources demanding help and action.
When Margaret Bauer set out to find her biological father, it was harrowing enough to learn he had been killed in the last days of the Second World War.
But then officials told her the “bitter truth” – that Wilhelm had been gunned down by Nazi concentration camp chief Anton Burger – who brazenly stole his identity to avoid capture until his death in 1991.
SS Major Burger ran the notorious Theresienstadt concentration camp near Prague and oversaw the murders of more than 33,000 Jews.
Margaret was born in Holland but was brought up in Calgary, Canada, with her Dutch mother and a Canadian soldier she married after the war.
She thought he was her natural father – until she learned she had been born two years before the liberation of the Netherlands and became curious.
She confronted her mother who confessed to a fling with Wilhelm Bauer that resulted in her birth.
Bauer was half-Jewish but he was a German who collaborated with the Nazis.
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Margaret’s husband Bruce Eekma, who has written a book about her grim discovery called A Daughter’s Search For Her Father, said: “Nobody wanted to talk about her birth in her family. Her father being a German, during the war the enemy of the Dutch, is the reason nobody would talk about it.
“Her mother, later in life, only gave her father’s name. The fact that she would give no other information made Margaret very unhappy.”
It was only when Margaret tried to trace her father that she learned he had been murdered by Anton Burger.
Burger was a fanatical Nazi and close friend of Adolf Eichmann, the architect of the Holocaust who was hanged in Israel in 1962.
An Austrian like Hitler, Burger’s hatred of Jews was pathological. One report written by his superior Eichmann stated: “Burger operates with efficiency and dedication in his work.
“He is a true National Socialist who realises the Jewish question is our most pressing problem to be solved.”
The men became friends, drinking red wine together in the evenings at quaint Vienna cafes after days spent plotting genocide.
PA
After war broke out, Burger was sent to Greece to ship off Jews for extermination and wrote to Eichmann to say he was “gratified” that 46,000 Greek Jews had been sent to Auschwitz.
He later served at Auschwitz – where about one million Jews died during the war – and Eichmann rewarded his devotion in 1943 by putting him in charge of Theresienstadt.
Twisted Burger even owned a velvet-lined case containing scalpels, hooks, forks and a hacksaw, which was set to go under the hammer in Bude, Cornwall last week.
The sale was cancelled after auctioneers received threats.
Burger was nicknamed The Faker because he fooled Red Cross officials into believing Theresienstadt was a model town where Jews lived happily.
They were invited by the Nazis to visit the camp and saw well-fed Jews working and children receiving an education.
PA
In reality, more than 30,000 people were starved, beaten, tortured and executed. A further 88,000 were shipped off to Auschwitz.
At Theresienstadt, Burger met Wilhelm Bauer, Margaret’s father and the man whose name he would steal.
Economics graduate Bauer had been working for the Nazis in Holland logging assets stripped from Jews. He believed working with the Nazis would ensure he was spared.
He had been at the camp from the spring of 1941 and met Margaret’s mother the following year.
“It was love at first sight,” said Bruce. “The couple fell madly in love and shortly afterwards she became pregnant with Margaret.”
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Bauer next set up a Nazi-administered bank at the Westerbork transit camp, where Dutch Jews changed their guilders into worthless “camp currency” before taking trains to their deaths.
In 1944 he was sent to Theresienstadt to help film a propaganda film and was given a tour by Burger. Bruce wrote: “Burger had a dislike for intellectual Jews like
Margaret’s father, who wore glasses. To him glasses meant a weakness.”
Shortly after, Burger invited him for a walk in the grounds. Minutes later, a shot rang out and Bauer was dead.
After the war, a witness recalled the killing. “The bullet entered his eye – it was ghastly,” he said. “Even though he was only a German, it was terrible to see.”
Burger was ordered to Berlin to explain himself to his old friend Eichmann. He was then sent back to Greece, where he rounded up 7,000 Jews from Rhodes and Crete.
Rex Features
As the Third Reich began to crumble, Burger knew he was a marked man. He finished the war in Altausee, Austria, where his association with Eichmann finally cost him his liberty.
Americans looking for Eichmann searched the wrong house and found Burger with a cache of weapons.
He was taken to an internment camp where, two years later, in 1947, his identity as the commandant of Theresienstadt was confirmed.
By then a court had already condemned him to death in absentia for war crimes.
Yousef al-Khattab, cofounder and former leader of the fringe extremist Muslim organization Revolution Muslim, has released a 20-minute video on YouTube responding to Younes Abdullah Muhammad’s guilty plea last week to charges of using the Internet to conspire to solicit murder and make threatening communications.
Referring to his 2009 posting on the Revolution Muslim Web site of a picture of Chabad’s world headquarters in Brooklyn with a message encouraging readers to “make EVERY attempt to reach these people and teach them the message of Islam or leave them a message from Islam,” al-Khattab admits that he is “the one that posted the things about Crown Heights,” and that he doesn’t view it as “anything illegal and I don’t think that it was a threat…”
He adds, however, that he “would have thought that they [law enforcement] would have considered that a threat much more than what he [Muhammad] did.”
Mahatma Gandhi’s admirers are not in the habit of confronting embarrassing facts about their favourite saint. His critics, by contrast, gleefully keep on reminding us of a few facts concerning the Mahatma which seem to undermine his aura of wisdom and ethical superiority. One of the decisive proofs of Gandhi’s silly lack of realism, cited by both his Leftist and his Hindutva detractors, is his attempted correspondence with Adolf Hitler, undertaken with a view to persuading Germany‘s dictator of the value of non-violence. I will now take upon myself the ungrateful task of arguing that in this attempt, Gandhi was (1) entirely Gandhian, and (2) essentially right.
