Rinaldo Nazzaro seen in a 2020 propaganda video. Scr

An FBI official has confirmed the agency is investigating the American founder of an international neo-Nazi terror group who is living in Russiafar from the grasp of U.S. authorities.

Rinaldo Nazzaro, 49, a former Pentagon contractor and Department of Homeland Security analyst, founded The Base in late 2018 as a heavily armed, insurgent force preparing to hasten the downfall of modern government and engage in a race war. Since then, members of The Base have plotted an assassination and several mass shootings, and a number of countries, including Canada and the United Kingdom, have designated it as an official terrorist organization alongside ISIS and al Qaeda.

An FBI counterterrorism probe against The Base over the past few years has netted more than a dozen members nationwide (with others apprehended in Europe), who are now serving a combined 100+ years in prison time. Yet Nazzaro, despite being named in U.S. courts as the founder of the group, has never been chargedpuzzling many analysts and government sources VICE News has spoken to about him over the years.

The first three episodes of American Terror are now available on Spotify.

Nazzaros situation also begs the question how a neo-Nazi leader whos well-known to the FBI is living comfortably in Russia, especially after President Vladimir Putin justified his invasion of Ukraine as a de-Nazification plan. Since at least 2018, Russia has provided safe harbor to Nazzaro, whom American authorities would seemingly arrest if he were to step back into their jurisdiction, as there is still no extradition treaty between Washington and the Kremlin. On the other hand, two years ago Ukraine immediately deported a U.S. Marine Corps dropout and former member of The Base, Ryan Burchfield, for alleged far-right terrorist activities there.

The FBI field office in Detroit, which successfully took down The Base cell in Michigan and thwarted a series of alleged terror attacks, said that Nazzaro was the subject of an open bureau investigation.

As far as he's concerned, that's being looked at by another field office, Christopher Tarrant, a supervisory special agent on domestic terrorism, told VICE News in an interview at an FBI office in the Detroit area. I cannot speak on what they're doing specifically when it comes to that.

Though Tarrant wouldnt elaborate on which FBI office he was referring to, Nazzaro did incorporate his security contracting company, Omega Solutions, and had an address in Manhattan, which could point to the New York field office that has successfully handled international terrorism investigations.

The FBI National Press Office said it did not have a comment.

Previously, in 2021, a State Department source told VICE News that Nazzaro was a Department of Justice matter.

In recent months, Nazzaro has complained online to followers that one of his email service providers cut off his account, and he posted a screenshot of an alleged notification from Uber telling him that information from his activities on the platform were forwarded to the Department of Justice. (Uber has yet to respond to VICE News about Nazzaros account.)

In a text exchange, Nazzaro said he was not surprised that the FBI would be investigating him and maintained he had done nothing illegal, claiming law enforcement was targeting him for political reasons.

It is unclear whether Nazzaro is being formally protected by Russian authorities, though he did make a national appearance on the Kremlin-controlled news channel Rossiya-24 (now banned in several countries for its role as a propaganda arm of Putin) in 2020 denouncing his connections to terrorism. (BBC News reported that Nazzaro had also attended a Russian government security exhibition in 2019.) Almost from the outset of The Bases founding, members were suspicious of Nazzaro, who was overseeing the group from his homebase in Russia where he lives with his wife and daughters, even joking that he was an asset of the FSBthe Russian intelligence agency known for its American and foreign spy operations.

Do you have any information about The Base or any other extremist groups? You can reach Ben Makuch by contacting 267-713-9832 on Signal, @benmakuch on the Wire app, or by email at ben.makuch@vice.com.

The Putin government has long cultivated relationships with domestic neo-Nazi militants, sending them to fight as private armies in Ukraine and aiding their networking with global white power groups. The Russian Imperial Movement, for example, which the U.S. State Department lists as a terrorist organization, is based in St. Petersberg and is known for providing paramilitary training to European neo-Nazis.

The Kremlins goal is to destabilize the democracies in the West, and utilizes far-right extremists like Nazzaro to achieve this, said Russia and terrorism expert Mollie Saltskog, a senior intelligence analyst at geopolitical intelligence firm the Soufan Group who has studied the links between the Kremlin and neo-Nazi networks.

According to her, the Putin government has fostered a host of relationships and influence campaigns with the global far-right.

The Kremlin always uses a degree of separation to claim plausible deniability, she said. But we know that Kremlin-backed or aligned actors have amplified white supremacy conspiracies and disinformation online, provided safe haven to American neo-Nazis, allowed sanctioned Russian terrorist entities to train European neo-Nazis, and funded white supremacy groups on European soil.

But since as far back as October 2020, Nazzaro has repeatedly denied he's a Moscow-controlled spook.

I am not a Russian agent, he told VICE News at the time. I have never had any contact with Russian law enforcement, military, or intelligence officials.

Several emails to Maria Zakharova, a spokesperson for the Russian Foreign Ministry and a mouthpiece for the Kremlin, asking about Nazzaros status and his connections to an international terror group inside her country, went unanswered.

Nazzaro claimed to VICE News that hes no longer the leader of The Base or in control of it. The Base still exists, but in late 2022, is a shell of its former self following the mass arrests and the high-profile infiltration by an anti-fascist activist. The group is, however, a fixture of hyper-violent, neo-Nazi Telegram networks and recently called for the killing of left-wing government officials in the U.S.

With files from Mack Lamoureux

The rest is here:

He Founded an American Neo-Nazi Terror Group. But Will Rinaldo Nazzaro Ever Face US Justice? - VICE

Date: 17 October 2022 Author: Maciej Bujalski

Although World War II ended the period of Poland being home to many faiths, the country was essentially Catholic-dominated before the war broke out. The 1931 census found that 65 percent of Polands prewar population declared themselves Catholic. Thus, this article depicts the Catholic Church in Nazi-occupied Poland while reviewing some attitudes the Polish clergy would adopt at that time.

The Nazi terror was fierce and protracted in Poland. Chief of the General Government in Nazi-occupied Poland Hans Frank brazenly named priests his deadly enemies. What he said reflected accurately the attitude of the Nazis towards clergymen. Some 2,500 priests from Poland and elsewhere were imprisoned at Dachau during the war. The Nazis struck terror into clergymen on the territories incorporated into the Third Reich, but atrocities knew no limits. Between 1939 and 1945, about 2,000 members of the Polish clergy perished.

Amid Nazi atrocities, the spirits of Polish clergymen proved unbreakable. The Catholic Church bolstered its leading role in suppressing any crushing authorities, probably a driving force behind Polands successful effort to free itself from the Soviet yoke nearly fifty years later.

Most notable figures of the Catholic Church in Nazi-occupied Poland included Fr. Maximilian Maria Kolbe, Archbishop Adam Sapieha, and August Cardinal Hlond. The deeds of that last one might indeed stand for the role the Catholic Church played in Polands independence pursuits if to consider its nature worldwide. All the virtues of August Cardinal Hlond prove a role church institutions could serve in geopolitical gamesa quite likely phenomenon to this date.

Hlond, who served as Archbishop of Gniezno and Warsaw, was injured as soon as the war broke out and then left Poland, heading for Romania. After the war, he returned to Polandwhere he died sometime laterdespite fierce opposition from the London-based government-in-exile. Politically active as he was, August Cardinal Hlond was even offered to become Polands prime minister. He was also believed to run for president. He made a stay in Rome where he conducted some behind-the-scenes efforts to inform the public about Nazi crimes and improve the living standards of the Polish clergy. He often featured Vatican radio broadcasts, where he defended the Polish case. He also submitted an official account of the persecutions of the Polish Church to the Vatican. Then he moved to France, where he was detained in 1944. However, his remarks on Jews might spark controversy. Yet he was engaged politicallyhe spoke favorably of Polands 1944 land reform, among other domestic topics. He died in 1948 in Warsaw.

What Hlond did for Poland may indeed differ from a heroic sacrifice Fr. Kolbe had made. Nonetheless, it says much about Polish attitudes towards the Nazi occupier. He embodied patriotismand even though his focus was outside politics, he still took advantage of his privileged position to care about his homeland. Other outstanding Poles, including Ignacy Jan Paderewski during World War I, remained devoted to the Polish case, which resonated in the countrys ties worldwide.

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Nazi persecution of the Catholic Church in Poland - Warsaw Institute

Twenty-year-old Father Ghibaudo went to confession and offered Mass in Boves, Italy, on the morning of Sept. 19, 1943. Hours later, he found himself rushing to help orphans escape to the countryside as German soldiers burned down 350 buildings in the Italian mountain town south of Turin.

The young priest returned to the town to preserve the consecrated sacred Hosts, offering absolution to people he encountered. As he approached a man who had been shot in the back of the head to give him absolution in articulo mortis, the priest himself was shot with a machine gun. A soldier further stamped on the priests face with his boots and stabbed him, killing him only three months after his ordination to the priesthood.

Ghibaudo died while ministering as a priest, fulfilling the call he felt when he received his First Communion and later wrote about when he was a high school student: Becoming a priest, living as a priest, dying as a priest: this is the synthesis of the dearest hopes I conceive for my life.

After Italy surrendered to the Allies in September 1943, two German soldiers were captured as armed clashes broke out in the mountains of Boves between Nazi soldiers and a group of Italian partisans. German Major Joseph Peiper threatened the destruction of Boves if the two soldiers were not released.

Excerpt from:

They died praying for others: Two Catholic priests martyred by Nazis beatified in Italy - Catholic News Agency

Bril was a champion Dutch boxer and Holocaust survivor

Sitting in his boxing gym just outside Amsterdam, former Dutch champion Barry Groenteman is reminiscing about the times he used to visit his grandmother.

When she was living in a retirement home and he would go to see her, he'd often come across an older man "who was always shadowboxing: in the hall, with the nurses".

Groenteman continues: "He'd show me his ring, with the Star of David on it. And my grandmother would whisper: 'That's Ben Bril.'"

For the young Groenteman, it was an introduction to a man who would have a huge impact on him and whose story he feels compelled to tell.

Like him, Bril grew up as Jewish boy in Amsterdam, and - also like him - boxing became his life.

But there the comparisons end. Groenteman was born in 1986. Bril was born in 1912. By the time he reached his 30s, his life had been transformed by invasion, violence and anti-Semitism.

On Monday, the Dutch boxing world will come together to celebrate the return of the Ben Bril Memorial night, at Amsterdam's famous Carre Theatre.

Those gathered will remember how a serial national champion was forced into hiding and then sent to the Nazi concentration camps by a former Olympic team-mate. They will look back on his remarkable survival and consider his legacy today - inside and outside of the ring.

Bril grew up in one of the poorest parts of Amsterdam as the second youngest of seven children.

It was a tough upbringing, according to Steven Rosenfeld, who is a relative of Bril's through his wife Celia and has written a book about his life: Dansen om te overleven (A Dance with Survival).

