Tag Archives: nazis

German government targets anti-nazi pastor instead of nazis

Posted on by
3

This is a video about German Protestant preacher Lothar König, speaking at an anti-racist demonstration in Jena.

By Martin Nowak in Germany:

State prosecutors in Dresden, Germany, target anti-Nazi protesters

26 April 2013

The state prosecutor in Dresden is systematically targeting opponents of Nazi groups, in a region that is one of the centres of right-wing extremism in Germany. Along with Mecklenburg-Pomerania, Saxony is the only state where the neo-fascist German National Democratic Party (NPD) is represented in the state parliament. The party also has representation in all city councils and many community councils. Saxony was the epicentre of the National Socialist Underground (NSU), a right-wing terrorist group responsible for at least nine murders between 2000 and 2006.

The trial against a youth pastor from the town of Jena, Lothar König, which began on April 4, is the high point of the campaign by the state authorities in Dresden. König has been accused of serious breach of the peace, obstruction of justice and resisting police officers. He supposedly incited demonstrators to attack the police at an annual demonstration against right-wing extremism in February 2011.

König, who is almost 60, has been involved for years in protests against the extreme right and Nazi groups. With his young followers, he supported protests in the 1990s against right-wing extremism and anti-immigrant chauvinism. At these events, he was known for opposing any sort of violence and intervening to de-escalate situations. His work among youth in Jena is well-regarded, and he has received awards from several anti-racist foundations.

As he has done every year, König travelled to Dresden on February 19, 2011, to demonstrate with a broad coalition of political parties, trade unions and victim-support groups against a march held by neo-Nazis to commemorate German victims of the allied bombing of the city during WWII. In his renovated Volkswagen (VW) bus with loudspeakers, nicknamed “Noisy”, he accompanied roughly 20,000 demonstrators, who protested against some 3,000 neo-Nazis.

In the course of the protest, clashes took place between demonstrators and the police, which according to police sources resulted in 118 severe injuries to officers. In reality, only eight police officers were hurt, while others suffered only minor injuries as they waded in against demonstrators.

Countless eyewitnesses and recordings have confirmed that König sought to de-escalate the situation, even when the police closed off all routes for the protesters. He used the loudspeakers on his vehicle to play music, show demonstrators where to go, and call for peaceful protest against the neo-Nazis.

Nonetheless, the state prosecutor has accused him of encouraging violence, either with declarations he apparently made or merely by his presence. According to officials, with the aid of “Noisy”, König acted as a “communications point and coordinator of violent acts.” “From his vehicle”, they claim, “he called upon leftists to commit violence.” The prosecutor alleges König’s vehicle issued a call to “cover the pigs with stones” and attempted to force a police vehicle off the road.

All of the available video and sound recordings of the demonstration directly contradict the accusations made against König by the state prosecutor.

In a video extract that the prosecution has used against him, König says, “Come on people. There are a lot of us here. Just move on. Go further on. The police have no shields, no weapons.” Then he turned his vehicle around and called for everyone to follow him.

The claim by the prosecutor that König called at this point for violence against the police is absurd. In an interview with ZDF television, Professor Martin Kutscha, an expert on constitutional law who had seen the video, declared, “I have the impression that the pastor tried to encourage moderation among the demonstrators by turning his vehicle around and calling upon them to stay with his car, and certainly did not attempt to incite people to throw stones or something similar.”

The prosecutor is even trying to use the fact that König played music against him. The prosecutor’s office refers to the “aggressive and inflammatory” character of the music—i.e., “Paint it Black” by the Rolling Stones and “Kein Macht für Niemand” (“No Power for Anybody”) by the German group Ton Steine Scherben—which supposedly promoted violence.

The trial of König is such a blatant travesty of basic constitutional principles and democratic rights that no fewer than four human rights organisations have denounced it as a “political trial.”

The lead-up to the trial and the course it has run so far make clear that the prosecution of König is aimed at criminalising all opposition to the annual neo-Nazi march in Dresden.

The trial was first postponed from its original start date of March 19. The defence requested this after discovering just a few days earlier that there were up to 170 pages of documents and a CD in the evidence files of which they had not been aware. The prosecution and a spokesperson for the court falsely claimed that this was insignificant material.

