Posts Tagged ‘Soviet’

The Sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff Dr. William Pierce

Monday, July 2nd, 2012

What’s said to be the most expensive motion picture ever made was released a few weeks ago and has been earning record money at the box office. The film, of course, is Titanic, and it’s about the sinking of the ocean liner RMS Titanic on April 15, 1912, with the loss of 1,513 lives, after the ship struck an iceberg in the North Atlantic. There are many superlatives in the film. The Titanic was the largest ship ever built at the time. It also was the most luxurious ship, intended to provide high-speed trans-Atlantic transportation in comfort for the rich and pampered. The implication of the film is that the sinking of the Titanic was the greatest maritime disaster of all time. I’m sure that the great majority of the American public believes that to be the case, but it isn’t. Everyone has heard about the sinking of the Titanic, and very few have heard about the sinking of the S.S. Wilhelm Gustloff, which was the greatest maritime disaster.

Wilhelm Gustloff
 Wilhelm Gustloff: The ship was named in honor of the Landesleiter of the NSDAP in Switzerland, murdered by a Jewish assassin, David Frankfurter, in 1936.

It is easy to understand why everyone has heard about the Titanic: it was a very big, very expensive ship, claimed to be virtually “unsinkable,” which went down on its maiden voyage with a record number of celebrities and tycoons aboard. The irony of the sinking helped generate public interest and an enormous media coverage. When the Wilhelm Gustloff went down, on the other hand, with the loss of more than 6,000 lives, the controlled media adopted the deliberate policy that it was a non-event, not to be commented on or even reported. The Wilhelm Gustloff, like the Titanic, was a big passenger liner and was reasonably new and luxurious. But it was a German passenger liner. It was sunk in the Baltic Sea on the night of January 30, 1945, by a Soviet submarine. It was packed with nearly 8,000 Germans, most of them women and children escaping from the advancing Soviet Army.

Many of these German refugees lived in East Prussia, a part of Germany that the Communist and democratic Allies had agreed would be taken from Germany and given to the Soviet Union at the end of the Second World War. Others lived in Danzig and the surrounding area, which the democrats and Communists had decided would be taken from Germany and given to Poland. All of these refugees were fleeing in terror from the Reds, who already had demonstrated in East Prussia what was in store for any German unfortunate enough to fall into their hands.

As Soviet military units overtook columns of German civilian refugees fleeing to the west, they behaved in a way which has not been seen in Europe since the Mongol invasions of the Middle Ages. Often the men, most of them farmers or Germans who had been engaged in other essential occupations and thus exempted from military service, were simply murdered on the spot. The women were, almost without exception, gang-raped. This was the fate of girls as young as eight years old and old women in their eighties, as well as women in the advanced stages of pregnancy. Women who resisted rape had their throats cut or were shot. Very often women were murdered after being gang-raped. Many women and girls were raped so often and so brutally that they died from this abuse alone. [Image: German officers examine the bodies of civilians murdered by the Red Army, October 1944.]

Sometimes Soviet tank columns simply rolled right over the fleeing refugees, grinding them into the mud with their tank treads. When Soviet Army units occupied East Prussian villages, they engaged in orgies of torture, rape, and murder so bestial that they cannot be described fully on this program. Sometimes they castrated the men and boys before killing them. Sometimes they gouged their eyes out. Sometimes they burned them alive. Some women after being gang-raped were crucified by being nailed to barn doors while still alive and then used for target practice.

This atrocious behavior on the part of the Communist troops was due in part to the nature of the Communist system, which had succeeded in overthrowing Russian society and the Russian government in the first place by organizing the scum of Russian society — the losers and ne’er-do-wells, the criminals, the resentful and the envious — under the Jews and setting them against the successful, the accomplished, the refined, and the prosperous, promising the rabble that if they pulled down their betters then they could take the place of the latter: the first shall be last, and the last shall be first.