"They lived in tenements, he didn't sleep in a bed, he slept on straw, they didn't have a toilet, he had to carry buckets down to the street," Rosenfeld says.

For the young Bril, fighting was a part of daily life. There were scraps with friends of course, but also clashes with rival groups from different communities in the tightly packed city, according to Ben Braber, a historian who has written extensivelyexternal-link about Jewish life in Amsterdam during the inter-war years.

But while some of his friends carried on brawling, Bril turned his hand to sport.

"Boxing was very popular in the Jewish quarter before World War II," says Braber.

"For some boys, it was hard fist-fighting for gamblers, but other young Jews joined clubs. They were popular because the training and the matches were an escape from daily routine, also [from] daily poverty.

"And [the young men] built their self-esteem, because the art of self-defence requires courage, stamina, quick reactions but also technical skills."

Bril was one of those young men, and his career sparked into life early when - at the age of only 15 - he was selected to fight for the Netherlands at the Amsterdam Olympics of 1928.

He turned 16 on the opening day of the Games (there are some suggestions he had to falsify his birthdate in order to qualify and was in fact only 15) and reached the quarter-finals in his weight class - flyweight.

As he got older, Bril found work in a butcher's shop, and used his new job to help develop his sport.

"He told me that when he had to chop up meat he always used his left hand, even though he was naturally right-handed, to strengthen his left jab," Braber remembers.

Rosenfeld recalls Ben's "brick-like" hands, toughened, he was told, by dipping it into pickle brine.

Through the late 1920s and the 1930s Bril became a serial champion, winning eight Dutch titles and national fame.

But life in Amsterdam would change dramatically over those years - especially for Jews like him.

Economic crisis, the rise of Nazi Germany and an associated increase in anti-Semitism in the Netherlands made discrimination against Jews increasingly prevalent.

Bril experienced this directly when, despite his domestic success, he was left out of the Dutch team for the 1932 Olympic Games in Los Angeles.

At the time, says Rosenfeld, he didn't fully understand what had happened, but it later became clear that he was blacklisted by anti-Semites on the Dutch national boxing committee.

Despite that, three years later in 1935 Bril claimed what, for him, would always be his greatest success - and the source of that Star of David ring he wore even as an old man.

He travelled to Tel Aviv, in what was then Mandatory Palestine, to take part in the second edition of the Maccabiah Games for Jewish athletes from around the world.

He and a fellow Dutch Jew, his friend Appie de Vries, both won gold medals and returned to a hero's welcome among the Jewish community in Amsterdam.

It was at about this time that Bril started wearing the Star of David on his shorts, to match the ring he had won.

It is something of a tradition among Jewish boxers to wear the Star in that way and Bril was certainly not the first.

The great 1920s American lightweight Benny Leonard, known as 'The Ghetto Wizard', did it in his heyday.

And, much later, as his own career took shape, Barry Groenteman would honour the man who inspired him by himself displaying the Star of David in the ring.

For Braber though, Bril's act of identifying himself in that way, in 1930s Netherlands, is "very significant".

"He clearly identified himself as being Jewish, but he also wanted to be identified [by others] as being Jewish - that was an important matter to him," he says.

Right up to 1939, Bril was still wearing the Star in the ring, and handing out signed publicity photos of himself wearing those trunks.

Rosenfeld, who also interviewed Bril extensively for his book, says Bril's first motivation in wearing the Star was an expression "of his sports accomplishment" in winning at the Maccabiah, rather than a political statement.

But he was clearly well aware of the wider situation around Europe and wasn't afraid to act on his own initiative.

In 1934, Bril went with a Dutch Jewish group to compete in Germany.

The Nazis had been in power for a year. The state had already begun to discriminate officially against Jews. The atmosphere was hostile and daily life was being made increasingly difficult.

Bril was appalled by what he saw.

"We saw brown uniforms everywhere, swastika flags, the word 'Jew' on Jewish people's businesses," Bril told a Dutch newspaper many years later.

"I said then, as long as this regime is in power, I will never go to Germany."

Despite his hurt at being overlooked for LA four years earlier, when the call came in 1936 for the Dutch champion to travel to Berlin for the Olympic Games, he turned it down.

As his amateur career continued and his fame grew, Bril married his wife Celia. They had a son - Abraham - and opened a sandwich shop in the city of Utrecht.

But their lives, and those of everyone in the country, were turned upside down by the outbreak of war in Europe in 1939. In May 1940 Germany invaded the Netherlands.

Initially little changed, but gradually life for Dutch Jews became more restricted, and increasingly under threat.

"In 1941, stricter regulations came in which were clearly an attempt to segregate the Jews in the Netherlands from the rest of the population," historian Braber says.

There were restrictions on which public spaces Jewish people could enter, and in particular an attempt to force bars and cafes to ban Jews from their premises, which often ended in violence.

This sparked the creation of a number of Jewish defence groups, some centred around the sports clubs like the one of which Bril was a member.

On 11 February 1941, Dutch Nazis marched into the Jewish district of Amsterdam.

A previous incursion two days earlier had resulted in attacks on Jewish homes and businesses, and there was a fear, says Braber, that synagogues would be the next target.

So the defenders - armed with bricks, metal bars, anything they could get their hands on - prepared themselves for another confrontation.

This time it was even more violent and bloody, "a ferocious battle", says Braber, that resulted in the death of at least one Nazi and led to repercussions against the Jewish community.

Within two weeks some 400 men had been rounded up and deported - many survived no more than a few months.

Although Braber was told by a friend of Bril's that Bril was involved - and many men he knew certainly were, including his trainer and a number of fellow boxers - it is unlikely that the champion took part directly in the fighting.

Rosenfeld says Bril was told to stay away, because his fame might make him a target.

But the brief confrontation in Amsterdam's Waterlooplein square, with Jewish fighting groups at the core - "a form of Jewish resistance unique in Europe," says Braber - was a stark demonstration of how life in the city had changed.

The intimidation, violence and official discrimination continued to grow in intensity in the months that followed and in July 1942 - shortly after it became compulsory to wear a yellow star - came the first deportations of Dutch Jews.

"At that point virtually nobody in the Netherlands knew exactly what was happening in those camps where Jews were sent," says Braber.

"What we know now about gas chambers and extermination camps only became clear after the war. Nonetheless, some 20% of people who were called up [for deportation] didn't turn up, and went into hiding."

That number included Bril and his family. As Braber points out, the decision to hide was a perilous one: "'Can we stay together, can we get help, are these people trustworthy?' All these types of things you have to think about."

According to Rosenfeld, the Brils were sheltered in a variety of different places and - despite the danger - were often out and about.

But eventually they were betrayed and held in custody - in a bitter echo of Bril's sporting life - by Sam Olij, who had been Bril's team-mate on the Olympic boxing squad of 1928.

Bril had also boxed with Olij's sons in Amsterdam, but the Olij family had become committed Nazis. According to Dutch sports historian Jurryt van de Voorenexternal-link it was Olij's son Jan who arrested Bril and his wife and son.

The Bril family were sent to the camps. First to Vught in the Netherlands, then - up by the German border in the north - to Westerbork, and finally to Bergen-Belsen, where it's estimated 50,000 people died, Anne Frank among them.

De Vooren has described Olij as "a notorious Jew hunter" who committed "the worst kind of betrayal in Dutch sport". After the war, he served nine years' imprisonment and died in 1975, while his son Jan was said to have fled to Argentina.

There is one moment that stands out from Bril's life in the war beyond all others. It was a moment fraught with danger, but one in which he acted instinctively. It came at the Nazi concentration camp at Vught, and we can hear about it through Bril's own words, because he told the story to Braber in the 1980s.

"A boy had attempted to escape [but] they caught him," said Bril.

"They placed him on a rack, and he was to get 25 lashes of a whip. Suddenly the commander called out: 'Boxer - step forward!'

"I had to carry out the punishment, but I refused. The commander said that if I didn't I would get 50 lashes, so I took the whip but when I hit him, I aimed to strike too high.

"The commander got mad: 'Not so!' he cried. He grabbed the whip and started beating like mad. I walked back to my line."

Why Bril suffered no consequences for his refusal to carry out the order is not known, but those who witnessed it were under no doubt as to what they had seen.

"[Ben Bril was] the only man I saw during two and a half years in concentration camps - or heard of - who risked refusing to carry out a formal order of the SS," Braber quotes the head of Vught's Jewish administration as testifying after the war.

It was, says the historian, "a very courageous act".

But Bril would also have to fight in the camps, both in Vught and in Westerbork. As a famous boxer he was a target - someone who the guards might want to see in action.

In 1988, on Dutch television, Bril told of one life-changing moment. "I boxed for my son, who was dying," he said.

He was to fight against a 'kapo' (a camp inmate who was appointed by the Nazis to guard and control the other prisoners) in Vught.

The man asked Bril not to knock him out. He replied that he would comply on condition that the man help him get medicine, and agree not to beat the inmates in his block.

Steven Rosenfeld says the man complied, and Bril's son overcame his illness.

Bril also helped organise fights which were staged for the entertainment of the camp authorities. Those taking part might have got extra rations or other benefits, according to Braber.

Groenteman made a powerful television programme about Bril's story and recalls being shown, by a former inmate, the papers detailing some of the fights in Camp Westerbork.

"I saw such a lot of names I know, I know their grandchildren," he says.

"The scariest thing was that they were so similar to the schedule papers that hang in changing rooms now, when I'm going to an amateur event with my guys. That was hard."

Almost all of Bril's extended family died in the Holocaust, but his son Abraham and his wife Celia survived the war along with him.

In January 1945, from Bergen-Belsen, the family were included in a prisoner exchange that saw them taken first to Switzerland, then to a United Nations camp in Algeria, before making it back to Utrecht.

Bril didn't return to the ring as a fighter after the war, but he couldn't leave boxing.

He became a senior official in the sport, acting as a referee and judge at fights around the world, all the way into the 1970s.

He went to the Olympic Games in Tokyo in 1964 (where he once again showed his character by leaping into the ring to protect a fellow referee who had been punched by a competitor), Mexico City in 1968 and Montreal in 1976.

He missed the 1972 Games in Munich, and its own tragic story, only because of a dispute with the boxing authorities in the Netherlands.

Ringside or on the canvas, he played a small role at the start of the careers of some of the greats, officiating in fights involving world champions Joe Frazier, George Foreman and Sugar Ray Leonard.

Bril died in 2003 at the age of 91. The first memorial night in his honour was held four years later.

Groenteman made his first appearance at the Carre at the 2011 event. He fought with the Star of David on his trunks, both to honour his family and the man who had inspired him as a youngster.

"I think that day I boxed the best fight in my whole career," he says.

"People get their strength from their religion, from meditation, from mindfulness, from where they come from. I always felt when I was boxing with the Star on my trunks, it gives me more power.