The first day of the trial focused on the accusations against König. The defence argued that the indictment should not be read out at the start, stating it was vague and suggestive, and did not even contain a concrete charge. Nevertheless, the charges were read out, after which König and his defence lawyer gave statements in which they accused the prosecution of suppressing evidence, sloppiness, laziness and making allegations damaging to König.

The Dresden state prosecutor has initiated thousands of investigations targeting participants in demonstrations against neo-Nazis. The police collected data from more than a million mobile phones through illegal surveillance. Thousands of charges were brought against opponents of neo-Nazis, including 1,500 alone for alleged offences against a law covering demonstrations.

Special forces commandos have stormed and searched the homes of suspects, in some cases without any permission, including König’s office in Jena. When König was away on a trip to the Alps, police officers broke into his home without any authorisation and confiscated a computer, some CDs and his VW bus, which was parked in front of the house.

The raid on August 10 of last year came just days after König gave an interview to the news magazine Der Spiegel, in which he criticised the authorities in Saxony, comparing their actions to the notorious Stasi security forces in the GDR (former East Germany), and denounced the police for their brutal methods.

The close ties between the authorities in Dresden and the extreme right are so evident that even the bourgeois press has published critical articles. Der Spiegel commented on the large-scale measures taken by the police against anti-Nazi demonstrators at the protest last year. “In fact, it seems like the authorities and the judiciary in Saxony seek to hound citizens who oppose the Nazis with full force, while the extreme right are able to do what they like”, noted the newspaper.

The Dresden district court intends to make an example of König. Just a few months before the beginning of his trial, another anti-Nazi protester, Tim H, was sentenced to 22 months imprisonment without bail for a severe breach of the peace, grievous bodily harm and verbal abuse. In this case, too, neither the court nor the prosecution was able to prove the alleged offences or even any general involvement in criminal activities on the part of the defendant.

Related articles

Nazi danger in Europe

Posted on by
19

This video says about itself:

Belsen Concentration Camp’s Liberation (1945) WARNING: DISTRESSING FOOTAGE.

Liberation of Belsen Concentration Camp, taken from the1945 British Pathe reel ‘Concentration Camp Footage’.

Unedited footage showing the discovery and subsequent liberation of Belsen concentration camp by British soldiers in Germany. Recent prisoners are seen smiling behind the barbed wire fences, including women and children with numbers branded on them.

Then the camera shows shots of dazed and starving detainees wondering around, or hungrily eating and drinking supplies brought by the British.

This reel then continues to show disturbing images of dead bodies. The full video can be found oin British Pathe’s online archive, it has been cut short for the sake of this YouTube channel. You can see it here.

By Menachem Rosensaft, professor of law in the USA and son of Holocaust survivors:

Ominous Clouds Hover Once Again Over Europe

Posted: 04/24/2013 8:14 am

Speech delivered on Sunday, April 21, 2013, at Bergen-Belsen, Germany, at the commemoration marking the 68th anniversary of that Nazi concentration camp’s liberation.

Standing here in the midst of the mass-graves of Bergen-Belsen, we are inexorably reminded that evil exists in this world. Ominous clouds hover once again over parts of Europe. Sixty-eight years after the liberation of Bergen-Belsen, 68 years after the end of the Holocaust, we may not ignore a disturbing resurgence of racist and neo-fascist political groups in at least three countries that belong to both the European Union and NATO.

In Greece, the viciously racist, anti-Semitic and anti-migrant Golden Dawn party is emerging, in World Jewish Congress President Ronald S. Lauder’s words, as “the new Nazis.” And we cannot, we must not, ignore reports that Golden Dawn is at least in contact if not conspiring with like-minded groups in other countries and has opened offices in the United States, Canada, Australia, as well as in Germany.

In Hungary, where 70 years ago hundreds of thousands of Jews were deported to their death in the gas chambers of Auschwitz-Birkenau, the government was forced to ban a rally by anti-Semitic thugs in front of the main synagogue of Budapest under the horrific slogan, “Give Gas.” Early next month, while the World Jewish Congress will be holding its plenary assembly in Budapest as a demonstration of solidarity with the Hungarian Jewish community, members of the reactionary anti-Jewish, anti-Roma and anti-gay Jobbik party are planning an “anti-Zionist” demonstration there.