It was the members of this rabble, this scum of Russian society, who became the bosses of local soviets and collectives and workers’ councils — when the positions had not already been taken by Jews. The Soviet soldiers of 1945 had grown up under this system of rule by the worst; for 25 years they had lived under commissars chosen from the dregs of Russian society. Any tendency toward nobility or gentility had been weeded out ruthlessly. Stalin had ordered the butchering of 35,000 Red Army officers, half of the old Russian officers’ corps, in 1937, just two years before the war, because he did not trust gentlemen. The officers who replaced those shot in the 1937 purge were not much more civilized in their behavior than the commissars.

An even more specific and immediate cause of the atrocities committed against the German population of East Prussia was the Soviet hate propaganda which deliberately incited the Soviet troops to rape and murder — even to murder German infants. The chief of the Soviet propaganda commissars was a hate-filled Jew named Ilya Ehrenburg. One of his directives to the Soviet troops read:

Kill! Kill! In the German race there is nothing but evil; not one among the living, not one among the yet unborn but is evil! Follow the precepts of Comrade Stalin. Stamp out the fascist beast once and for all in its lair! Use force and break the racial pride of these Germanic women. Take them as your lawful booty. Kill! As you storm onward, kill, you gallant soldiers of the Red Army.

Not every Russian soldier was a butcher or a rapist, of course: just most of them. A few of them still had a sense of morality and decency which even Jewish Communism had not destroyed. Alexander Solzhenitsyn was one of these. He was a young captain in the Red Army when it entered East Prussia in January 1945. He wrote later in his Gulag Archipelago: “All of us knew very well that if the girls were German they could be raped and then shot. This was almost a combat distinction.”

In one of his poems, Prussian Nights, he describes a scene he witnessed in a house in the East Prussian town of Neidenburg:

Twenty-two Hoeringstrasse.
It’s not been burned, just looted, rifled.
A moaning by the walls, half muffled:
The mother’s wounded, half alive.
The little daughter’s on the mattress,
Dead. How many have been on it?
A platoon? A company perhaps?
A girl’s been turned into a woman,
A woman turned into a corpse …
The mother begs, ‘Soldier, kill me!’

And so, German civilians were fleeing in terror from East Prussia, and for many of them the only route of escape was across the icy Baltic Sea. They packed the port of Gotenhafen, near Danzig, hoping to find passage to the west. Hitler ordered all available civilian ships into the rescue effort. The Wilhelm Gustloff was one of these. A 25,000-ton passenger liner, it had been used before the war by the “Strength through Joy” organization to take German workers on low-cost vacation excursions. On January 30, 1945, when it steamed out of Gotenhafen it carried a crew of just under 1,100 officers and men, 73 critically wounded soldiers, 373 young women of the Women’s Naval Auxiliary, equivalent to our WAVES, and more than 6,000 desperate refugees, most of them women and children.

Soviet submarines and aircraft were a constant menace to this rescue effort. They regarded the refugee ships in the light of Ehrenburg’s genocidal propaganda: the more Germans they could kill the better, and it didn’t make any difference to them whether their victims were soldiers or women and children. At just after 9:00 PM, when the Wilhelm Gustloff was 13 miles off the coast of Pomerania, three torpedoes from the Soviet submarine S-13, under the command of Captain A.I. Marinesko, struck the ship. Ninety minutes later it sank beneath the icy waves of the Baltic. Although a heroic effort to pick up survivors was made by other German ships, barely 1,100 were saved. The rest, more than 7,000 Germans, died in the frigid water that night.

A few days later, on February 10, 1945, the same Soviet submarine sank the German hospital ship, the General von Steuben, and 3,500 wounded soldiers aboard the ship, who were being evacuated from East Prussia, drowned. To the Soviets, inflamed by Jewish hate propaganda, the sign of the Red Cross meant nothing. On May 6, 1945, the German freighter Goya, also part of the rescue fleet, was torpedoed by another Soviet submarine, and more than 6,000 refugees fleeing from East Prussia died.