"We're raised up with the attitude: 'Never walk away from where you come from.' Ben Bril stood for who he was."

Read the original:

Ben Bril: The Dutch Jewish boxing champion sent to Nazi camps by Olympic team-mate - BBC

A Massachusetts police officer attended the deadly Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, five years ago and acted in key security and planning roles, HuffPost has confirmed. He also used an alias to post racist and antisemitic comments online. The officer, John Donnelly, was still an active-duty member of the police force until Thursday, shortly after HuffPost inquired about his status with the department and role in the deadly white supremacist rally.

Donnelly, 33, was a patrolman for the Woburn Police Department near Boston, where he has been employed since 2015.

But on the morning of Aug. 12, 2017, Donnelly could be seen on video arriving at the Charlottesville rally with Richard Spencer, a prominent white supremacist for whom Donnelly was apparently acting as a security guard. Spencer, Donnelly and a coterie of other suit-and-tie fascists worked their way into a city park where they held court beneath a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee, posing for photos and talking into livestreams.

Donnelly was among hundreds of white supremacists who invaded the university town. His fellow attendees violently attacked counterprotesters, with one neo-Nazi driving his car into a crowd of anti-fascists, killing a 32-year-old woman and injuring 19 others. That evening, Donnelly went to a party at a house near Charlottesville, where he joined in a celebration of the days events.

Donnelly then returned to Massachusetts and resumed his job as a cop.

His white supremacist activism and involvement in the Charlottesville rally has gone unknown for five years, during which time Donnelly while still working as a police officer became the president of a back the blue nonprofit raising money for law enforcement, as well as an award-winning real estate agent whose face is featured on a massive billboard in Woburn, a Boston suburb.

But last month, an anti-fascist collective called Ignite the Right provided HuffPost with evidence showing Donnelly attended the Charlottesville rally and connecting him to a series of deeply alarming messages posted online in which he advocated violence against leftists and minority groups.

HuffPost has verified the collectives research and confirmed Donnellys employment with the Woburn Police Department.

After HuffPost contacted the department about Donnellys extremism, Police Chief Robert Rufo and Woburn Mayor Scott Galvin released a statement announcing Donnelly had been put on administrative leave pending an investigation.

The Charlottesville rally is a dark moment in our history, and deeply disturbing, Galvin said. The City of Woburn is taking these allegations seriously by investigating the incident thoroughly and I will move to terminate Officer Donnelly if the investigation concludes that the allegations are accurate.

Rufo added that if the allegations against Donnelly are sustained, the department will ask the Massachusetts Peace Officer Standards and Training Commission to decertify Officer Donnelly, ensuring he may no longer serve in law enforcement in the state.

In response to questions regarding whether Donnelly had ever been disciplined for violating codes of conduct, or whether hed been the subject of civilian complaints, Rufo said HuffPosts inquiries would be treated as a public records request and answered within 10 days.

Donnelly did not respond to multiple requests for comment. After HuffPost left him voicemails, emailed him and messaged him, he deleted his pages on Facebook, LinkedIn and Instagram.

White Supremacist Johnny OMalley, Patrolman Johnny Donnelly

Ignite the Right is a group dedicated to exposing every single person who participated in the 2017 event. We do not forgive, the groups website states. We do not forget.

The site includes a database of white supremacists who have been identified as attending the demonstration. (HuffPost has not independently verified these IDs.) It also includes photos of the many white supremacists whose names are still unknown, five years later.

One of those photos was of a white man wearing a suit and sunglasses, sporting a high-and-tight haircut favored by fascists at the time.

The anti-fascists with Ignite the Right plugged that photo into a facial recognition tool. The software searched the internet and shot back a photo of an identical-looking man from a profile page on the online real estate marketplace Zillow. It belonged to a Boston-area realtor named John Donnelly, a buyers agent and listing agent catering to clients in the police and the military.

The anti-fascists then went to work finding corroboration that the facial recognition identification was correct to prove Donnelly was really the man in the suit and sunglasses.

They found a video on YouTube, filmed by someone named KK, from the Aug. 12, 2017, rally, showing the man standing beneath Charlottesvilles statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee. In the video he introduces himself to KK.

Im Johnny OMalley, he says.

The anti-fascists recognized this name and understood it was likely an alias. Theyd seen a Johnny OMalley in a private message group for white supremacists planning the Charlottesville rally. Most of the groups members used pseudonyms.

The members messages to each other hosted on the instant messaging platform Discord were later obtained and published online by the independent media collective Unicorn Riot.

In a message on Aug. 14, 2017, someone in the group chat told Johnny OMalley hed seen him the YouTube video from Charlottesville. Oh hey OMalley, I saw you on KKs videonice glasses, the message read.

Oy vey thanks lol, OMalley replied, suggesting that the OMalley in the video and the OMalley in the chat were the same man.

As the anti-fascists scrolled through messages from Johnny OMalley, they found him divulging biographical details that matched those of John Donnelly, the real estate agent. OMalley, for example, often talked about being Irish American and living in the Boston area.

And in a message dated Aug. 20, 2017, OMalley wrote, My sister got married to a huhwhite guy today Im trashed. (Huhwhite is alt-right lingo for white, a reference to how some older white nationalists pronounce the word.)

According to the Facebook profile belonging to John Donnellys sister, she was married on Aug. 20, 2017.

Ignite the Right noticed on Donnellys LinkedIn page that he was not only a realtor; he was a cop. Police Officer, City of Woburn, the page said. Acted in support of regular police operations serving arrests, enforcing traffic laws, and providing services to 40,000+ residents of Woburn.

Earlier this week, HuffPost emailed the photo of Johnny OMalley from Charlottesville to Rufo, the police chief, asking him to confirm the name and rank of the man in the photo.

Johnny Donnelly, Rufo responded. Patrolman.

Johnny OMalley In Charlottesville

Donnelly was not some random attendee of the Charlottesville rally, but appears to have been deeply involved in organizing the event.

In the chat logs obtained by Unicorn Riot, where he used the name Johnny OMalley, Donnelly can be seen coordinating flights and carpools to Charlottesville for Unite the Right.

In one message, Donnelly refers to himself as an Identity Evropa member, or at least suggests he is closely affiliated with those who are. Identity Evropa is a since-dissolved white supremacist group.

If anyone heading downtown flying in Friday and has transportation that wants to pick up two IE goys up at the airport, shoot me a [private message], he wrote. Were flying into CVille airport. (The word goy is a Jewish name for non-Jewish people thats been appropriated by antisemites in recent years.)

In the video of Donnelly at the rally, its clear that he is working as a bodyguard for Spencer, the racist and antisemitic leader of the alt-right a term Spencer coined to make his white supremacist movement sound more palatable to the general public.

Donnelly stands next to Spencer in the video. Were you at the torch rally last night? the cameraman asks Donnelly, referring to a demonstration on the evening of Aug. 11, 2017, when hundreds of white supremacists marched across the campus of the University of Virginia carrying tiki torches and chanting, You will not replace us! and Jews will not replace us!

Yeah, I was protecting this guy, Donnelly responded to the cameramans question, gesturing at Spencer.

Chip Somodevilla via Getty Images

After the video of Donnelly and Spencer was filmed, the Unite the Right rally attendees broke into various bigoted chants, some targeting anti-fascist demonstrators.

And a short time later, the rally exploded into violence, with white supremacists and anti-fascists trading blows in the streets for hours as police stood nearby, watching.

Police eventually declared the rally an unlawful assembly and started to push the white supremacists out of Lee Park. Photos show Spencer pushing himself against a phalanx of riot police, screaming and not wanting to leave.

Its unclear if Donnelly, a police officer, joined Spencer in pushing the police.

Scattered violence broke out around Charlottesville as the white supremacists made their way out of the city. One fascist contingent beat a Black counterprotester with flag poles inside a parking garage.

And a neo-Nazi named James Alex Fields drove his Dodge Challenger into a crowd of anti-fascists, sending people flying into the air and fatally injuring 32-year-old Heather Heyer.

Chip Somodevilla via Getty Images

That evening, Donnelly joined a celebration of this violence.

In a message posted in the Discord group, Donnelly described getting a cab to a party after the Unite the Right rally. And I was redpilling the fuck out of the driver about the JQ, Donnelly recounted. Redpilling means awakening to white supremacist beliefs, and JQ is an acronym for the Jewish Question, a phrase with Nazi roots referring to the antisemitic belief that Jews have undue influence and control over society.

Donnelly wrote that the cab was to Azzmadors house, apparently a reference to Robert Azzmador Ray, an elder neo-Nazi who hosted a party at a safe house for white supremacists the evening of Aug. 12, 2017.

As HuffPost first reported, a video from that party shows Azzmador delivering a fiery speech after finding out about Heyers murder.

This is our war! he howled. This has always been our war. And I wouldnt want it any other way. Death to traitors! Death to the enemies of the white race! Hail victory!

Azzmadors adoring fans responded with their own shouts of Hail victory, the English translation of the German Nazi slogan Sieg Heil.

They then broke into a racist and antisemitic song, set to the tune of Battle Hymn of the Republic.

My eyes have seen the glory of the trampling at the zoo. Weve washed ourselves in n****rs blood and all the mongrels too. Were taking down the ZOG machine Jew by Jew by Jew! The white man marches on!

Donnelly didnt respond to a HuffPost request for comment about whether he sang along.

Police Officer And Alt-Right Shitposter

Donnellys messages in the chat group are replete with racist and antisemitic slurs, along with appeals to violence.

I wore my physical removal shirt from Right Wing Death Squad apparel to the gym today, Donnelly wrote in one 2017 post. Got some looks. If youre not wearing offensive clothing to the gym, the kikes win.

Right Wing Death Squad is an apparel company that was popular among the so-called alt-right in 2017. Its physical removal T-shirt is emblazoned with the words PINOCHET DID NOTHING WRONG, a reference to former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochets penchant for killing leftists by throwing them out of helicopters into the ocean.

An illustration on the back of the T-shirt depicts anti-fascists, or antifa, being thrown out of a helicopter. MAKE COMMUNISTS AFRAID OF ROTARY AIRCRAFT AGAIN, it says. PHYSICAL REMOVAL SINCE 1973.

Elsewhere in the chats, Donnelly wrote: Friendly reminder that if you dont lift today the kikes win.

We have enough fags in Boston we dont need anymore, read another message.

Just call them n*****s, read another.

He also once posted his email address, which contains the word rotors a likely reference to Pinochets helicopters.

That email address is connected to an account on Gab, a white-supremacist-friendly Twitter knockoff.

Finally a place to shitpost without normie intervention, Donnelly wrote on Gab.

REMOVE KEBAB, he wrote a short time later, using a racist alt-right euphemism for ethnically cleansing the U.S. and Europe of Muslims.