There can be no doubt that, as President Lauder wrote in the Süddeutsche Zeitung earlier this month, the anti-Semitic declarations of Jobbik‘s leaders “deliberately evoke memories of the pro-Hitler wartime regime in Hungary.”

Here in Germany, we note with profound consternation and dismay that the federal government seems to be acquiescing in the legitimization of contemporary far-right extremism by refusing to support efforts to ban the neo-Nazi National Democratic Party, or NPD. Last month, the New York Times quoted Philipp Rösler, the head of the Free Democratic Party as defending his government’s decision not to seek to outlaw the NPD with the comment, “Stupidity can’t be banned.”

Standing here beside the Jewish Monument of Bergen-Belsen which my father dedicated on the first anniversary of the liberation in 1946, we must remind Germany’s political and intellectual leaders that racism, anti-Semitism, fascism, intolerance, homophobia, and the desecration of Jewish cemeteries and memorials to the Nazi deportation of Roma and Sinti should never be dismissed cavalierly as mere indications of stupidity. They are manifestations of evil, of the very evil that led to the murder of the tens of thousands who lie buried in the mass-graves that surround us and the millions who were gassed at Auschwitz, Treblinka, Majdanek and the other death camps of Nazi Europe. We will not, we may not, tolerate their resurrection in any form anywhere, but especially not in Germany.

We are gratified by the news that the Central Office for the Investigation of National Socialist Crimes in Ludwigsburg is considering prosecuting some 50 former Auschwitz guards for their role in the genocide of the Jews of Europe, but we cannot ignore the fact that such prosecutions, if they ever take place, will occur many decades too late.

Let us never lose sight of the simple fact that Anne Frank, who died here of typhus a month before the liberation, wrote her famous observation — “I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are really good at heart” — while she was still in her hiding place in Amsterdam, while she still felt protected by Miep Gies and the other Dutch Christians who tried to save her and her family. I have no doubt that Anne Frank’s faith in the goodness of humankind was profoundly shaken if not completely erased after she was betrayed on August 4, 1944, and taken first to the Westerbork transit camp, then to Auschwitz, and eventually to Bergen-Belsen.

Which is not to say that we should ever forget those non-Jews like Miep Gies, like Pastor André Trocmé in le Chambon-sur-Lignon, and like former Polish Foreign Minister Władysław Bartoszewski who helped Jews in the years of the Holocaust, often at the risk of their own lives. And we remember with profound gratitude the British officers and soldiers who announced to the inmates of the “horror camp” of Bergen-Belsen on April 15, 1945, that “you are free,” “Ihr seit frei.” Together with the US troops who liberated Buchenwald, Dachau, and so many other German concentration camps in the spring of 1945, and the Soviet soldiers who entered Auschwitz on January 27, 1945, these Allied soldiers gave the gift of life to the surviving remnants of European Jewry, and we are eternally in their debt.

Seventy years ago today, the Warsaw Ghetto was in flames on the third day of the armed uprising, with its heroic Jewish fighters writing a glorious page of defiance into the annals of history. But let us also not forget the thousands upon thousands of Poles in Warsaw who heard the gun fire and saw the smoke but went about their business. And while more than 40,000 Jews died a horrific public death, a merry-go-round was entertaining Poles just outside the Ghetto walls in Krasiński Square.

Today, let us remember that our obligation is to the dead who lie buried here as well as to history and to the future. The Holocaust, the Shoah, was possible because human beings who could have stopped it allowed it to take place, just as they allowed the genocides in Bosnia, Rwanda, Darfur and elsewhere to take place.

We come here every year to assure the dead of Belsen that we have not abandoned them, that we will never abandon them. But equally important, we must recommit ourselves once again in this sacred place to do everything in our collective power not to allow the spiritual and ideological heirs of the National Socialist regime to arise anywhere in the world as a new scourge of humankind.