Gandhi’s first letter to Hitler
Both of Gandhi’s letters to Hitler are addressed to “my friend”. In the case of anyone else than the Mahatma, this friendliness would be somewhat strange given the advice which Hitler had tendered to the British government concerning the suppression of India’s freedom movement. During a meeting with Lord Halifax in 1938, Hitler had pledged his support to the preservation of the British empire and offered his formula for dealing with the Indian National Congress: kill Gandhi, if that isn’t enough then kill the other leaders too, if that isn’t enough then two hundred more activists, and so on until the Indian people will give up the hope of independence. Gandhi may of course have been unaware of Hitler’s advice, but it would also be characteristically Gandhian to remain friendly towards his own would-be killer.
Some people will be shocked that Gandhi called the ultimate monster a “friend”. But the correct view of sinners, view which I imbibed as the “Christian” view but which I believe has universal validity, is that they are all but instances of the general human trait of sinfulness. Hitler’s fanaticism, cruelty, coldness of heart and other reprehensible traits may have differed in intensity but not in essence with those very same traits in other human beings. As human beings gifted with reason and conscience, sinners are also not beyond redemption: your fiercest persecutor today may repent and seek your friendship tomorrow. If Gandhi could approach heartless fanatics like Mohammed Ali Jinnah in a spirit of friendship, there is no reason why he should have withheld his offer of friendship from Hitler.
In his first letter dd. 23 July 1939 (Complete Works, vol.70, p.20-21), and which the Government did not permit to go, Gandhi does mention his hesitation in addressing Hitler. But the reason is modesty rather than abhorrence: “Friends have been urging me to write to you for the sake of humanity. But I have resisted their request, because of the feeling that any letter from me would be an impertinence.” But the sense of impending war, after the German occupation of Czech-inhabited Bohemia-Moravia (in violation of the 1938 Munich agreement and of the principle of the “self-determination of nations” which had justified the annexation of German-inhabited Austria and Sudetenland) and rising hostility with Poland, prompted him to set aside his scruples: “Something tells me that I must not calculate and that I must make my appeal for whatever it may be worth.” Even so, the end of his letter is again beset with scruples and modesty: “Anyway I anticipate your forgiveness, if I have erred in writing to you. I remain, Your sincere friend, Sd. M. MK Gandhi“.
The remainder and substance of this short letter reads: “It is quite clear that you are today the one person in the world who can prevent a war which may reduce humanity to the savage state. Must you pay that price for an object however worthy it may appear to you to be? Will you listen to the appeal of one who has deliberately shunned the method of war not without considerable success?”
This approach is held in utter contempt by post-War generations. Thus, the Flemish Leftist novelist and literature professor Kristien Hemmerechts has commented (“Milosevic, Saddam, Gandhi en Hitler”, De Morgen, 16-4-1999): “In other words, Gandhi was a naïve fool who tried in vain to sell his non-violence as a panacea to the Führer.”
This presupposes that Gandhi was giving carte blanche to Hitler for doing that which we know Hitler to have done, viz. the deportation of Jews and others, the mass killings, the ruthless oppression of the subject populations, the self-destructive military policies imposed on the Germans in the final stage of the war. But in reality, Gandhi’s approach, if successful, would precisely have prevented that terrible outcome. Most of Hitler’s atrocities were made possible by the war circumstances. In peacetime, the German public would not have tolerated the amount of repression which disfigured their society in 1941-45. Indeed, even in the early (and for German civilians, low-intensity) part of the war, protests from the public forced Hitler to stop the programme of euthanasia on the handicapped.
Moreover, it was the paranoia of the Nazi leadership about Jews as a “fifth column”, retained from their (subjective and admittedly distorted) World War 1 experience of Leftist agitators in the German cities stabbing the frontline soldiers in the back, which made them decide to remove the Jews from society in Germany and the occupied countries. This is clear from official Nazi statements such as Heinrich Himmler’s Posen speech of October 1943. In a non-war scenario, at least an organized transfer of the Jews to a safe territory outside Europe could have been negotiated and implemented. Under a peace agreement, especially one backed up by sufficient armed force on the part of the other treaty powers, Hitler could have been kept in check. By escalating rather than containing the war, the Allied as much as the Axis governments foreclosed the more humane options. (More on this in Elst: The Saffron Swastika, Voice of India, Delhi 2001, p.506-517, and in Elst: Gandhi and Godse, Voice of India, Delhi 2001, p.48-56)
When you start a war, you don’t know beforehand just what terrible things will happen, but you do know in general that they will be terrible. That is the basic rationale of pacifism, and Gandhi was entirely correct to keep it in mind when most political leaders were getting caught up in war fever. Containing Hitler for a few more decades would have been a trying and testing exercise for Germany’s neighbours, but Gandhi never claimed that non-violence was the way of the weak and the lazy. At any rate, would this effort in long-term vigilance not have been preferable to a war with fifty million dead, many more lives ruined, many countries overrun by Communism and fated to further massacres, and the unleashing of nuclear weapons on the world?