A Real Estate Agent, Back The Blue Booster, And Firearms Instructor

Earlier this year, John Donnelly was the subject of a nice profile in Boston Agent Magazine, a local real estate trade publication. It began:

A Massachusetts resident for 32 years, John Donnelly, in his own words, is an agents agent. A Woburn native, Donnelly takes pride in the local connections hes fostered in his three years in real estate and during his career as a police officer.

In addition to providing him an outlet to hone his social skills, Donnelly credits his experience on the police force with giving him a strong eye for detail and a fine-tuned negotiation style that helps him succeed today.

Donnelly now has a team of 15 motivated people working with him as The Donnelly Group, which primarily serves clients in the northern Boston and southern New Hampshire areas. My team consists of a positive and fun atmosphere which promotes synergy, allowing us to get more done, he remarks. In 2021, Century 21 also recognized Donnelly personally with the CENTURY 21 CENTURION production award.

Donnelly got into the real estate business in 2018, according to his since-deleted LinkedIn profile. By November 2020, according to an Instagram post from The Donnelly Group, he had his own billboard in Woburn. The photo shows him standing with his German shepherd in front of the sign which features his likeness and his businesss phone number.

Century 21 did not immediately respond to a request for comment Thursday about Donnellys white supremacist activism.

Donnellys former LinkedIn profile also described him as being the president of a nonprofit organization called Irish Angel since February of this year.

Irish Angel is a support network for Law Enforcement, EMS, Firefighters, and the Military, the groups website states. We provide education, awareness, and resources about addictions, PTSD, PTSI, TBI, Depression, and anxiety.

Irish Angels social media accounts frequently post images of the Thin Blue Line flag, and messages with the phrase Blue Lives Matter common symbols in law enforcement communities across the country that were developed as a racist retort to the Black Lives Matter movement.

Donnelly frequently posts this type of pro-police propaganda on his own social media accounts.

He also appeared at a fundraiser for Irish Angel as recently as September 2021, according to a photo posted to Twitter that shows him posing with the organizations founder, Amanda Coleman.

A short time after HuffPost emailed Irish Angel about evidence of Donnellys white supremacist activism, the organization removed his picture from its website.

Were absolutely disappointed and appalled in light of this information, Jorey Herrscher, the groups treasurer, told HuffPost on Thursday. We certainly had no knowledge of that going on, or otherwise he never wouldve been in that position. Its a sad thing that groups like the ones he belonged to can infiltrate the best of organizations.

Herrscher said Donnelly was immediately removed as president of Irish Angel and that an investigation has been launched to ensure his white supremacist activities didnt impact the organizations mission.

Before Donnelly was a cop, before he was a real estate agent, and before he was the president of a police nonprofit, he worked with his father at Precision Point Firearms.

The companys website describes it as federally licensed manufacturer and dealer of firearms in Massachusetts. According to the vanished LinkedIn page, Donnelly was a part owner of the company, as well as a lead firearms instructor and expert witness until January 2017.

Photos from Precision Point Firearms show Donnelly attending different gun fairs and posing with big guns.

And one post, from early August 2017 a week before Donnelly flew down to Charlottesville shows a pistol for sale next to a Precision Point Firearms-branded sticker.

BLACK GUNS MATTER, the sticker said.

Anti-Fascists To Unite The Right Attendees: We Will Find You

In the weeks leading up to the Charlottesville rally, Donnelly coached future attendees how not to be doxxed.

If youre worried about being identified, Donnelly wrote to members of the group chat, try to be low key. Dont wear T-shirts with slogans or carry signs that might attract the attention of photojournalists.

He also tried to put the white supremacists at ease.

[Anti-fascists] can review all the footage they want, but unless there is a massive effort, theyre not going to be able to doxx every person there, Donnelly wrote.

Five years later, Donnelly has been doxxed by precisely that kind of massive effort.

Ignite the Right is a coalition of anonymous anti-fascist researchers that formed on the five-year anniversary of the rally in Charlottesville this past August.

When it launched, the coalition implored people in communities across the country to send them tips that could help them ID people who attended Unite the Right.

The coalition now has the photos of 529 people who attended the rally on its website. Two-hundred eighty-one of them have been identified, a spokesperson said, while another 248 still need to be IDd. (Again, HuffPost has not independently verified these IDs.)

Among the dozens of white supremacists the coalition claims to have exposed over the last few months was a computer science professor at Furman University in South Carolina. The professor, Christopher Healy, has been put on leave pending an investigation by the school.

In a statement to HuffPost this week, Ignite the Right emphasized that it will never stop its search to find the fascists who terrorized Charlottesville.

A woman was murdered at Unite The Right by a white supremacist compatriot of neo-Nazi cop John Donnelly, the statement said. The white supremacists who attended Unite The Right are an ever-present danger to their communities. We cannot tolerate Nazi cops and Nazi gun dealers having the authority to execute or imprison people. All his cases must be reviewed.

See the rest here:

He Marched At The Nazi Rally In Charlottesville. Then He Went Back To Being A Cop. - HuffPost

Issued on: 09/01/2022 - 10:44Modified: 09/01/2022 - 10:42

Poznan (Poland) (AFP) Curators combing through a vast historic archive of Freemasonry in Europe amassed by the Nazis in their wartime anti-Masonic purge say they believe there are still secrets to be unearthed.

From insight into women's Masonic lodges to the musical scores used in closed ceremonies, the trove -- housed in an old university library in western Poland -- has already shed light on a little known history.

But more work remains to be done to fully examine all the 80,000 items that date from the 17th century to the pre-World War II period.

"It is one of the biggest Masonic archives in Europe," said curator Iuliana Grazynska, who has just started working on dozens of boxes of papers within it that have not yet been properly categorised.

"It still holds mysteries," she told AFP, of the collection which curators began going through decades ago and is held at the UAM library in the city of Poznan.

Initially tolerated by the Nazis, Freemasons became the subject of regime conspiracy theories in the 1930s, seen as liberal intellectuals whose secretive circles could become centres of opposition.

Lodges were broken up and their members imprisoned and killed both in Germany and elsewhere as Nazi troops advanced during WWII.

The collection was put together under the orders of top Nazi henchman and SS chief Heinrich Himmler and is composed of many smaller archives from European Masonic lodges that were seized by the Nazis.

It is seen by researchers as a precious repository of the history of the day-to-day activities of lodges across Europe, ranging from the menus for celebrations to educational texts.

- 'Mine of information' -

Fine prints, copies of speeches and membership lists of Masonic lodges in Germany and beyond feature in the archive. Some documents still bear Nazi stamps.

"The Nazis hated the Freemasons," Andrzej Karpowicz, who managed the collection for three decades, told AFP.

Nazi ideology, he said, was inherently "anti-Masonic" because of its anti-intellectual, anti-elite tendencies.

The library puts some select items on show, including the first edition of the earliest Masonic constitution written in 1723, six years after the first lodge was created in England.

"It's one of our proudest possessions," Grazynska said.

The oldest documents in the collection are prints from the 17th century relating to the Rosicrucians -- an esoteric spiritual movement seen as a precursor to the Freemasons whose symbol was a crucifix with a rose at its centre.

During the war as Allied bombing intensified, the collection was moved from Germany for safekeeping and broken up into three parts -- two were taken to what is now Poland and one to the Czech Republic.

The section left in the town of Slawa Slaska in Poland was seized by Polish authorities in 1945, while the others were taken by the Red Army.

In 1959, the Polish Masonic collection was formally established as an archive and curators began studying it -- at that time, Freemasonry was banned in the country under Communism.

The collection is open to researchers and other visitors, who have included representatives of German Masonic lodges wanting to recover their pre-war history.

It is "a mine of information in which you can dig at will," said Karpowicz.

2022 AFP

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Archive amassed by Nazis sheds light on Masonic history - FRANCE 24

The easiest way to respond to the ethics of doctors, nurses, and health care in the Third Reich is to dismiss what happened as the product of fringe practitioners getting permission from, or being forced by, fanatical ideological leaders to undertake manifestly bad science upon hated minorities.

Unfortunately, a huge volume of scholarship, beginning with my book, When Medicine Went Mad, shows this story is utterly false.

Doctors and scientists were not dragged into Nazism from the fringe. Leading theorists and distinguished doctors enthusiastically fueled the racism that Hitler and his cronies molded into their fascism. This applied biology led to the euthanasia machine that was medicine in Germany during the 1930s and 40s.

Sound science, according to the standards of the day, drove lethal experiments supported by the German armed forces to find answers to hypothermia, decompression, typhoid, typhus, burns, and many other wartime issues.

Mainstream German medicine had an ethic that justified horrific experimentssterilization and genocidal euthanasiaas necessary health measures.

What is more startling, albeit less analyzed, is the huge emphasis the Nazi government placed on public health, with an eye toward cancer prevention. The preeminent historian of the Nazi orientation to prevention and health promotion, Robert Proctor, has established that Nazi Germany was decades ahead of other countries in promoting health reforms that we today regard as progressive and socially responsible.

Nazi scientists were the first to definitively link lung cancer and cigarette smoking, aggressively promoted a healthy diet, and urged control of chemical exposures. They also created eugenic breeding programs to infuse health through optimal gene flow into the German population or Volk.

What is more startling, albeit less analyzed, is the huge emphasis the Nazi government placed on public health, with an eye toward cancer prevention.

Much of todays battle against COVID is managed under the rubric of public health in the USA and other nations. And this means shifting focus from individual patients and their choices to community and population interventions, often with the power of government to encourage or enforce them.

Critics often embrace individual choice over community duties and some even invoke Nazism, communism, or other forms of totalitarianism to protest efforts to require or mandate community-oriented behavior.

On Jan. 31 through Feb. 1, NYU medical ethics, along with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, will hold the first annual Sedley Holocaust and Medicine Symposium.

This years event will examine the ways in which racism shaped and continues to influence health care and public health from the Nazi era to today.

The meeting this year is all virtual (using Zoom), free, and open to the public. But you must preregister for what promises to be an important and timely event. The agenda is posted here, and the registration link is here.

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Symposium focuses on racism in health care and public healthfrom Nazi medicine to COVID and cancer - The Cancer Letter

World War II is the backdrop for Quentin Tarantinos stylized revenge fantasy, shot by Robert Richardson, ASC.At top, the tense discussion between a desperate father and a cruel Gestapoofficer (Denis Mnochet and ChristophWaltz).

Unit photography by Francois Duhamel, SMPSP

During a press conference at this years [2009] Cannes Film Festival, Quentin Tarantino maintained, I am not an American filmmaker. I make movies for the planet Earth. The director and his crew were at the festival for the world premiere of his latest creation, Inglourious Basterds, whose intentionally misspelled title is the first of many twists from a production that combines a European milieu with its earthling auteurs stylized sensibilities.