Menachem Z. Rosensaft, born in the Displaced Persons camp of Bergen-Belsen on May 1, 1948, is General Counsel of the World Jewish Congress and Vice President of the American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors and Their Descendants. He teaches about the law of genocide and war crimes trials at the law schools of Columbia, Cornell and Syracuse universities.

Related articles

Dutch xenophobe Wilders invites French fascist Le Pen

Posted on by
3

This video says about itself:

Jean-Marie Le Pen, MEP and leader of France’s far-right Front National, outraged assembled members of the European Parliament by repeating his assertion that the Nazi gas chambers were “a mere detail” in the history of the Second World War.

Now, Jean-Marie Le Pen has transferred the leadership of his neo-fascist Front National party, to his daughter Marine, whom he had groomed for that.

This video from France is called Marine le Pen amoureuse du producteur de chants Nazis (extraits musicaux). It is about the production and sales by the Le Pen dynasty/Front National neo-fascist party of albums of Adolf Hitler’s nazi party songs.

And today, NOS TV in the Netherlands reports that Geert Wilders, leader of the xenophobic PVV, has invited Marine Le Pen to come to the Netherlands.

Wilders calls Ms Le Pen “an impressive woman”. Evidently seeing the French fascists as a sister party to his PVV.

So far, Wilders pretended that his xenophobic attacks on immigrants from Muslim countries were not racist, but just ideological criticism of Islam.

With this political marriage to Marine Le Pen, Wilders drops that mask.

Marine Le Pen and Wilders

Related articles

New Israeli film on nazi history

Posted on by
3

This video is called The Flat, Documentary Film Trailer.

By Fred Mazelis:

The Flat: A family examines a Nazi-Zionist friendship

22 April 2013

Written and directed by Arnon Goldfinger

The Flat, a prize-winning Israeli documentary released in 2011 and now available on DVD, raises important historical issues. While the filmmaker, Arnon Goldfinger, is neither willing nor able to fully explore them, there is still much that is of interest in his story, which deals with experiences of his German-born grandparents that occurred well before he was born.

The documentary begins in the Tel Aviv apartment of Gerda Tuchler. Her grandson has taken on the task, along with his mother Hannah and other relatives, of clearing out his grandmother’s flat after her death at the age of 98. She had lived in the same apartment for 70 years, since arriving in Palestine with her husband Kurt in 1937 as refugees from Nazi Germany.

As they proceed with the difficult and sometimes tedious job of sifting through decades of memories, Arnon and his mother come across what seems to them a startling, almost unbelievable discovery—a carefully preserved German newspaper article from 1934 entitled (in English translation), “A Nazi Travels to Palestine.”

The article comes from Der Angriff ( The Attack ), a leading Nazi publication. It describes a trip undertaken in 1933 by a high Nazi official, Leopold von Mildenstein, and his wife to Palestine, accompanied by Arnon Goldfinger’s grandparents, Kurt and Gerda Tuchler. The article shows the Mildensteins and Tuchlers in Palestine, and includes photos favorably depicting the lives of Jewish settlers.

It is this discovery that leads Goldfinger to make his documentary. He wonders, in his voice-over narration, “What is Nazi propaganda doing in my grandparents’ flat?” The apparent mystery is only deepened when he comes across numerous photos and correspondence showing that the Tuchlers and Mildensteins resumed their friendship after the war. His mother says she knows nothing about these friends of her parents, nor is she very interested in finding out more.

Goldfinger’s parents’ generation as a rule avoided looking too deeply into the fate of their family members in the Holocaust. In fact, it is only during the course of the investigation of his grandparents’ history that the filmmaker learns the details of the fate of his great-grandmothers. Kurt’s mother died in the Theresienstadt concentration camp, and Gerda’s mother, Susan Lehmann, was deported to the Riga ghetto where she perished.

The issue of his grandparents’ friends becomes even more disturbing when Goldfinger examines accounts of the famous 1961 war crimes trial of Adolf Eichmann, which ended with his conviction and execution. Eichmann testified that Mildenstein, an advocate of resettling German Jews in Palestine, was his superior between 1934 and 1937 in the department of the Nazi SS dealing with Jewish affairs.