The chances for peace in 1939
At that point in time, Hitler’s “worthy object” to which Gandhi refers, the topic of heated diplomatic exchanges and indeed the professed casus belliof the impending German invasion of Poland, was the rights of the German minority in Poland along with the issue of the “corridor”. This was a planned overground railway-cum-motorway which should either link German Pomerania with German East Prussia through Polish West Prussia (including the city of Danzig); or, in case a referendum in West Prussia favoured the region’s return to Germany from which it had been taken in 1919, link land-locked Poland with a harbour set aside for the Poles on the Baltic coast through West Prussia. In 1945, all the regions concerned were ethnically cleansed of Germans and allotted to Poland, and Germany no longer claims any of them, but in 1939 many observers felt that the German demands were reasonable or at any rate not worth opposing by military means (“Who would want to die for Danzig?”).
It was common knowledge that Poland was oppressing its German and Jewish minorities, so a case could be made that the advancement of the German minority (it goes without saying that Hitler cared less for the Polish Jews) was a just cause. It was also the type of cause which could be furthered through non-violent protests and mobilizing non-violent international support. It wouldn’t formally humiliate Poland by making it give up territory or sovereignty, so perhaps the Polish government could be peacefully persuaded to change its ways regarding the minorities. On this point, Gandhi was undeniably right as well as true to himself by highlighting the non-violent option in striving for a worthy political object.
The question of the corridor was less manageable, as it did involve territory and hence unmistakable face-losing concessions by one of the parties. The apprehension which troubled the Poles and their well-wishers was that the demand of a corridor was merely the reasonable-sounding opening move of a total conquest of Poland. It is difficult to estimate Nazi Germany’s exact plans for conquest, which was then already and has since remained the object of mythomanic war propaganda. Among the uninformed public, it is still widely believed that the Nazis aimed at “conquering the world”, no less; but this is nonsense. Hitler was ready to respect the British empire, and his alleged plan for an invasion of America was shown to be a British forgery planted in order to gain American support. In repeated peace offers to France and Britain in autumn 1939 and throughout 1940, Hitler proposed to withdraw from all historically non-German territories (which would still leave him in control of Austria, Sudetenland, West Prussia and some smaller border regions of Poland and, from May-June 1940 on, also Luxemburg, the Belgian East Cantons and French Elzas-Lotharingen) and maintain a territorial status-quo thenceforth.
It is possible that he meant it when he agreed to limit his territorial ambitions to historically German regions, at least where the competition consisted of allied or somehow respected nations such as the Italians or the French. However, in the case of the despised Slavic countries Poland and Ukraine, the fear of German conquest was more thoroughly justified.
In early 1918, the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk with the fledgling Soviet Union gave Germany control of Poland and western Ukraine. As a soldier, Hitler had applauded this gain of “living space”, which was to be settled with German farmers after moving the Slavs to Siberia. It was also this brief gain which made the subsequent defeat in World War 1 and the implied loss of territory so unbearable for Hitler and many Germans of his generation. There is no doubt that the Nazi leaders had an eye on these fertile territories for a future expansion of Germany. It was less certain that they wanted to conduct this annexation at once: would they abide by an agreement on a mere corridor if one were concluded, respecting Poland’s sovereignty over the rest of its territory?
The safest course was not to take chances and contain Hitler’s expansionism by military deterrence. As Poland itself could not provide this, it sought and received the assurance of help from Britain and France. This implied that a brief local war triggered by German aggression against Poland would turn into a protracted international war on the model of the Serb-Austrian crisis of 1914 triggering the Great War now known as World War 1. It was at this point that Gandhi asked Hitler to desist from any plans of invading Poland. There can be no doubt that this was a correct demand for a pacifist to make. Was it perhaps a foolish demand, in the sense that no words should have been wasted on Hitler? We will consider this question later on, but note for now that in July 1939 everything was still possible, at least if we believe in human freedom.
Gandhi’s second letter to Hitler
On 24 December 1940, on the eve of Christmas, which to Christians is a day of peace when the weapons are silenced, Gandhi wrote a lengthy second letter to Hitler. The world situation at that time was as follows: Germany and Italy controlled most of Europe and seemed set to decide the war in their favour, the German-Soviet pact concluded in August 1939 was still in force, and under Winston Churchill, a lonely Great Britain was continuing the war it had declared on Germany immediately after Germany’s invasion of Poland in September 1939.
On this occasion, Gandhi took the trouble of justifying his addressing Hitler as “my friend” and closing his letter with “your sincere friend”, in a brief statement of what exactly he stood for: “That I address you as a friend is no formality. I own no foes. My business in life has been for the past 33 years to enlist the friendship of the whole of humanity by befriending mankind, irrespective of race, colour or creed.” This very un-Hitlerian reason to befriend Hitler, what Gandhi goes on to call the “doctrine of universal friendship”, contrasts with the Hitler-like hatred of one’s enemy which is commonly thought to be the only correct attitude to Hitler.
Gandhi certainly earns the ire of post-war public opinion by stating: “We have no doubt about your bravery or devotion to your fatherland, nor do we believe that you are the monster described by your opponents.” To be sure, this was written in a period of fairly limited warfare, well before the total war with the Soviet Union and the USA, and well before the mass killing and deportation of Jews. But the prevailing attitude today is one of judging Hitler and his contemporaries’ dealings with him as if they all had the knowledge that we have acquired in and since 1945. By that standard, anyone doubting the British government’s hostile depiction of Hitler, including Gandhi, was practically an accomplice to Hitler’s crimes.