The lack of knowledge in the United States about any of these terrible maritime disasters of 1945 is profound, even among people who consider themselves knowledgeable on naval matters. And this ignorance stems from the deliberate policy of the controlled media, a policy which has relegated these disasters to the category of non-events. The reason for this media policy originally was the same reason which led the Jewish media bosses to blame the slaughter of 15,000 Polish officers and intellectuals in the Katyn woods in 1940 on the Germans. They knew that the Soviets had done it, as part of their effort to “proletarianize” Poland and make the Poles more amenable to Communist rule, but they didn’t want to tarnish the image of our “gallant Soviet ally,” as the Reds were called by the controlled U.S. media during the war. They wanted Americans to think that the Germans were the bad guys and the Soviets were the good guys, so they simply lied about the Katyn massacre.

Likewise, even in the last months of the war, they didn’t want Americans alerted to the fact that our “gallant Soviet ally” was butchering and raping the civilian population of East Prussia and deliberately sinking the civilian refugee ships which were helping the East Prussians escape across the Baltic Sea. That might damage America’s enthusiasm for continuing the destruction of Germany with the help of our “gallant Soviet ally.” So the controlled media simply didn’t report these things.

After the triumph of the democratic and Communist Allies and the unconditional surrender of Germany this reason no longer was valid, of course. But by then another motive had taken its place. The Jews were beginning to build their “Holocaust” story and were demanding sympathy from the world — and reparations money from anyone they could get it from. As they began wailing about the supposed extermination of six million of their kinsmen in “gas ovens” by the wicked Germans and portraying themselves as the innocent and inoffensive victims of the greatest crime in history, they didn’t want any facts getting in the way — and they certainly didn’t want Americans to see both sides of the conflict; they didn’t want the Germans seen as victims too. All Germans were evil, just like Comrade Ehrenburg had said; all Jews were good; and that was it. The Jews suffered, and the Germans didn’t, and so now the world owed the Jews a living for not stopping the “Holocaust.”

It really wouldn’t help their “Holocaust” propaganda at all to have the American public learn about what had happened in East Prussia or in the Baltic Sea — or to learn that our “gallant Soviet ally” had deliberately murdered the leadership stratum of the Polish nation in the Katyn woods, and that some of the murderers involved in that horrendous act were Jews. And so there has been a conspiracy of silence in America on the part of the Jewish media bosses.

That’s why Hollywood was willing to spend $200 million producing the film Titanic but would never consider any film dealing with the sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff. It’s not that such a film couldn’t make money — I think that a film about East Prussia and the Wilhelm Gustloff could be a real blockbuster — it’s that there must be no sympathy for the Germans. There must be no rethinking of America’s reasons for waging war against Germany, no questioning of whether or not we did the right thing in allying ourselves with Communism on behalf of the Jews. And beside these considerations, the truth simply doesn’t count — at least, not to the Jews who control our mass media.

This bit of history — America’s motivations for engaging in the war in Europe, which really was something altogether separate from the war in the Pacific, despite the alliance between Germany and Japan — this bit of history always has fascinated me. And one of the interesting aspects about it is the unwillingness of so many Americans to examine it. I understand the sentiments of the Clintonista elements. To the kind of people who voted for Clinton, the Soviets were the good guys and the Germans were the bad guys on ideological grounds. Gang-rape, mass murder, and the sinking of refugee ships are not really crimes in the eyes of the Bill-and-Hillary types when they’re done by Communists against “Nazis.”

But there also were a lot of decent Americans who fought in the war in Europe, anti-Communist Americans, and many of them don’t want to think about the fact that they fought on the wrong side. These American Legion and VFW types don’t want to hear about who really killed all of those Polish intellectuals and leaders in the Katyn woods. They don’t want to know what happened in East Prussia in 1945. They hate it when I ask them, why did we fight Germany in the name of freedom and then turn half of Europe over to Communist slavery at the end of the war?