The relationship between the Tuchlers and Mildensteins obviously haunts Goldfinger. He repeats the above question in different words, and his face registers puzzlement and concern.

The documentary follows Goldfinger’s attempts to trace his grandparents’ history. The search leads him to the German city of Wuppertal, near Dusseldorf, where he visits the Mildensteins’ daughter, Edda Milz von Mildenstein. Edda, a woman who is now about 70 years old, lived in Britain for 30 years after the war and speaks perfect English. She welcomes him warmly and tells him she knew his grandparents quite well, from their frequent visits to her parents in the 1950s and 60s.

This cultured and educated woman, who was only five years old when the war ended, suggests that her father, though he was a Nazi party member early on, left the party and took up a career in journalism during the war. He later became an official for Coca-Cola in West Germany.

Goldfinger finds evidence that contradicts Edda’s account. He speaks to a retired journalist, the author of a 1966 article in Der Spiegel on von Mildenstein that confirmed his membership in the Nazi SS in the mid-1930s. The filmmaker then examines historical archives in Berlin that provide additional information, showing that Mildenstein joined the Nazis before they took power in 1933, and that he never left the party, instead working in Goebbels’s propaganda ministry throughout the war.

As the film proceeds, Goldfinger more and more shifts his emphasis away from examining his grandparents’ motives and instead toward exposing the role of Mildenstein. He goes back to visit Edda and confronts her with the evidence of her father’s fuller career as a Nazi functionary. She at first resists and then claims she was kept in the dark, which may in fact be the case.

It seems clear that Mildenstein, though probably not an active participant in planning and carrying out the “final solution,” was a longtime Nazi functionary. Like thousands of others who prospered in industry or the state apparatus after the war, including some who occupied far more important postwar positions than he did, Mildenstein paid no penalty.

There is another side to the story, however, one that is also important. Why were the Tuchlers and Mildensteins such good friends in the first place? In the end, Goldfinger settles for a very limited and superficial explanation. He finds a German expert on “Nazi denial,” who speculates that the intense German patriotism of the Tuchlers led them to value their connection to the Mildensteins, and that they “did not know necessarily” that Mildenstein had been a high official.

This may be true. Perhaps Mildenstein resumed the relationship in the postwar period as a way of shielding himself against charges relating to his Nazi past. Perhaps he hid from the Tuchlers the fact that he remained a Nazi until Hitler’s defeat. This still skirts the most important issue: what was the political basis of a relationship that lasted several decades? Why did they hit it off so well? Why were the Tuchlers so willing to accept at face value Mildenstein’s explanation of his wartime career, if that is what happened?

The fact remains that the two couples traveled together on a trip that lasted for months in 1933-1934. This was after the Nazis had come to power, physically smashed the trade unions and the workers’ parties, threw thousands of Communists and other political prisoners into concentration camps and instituted a regime of brutal terror. None of this disturbed the Tuchlers enough to prevent their trip to Palestine with their Nazi friends, a trip that was featured in the fascist press.

Early in the film there is a brief but significant interview, one that Goldfinger chooses not to discuss further. An elderly Israeli historian of German Jewish emigration to Palestine explains that the story of the Tuchlers is not unbelievable at all. He talks about the “common interest” between the National Socialists and the Zionists during the 1930s. Kurt Tuchler, who was a Berlin traffic court judge at the time, was an active member of the German Zionist Federation. This Federation, in an apparent attempt to boost support within Nazi circles for Jewish emigration, sent Tuchler to accompany Mildenstein on the trip to Palestine.

A family memoir cannot deal in depth with historical questions that demand much longer treatment, but the story of the Tuchlers cannot be fully understood without examining the role of Zionism. During this pre-World War II period, it was a distinctly minority viewpoint within the Jewish population, in Germany and everywhere else. Dedicated above all to nationalism and national exclusivism, it drew support primarily from middle class layers, and was hostile to assimilation and above all to a mass socialist movement encompassing all sections of the working class.