However, while not giving up on the chance of converting Hitler to more peaceful ways, Gandhi was not that mild in judging the crimes Hitler had already committed. In particular, he criticized the already well-publicized Nazi conviction that the strong have a right to subdue the weak: “But your own writings and pronouncements and those of your friends and admirers leave no room for doubt that many of your acts are monstrous and unbecoming of human dignity, especially in the estimation of men like me who believe in human friendliness. Such are your humiliation of Czechoslovakia, the rape of Poland and the swallowing of Denmark. I am aware that your view of life regards such spoliations as virtuous acts. But we have been taught from childhood to regard them as acts degrading humanity.”
So, Gandhi felt forced to join the ranks of Hitler’s opponents: “Hence we cannot possibly wish success to your arms.” Yet this did not make him join the British war effort nor even some non-violent department of the British Empire’s cause: “But ours is a unique position. We resist British imperialism no less than Nazism.” To Gandhi, British imperialism is closely akin to Nazi imperialism: “If there is a difference, it is in degree. One-fifth of the human race has been brought under the British heel by means that will not bear scrutiny.”
In outlining his position vis-à-vis British imperialism, Gandhi at once explained his attitude vis-à-vis Nazism: “Our resistance to it does not mean harm to the British people. We seek to convert them, not to defeat them on the battle-field.” This was exactly what Gandhi was now trying out on Hitler: to convert him rather than defeat him, thus sparing him defeat if only he had listened.
Follows an explanation of the Gandhian method of making “their rule impossible by non-violent non-co-operation”, based on “the knowledge that no spoliator can compass his end without a certain degree of co-operation, willing or unwilling, of the victim”. In a slogan: “The rulers may have our land and bodies but not our souls.” To this, Hitler probably made a mental comment that prisoners, such as the many people whom he himself was locking away, were quite entitled to their souls, as long as they left their land as living space and their bodies as slave labour to the rulers.
Unlike many of his countrymen, Gandhi rejected the idea of achieving freedom from British rule with German help: “We know what the British heel means for us and the non-European races of the world. But we would never wish to end the British rule with German aid.” Instead, Gandhi explained to Hitler, the non-violent method could defeat “a combination of all the most violent forces in the world”.
In Gandhi’s view, a violent winner is bound to be defeated by superior force in the end (a prediction proven true in Hitler’s case), and even the memory of his victory will be tainted by its violent nature: “If not the British, some other power will certainly improve upon your method and beat you with your own weapon. You are leaving no legacy to your people of which they would feel proud.” Here Gandhi probably projected his own disapproval of violent methods onto the masses of mankind, who are less inhibited by scruples about glorifying violent winners. Look at the lionization of Chengiz Khan in Mongolia, of Timur and Babar in Uzbekistan, of Alexander in Greece and Macedonia, even though their empires didn’t last forever; and rest assured that the Germans would likewise have been proud of Hitler if he had been victorious.
Gandhi had to address Hitler
Gandhi would not have been Gandhi if he hadn’t attempted to prevent World War 2. This was, to our knowledge, the single most lethal war in world history, with a death toll estimated as up to 50 million, not mentioning the even larger number of refugees, widows and orphans, people deported, people maimed, lives broken by the various horrors of war. It would be a strange pacifist who condoned this torrent of violence.
Nowadays it is common to lambast those who opposed the war. American campaigners against involvement in the war, such as aviator Charles Lindbergh, are routinely smeared as Nazis for no other reason than that they opposed war against the Nazis (or more precisely, war against the Germans, for only a minority of the seven million Germans killed during the war were Nazis). Leftist readers may get my point if they recall how those who opposed anticommunist projects such as the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba were automatically denounced as being Communists themselves. Do they think this amalgamation of opposition to war and collusion (or actual identity) with the enemy is justified?
Gandhi’s utterances regarding Nazism leave no doubt about his firm hostility to this militaristic and freedom-hating doctrine. Yet, he opposed war against Nazism. This was entirely logical, for he rejected the militaristic element in both Nazism and the crusade against it. He did support the fight against Nazism but envisioned it as a non-violent struggle aimed at convincing rather than destroying.
It is not certain that this would have worked, but then Gandhism is not synonymous with effectiveness. Gandhi’s methods were successful in dissuading the British from holding on to India, not in dissuading the Muslim League from partitioning India. From that angle, it simply remains an open question, an untried experiment, whether the Gandhian approach could have succeeded in preventing World War 2. By contrast, there simply cannot be two opinions on whether that approach of non-violent dissuasion would have been Gandhian. The Mahatma would not have been the Mahatma if he had preferred any other method. Our judgment of his letters to Hitler must be the same as our judgment of Gandhism itself: either both represented a lofty ethical alternative to the more common methods of power politics, or both were erroneous and ridiculous.
In Autumn 2010 I was working in Tunisia, and one day I got talking to the owner of a vegetable stall who noticed my accent. He told me, excitedly, that I sounded like “a real Manchester person”, and asked which team I followed. When I’m far from home I’ve found the football-in-Manchester ice-breaker can often be a blessing, and since City’s rise there’s been more to talk about. So I was happy to chat. The vegetable seller and I discussed recent results, which he told me he followed closely in the shisha house. He was a United fan, too, he said. We were brothers. But he had a confession: “I hate Chelsea,” he told me. Well, hate’s a strong word, but it was his country and this was my first conversation in three days, so I just smiled. The man’s voice rose. “Hate,” he repeated, pointing skyward. “Abramovich is Israel, Chelsea is Jew!”