I was far too young for military service in the Second World War, but I am sure that if I had fought in that war, I’d be even more interested in understanding what was behind it. I believe that knowing the truth about these things is far more important than protecting our carefully nurtured belief that we were on the side of righteousness. I believe that understanding how we were deceived in the past is necessary, if we are to avoid being deceived in the future.

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A Time of Ominous Transition

Sunday, May 6th, 2012

Still emerging from seven decades of Soviet rule, Russiansare groping toward a new sense of national identity. Not yet havingcome to grips with its past, this is a land of historical paradox.Thus, Lenin‘s embalmed corpse is still enshrined in a monumentalsarcophagus on Moscow’s Red Square, and not a single former Communistofficial has been brought to trial for Soviet-era crimes.

As Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn has observed, Russia today is neitheran authentic political democracy nor a genuine free market economy.While an ambitious few amass vast fortunes and great power throughillicit deals, the country’s productive workers, children andelderly suffer. A small oligarchy rules over a population thatlives in near destitution. “Democracy in the true sense ofthe word does not exist in Russia,” writes Solzhenitsyn.He continues:

There exists no legal framework or financial means for thecreation of local self-government. People will have no choicebut to achieve it through social struggle … This system of centralizedpower cannot be called a democracy … The fate of the countryis now decided by a stable oligarchy of 150-200 people, whichincludes the nimbler members of the old Communist system’s topand middle ranks, plus the nouveaux riches … Our present rulingcircles have not shown themselves in the least morally superiorto the Communists who preceded them … Russia is being exhaustedby crime, not a single serious crime has been exposed, nor hasthere been a single public trial … This destructive course ofevents over the last decade has come about because the government,while ineptly imitating foreign models, has completely disregardedthe country’s innate creativity and singular character as wellas Russia’s centuries-old spiritual and social traditions.

For the historically minded observer, the parallels betweenRussia today and Germany during the pre-Hitler Weimar republicyears are striking and portentous. In each case, there has beensevere economic, political and social upheaval, monetary chaos,substantial loss of territory, and humiliating subordination toforeign powers following the abrupt collapse of an seemingly entrenchedpolitical regime. Unscrupulous individuals, many of them membersof an alien ethnic minority, have exploited their foreign connectionsand the prevailing disorder to quickly enrich themselves at theexpense of the common people. Major media and financial institutionsare largely in the hands of people with no national loyalty. Ineach case, the social dislocation has come with a drastic fallin cultural and moral standards.

Much of the talk in the United States about democracy in Russiais as ridiculous today as it has always been. Plus ça change,plus c’est la meme chose. Throughout its history, Russia has beenruled by an elite, entrenched in Moscow and St. Petersburg, oftenof non-Russian origin and fascinated by Western philosophies.

As a potentially wealthy country with a proud and illustriouspast, it is difficult to imagine that Russians will permit thecurrent miserable and humiliating situation to continue indefinitely.At the same time, it’s hard to see how Russia’s problems can bemastered without very drastic change.

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JEWISH-LED SECRET POLICE MURDER MILLIONS

Monday, April 30th, 2012

It was during this time that Bolshevik Commissars (many of them Jews) conducted a horrendous reign of terror against the non-Jewish Russian population. In one operation alone, they deliberately starved to death 8 to 15 million Ukrainian gentile farmers during the 1920′s in one of the most vile campaigns in history orchestrated by Stalin’s brother-in-law and the most powerful Jew in the USSR, Lazar Kaganovich. Of course, Kaganovich certainly wasn’t the only Jew involved: “[I]n (the) Ukraine Jews made up nearly 80 percent of the rank-and-file Cheka agents,” reports W. Bruce Lincoln, an American professor of Russian history. Veteran Chicago Tribune Baltic correspondent, Donald Day, exposed yet another important Jew involved in the Ukrainian crimes: “Artemic Bagratovich Khalatov (Jewish) headed that branch of the Cheka which organized the food supply of the Soviets. He organized the punitive expeditions of the Cheka which confiscated the grain and foodstuffs from the peasants. A policy whose direct result was the great famine of 1920-21.”