The World War II saga was shot mostly atStudio Babelsberg near Berlin, with an international cast that includes Brad Pitt, Mlanie Laurent, Diane Kruger, and Christoph Waltz. One of Tarantinos innovations was to allow the characters to speak in their native tongues; the subtitled film skips easily from French to English to German, and the mastery of foreign languages, the subtlety of accents, and even body language are all important plot points.

Inglouriousmarks the third collaboration between Tarantino and Robert Richardson, ASC followingKill Bill: Vol. I(ACOct. 03) andVol. II.Prior to teaming with Tarantino, Richardson shot 11 films for Oliver Stone before establishing an ongoing rapport with Martin Scorsese (for whom he recently shot the forthcoming thrillerShutter Island). Richardson has won two Academy Awards forJFK(ACFeb. 92) and The Aviator (ACJan. 05) and notched three other Oscar nominations, and he has been nominated for eight ASC Awards. [He was honored with the ASC Lifetime Achievement Award in 2019.]

The story unfolds as a series of chapters that weave three subplots united by one very bad guy, Gestapo Col. Hans Landa (Waltz). In an opening that evokes Spaghetti Westerns, Landa and his posse of Nazis drop in on a French farmer and his family. While soldiers and the family wait outside, Landa methodically asks the farmer increasingly pointed questions about the whereabouts of missing Jewish neighbors during a cat-and-mouse sequence that builds inexorably to violence.

After Landa kills her family, Shosanna (Laurent) escapes to Paris, where she runs a movie theater and meets top Nazi brass. When Shosanna learns that her theater has been chosen for the VIP premiere of a Nazi propaganda film, she sees an opportunity for revenge.

Elsewhere in France, a unit of Jewish-American soldiers, led by hillbilly Aldo Raine (Pitt), lurks behind enemy lines terrorizing Nazis with the threat of mutilation, scalpings and executions by baseball bat. Tales of these Basterds eventually reach Hitler, who throws a fit.

Meanwhile, in London, the British high command hatches a plot to blow up the movie premiere. German-speaking agents are sent to a cellar tavern called La Louisiane, where they meet with a glamorous German actress (Kruger) who is actually a British secret agent. In a lengthy scene, the agents exchange pleasantries with a party of drunken German soldiers, and then with a suspicious Gestapo officer, before engaging in a climactic shootout.

As always with Tarantinos films, Basterds is rife with cinematic references. Indeed, much of the action takes place inside the movie theater during the projection of a black-and-white film-within-a-film directed by Eli Roth; the production even arranged for lead actress Laurent to learn how to run a film projector. The final sequence gathers its main characters at the big movie premiere, leading to a spectacular, surprising conclusion followed by an ironic epilogue.

In discussing Tarantinos approach to moviemaking, Richardson agrees that the director qualifies as a film purist. Richardsons longtime camera assistant, Gregor Tavenner, concurs, noting that Tarantino eschews the video village found on most contemporary sets. The only video monitor on the set is the small one on the camera, says Tavenner. During takes, Tarantino stays next to the camera, near the actors. If there is a dolly move, he climbs along for the ride, looking at the actors and glancing at the small Transvideo monitor on the camera to check the framing.

Tarantino favors shooting with a single camera, going against the trend for two cameras, which often necessitates lighting and staging compromises. You get such a handcrafted movie, Tavenner enthuses. The actors know theyre going to do a lot of setups because its only one camera, but they get to perfect their craft. The camera rolls for as many takes as necessary to perfect each shot, and its a real joy and a pleasure.

Tavenner explains that the director enforces a quiet set: Quentin creates a beautiful environment for the actors to perform in. The crew is trained to be so respectful. Tarantino bans cellphones from his set; a security person at the door collects all such devices. Tavenner recalls a tense moment when producer Harvey Weinstein came to visit the set and the guard asked for his phone. There was a moments pause, but Weinstein finally handed it over and nodded to his assistant, who then handed over four more. Everybody cheered, Tavenner recalls with a chuckle.

Richardsons longtime gaffer, Ian Kincaid, describes another Tarantino tradition on the set: every 100 cans of exposed film are celebrated on the spot with a glass of champagne for each crew member. Quentin is very gracious. Hell say, Hey, everybody gather round. Lets celebrate another 100 rolls! even if its 11 in the morning. During production, Tarantino also arranged for evening crew screenings of features he personally selected.

Part of the period style of Inglourious Basterds is created via dolly and crane movements. In a way, says Tavenner, its a classic style. Theres maybe one Steadicam shot in the whole film. A Technocrane was used sparingly (once to sweep across the audience in the movie theater), but the bulk of the crane shots were done with Richardson riding a one-person crane made by Grip Factory Munich, allowing for more organic, less automated movements than a remote head would produce. I often use a crane as a dolly when the space allows, because it allows for greater movement, the cinematographer notes. I can also do a tracking shot without seeing the dolly track in frame.

Inglourious was shot with Panavision anamorphic Primo and G-Series lenses, as well as the companys new anamorphic zooms and a Panavised Cooke. The Primos held up the best in terms of overall resolution, Tavenner asserts. You have a sweet spot between T2.8 and T4. If you can close those lenses down a stop, you gain quality that is well worth it.

Richardson explains that Tarantinos propensity for wide-angle lenses and centered framing give the film a contemporary, original feel. I could have shot the movie with just the 35, 40 and 50mm, he says. Thats not what you would do on an old-fashioned movie, though; this lensing is more modern.

Quentin and I will have these interesting little battles while Im composing a shot, Richardson continues. I naturally move to one side or the other, especially when shooting anamorphic, whereas Quentin enjoys dead-center framing. For singles in particular, were just cutting dead-center framing from one side to the other, with the actors looking just past the barrel of the lens.

Part of the distinctive look of Inglourious Basterds stems from its disregard for pure naturalism and lighting motivation, which also contributes to its impressionistic period feel. For example, the look of the opening scene in the farmhouse is defined by hot, hard daylight that shines down onto a table, bouncing to illuminate the two characters. Although one can imagine a skylight above the table, there is no clear motivation for the farmhouse lighting. I dont believe there always needs to be a motivation for a light, says Richardson. Sometimes you have to light for what you feel the sequence is.

He explains that he avoided a source-y approach to the scene (i.e., having the main source come through the windows) in part because this would have put a lot more light on the background. Here you feel the daylight on their faces but the background is relatively dark. The room was tiny and the source was isolating them in that small space. He points out that the table bounce is also adapted to the action of the scene: Landa fills out his paperwork, while the farmer has a tendency to look down. I felt it was important to have light in their eyes and to always have that bright spot available to the iris if so desired, he says. The toplight source also gave the actors the opportunity to play with the light by moving in and out of the shadows, and it enabled Tarantinos camera staging, which involved several wide-angle dolly moves around the table. When the camera started on one side and ended on the other, there were very few places to get a light in, Richardson observes.

The cinematographer would often add a soft fill light during the scene, and he felt free to adjust the direction of the top keylight from shot to shot.When I had the opportunity, I would add a level of bounce, and I would move the toplight to one side or the other to help the dark side move toward camera. I prefer to have the face lit from the opposite side not backlit, but and I want the dark side toward my lens as often as possible; theres something I like aesthetically about that choice. Im willing to flip a key in a sequence to accommodate that.

Tarantino told Richardson he wanted to see the landscape through the windows of the farmhouse, which required the quick changing of ND gels on the windows to adjust for the changing weather outside. Kincaid notes, Wed sometimes have to bring the light way up inside to balance with the exterior view. All of the scenes sources were daylight-balanced HMIs, and inside, the main overhead source comprised Par 1.2Ks rigged in an attic above the table. Most of the lights were gelled with CTO to lend the daylight a slight warmth.

Large sources outside provided some soft light and an occasional touch of hard light inside. These external sources included 18K Arrimax HMIs on turtle stands bounced up on big muslin frames, a 12K Par through the door, and a 6K Par through a window to create a small spot of sunlight on the wall.

Kincaid confirms that there was no lighting whatsoever, not even a passive bounce, during the 100' tracking shot of Shosanna running away in profile at the end of the sequence. Achieving this shot was simply a matter of choosing the right moment to film against the naturally soft backlight of the northern sky.

Filming began on location at a farmhouse in northern Germany with an initial plan to capture mostly exterior shots before moving to a soundstage for the interiors. But Tarantino quickly decided to start shooting the dialogue inside the house before continuing to shoot the same scene on the Babelsberg stages near Berlin, creating a challenge in terms of lighting continuity because the location and stage footage had to cut together seamlessly throughout the 25-minute sequence. To maintain continuity, the location lighting was duplicated in Babelsberg, and Richardson decided to use HMIs on the soundstage, which we never do, says Kincaid. For the windows, Richardson used greenscreened plates when necessary, or painted backdrops masked with black net when the windows were less present in the frame.

The roomy soundstage allowed for bigger bounce fills than the location, but the principle was the same: muzz and muzz. Kincaid explains that Richardson eschews plastic diffusion or bouncing material like beadboards or Griffolyn in favor of cotton muslin or real silk. A muzz and muzz soft source involves hard lights bounced off muslin and then diffused through muslin again. The sides of the setup are covered with black material to prevent spill, creating a pie-shaped, soft light box. Richardson explains his affinity for muslin by noting it has a more natural feel on the skin. I dont feel as many highlights coming back, whereas plastic materials give a shine off of makeup or skin.

Richardson claims that the muslin-bounced diffusion lends a unique quality to the soft source. Its the quality of the wrap of the light. I dont feel the shadow of the source. I enjoy the way the light moves across the face. Because the soft light has to be cut and flagged, the cinematographer usually tries to obtain the largest possible diffusion surface for the location. For example, when Pitts character interrogates a Nazi in the ravine scene, the bounce is a 12-by, but for tight interiors, the cinematographer will sometimes just staple a 4' piece of muslin bounce to the wall.

For a few scenes in Inglourious, Richardson uses a passive bounce as a key. A 12K provides most of the lighting for a brief but memorable scene in which Shosanna wields a hatchet and threatens a film developer positioned on a table. The hard source backlights Shosanna and her accomplice and then bounces off the table to provide a soft key on her face. The lighting is completed by a practical above and a 12K positioned on a Condor outside a window.

A similarly elegant use of hard light and bounce can be seen toward the end of the film when a smitten German soldier barges into the projection booth and confronts Shosanna at the doorway. Shosanna is backlit by a 20K positioned farther back on the set, and the soldier acts as her moving bounce: a strip of muslin was pinned to him off-camera. Depending on how close she moves to him, Richardson comments, there is a movement [in the light] and a lighter and darker quality on her face. A hint of red bounce also comes from Shosannas red dress. On the reverse shot, a similar setup lights the German, with a 12K bouncing off of the red dress. Other backlights were added to extend this effect once the actors move further inside the booth.