Perhaps a braver man would have pointed out that United’s owners, the Glazer family, are also Jewish. Or reminded him that, unlike “football” and “Manchester”, “Israel” and “Jew” are not terms I’m comfortable interchanging. Perhaps I was a coward for making my excuses and leaving, but I couldn’t answer. I didn’t know how to.
I thought of that vegetable shop again this week when I heard about the586 antisemitic attacks reported in the UK this year, 244 of which took place in Manchester. Was this down to what the Community Security Trust (CST) report calls “ideological drivers”?
The headline figure reported in recent days has been the curious one that more attacks take place in Manchester than London, though that community is seven times larger. My initial instinct was to think the reason for this was simple: communities in Greater Manchester are, generally speaking, more “visibly Jewish” than the more assimilated ones of London. (Not true. Too simplistic.) Also, they live in compact areas, so are more easily targeted. (But there are several easy targets in London, too.)
Well then, I thought. Maybe Manchester has a less diverse population, more likely to turn on minorities? (Again, not true. Bury and Cheetham Hill are every bit as multicultural as anywhere in the south.) Perhaps then, it was the increased effort to record these crimes that accounted for the numbers? (Chief Superintendent Jon Rush feels this partly explains the rise – but it doesn’t explain the discrepancy between north and south.) So what’s going on then? How can we make sense of this?
When you go into the detail of the CST’s report, it becomes clear there are many competing factors at work and, frustrating though it is, none of the statistics make for neat conclusions. Yes, we can say for sure that antisemitism is particularly prevalent in the UK when there is conflict in Israel-Palestine – CST statistics clearly show a huge spike during both the war in Lebanon in 2006 and the ground invasion of Gaza in 2009 – but just as random attacks on Muslims after 9/11 were abhorrent, and made no sense, so foreign politics should not be used as mitigating factor here. Besides, 2011 was still the fourth highest year on record for antisemitic attacks, and there was no new conflict.
None of this is easy to understand. As Dave Rich of CST reminds us, that’s because “race hate crimes are emotional, not rational”, and, as with the Tunisian football fan, they don’t always come from obvious sources. They are committed by one-off opportunists, confused vegetable sellers and hardened repeat offenders. They range from low-level abuse hurled in the street to the desecration of graves. Perhaps we should not be so keen to find easy answers or focus on whether numbers have gone slightly up or down. In concentrating on Manchester’s quirky statistic, we risk losing sight of the real headline here: that race hate is not just part of our past. Perhaps better just to say that in the UK in the 21st century, synagogues have been attacked, Jewish schools have been targeted, hate mail has been sent, physical assaults have been carried out on university campuses, and elderly people have been attacked on the way to prayers. And to say: there’s no excuse for it.
Organizations such as the SPLC and ADL often accuse pro-white organizations of harboring openly hateful people, anti-Semites and lunatics. Unfortunately, this often turns out to be true. If a pro-white person, of healthy demeanor, wishes to join other pro-whites as an organization, he will discover that neo-Nazis* are also pro-white and also wish to attach themselves to these organizations.
What is one to do when he is privy to important truths – but the vast majority of other people who recognize those truths are social pariahs? Should he avoid all contact with any of them? If he takes this path, then he will be lonely indeed. He will find himself on a small rowboat in rough seas with no land in sight and all other boats and ships inhabited by the enemy. He will find that his avoidance of them will do him little good; he will still be considered an extremist and lumped in with the rest. If he chooses to avail himself of the networks built by those pariahs, then he will be lumped together with them in the eyes of the rest of humanity and his associations with them will be brought up over and over again as proof of his hate and ignorance.
Being pro-white is an unpopular position to take and, the way things are going, it will remain so for quite some time. But it is wrong to give up. To continue the fight, we need organizations to represent us and those organizations need to represent a wide range of attitudes. Some need to be geared toward suit-and-tie intellectuals while others need to be geared toward thuggish intimidation – depending on what is necessary at the time. A suit-and-tie intellectual is not very useful to whites who need physical protection from non-white thugs who are out to get him; the law is of little use in such cases. Send a group of tough street fighters and the situation might be diffused as the aggressors realize they picked the wrong fight. But it would not be appropriate to send the same street fighters, dressed to intimidate, to a public protest or to an interview with the media. Some organizations are more orientated toward racial science, while others would focus more on social issues.
An organizations might blend various approaches into one. But there is one attitude that some pro-white organizations should take care to be clean of: hatred toward people based entirely on what they were born as. It is one thing to have a distaste for blacks in general, but quite another to declare that one hates all blacks. Many, in the pro-white movement, hate Jews – some hate all Jews, regardless of affiliation. There is a reason the wider public disdains such hatred: it is stupid and wrong. By planting themselves in practically all pro-white organizations, these haters succeed in giving anti-white hate groups such as the SPLC ammunition to paint all pro-whites with the same brush. Thus, in a sense, there is not enough diversity in the pro-white movement.