The prominence of Jews in Soviet secret police agencies was not isolated to the Unkraine, Benjamin Ginsberg discusses this in his 1994 book “The Fatal Embrace – Jews and the State”: “During the 1920s and 1930s, Jews were a major element in the secret police and other Soviet security forces. Genrikh Yagoda, for instance, served as chief of the secret police during the 1930s. Yagoda had been a pharmacist before the Revolution and specialized in preparing poisons for his agents to use in liquidating Stalin’s opponents.”

Ginsberg continues in the next paragraph by describing how Jews greatly expanded and organized the murderous Soviet Gulag prison system: “Other high-ranking Jewish secret policemen included Matvei Berman and Naftali Frenkel who helped to expand and institutionalize the slave labor system. Slave laborers working under Frenkel’s supervision built the White-Sea Baltic Canal in 1932. As many as 200,000 workers perished while completing this project. Another Jewish security officer, K. V. Pauker, served as chief of operations of the secret police in the 1930s. Lev lnzhir was chief accountant for the Gulag. M. T. Gay headed the special secret police department that conducted the purges of the 1930s. In what came to be called the “Great Terror,” he supervised the mass arrests, trials, and executions of Stalin’s opponents. Two other Jewish secret policemen, A. A. Slutsky and Boris Berman, were in charge of Soviet terror and espionage abroad during the 1930s. Jews were also important in the Red Army. In addition to Trotsky, prominent Jewish generals included Yona Yakir, who was a member of the Communist party central committee; Dmitri Schmidt, a civil war hero and commander of the Kiev area; and Yakob Kreiser, a hero of the defense of Moscow during the Second World War.”

Some modern historians estimate that upwards of 80 million persons were murdered in the 70 years of communist rule in Russia, many of them directly at the hands of Jews at the order of Jewish Communist secret police bosses using execution, starvation, assassination, and the Gulag slave labor prisons.

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The So-Called Russian Soul by Joseph Goebbels

Tuesday, March 13th, 2012

The hard and pitiless battle for Sevastapol, as well as the recent broad offensive operations of the German army, have reopened a lively debate, above all in the neutral press. Similar to that of the past winter, it is on the issue of the so-called Russian soul. The spiritual as well as the territorial boundaries between Asia and Europe have always interested Western Europeans. It is not to be denied that the ethnic mixture that we called Russia before 1917 and the Soviet Union thereafter has been a riddle to our part of the world. That had nothing to do with tsarism then or Bolshevism today. It simply has to do with the fact that the various peoples joined together in this monster of a nation are not a people [Volk] in our sense of the word.

The many sides of the Russian soul which appears so complex and contradictory to us are in reality nothing but the reflection of the various peoples who are a part of it. It would be a mistake to evaluate it by the standards of Western Europe. What we call Russia has always been a collective mass. Only a small portion of it has made history. Earlier it was the tsarist upper class, today the Bolshevist-Jewish ruling clique. The broad masses of peasants and workers were only tools, having themselves no part in historical events.

The peoples of the Soviet Union live at a level of brutish primitiveness that we can hardly imagine. An exhibition called “The Soviet Paradise” has recently visited Berlin and other large cities, trying to show the nature of life in the Soviet Union through original materials. Normal and naive people can hardly believe it. One often saw groups of civilians discussing the matter heatedly, who then had to be told by a few wounded veterans of the Eastern Front that reality in the so-called workers’ and peasants’ paradise was even worse than what was presented. It is significant that the campaign against the Soviet Union has not brought back any fond memories of communism. None of our soldiers has seen any evidence of an agreement between the theory and practice of Bolshevism. None has returned from the East as a communist. The veil has been removed. Bolshevism is not a danger for us any longer.

It still seems astonishing that the Soviet army has put up resistance against our troops that they have not encountered in previous campaigns. They fight with a stolid, almost bestial determination, and sometimes show a contempt of death that is more than remarkable. Participants in the Battle of Sevastopol relate stories of the resistance of the Soviet troops that need explanation if they are not to unsettle a large part of the public.