It was not unheard of for upper middle class German Jews, including those, like Kurt Tuchler, who proudly wore their medals from the First World War, to voice some “understanding” of the program and the appeal of the National Socialists. Furthermore, the Tuchlers would have favorably compared the cultivated Mildensteins to the Nazi “rabble,” and perhaps have placed their hopes on a moderation of Nazi policies and the emergence of a more “moderate” German nationalism under people like Mildenstein. The tragic fate of European Jewry in the Holocaust transformed the fortunes of Zionism. Many, with their hopes for the future shattered after the loss of 6 million Jews, came to embrace the doctrine of an exclusive Jewish homeland. Major sections of world capitalism, above all the United States, which had emerged as the chief victor from the Second World War, transferred their support to the Zionists.

History was rewritten in accord with the need for a Zionist mythology. Zionism, rather than being a minority view, now became officially synonymous with the Jewish people. Anti-Zionists were depicted as anti-Semites or “self-hating Jews.” The leading role of Jewish socialists and communists in the Warsaw Ghetto and other heroic resistance to the Nazis was pushed aside. Not only was Zionist collaboration with the National Socialists erased, as in the relatively minor example of the Tuchlers, but the German people as a whole were portrayed as collectively responsible for Hitler, as in the notorious book Hitler’s Willing Executioners.

Arnon Goldfinger and his generation were raised on this myth, and that may be why he reacted to the revelations about his grandparents with shock and incomprehension. Coming to grips with this history, however, will be crucial if Israeli Jews are to find an answer to the blind alley and increasing crisis that Zionism has produced for them, decades after the events discussed in The Flat.

Related articles

Anti-nazi demonstration in Germany

Posted on by
3

Anti-nazi demonstration in Munich

From daily The Morning Star in Britain:

10,000 march in Munich against far-right terror

Sunday 14 April 2013

by Our Foreign Desk

More than 10,000 people marched through Munich in protest against neonazi terrorism on Saturday.

Anti-racist and anti-fascist protesters from around the country gathered to oppose right-wing extremism in Germany at a demonstration where organisers sought to exclude nationalistic slogans.

Over 200 left-wing organisations took part in the event, which also included Munich’s Social Democrats and members of the Green Party.

“We want to show what brings us together and not what separates us. In doing so, we want to send a sign of solidarity to the victims and to those close to them,” said Alliance against Nazi Terror and Racism spokesman Bernd Kaminski.

He added: “We want to turn our attention more closely to racist structures in society.”

The alliance has called for the abolition of the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, Germany’s domestic intelligence authority, which the organisation accuses of tacitly allowing right-wing terrorist National Socialist Underground to operate and, as such, is implicated in NSU crimes.

The sole surviving member of the NSU is going on trial next Wednesday at Munich regional court.

Beate Zschaepe is suspected of involvement in the killing of nine businessmen and a policewoman since 2000.

The far-right murders hit the immigrant community hardest because eight of the victims had Turkish roots.

Several senior security officials have resigned following revelations during the last two years that authorities had assumed for years that the murders were the work of immigrant gangs, not racist violence.

See also here.

Photos are here.

Related articles

German nazi criminal gangs update

Posted on by
4

This video is called Germany‘s Neo-Nazi & Far-Right Extremism, The Immortals and Attacks on Immigrants.

Translated from NOS TV in the Netherlands:

Neo-Nazi network discovered in Germany

Wednesday, April 10, 2013, 17:54

The German judiciary has discovered a network of right-wing extremists. They sent messages to each other through letters and secret codes. It is also said to have sought contact with the NSU, the terrorist organisation which is held responsible for the murder of nine immigrants and a policewoman.

The network, according to German investigators, originates from an organization which tries to help right-wing extremists in prisons. That organization was already banned, but apparently its members have continued to maintain contacts. They are also said to have sought contact with Beate Zschäpe, the only survivor of the three neo-Nazis considered responsible for the series of murderous attacks.

This is yet another painful mistake by the German judiciary, which for many years had not thought about neo-Nazis as perpetrators of the murders of immigrants, our correspondent Wouter Meijer says. “Eight out of ten victims were Turks, so there was talk about gambling debts, Turkish gangs, conflicts with Kurds and other issues – anything but racism.”