Richardson used a mixture of hard and soft sources for a beautiful scene on the top floor of the theater. As Shosanna prepares for the fateful premiere by applying her makeup, a 20K shines in through a circular window to provide a searing backlight. In front of the mirror, her face is keyed by a warm, soft source com prising a cluster of small, tungsten golf ball bulbs dimmed way down and diffused through muslin. Kincaid explains, The muslin lends a creamy feel to her skin. When were shooting a beautiful woman, well go muzz-muzz. Generally, the front is bleached muslin and the back is unbleached. Unbleached muslin has a tighter weave; its a nice, rough surface, so it has no sheen. Its a bit erratic, but it softens the light, and then the bleached muslin in front unifies it.

Kincaid reveals that Richardson often uses rows of dimmed tungsten bulbs with diffusion to create soft sources that can fit in tight places. On this film, we used soft frosted bulbs on wires, bunched in balls, attached to squares of wood and even draped around the camera, says the gaffer. A variation of this technique was applied for a scene in which Shosanna is whisked off to meet Goebbels in a swanky French restaurant. Their encounter was shot in a private dining room at Berlins Einstein Cafe. Rows of tungsten bulbs were suspended from the low ceiling and diffused with muslin to create a soft top source, which was supplemented by several Chinese lanterns and a Par can throwing a pool of hard light down onto the tablecloth. Kincaid notes that Richardson frequently uses lightweight Par cans. You can cluster them, and we use them for accent lights, for narrow backlight, and often for bouncing, he says.

The long scene in the La Louisiane tavern posed one of the shows biggest lighting challenges. Ten characters meet around two small tables in the cramped basement bar. The three British agents try to talk their way out of the tavern, leaving one table of drunken Germans and then accepting a round of drinks with a suspicious Gestapo officer. The tension rises until the scene explodes in a shootout.

The tavern set had very low ceilings and little room in which to maneuver. Richardson deadpans, For all intents and purposes, it was a practical location built on a stage. Kincaid adds, We said to ourselves, Okay, this is like the trailer scene in Kill Bill.

Quentin wants to create the feeling that nobodys getting out of here easily. Complicating matters further, the actors frequently move from seated to standing positions.

After trying and rejecting inframe practicals as too cluttered, the crew attached rows of tungsten bulbs to the ceiling, adding two layers of muslin beneath them to create a soft base light. The headroom was so tight that the bottom layer of muslin had to be removed when actors stood. Richardson then decided to add Par can toplights and bounced backlights as the shots progressed, reflecting the scenes mounting tension. Slowly, as the scene evolved, I moved from the soft top and started adding hard lights off the table to increase the contrast. I also began bringing in soft backlights to separate actors from the background. I just felt this need to do it as I went along, but I tried not to do it in an obvious manner so the audience wouldnt be aware of it.

Although the transition is subtle, Richardson confesses that he wondered at the time whether altering the light was a gigantic error. Kincaid concedes, We were very busy in there; every setup was a new challenge. We have a saying, though: Pressure makes diamonds.

When the shootout starts, the lighting changes dramatically, with beams of hard light shining through the smoke and gunfire. Tarantino punctuates the scene with a few of his signature snap-zooms into Germans firing their weapons. The timing of the shootout feels realistically rapid, without the extensive high-speed work that has become a convention in contemporary action films. The lighting for the dramatic climax in the movie theater involved a series of 6K and 9K Maxi-Brutes hung from the ceiling with black skirts and silk frames. A fire effect was created mostly with real fire generated by an extensive network of gas pipes, supplemented by red gels on the Maxis.

Richardson did the digital intermediate for Basterds at EFilm with colorist Yvan Lucas, and the colorist says he did the color correction the old-fashioned way, starting from the qualities Tarantino and Richardson liked in the workprint made by Arri Munich during shooting. While he was timing the tavern scene, Lucas recalls, Bob said, Yvan, I know you come from film, so youre going to match the faces, right? Youre not going to do it like the video timers, who match the backgrounds? His point was that faces are what jump out at you, and that was the big idea of the film: to work the old-fashioned way, by matching faces, and then seeing what we could do with the backgrounds if there were any problems.

Asked how Richardsons penchant for strong hard light impacts the digital grade, Lucas notes that he sometimes uses Richardsons highlights to find the timing of a shot. Ill often start with the faces, but I can also find my density value in relation to the strong highlight. Its like a visual reference that shows me where I have to place the shot. If the white is too bright, its not very pretty. By adding density, the white remains very overexposed and very strong, but it gets more body. In fact, there is very little choice in timing. There is one value thats really right. Often when Bob sees what Ive prepared for him, he doesnt ask for density changes because Im already where he wants to be.

Bob has a very particular way of lighting a face its very chiseled, Lucas continues. That allows me to go to a density value I would never dare use on another film. There is a gradation in the grays of the shadows that I can work with. His lighting allows me to go to a darker and very interesting density value without smothering the blacks. For example, the colorist adds, referring to the scene in which Shosanna stands at the window before applying her makeup, because the backlight is very strong, there is detail in the blacks. Although she is in the shadows, her face is delineated. When you add density, you see the cheekbones... but with this gradation. Its very beautiful, and its due to the very hard light.

Reflecting on his work, Richardson muses, When Im shooting, I dont sense the passage of time. I start and finish the sequence, and I dont recall the majority of what takes place in between unless I have a tremendous problem or Im trying to rectify something in the middle of the sequence. Nothing exists except for that moment. The closest thing to it is when I jumped out of an airplane and parachuted to the ground. I dont recall anything after jumping ... until my chute opened.

2.40:1 Anamorphic 35mm Panaflex Millennium; Arri 435 Panavision Primo, G-Series lenses Kodak Vision2 200T5217, Vision3 500T 5219 Digital Intermediate Printed on Fuji Eterna-CP 3513D

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Inglourious Basterds: A Nazi's Worst Nightmare - The American Society of Cinematographers - American Cinematographer

Karl Burghard Bangert is one of four men being charged for hate speech and gun violations.PHOTO:YouTube

A so-called Nazi druid who allegedly denied the Holocaust and called for the murder of Jews went on trial in Germany on Friday, charged with sedition and violation of gun laws.

Karl Burghard Bangert, a bearded, longhaired 71-year-old who styles himself as a mystical Celtic druid under the alias Burgos von Buchonia, is facing trial along with three other men, who are all considered to be right-wing extremists by German security services.

The four defendants, who are all allegedly Reichsbrger (citizens of the Reich) members of Germanys anti-establishment, sovereign citizen conspiracy movement, who believe the government is illegitimate are charged with illegally hoarding an arsenal of weapons, ammunition and explosives between 2015 and 2017, when they were raided by authorities.

Prosecutors say the group were preppers, seeking to arm themselves ahead of the imminent collapse of society; according to reports, Bangert sought to set up an armed compound with other like-minded people, where they would survive after the fall of the state.

Among the weapons recovered in the raids were a flamethrower, a semi-automatic self-loading pistol, and self-made single-shot handguns.

Bangert is also charged with sedition over a series of social media posts in which he denied the Holocaust, called for the murder of Jews, and incited hatred against refugees, according to prosecutors.

He appeared in Mannheim district court wearing a shirt with a Celtic logo and a necklace of what appeared to be pagan charms.

Bangert is a former insurance agent who, after reinventing himself as a druid, developed a modest profile in local media for his eccentric appearance. According to DW, in a TV news segment that aired on Bavarias state broadcaster in 2008, the self-styled druid claimed he was born 2,500 years ago, and raised by his uncle, the great wizard Merlin," after his mother died in childbirth.

He was known to give guided tours of the Rhone region, and perform New Age ceremonies, said Nicholas Potter, a far-right expert at the Amadeu Antonio Foundation in Berlin.

But along with the belief in New Age spiritualism, he also harboured vehemently racist views including the virulent antisemitic, conspiracy-driven worldview that Jews have been waging a secret war against the German people for centuries, said Potter.

Jan Rathje, a far-right expert at the Center for Monitoring, Analysis and Strategy, said that Bangert presented himself on the one hand as a druid and on the other as a far-right and antisemitic resistance fighter - especially via social media.

There, he spreads hatred against Jews, migrants, journalists, and politicians, he said, adding that his group believed in the racist "Great Replacement" myth. He added that the group had been mobilised to try to set up his armed compound at the height of the panic over migration into Europe around 2015.

While New Age and far-right beliefs might seem unlikely bedfellows, extremism experts say that there is a long tradition of esoteric far-right conspiracy beliefs in Germany.

Back in the imperial era, certain esoteric groups and the [ethnonationalist] Vlkisch movement were linked by their anti-modern, racist, and antisemitic ideas, said Rathje.

These included the belief that there was a hierarchical natural order to the world that was threatened by liberalism, socialism, democracy, science, and minority rights.

Nazi ideology contained a pronounced esoteric strand, and new age movements continue to play a role on the far-right fringe to this day, said Potter.

Nazi ideology was a bizarre potpourri of Nordic myths, Indian symbolism and occult rituals. Fast-forward to the last few decades and the esoteric world has proved a fertile soil for conspiracy narratives such as the Reichsbrger movement, he said.

Both adopt an anti-authoritarian and anti-state mindset that challenges the established view of the world, be it regarding medicine, politics or the media.

He said the connections between new age and far-right ideology had become particularly visible during the pandemic, with the rise of the COVID-denying Querdenken (lateral thinkers) conspiracy movement, which united neo-Nazi hooligans with people from the new age, spiritual and wellness spheres.

An esoteric worldview that denies the existence of COVID and the effectiveness of vaccines has been able to unite yoga teachers, Reichsbrger and Nazi skinheads in their goal of wanting to overthrow the state, which they frame as a dictatorship, he said.

READ: New agers and wellness influencers are falling for far-right COVID conspiracies

The trial has been adjourned until April.

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Nazi Druid Accused of Hoarding Weapons to Prepare for Societys Collapse - VICE

Editorial Boardreaders are familiar with my obsession with political time or how one party and its ideas prevail with a majority of Americans for four or five decades before falling into a period of transition, after which the other party and its ideas prevail.

But most don't know why I'm obsessed. I'll tell you. It's because I have been feeling hopeless. I hate feeling hopeless. Knowing that history isn't static knowing that it moves in recurring cycles rather than in a straight line with a beginning and an end well, that gives me hope. It gives me hope to know, good or bad, nothing stays the same.

These "paradigms" have been for more than a year a regular subject of discussion between me andJay Weixelbaum. He's a writer and business historian who's producing a streaming mini-series about the time a Nazi spy joined US businessmen to toast the fall of France in a Manhattan hotel while a Jewish FBI agent investigated.

Jay's project is calledA Nazi on Wall Street. (You candonate to the cause here.) During our conversation, he explained why he believes we are moving into a new paradigm and how the choices made in the 1940s seem to mirror choices being made in the 2020s. We could have turned fully fascist back then. Let's hope we don't do that now.