The Russians throughout their history have always shown a particularly stubborn and tough manner of defense, while never being particularly gifted at offense. Their national character has a defensive nature. They are stolid and animalistic. They are accustomed to a hard and impoverished existence, and therefore do not hold on to life all that strongly. The average person has less worth than a bicycle. A rapid birthrate quickly replaces any losses. They have a type of primitive toughness that one cannot call bravery. It is entirely different. Bravery is a kind of spiritual courage. The toughness with which the Bolshevists defended their bunkers in Sevastapol was more a bestial drive, and nothing could be more mistaken than to assume that it was the result of Bolshevist views or education. The Russians were always like that, and will likely always remain so. It is also easier to throw a life away when there is no promise to it than when, even at the moment of danger, a distant paradise still seems to beckon.

One does not need to speak of the enormous danger that the armed uprising of such stolid millions is for Germany and all of Europe. For attacking soldiers, the motive of the defenders is not particularly relevant. The methods the Bolshevist commissars use to drive their troops to the last measure of resistance are not really all that important for the course of battle. It is however important to know it to prevent false impressions. Bolshevism is a master at exploiting the Slavic national soul. Only in Russia was this dreadful experiment possible. It required the primitive and bestial dullness of the peoples forming the Soviet Union, as well as their limited social and economic expectations. Its methods were then implemented with a consistency that amazed the observer.

Our first images of Bolshevism were not exaggerated, but understated. They were cast into the shadows by reality. We will not even mention the so-called social achievements of the Soviet system, which in comparison with ours can provoke only laughter or shock. It has hardly a matter of taste, however, to be astonished by the fact that Bolshevist propaganda largely succeeded in sealing the masses of Russian workers and peasants off from the world and persuading them by stupid repetition that they were living in a paradise on earth. Independent judgment requires the opportunity to compare. That is ruled out for them. The workers and peasants of the Soviet Union are like the man imprisoned in a dark dungeon for 25 years, who may easily be persuaded that a kerosene lantern is the sun.

The political commissar has a function in such a system that is absolutely incomprehensible for us. He wields the whip, both among the masses and in the army. He has full power over life and death, and his own head is on the line as well. The stolid masses are at his disposal. They are forced to choose between accepting it all or facing jail at the least or bestial death at the worst. There is nothing like an intelligentsia remaining to put up any resistance. The system has the resources to eliminate it at the earliest stages. The whole country is covered by a spy system that misuses children to spy on their parents. What choice do the stolid and hopeless masses have but to obey with the fatalism that lies within their racial soul, to give themselves up to their fate? What choice does a soldier in a bunker have when the commissar is standing there with a drawn pistol, and systematic Jewish propaganda has persuaded him that becoming a prisoner means not only death, but gruesome torture?

That really has nothing to do with bravery as we understand it. Even this system, when it faces the final test, will bend before the superior force of manly combativeness. The Bolshevists had a great advantage in their defensive positions, yet they capitulated after 25 days. In the end, their system lacks the free personal will that springs from the individual fighting spirit. It overcomes difficulty and danger not through terror and threats, but through individual bravery. Certainly international Jewry with its organized stolid and malleable human material is a dangerous enemy. Once it is used up, there will be no threat left for us to face. We would have to doubt the quality of our race, the goodness of our soldiers, and the fighting power of our worldview and principles if we even for a moment doubted that we can break this danger.

It is a part of the fate of the German race that at critical points it must defend itself against the threat from the East. It is especially dangerous today, bound as it is to the ruthless infernal goals of Jewish intellectualism. Without doubt it was a near fatal threat not only to Germany, but to all of occidental culture, when Jewry transformed the physical capacities of the East into a monstrous and armed Soviet military, aimed at Germany and all of Europe. The red commissar is defending his world tby holding together his attack on us. We must destroy his system if we want to live free from danger in the future.