What we need is an organization that promotes the interests of whites and has no connection, whatsoever, to neo-Nazi groups, the KKK or any other group that is associated with hate (even if that association, in the eyes of the public, is based on ignorance). Such a clean organization can then publicly boast that it opposes racial/ethnic hatred and that it is a strictly positive organization. Of course, it would still be accused of being “racist” but it would be a lot easier for this organization to win converts. The leaders of this organization would be very careful who they let in; anybody with past connections to “hateful groups” (I wish I had a better term) would have to go through a cleansing process of some sort and make public pronouncements that his motivation is to help people. Not to hurt them. There would be actual membership and dues would be paid. There have been some organizations that approximate what I am talking about – such as the EAIF, which unfortunately does not appear to have much recent activity.
Of course, for those pro-whites who disagree with the above conditions and philosophy, there are plenty of other groups they can join. While in Charlotte, some of us discussed founding such a group but, for the moment, it is only an idea. We have a name and, possibly, even a logo – but I shall not divulge any of this yet.
*There is always a problem with labels. When I say “neo-Nazi”, I mean somebody who hates all Jews and is not averse to violence. I fully realize that there might be some who call themselves “neo-Nazis” who do not fit this description and there might be others who do, but call themselves something else.
Three letters by Albert Einstein to a American-German group which campaigned against the Nazis in Germany in the 1930s will go on the auction block in Los Angeles next week.
In one, the father of relativity praises the “Friends of Truth,” a Cincinnati-based German-American group, for not allowing Jews to join it because it would weaken their anti-Nazi message.
“I welcome your association and their work from the bottom of my heart,” Einstein, who made his home in the United States after Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933, wrote in an August 1934 letter to group member August Hamelberg.
“Every German who has the opportunity, by living away from Germany, to be healthy and stay out of life-threatening danger, should see it as their obligation to do so.
“Your concise brochure is a masterpiece of such action, by avoiding taking political sides with a healthy sense of justice,” he said, referring to four pamphlets with titles including “The Nazi Obsession: Jews and Germans.”
And he said: “You’re absolutely right not to accept Jews in your ranks, as it would weaken your position. For similar reasons, I have so far avoided speaking out openly about this issue.”
In June 1935, he wrote “Your blessed work is all the more honorable as it isn’t only an investment of your time but it asks a great measure of courage and self-reliance.
“If there were only as many like-minded Germans over there, the German community wouldn’t have sunk so low!”
The letters are to be sold at auction on January 31 by LA-based auction house Nate D Sanders, which last October sold an Einstein letter commending an activist for his efforts helping European Jews for nearly $14,000.
WARSAW, Poland (AP) — Kazimierz Smolen, a 91-year-old Auschwitz survivor who after World War II became director of the memorial site, died Friday on the 67th anniversary of its liberation. Smolen died in a hospital in Oswiecim, the southern Polish town where Nazi Germany operated Auschwitz-Birkenau during World War II, said Pawel Sawicki, a spokesman for the Auschwitz-Birkenau state museum.
Friday is the anniversary of the camp’s 1945 liberation by Soviet troops. Jan. 27 was designated as International Holocaust Remembrance Day by the United Nations in 2005, and was marked with ceremonies across Europe. Two years after the war ended, Auschwitz-Birkenau became a museum — and Smolen himself served as its director from 1955-1990. He continued to live in the town after his retirement, often attending the memorial ceremonies marking the camp’s liberation.
Sawicki said soon after Smolen’s death the news was announced to Holocaust survivors commemorating the anniversary in Oswiecim. They fell silent for a minute in his honor.
Smolen was born on April 19, 1920, in the southern Polish town of Chorzow Stary. He was a Polish Catholic involved in the anti-Nazi resistance who was arrested by the Germans in April 1941 and taken to Auschwitz in one of the early shipments of prisoners there. He left the camp on the last transport of prisoners evacuated by the Germans on Jan. 18, 1945, nine days before its liberation. He later attributed his survival to good health and extreme luck.
He once explained his decision to return to the camp to manage it as a way of honoring those who were killed there. “Sometimes when I think about it, I feel it may be some kind of sacrifice, some kind of obligation I have for having survived,” he said.
In other gestures of remembrance, Norway’s Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg apologized for his nation’s role in arresting and deporting Jews after it was invaded by Nazi Germany. During the war, 772 Norwegian Jews and Jewish refugees were deported to Germany. Only 34 survived.
He said it’s time the nation acknowledges that politicians and other Norwegians took part and expressed “our deep regrets that this could have happened on Norwegian soil.” He spoke at a ceremony in Oslo attended by the last surviving Jew in a group of 532 deported from Norway in 1942.
In Turkey, state television on Thursday broadcast the epic French documentary “Shoah,” about the mass murder of Jews under the German Nazi regime. It was the first time the film has been aired on public television in a predominantly Muslim country. “It is a historical event,” filmmaker Claude Lanzmann, 87, said in a telephone interview with The Associated Press from his home in Paris. “It is extremely important that it is being shown in a Muslim country.”
Germany’s Parliament also gathered Friday for a special sitting to remember the Holocaust. Prominent survivor and literary critic Marcel Reich-Ranicki recalled how the Nazi SS informed members of the Warsaw ghetto’s Jewish council in July 1942 of plans for the inhabitants’ “resettlement” to the east.
Reich-Ranicki, 91, recounted how a “deathly silence” was followed by uproar. He said those present “seemed to sense what had happened: that the sentence had been pronounced for the biggest Jewish city in Europe. The death sentence.”
The Nazis set up the Warsaw ghetto in November 1940, cramming hundreds of thousands of Jews into inhuman conditions. Most who survived disease and starvation in the ghetto were transported to death camps.