READ:Prominent QAnon anti-vaxxer who called for Anthony Fauci's execution dies of COVID-19

In a recent thread, you said the J6 insurrection was a watershed moment between "paradigms." Can you explain what you mean by "paradigms." What does J6 have to do with them?

A "paradigm shift" describes a major change in our lives. The term "status quo" describes a time when we have a shared understanding about how politics work, how economics work and how culture works. When a paradigm shift happens, the status quo changes.

Paradigm shifts can take many years, and my belief is that we know we're in one when it's not just scholars pointing this out but when everyone sees it and feels it. January 6 was a moment like that.

Many historians have observed that the Republican Party had been in the business of rejecting democratic ideals since the passage of the Civil Rights Acts in the 1960s. They were unwilling to share democracy with people they deemed were less than them.

Watergate was part of this. The 2000 election and the 2016 election were other watershed moments of the GOP's slide toward a full rejection of American democracy. I see J6 as a culmination.

Can you characterize the paradigm we are leaving and perhaps the one we are entering?

Paradigms are a buildup of chaos in our political, economic and social systems, as unresolved problems feed off each other. In chaotic periods, even small events can have enormous impact. We're right in the middle of the shift, so it's hard to see where we are going.

The reason I'm adapting my research on American businessmen working with Nazis in 1940 into astreaming mini-seriesis because in 1940, it really wasn't clear which way things were going. That was a paradigm shift, too.

READ:Cult survivor explains how Trump 'weaponizes' the 'us vs. them' tactics of a 'cult leader'

We grow up with stories about a triumphant America that won World War II, but in 1940, it wasn't at all clear how history was going to play out. I want American audiences to understand that, especially as we inevitably look back and reflect on our current moment,

Just as 2020 was a crucial year. I believe 2022 will also decide our fates for the next era, however long it will be. Democrats in Congress are beginning the process of altering the filibuster to pass voting rights legislationthis week, which is a direct response to GOP legislatures passing laws to throw out millions of votes they may happen to dislike. Democratic leaders call this a "continuation of January 6."

That's crucial, and we don't know how this will play out.

Another big, unpredictable factor is the pandemic. I think future historians (provided humanity survives) will debate how covid helped push the previous president out of power, particularly his lack of ability to address it effectively.

A third major factor is the midterms. Yes, the previous status quo predicts the party holding the White House to take losses. But if we are headed toward a new status quo, the rules may no longer apply.

Corporate donations to GOP House candidates is about half of what it was. And gerrymandering, while still a major threat to democracy, hasn't played out as badly as it could have after the 2020 census.

Also, depending on how the Supreme Court rules on reproductive choice, this may dramatically affect turnout.

So there's still a bunch of unknowns that could have a major impact in this critical turning point.

When did this start? With the white backlash against civil rights?

The civil rights era and feminism in particular, as well as a hostility to the New Deal, animated the right. They built up religious and allegedly libertarian factions in the 1970s that coalesced in the "Reagan Revolution," which could then be escalated for four decades.

History is always events leading to and from each other. There are certainly antecedents in the 1920s and 1930s GOP. It was taking money from literal Nazi spies in order to try to sweep FDR out of power.

Our government knew this was happening. There was an intense and often unseen struggle to fight back against this Nazi-American rightwing coalition.

Is this the 1940s fork in the road you were talking about?

Yes, precisely. Like with other paradigm shifts, there were years of building to this point, and years of aftermath. Nazi spies were operating in the US in the 1930s. The FBI was tasked with tracking them down. Meanwhile, US companies had businesses operating within Nazi Germany.

Beyond these lesser known activities, rightwing groups and personalities espoused the Nazi cause to millions of Americans. Many Americans found this ideology enticing. It's easy to blame immigrants for problems; many Americans believed the US should stay out of European affairs; some Americans were sympathetic to Germany post-World War I. The radio priest, Charles Coughlin, broadcast these views to millions. He was kind of the Rush Limbaugh of his day.

Nazi influence in the US culminated with a huge march and rally in New York City in 1939. Thousands gathered in Madison Square Garden to listen to blatantly fascist speeches under the banners of George Washington adorned with swastikas.

In 1940, FDR gave a fresh directive to hunt down Nazis. The FBI built a secret spy headquarters inside the 30 Rock building to spy on Nazi activities worldwide, but especially in South America where they could get raw materials a war machine needs to be effective.

Without recapping the story of WWII, FDR was reelected, despite Nazi groups funneling money into Charles Lindbergh's campaign. FDR started providing aid to Britain and preparing for war against fascism. Thus, the paradigm shift started to turn on the events of 1940.

The president pinned blame for J6 on Trump. No sitting president in my lifetime came within an inch of calling his predecessor a traitor. That seems like an indicator of paradigm shifting no?

Absolutely. I don't think we've seen anything like this since at least the Civil War. The evidence is so overwhelming, I think Biden was on safe political ground to take off the gloves.

It's also important to point out that fascist violence often starts with the war on the truth. Biden was making a clear point to push back on fascist lies.

I'd call the Republicans' sabotage of pandemic recovery a form of fascist violence, but that's just me.

I think that's also a fair observation. Fascism is unsustainable as a form of government. It's inherently irrational and destructive. It's an extreme form of populism based on emotions feelings of grievance, more specifically. That's an inherently unstable foundation to attempt to run a society.

Economies need stability. Political regimes need economic stability to stay viable long-term. But fascists don't care about the long term. They care about feeding grievance addictions. They build policy around that.

Perhaps this ties into your observation about "civil war." It would take sacrifice of an order that most people would reject.

Exactly. I think the potential for violence and destruction is great. But I don't see that as long term, because people won't tolerate a consumer economy being interrupted so drastically by violence and disruption.

Scholars of Nazi Germany saw this. Just below their fake bravado, the Nazis were terrified about economic problems. We'll never know how the Nazi regime might have worked if it hadn't made foolish military choices, but it's pretty clear that things were quite unstable.

I think the Republican Party has been able to lean toward anti-democracy and fascism precisely, because it still rested on a liberal democratic order. Take that away and it's a new status quo

Agree. It's parasitic.

Yes! Fascism is a parasite on liberal democracy, but it can kill its host. Then all bets are off on how long it will survive.

What would tell you the coming midterms are different from previous midterms?

Preserving democracy is a key policy issue. It will be a particular policy point discussed in numerous midterm campaigns. Typically it's healthcare, guns, climate, etc. Democracy as policy is a new norm.

Telling people that they need to vote now or they won't be able to depend on the vote in the future is pretty drastic and I'd argue a new development. We saw it in 2020. It'll be here for 2022.

More:

The disturbing parallels between the 2020s and 1940s in the U.S. - Salon

A month after leaving Siberia, Alina and Olga reached Tallinn. The city was bedlam. Six months earlier, the Nazis had been bombing it. Now the Germans were in control and the Allies pummelled the city with their new allies, the Soviets.

The Nazis had mined the harbour to make sure no one could get in or out but behind drawn curtains, deals were being struck with families desperate to escape. Stefan found a fisherman who agreed to help them get to Sweden.

The fishing boat left at 2am. It wove in and out of sunken destroyers and from the sea, my mum watched the cathedral lit up by sudden flashes of Allied bombs exploding. Olga clutched Alinas arm and smiled broadly. Alina never forgot that smile.

Alina could not get over the fact that her father wasnt waiting for them in Sweden when they arrived. She blamed her mother and they stayed out of each others way Olga turned her tarot cards alone, Alina played hide and seek with other children who had made it to Sweden from all over Europe.

The Swedish hospital was one of her happiest times. She was allowed to build dens and explore, free of danger, but it did not last long.

One morning Olga woke bolt upright. Were leaving. Pack your clothes.

Olga had no idea what had happened to her [other three] children. Her choice now was brutal: stay safe in Sweden, or risk both their lives to find Kazhik, Juta and Pavel.

I asked my mother how she felt about this. We had safety for the first time in Sweden and I was happy. She decided to go to Warsaw because she felt guilty about leaving my brothers and sister behind Well, what about me?

Olga had no trouble finding a smuggler. The plan was to go from Sandhammaren in southern Sweden and cross to the Danish island of Bornholm, where they would be handed to another guide. There was one problem. The sea had frozen over and they would need dogs to pull them across. Some areas were thick with ice but others were too thin for a sled; they could fall through and drown.

The first half of the journey was uneventful but as the sled approached Bornholm, Olga became anxious. It was not the deserted stop-off point that their smuggler Orhan had led them to believe but a heavily fortified Nazi stronghold. Searchlights criss-crossed the ice.

Orhan told Olga to remain calm. But Orhan had miscalculated their route. They were on the south side, near the Luftwaffe runway, the most heavily defended part of Bornholm. It was a massive cock-up.

Orhan pulled a white bed sheet out of a rucksack and they began tracking by foot across the ice. It was so cold, Alina could no longer feel her limbs. When the wind dropped there was silence. Then they heard the plane.

It was a distant, tinny sound at first, but as it approached, its engine grew louder. It was a Luftwaffe reconnaissance light aircraft, out on a scout. Its searchlight shone directly on to the ice, which acted like a mirror, the single light becoming a thousand searchlights, each refracting off the surface. It was the most terrifying moment of Alinas life.

As the plane approached the searchlight became impossible to hide from; my mum urinated in her pants. In a single balletic flourish, Orhan threw the white sheet over all three of them, so fast, my mum didnt know it had even happened.

One moment they were exposed on the ice waiting to be shot at, the next lying flat on the ground with a sheet over them.

The reconnaissance plane was firing uncreatively in regular 10-second bursts. As it flew overhead, it was so fast and low that the sheet lifted. But the moment they were revealed, the pilot climbed steeply away.

When they reached Poland, Olga and Alina crossed a country they scarcely recognised. My mum had seen mutilated bodies in Siberia, but not on this scale.

They lay piled against the side of the road of towns mixed in with the black, oily snow or stood against crucifixes in fields. Murdered by the Gestapo for collaborating with the resistance, or the other way round.

On a bright February morning, Olga and Alina finally arrived in Warsaw. Alina had not seen her brothers and sister for three years.

What if theyre not here? she whispered nervously.

They are, Olga said. The tarot cards had foretold it.

She pressed the ivory doorbell of their second-floor apartment.

Klo to jest? [Who is it?] said a voice it was Kazhik.

Matka [Mother], Olga replied.

In the kitchen they all embraced. Olga sat on the chair, weeping. Pavel put his arm around her. Kazhik told Alina a joke and pinched her cheek. She was just happy they were back together.

Read more here:

My mother has dementia but can still remember the Nazi doctor who gave her 'medicine' at Auschwitz - Telegraph.co.uk

Austria, the birthplace of Adolf Hitler, long cast itself as a victim after being annexed by Nazi Germany. Only in the past three decades has the country begun to examine seriously its role in the Holocaust.