This explanation goes beyond the realm of Philistine discussions of the so-called Russian soul. The old measures are inadequate to things of such an enormous spiritual and philosophical scale. The gigantic battle on the Eastern Front is shaking a world that must fall if we are to have any kind of a national future. The bestial brutality with which the enemy is waging war is proof of the enormity of the danger facing us. Everything is truly at stake. One cannot imagine the consequences if that system were to be implemented here. It would introduce Europe’s total domination by international Jewry. Our people would be subjected to the stolid brutality of a primitive race and would lose its most valuable aspects. London could only welcome such a thing. They have an opponent they are unable to defeat by their own strength, as the development of the war shows.

One therefore understands why we Germans have limited patience for intellectual discussions of a so-called Russian national soul, which must be thoroughly investigated in order to uncover its presumed secrets. There are no mysteries here, only facts. We are battling a world power that threatens our national life. The war is hard reality for us, not a philosophical question. We see its ghastly origins, and our soldiers are fighting for our holiest possessions. We do not underestimate our opponent. Still, we are as always persuaded that here too the higher race will triumph over the lower one, regardless of what infernal means it uses to escape its deserved fate.

We know well that Europe would be lost if the Axis powers did not defend it. We have given our part of the world renewed youth. The attack from the East against its life and culture will fail, because we will meet its stolid power with an offensive resistance that draws its strength from the intelligence of the leadership and the vitality of Europe’s young races.

As so often before, this time, too, the surging nomads of the East will be driven back to their steppes. That is the purpose of our battle against the Soviet Union.

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Life of Russian Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin in Britain Exhibition at the British Council

Sunday, March 11th, 2012

In celebration of the 50th anniversary of the first manned space flight and the installation of the Yuri Gagarin statue on the Mall, the British Council presents Gagarin in Britain, an exhibition on the life of Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin and the early Soviet space programme. This exhibition is part of a wider programme of cultural and educational links between the UK and Russia organised by the British Council. It showcases items from the Vostok (“East”) manned space programme rarely seen in Britain: the first space suit – SK-1, including the padded inner lining, blue rubberised pressure-suit and outer orange layer; and an ejector seat of the model used by Gagarin when he parachuted out of Vostok 1 at an altitude of 7km. These exhibits are complemented by Soviet posters from the Moscow Museum of Cosmonautics; a film made by Roscosmos showing original footage of the early training programme and the 1961 launch itself; a model of Sputnik, the first artificial satellite in the world, launched in October 1957; an array of space food; and one of the earliest dog space suits, used prior to man’s first spaceflight to test the capacity of living creatures in space. Accompanying the artefacts is a photographic exhibition telling the story of Gagarin’s life, featuring more than 80 photographs from the Gagarin family archive and other sources, many never published before. They show the small town of Klushino where Gagarin was born; the devastation brought about by the Nazi occupation; and the tale of a young man of modest beginnings gradually becoming a pilot, then a cosmonaut, then – within an instant of his return to earth – the most famous man on the planet. A special section is devoted to Gagarin’s visit to Britain from 11 to 15 July 1961, with photographs of the extraordinary welcome given to him by the British public, and of his meeting with politicians and people alike.

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Hitler Speaks in Munich SPEECH OF MAY 1, 1923

Tuesday, February 7th, 2012

If the first of May is to be transferred in accordance with Its true meaning from the life of Nature to the life of peoples, then it must symbolize the renewal of the body of a people which has fallen into senility. And in the life of peoples senility means internationalism. What is born of senility? Nothing, nothing at all. Whatever in human civilization has real value, that arose not out of internationalism, it sprang from the soul of a single people. When peoples have lost their creative vigor, then they become international Everywhere, wherever intellectual incapacity rules in the life of peoples, there internationalism appears. And it is no chance that the promoter of this cast of thought is a people which itself can boast of no real creative force – the Jewish people….