So the MP cast Alex Salmond as Hitler in a Downfall video. Who was offended by the use of this tired old meme?
So Tom Harris, MP for Glasgow South has stepped down from his role as Labour’s new media adviser because he made a spoof video, taking a scene from the movie Downfall and resubtitling it as if Hitler having a hissy fit in his führerbunker were Alex Salmond, leader of the SNP, losing his rag.
Of course, Harris didn’t come up with this concept himself; it’s a once-hilarious, but now rather tired internet meme, in which a huge variety of people have had their views subtitled in over Bruno Ganz’s magnificent performance of one of Hitler’s characteristic rages. Other examples have included the creator of Second Life, Star Trek fans, iPad users and Oasis fans. Like most internet memes, it was fun while it lasted, and it probably should have lasted about two weeks.
Harris seems to have resigned because somebody was offended. Or, more troublingly, because there was the possibility that someone might be offended. What is harder to work out is who that offended person is supposed to be. Is it Salmond? Jewish people? Holocaust survivors? Are we concerned that Hitler fans might be offended?
Taking them one by one, neo-Nazis probably have most reason to be offended by the whole meme. It’s in a grand tradition of mocking Hitler, starting with Charlie Chaplin in The Great Dictator in 1940 and going right through to Mel Brooks’s The Producers and South Park’s Cartman-as-Hitler. Belittling Hitler by associating him with a variety of pompous people infuriated by minor annoyances isn’t the greatest comic wheeze of all time, but it’s enough to raise a frown on the face of a contributor to Stormfront and therefore a smile on mine.
This is of course the answer to the concern about whether Jewish people or Holocaust survivors could be offended by the mockery of one of the greatest mass-murderers in human history. There may well be a danger of forgetting the lessons of the Holocaust as the number of living survivors dwindles. There may be an argument for serious examination of Hitler’s motivations, for thinking that “he was evil” is not a sufficient explanation for the horrors inflicted by him and his regime. There might be a concern that if, as a culture, we don’t balance comic portrayals with thoughtful investigation then we risk trivialisation. But to get rid of the ability to mock him at all? No. Jews have always known that the greatest weapon against oppression and tyranny is laughter. Give me comedy Hitlers getting a custard pie in the face or give me death.
So we’re left with Salmond as the only remaining offended party. I suppose it is true that in currently democratic Britain one shouldn’t compare one’s political opponents with Hitler unless they are actually calling for extermination of the Jews and anschluss with, oh let’s say, Brittany. But this video wasn’t really a comparison with Hitler – its point was a bit more subtle than that, mostly that it’s funny to imagine Salmond ranting about having to rein in other SNP members to make the party appear mainstream and accessible. But I suppose a savvy political operator ought to know that many people find it hard to understand subtlety, particularly when there’s an easily accessible knee to jerk.
I can see an argument that Harris should perhaps have apologised to fellow politician Salmond. A swift “I thought it was funny, but I can see that to people unfamiliar with this internet meme it might have looked like I was comparing Salmond to Hitler, but that was never my intention” should have done it, perhaps with a humble dose of “and as a ‘new media guru’ I should have known how easy it is to take things out of context on the internet”. What’s really troubling is that Harris has had to step down for such a minor infraction. Immediate resignation seems to be a go-to strategy for all parties these days faced with a gaffe, rather than discussion, admission of differences or thoughtful apology.
JERUSALEM — In the three months since the Israeli Health Ministry awarded a prize to a pediatrics professor for her book on hereditary diseases common to Jews, her experience at the awards ceremony has become a rallying cry.
The professor, Channa Maayan, knew that the acting health minister, who is ultra-Orthodox, and other religious people would be in attendance. So she wore a long-sleeve top and a long skirt. But that was hardly enough.
Not only did Dr. Maayan and her husband have to sit separately, as men and women were segregated at the event, but she was instructed that a male colleague would have to accept the award for her because women were not permitted on stage.
Though shocked that this was happening at a government ceremony, Dr. Maayan bit her tongue. But others have not, and her story is entering the pantheon of secular anger building as a battle rages in Israel for control of the public space between the strictly religious and everyone else.
At a time when there is no progress on the Palestiniandispute, Israelis are turning inward and discovering that an issue they had neglected — the place of the ultra-Orthodox Jews — has erupted into a crisis.
And it is centered on women.
“Just as secular nationalism and socialism posed challenges to the religious establishment a century ago, today the issue is feminism,” said Moshe Halbertal, a professor of Jewish philosophy at Hebrew University. “This is an immense ideological and moral challenge that touches at the core of life, and just as it is affecting the Islamic world, it is the main issue that the rabbis are losing sleep over.”
The list of controversies grows weekly: Organizers of a conference last week on women’s health and Jewish law barred women from speaking from the podium, leading at least eight speakers to cancel; ultra-Orthodox men spit on an 8-year-old girl whom they deemed immodestly dressed; the chief rabbi of the air force resigned his post because the army declined to excuse ultra-Orthodox soldiers from attending events where female singers perform; protesters depicted the Jerusalem police commander as Hitler on posters because he instructed public bus lines with mixed-sex seating to drive through ultra-Orthodox neighborhoods; vandals blacked out women’s faces on Jerusalem billboards.
Public discourse in Israel is suddenly dominated by a new, high-toned Hebrew phrase, “hadarat nashim,” or the exclusion of women. The term is everywhere in recent weeks, rather like the way the phrase “male chauvinism” emerged decades ago in the United States.