Next week the trial of Beate Zschäpe and several co-defendants will begin.

See also here.

Related articles

French film on nazi anti-Jewish atrocities

Posted on by
3

This video is part of the film “Shoah” about the Holocaust, Claude Lanzmann, edited by Ziva Postec.

From Prensa Latina news agency:

Documentary about Nazi Experiments on Jews to be Presented in France

Paris, Apr 7. A documentary about the murder of 86 Jews in Nazi experiments during Word War II, will be presented on April 10th in that capital city.

“In the Name of Race and of Science, Strasbourg 1941-1944” relates how the mutilated corpses found in the basement of the Anatomy Institute of the Strasbourg University, were destined to leave a trace of Jewish people once they were exterminated.

Under the guidance of Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS and later Interior Ministry, those men and women who came from Auschwitz concentration camp in 1943, were murdered in gas chambers in France and sent to the Strasbourg university to be preserved in formol.

To avoid the brutal crime remaining unpunished in Europeans’ memory, the producer Temps Noir and the directors Sonia Rolley, Axel and Tancrede Ramonet decided to make the 55-minute documentary, which shows unknown images from archives.

“I found that story by accident in 2005, when I was a journalism student in Strasbourg”, said Rolley.

She said also that through that story, practically unknown, they could discover the entire criminal mechanism of the Nazis.

The film was premiered this week in Rothau, an Alsatian commune very close to where a Nazi concentration camp operated during German occupation.

To mark Holocaust Remembrance Day this year — it falls on Monday, April 8, 2013 — HBO is premiering 50 Children: The Rescue Mission of Mr. and Mrs. Kraus, a deeply affecting story about how an American couple from Philadelphia went into the heart of Nazi-occupied Europe, risking their personal safely to save 50 Jewish children from the Shoah: here.

Related articles

Nazi murder gang at work in Texas?

Posted on by
4

Not only nazi murder gangs in Germany …

Aryan Brotherhood tattoo at the Calipatria State Prison in Calipatria, California, in 2004. (photo: Mark Allen Johnson/Corbis file)

By David Walsh in the USA:

Extreme right prison gang suspected in Texas killings

3 April 2013

US federal and state authorities are continuing their investigations into the shooting deaths of Kaufman County, Texas District Attorney Mike McLelland and his wife, Cynthia, whose bodies were discovered by friends on Saturday.

The McLellands were apparently murdered the night before at their home in semi-rural Forney, Texas, some 20 miles east of Dallas. A local television station reported that police found 14 shells from a .223 caliber rifle at the crime scene.

McLelland’s chief felony prosecutor, Mark Hasse, was shot and killed in broad daylight on January 31 outside the Kaufman County courthouse. After Hasse’s death, McLelland’s house was patrolled by a sheriff’s deputy, but the special security detail was later discontinued.

No connection has yet been uncovered between the killings, but a federal law enforcement official told USA Today, “Given the profile and the position of [McLelland], you start with that theory until you have discounted that connection … The way it appears is like an assault on the rule of law.”

Scott Burns of the National District Attorneys Association told the media, “[I]t is a very rare thing for a prosecutor to be murdered in the line of duty—very rare. And it is unprecedented for two in the same county to be murdered in a two-month period. It is simply unheard of.”

Authorities have no motives or suspects at this point, but investigators are considering the possibility that the Aryan Brotherhood of Texas (ABT), a white supremacist prison gang, may be responsible. Kaufman County authorities were involved in a US government-led investigation that resulted in the indictment in November 2012 of 34 leading members of the ABT on murder, conspiracy, arson, assault, robbery and drug trafficking charges. Ten of those indicted could face the death penalty if convicted.

“Hasse,” noted the Los Angeles Times, “was shot on the day he was publicly credited for assisting with the successful prosecution of members of the Aryan Brotherhood of Texas.”

In December 2012, the Texas Department of Public Safety, after making a retaliation assessment, circulated a bulletin that read in part: “High-ranking members [of the ABT] … are involved in issuing orders to inflict ‘mass casualties or death’ to law enforcement officials who were involved in cases where Aryan Brotherhood of Texas are facing life sentences or the death penalty.”