So the first of May can be only a glorification of the national creative will over against the conception of international disintegration, of the liberation of the nation’s spirit and of its economic outlook from the infection of internationalism. That is in the last resort the question of the restoration to health of peoples . . . and the question arises: Is the German oak ever destined to see another springtime? And that is where the mission of our Movement begins. We have the strength to conquer that which the autumn has brought upon us. Our will is to be National Socialists – not national in the current sense of the word – not national by halves. We are National Socialist fanatics, not dancers on the tight-rope of moderation!

There are three words which many use without a thought which for us are no catch-phrases: Love, Faith, and Hope. We National Socialists wish to love our Fatherland, we wish to learn to love it, to learn to love it jealously, to love it alone and to suffer no other idol to stand by its side. We know only one interest and that is the interest of our people.

We are fanatical in our love for our people, and we are anxious that so-called ‘national governments’ should be conscious of that fact. We can go as loyally as a dog with those who share our sincerity, but we will pursue with fanatical hatred the man who believes that he can play tricks with this love of ours. We cannot go with governments who look two ways at once, who squint both towards the Right and towards the Left. We are straightforward: it must be either love or hate.

We have faith in the rights of our people, the rights which have existed time out of mind. We protest against the view that every other nation should have rights – and we have none. We must learn to make our own this blind faith in the rights of our people, in the necessity of devoting ourselves to the service of these rights; we must make our own the faith that gradually victory must be granted us if only we are fanatical enough. And from this love and from this faith there emerges for us the idea of hope. When others doubt and hesitate for the future of Germany – we have no doubts. We have both the hope and the faith that Germany will and must once more become great and mighty.

We have both the hope and the faith that the day will come on which Germany shall stretch from Koenigsberg to Strassburg, and from Hamburg to Vienna.

We have faith that one day Heaven will bring the Germans back into a Reich over which there shall be no Soviet star, no Jewish star of David, but above that Reich there shall be the symbol of German labor – the Swastika. And that will mean that the first of May has truly come.

 


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The Incredible Story Of The Soviet Spy Who Saved The Lives Of Stalin, Churchill, And Roosevelt

Thursday, January 12th, 2012

Gevorg Vartanian Spy

Soviet spy Gevork Vartanian, who helped foil a Nazi plot to kill Allied leaders during World War II, died of cancer in Moscow on Tuesday, according to the Russian government.

 

He had a remarkable life.

Vartanian was born on 17 February 1924 in the southern Russian city of Rostov-on-Don. Following in his father’s footsteps, he became a Soviet agent at the tender age of 16.

Codenamed “Amir”, his task was to root out German and British spies, which he did admirably. Not only did he and his team manage to root out 400 German spies in 1940-41, according to the SVR, Vartanian also infiltrated British intelligence in the USSR by getting accepted into a British training course for spies in Tehran. Vartanian underwent training, then passed on information on the British school to Moscow.

However, the operation for which he was famous was a great help to his British and English allies.

Working in Tehran in November 1943, he and his group tracked “Long Jump”, an advanced team of German agents who had arrived to attack a conference attended by Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill, the BBC reports. The agents were captured and forced to broadcast false messages of failure to Berlin, which led to the attack being aborted.

Incredibly, Vartanian was only 19 years old at the time. A Russian film, “Tehran 43“, was made about the events of that year.

Vartanian gave an interview with Ria Novosti in 2007 that detailed how he beat the German spies. He ascribes his success to the “luck” of having never “met a single traitor”.

His wife was also a Soviet spy, and after the war they worked together for the next 30 years. The SVR, Russia’s foreign intelligence service, said Vartanian and his wife got married several times in different places as part of their cover. Gevork Vartanian retired from the SVR in 1992, after which he trained young agents.

Offering condolences to Vartanian’s wife Goar, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev described him as a true patriot who participated in “brilliant special operations which became part of history of the nation’s foreign intelligence,” according to the AP.

In recognition of his services, Vartanian received the highest Soviet award, the Hero of the Soviet Union medal. He was 87 years old when he died.

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