All of this seems anomalous to most people in a country where five young women just graduated from the air force’s prestigious pilots course and a woman presides over the Supreme Court.
But each side in this dispute is waging a vigorous public campaign.
The New Israel Fund, which advocates for equality and democracy, organized singalongs and concerts featuring women in Jerusalem and put up posters of women’s faces under the slogan, “Women should be seen and heard.” The Israel Medical Association asserted last week that its members should boycott events that exclude women from speaking on stages.
Religious authorities said liberal groups were waging a war of hatred against a pious sector that wanted only to be left in peace.
That sector, the black-clad ultra-Orthodox, is known in Israel as Haredim, meaning those who tremble before God. It comprises many groups with distinct approaches to liturgy as well as to coat length, hat style, beard and side locks and different hair coverings for women. Among them are the Hasidim of European origin as well as those from Middle Eastern countries who are represented by the political party Shas.
As a group, the ultra-Orthodox are, at best, ambivalent about the Israeli state, which they consider insufficiently religious and premature in its founding because the Messiah has not yet arrived. Over the decades the Haredim angrily demonstrated against state practices like allowing buses to run on the Sabbath, and most believed the state would not survive.
The feeling was mutual. The original Haredi communities in Europe were decimated in the Holocaust, and when Israel’s founding prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, offered subsidies and army exemptions to the few in Israel then, he thought he was providing the group with a dignified funeral.
“Most Israelis at the time assumed the Haredim would die off in one generation,” said Jonathan Rosenblum, a Haredi writer.
Instead, they have multiplied, joined government coalitions and won subsidies and exemptions for children, housing and Torah study. They now number a million, a mostly poor community in an otherwise fairly well-off country of 7.8 million.
They have generally stayed out of the normal Israeli politics of war and peace, often staying neutral on the Palestinian question and focusing their deal-making on the material and spiritual needs of their constituents. Politically they have edged rightward in recent years.
In other words, while rejecting the state, the ultra-Orthodox have survived by making deals with it. And while dismissing the group, successive governments — whether run by the left or the right — have survived by trading subsidies for its votes. Now each has to live with the other, and the resulting friction is hard to contain.
“The coexistence between the two is breaking down,” said Arye Carmon, president of theIsrael Democracy Institute, a Jerusalem research organization. “It is an extreme danger.”
Mr. Carmon compared the strictly religious Jews of Israel to the Islamists in the Arab world, saying that there was a similar dynamic at play in Egypt, with tensions growing between the secular forces that led the revolution and the Islamic parties now rising to prominence.
“Today there is not a city without a Haredi community,” said Rabbi Abraham Israel Gellis, a 10th-generation Jerusalem Haredi rabbi, as he sat in his home, an enormous yeshiva on a hill outside his window. “I have 38 grandchildren and they live all over the country.”
But while the community has gained increased economic might — there is a growing market catering to its needs — what is lacking is economic productivity. The community places Torah study above all other values and has worked assiduously to make it possible for its men to do that rather than work. While the women often work, there is a 60 percent unemployment rate among the men, who also generally do not serve in the army.
It is this combination — accepting government subsidies, refusing military service and declining to work, all while having six to eight children per family — that is unsettling for many Israelis, especially when citizens feel economically insecure and mistreated by the government.
“The Haredi issue is a force flowing underground, like lava, and it could explode,” Shelly Yacimovich, a member of the Israeli Parliament, and leader of the Labor Party, said in an interview. “That’s why it must be dealt with wisely, helping them to join modern society through work.”
While change has begun — thousands of Haredi men are learning professions, more are getting jobs and a small number have joined the Israeli Army — the community is in crisis. Many ultra-Orthodox leaders feel threatened by the integration into the broader society by some of their followers, and they are desperately holding on to their power.
“We have to earn a living,” said Rabbi Shmuel Pappenheim, a reformist Haredi leader from the town of Beit Shemesh. “We are a million people with a million problems. The rabbis can shout a thousand times against it but it won’t help them. And so we have the extremism — on both sides.”
Dan Ben-David, executive director of the Taub Center for Social Policy Studies in Israel, said fertility rates in the Haredi community made the issue especially acute; the very religious Jews are the only group in Israel having more children today than 30 years ago.
“They make up more than 20 percent of all kids in primary schools,” he said. “In 20 years, there is a risk we will have a third-world population here which can’t sustain a first-world economy and army.”
And, Mr. Ben-David added, what children learn in the ultra-Orthodox school system — largely unregulated by the state as a result of political deals — is unsuited for the 21st century, so even those who wish to work are finding it hard to find jobs.
“Their schools do not give them the skills to work in a modern economy and no training in civil or human rights or democracy,” Mr. Ben-David said. “They don’t even know what we are talking about — what we want from them — when we talk about discrimination against women.”
The Haredi community thinks this is a wild misunderstanding of its views.
Rabbi Dror Moshe Cassouto, a 33-year-old Hasid, lives with his wife and four sons in the Jerusalem neighborhood of Mea Shearim, one of the centers of Haredi life in Israel. He never looks directly at a woman, other than his wife, and he believes that men and women have roles in nature that in modern society have been reversed, “because we live in darkness.”
His goal is to spread the light. “God watches over the Jewish nation as long as it studies Torah,” he said.
Still, the spitting and Nazi talk horrify him. He says hard-liners have caused harm to the Haredim.
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