The Aryan Brotherhood of Texas originated in the state’s prison system in the 1980s and espouses a racist and neo-Nazi ideology. Its activities to this point, however, have been principally criminal—drug dealing, theft, extortion, identity theft—rather than political.

Mark Potok of the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) wrote earlier this year: “The Aryan Brotherhood (AB) is a large, white supremacist prison gang that is infamous for its violence and its sprawling criminal empire, which also is highly active outside the nation’s prisons. A related group, the Aryan Brotherhood of Texas (ABT), is known to be particularly violent, and prosecutors in that state have been aggressively moving against its members for several years now.”

The American media is playing down the fascist ideology of the ABT and treating the possibility of its involvement, in the Hasse-McLelland murders as a purely retaliatory, criminal action. If, in fact, there is such involvement that may be the case, but numerous ABT members have been charged with politically motivated hate crimes outside prison walls.

The SPLC’s Potok details numerous cases involving ABT members, including the “most infamous racially motivated murder since the civil rights era … in 1998, when three white men, two of them ex-cons, tied a black man, James Byrd Jr., to the back of their pickup truck with a logging chain, dragged him to death over three miles of country roads outside Jasper, Texas, and then deposited his shredded remains in front of a predominantly black cemetery. One of the ex-cons testified at his trial that he and one of his accomplices had both joined the ABT for protection from black inmates while they were incarcerated. When he rejoined society, his arms were covered with Aryan Brotherhood tattoos, including one depicting a black man being lynched.”

The neo-fascist outfit was also deemed responsible for the gunning down of a Bangladeshi immigrant working at a Texas gas station, in October 2001, as part of “the backlash against Arab-Americans that followed the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks … Mark Stroman, later convicted of the killing, was an ex-convict member of the Aryan Brotherhood (ABT) of Texas.”

In November 2011, Steven Scott Cantrell, 26, of Crane, Texas, was sentenced to 450 months in prison by a US district judge for hate crimes committed in December 2010. Cantrell set fire to several buildings, including a predominantly African American church as part of an effort to kill a disabled man, a house belonging to someone Cantrell believed to be Jewish and a gym patronized by Mexican Americans and African Americans and owned by a white man married to a woman of Mexican descent.

According to the Justice Department, the crimes were part of “a series of racially-motivated arsons that Cantrell perpetrated … in his attempt to gain status with the Aryan Brotherhood of Texas.”

If the ABT has now escalated its activities to include the assassination of elected officials such as McLelland, this has a political significance.

On March 19, the state of Colorado’s prison chief, Tom Clements, was murdered at his home. The suspect in the crime was white supremacist Evan Spencer Ebel. Ebel, member of the 211 Crew gang, died in a shootout with police in north Texas on March 21.

Right-wing terrorist violence has increased in the US in the past two decades, a malignant expression of the growth in social tensions. Two years ago, Democratic Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords was wounded and Federal Judge John M. Roll and five others were killed near Tucson, Arizona by a deranged man, influenced by Tea Party-type rhetoric.

Then there is the shooting in Newtown, Connecticut last year by a gun enthusiast who killed 26 people, including 20 children. While the motives of the killer, Adam Lanza, are yet to be entirely clarified, he reportedly modeled himself on Norway’s fascistic mass killer, Anders Behring Breivik. The latter killed 77 people in July 2011, including 69 at a Labour Party youth camp.

At the time of the Giffords shooting in January 2011, the WSWS pointed to the Oklahoma City bombing carried out by Timothy McVeigh, the anthrax attacks in 2001 and the murder of Kansas physician Dr. George Tiller by an anti-abortion fanatic in 2009.

The WSWS noted: “For more than 40 years, the Republican Party has appealed to and allied itself with racist and fascistic forces in order to shore up its base of support. The corporate-controlled media has assiduously sought to promote a right-wing political atmosphere.”

In each of these cases of right-wing terrorism, the connection, direct or indirect, between the extremist groups and sections of the political establishment has been ignored or obscured. So too has the general social environment—characterized by endless war overseas, the promotion of militaristic violence and the deepening social and economic crisis within the US.

Related articles