Cut to 2022 and an exhibition in Austria's capital.

A woven swastika tapestry, Nazi flags, and paintings of German military officers from World War II.

In Vienna Museum MUSA, these Nazi themed-pieces are aiming to shed light on the politics of art under the Third Reich, one of the latest ways in which Vienna is seeking to address its complicated war-era past.

The exhibit's curators are hoping their research will help in that process but they have been careful not to give the artworks too much of an "aura".

The exhibition called "Vienna Falls in Line. The Politics of Art under National Socialism" is part of a broader trend of reconciling with an ugly chapter of Austrian history.

Austria had a Jewish population of 200,000 before Nazi Germany annexed the country in 1938. More than 65,000 of them were killed in the Holocaust, which exterminated six million Jews.

Instead of being displayed on the museum's large walls, the works are packed into just two rooms, as if in a warehouse.

"This can't be like other exhibitions in the classical sense... it had to be broken up," says curator Ingrid Holzschuh.

"Under this (Nazi) art policy, institutions and artists were promoted, and of course, after 1945 they also significantly participated in the art policy and above all institutions, which also continued to work. In order to understand these things, it is essential to include the period of National Socialism in art history."

The show came about after four years of research by Holzschuh and fellow curator Sabine Plakolm-Forsthuber, who combed through the membership files of 3,000 artists who officially belonged to the Reich's artistic association after the Nazi annexation.

The artists were all carefully vetted and closely watched, Jewish artists were barred.

Under the regime, Viennese artists who did not comply with the new rules were forced to flee or murdered in concentration camps, according to the show's catalogue.

This exhibition is not the only way the city is confronting its complex wartime legacy.

Vienna recently said it would launch an art competition to contextualise a statue of the anti-Semitic former mayor Karl Lueger who inspired Hitler, which has been defaced several times.

The city has also re-assessed street names honouring anti-Semitic or otherwise tainted historical figures -- most recently galvanised by the Black Lives Matter movement and protests around historical monuments.

The exhibition runs until Apr 24, 2022.

Link:

Vienna examines its WWII legacy with exhibition of Nazi art - Euronews

The UK government has made a final call for claims for compensation for those who had property confiscated during World War II.

For more than 20 years the Enemy Property Claims Assessment Panel (EPCAP) has been compensating individuals whose assets were confiscated by the UK government where they had suffered Nazi persecution. The Panel also oversee the Baltic States Scheme.

Today, the government is launching a consultation on a final date for closure of the schemes, which have provided over 25 million of compensation over the course of their operation.

To date, EPCAP has considered more than 1200 applications for compensation, but in recent years the numbers of claims submitted has fallen substantially. Other comparable compensation schemes across Europe concluded their operations many years ago.

Those who have received compensation under the scheme have included a non-Jewish doctor who risked his life to help Jewish colleagues and was forced to flee his home, the family of an art collector who perished in the Holocaust, while his collection was sold off for profit, and Jewish people who fled from France to South America.

The government will now consult on a final date for claims to be submitted, with a provisional date set for 9 September 2022, pending response to the consultation. Potential claimants will be able to lodge claims throughout the consultation period.

Business Minister Paul Scully said:

These schemes, universally recognised as among the most generous to operate worldwide, have offered hundreds of people rightful compensation for the horrors they faced during the Second World War, at the hands of Nazis and other totalitarian oppressors.

The Enemy Property Claims Assessment Panel have done amazing work in the past 2 decades or so, but the scheme is now drawing to a natural conclusion. I would urge anyone who has yet to make their claim to do so now, to ensure everyone receives the compensation they are entitled to.

EPCAP Panel Chair Arthur Harverd said:

The EPCAP Scheme has been a vitally important UK government initiative, providing the families of those who suffered Nazi persecution with a sense that at long last justice has been done, the suffering endured by their forebears has been recognised and closure achieved.

Panel colleagues have worked tirelessly in evaluating the details of every claim and we are thankful for the support of successive ministers and officials at BEIS and the dedicated assistance of the members of the EPCAP Secretariat in support of the scheme.

The overwhelming majority of the original owners of the assets concerned have of course now died and very few new claims are being received. We therefore believe that this is an appropriate time to consult on closing the schemes, while allowing for new claims still to be received up to the date of actual closure.

During the period of the Second World War the UK government confiscated assets in British territories owned by residents of enemy countries, including the former Nazi Germany, Italy and Japan and countries occupied by them, under the Trading with the Enemy Act 1939.

There are 2 schemes administered by the Enemy Property Claims Assessment Panel:

Individuals who believe that they or a direct relation may have held or deposited assets in the UK that were then confiscated by the UK government are encouraged to make their claim to EPCAP. Both Schemes are administered by the Department of Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS).

Any individuals or organisations who would like to respond to the consultation for a final date for the EPCAP scheme can do so.

See more here:

Last call for claims to scheme compensating victims of Nazis for property confiscated in WWII - GOV.UK

MMA fighter Radek Roual was recently barred from competing in Czech organization Oktagon MMA due to his visible neo-Nazi tattoos.

Roual was scheduled to make his MMA debut against Nikolas Krivk in a last-minute booking, but the bout was called off when officials noticed a depiction of Adolf Hitler tattooed on Rouals right hand. Additionally, Roual had a tattoo of an SS (Schutzstaffel) officer, which was a corps of political soldiers of the Nazi party.

Oktagon MMA promoter Ondej Novotnaddressed his reaction when he observed Rouals controversial body art.

This doesnt exist for you come up to us and look like this, Novotntold idnes.cz. We have it in the contract, we could give him a fine. Even on the chest, he has (apparently the cap of an SS officer, the skull could also refer to the Death Skull Unit of the SS organization responsible for managing the extermination camps). Whatsoever! We didnt study what it looked like, nor did the photographers and cameramen notice. No one had talked about it before We didnt know about it, certainly not.

Roual did not deny the presence of neo-Nazi tattoos on his person, but he chalked it up to bad decisions made during a naive, desperate, and vulnerable stage of his life.

I grew up in a problematic community of people that gave rise to this tattoo, he explained. At that time, I did not know what to do with life, I was young and this tattoo was stupid. Later, I started doing martial arts, which led me to a completely different life and view of the world. I have more tattoos that I regret, Ill gradually re-tattoo them all.

Novotn rejected this explanation when it was told to him directly from Roual.

He explained it to me, adds Novotn. I told him he was crazy. Im not a tattoo expert, but how long can it take to re-tattoo this? Two days? Its nice that he basically distanced himself from it, I trust him and Im able to understand everything, but this is not and it can be done faster.

Rouals gym Muay Thai Brno also issued a statement on the matter, which addressed the matter of having the tattoos removed.

Radek and I have been dealing with the situation and the tattoo removal, which, according to his words, originated years ago in youthful indiscretion, has been ordered for a long time with a deadline for January. However, the offer for the match came at the last minute, before its removal.

Our gym is unequivocally against manifestations of any racial or other discrimination and intolerance. We meet people of all nationalities and skin colors, we cooperate with various non-profit organizations, including those dedicated to working with minorities. At the same time, we also lend a helping hand to those who can learn from their mistakes and mistakes.

Roual remains 0-0 as an MMA fighter and is 0-1 as a kickboxer. His tale shares similarities with the story of UFC flyweight Andrea Lees ex-coach and estranged husband, Donny Aaron, who also has neo-Nazi tattoos.

At the time, Lee defended Aarons character in the middle of the controversy; yet, Aaron stated that he would not get the tattoos removed. Lee and Aaron are no longer together after Aaron was charged with domestic battery abuse against Lee.

What are your thoughts on this story?

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MMA Fighter Barred From Competing In Organization Due To Nazi Tattoos - MMA News

This comes in response to accusations of the glorification of Nazism in the country. Thousands of far-right activists held a torch-lit march in Kiev to mark the birthday of a controversial Adolf Hitler collaborator, Stepan Bandera.

Reacting to the march, a top Russian legislator called for a pan-European response.

In a Telegram post, State Duma Chairman Vyacheslav Volodin condemned the actions of the far-right, calling them "unacceptable".

He said: It is unacceptable when, in the 21st century, Nazi leaders are glorified again, those who organized atrocities, were Nazi collaborators, burned villages to the ground, killed elderly people, women, children and babies."

He called on Brussels to join forces with Russia in condemning the movement, even threatening Ukraine with sanctions.

He said: What is happening in Ukraine must be condemned by the European Parliament, PACE [the Council of Europe] and the OSCE PA.

"Its leadership must be held accountable for the promotion of nationalism, sanctions must be imposed, everything must be done to stop its resurgence in Europe.

He added that the country is increasingly sliding toward a state based on a nationalist ideology", promising to raise the issue with European lawmakers during upcoming inter-parliamentary meetings.

This comes amid simmering tensions between Russia and Ukraine after Moscow amassed tens of thousands of troops along its border.

READ MORE:Putin outsmart EU with new gas deal to pump 'same amount' to China

The OUN carried out thousands of murders, many of whom were civilians, during a campaign of ethnic cleansing in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia, killing as many as 100,000 people over the course of two years.

However, Mr Bandera's legacy has triggered a mixed response from Ukrainian governments in recent years.

In 2010, Mr Bandera was named a "Hero of Ukraine" by outgoing President Viktor Yushchenko but he was later stripped of the title in 2011 under President Viktor Yanukovych.

And when President Yanukovych was ousted in 2014, Kiev's City Council renamed the citys Moscow Avenue Stepan Bandera Avenue, to mark the Russian invasion of eastern Ukraine.

Israel also hit out at Kiev's nationalist march, calling it "insulting".

In a Facebook post, Israel's Embassy said: "The glorification of those who supported Nazi ideology insults the memory of the victims of Holocaust in Ukraine."

See the article here:

Putin demands EU joins forces with Russia in severe Nazi crackdown in Ukraine - Daily Express

No one doesnt know what a swastika means. Thats a sentence I never imagined Id be shouting in the opening days of 2022. And yet, there I was, arguing with two relatives about the Nazi flag currently displayed on my cousins bedroom wall.

They had found out about the flag quite by accident, walking in to say hi on a recent visit to his parents (with whom he lives.) And they were disturbingly blase about the whole thing. Thats not to say they were thrilled there were even a little upset but on the whole agreed with each other that it isnt a big deal. He doesnt know what it means, they kept insisting, calling him a sweet kid who just doesnt know better. He is in his thirties, and he lives in the United States.

That white America including my own family still does not see the danger its hateful sons and daughters pose to the Republic is deeply concerning. A year ago today, radicalized Americans at least some of them white nationalists stormed the Capitol in Washington DC an attempt to overthrow our democratically elected government. The irony of this conversation happening so close to the anniversary of the January 6 insurrection was not lost on me.

Yet it is worth noting that the stereotype of racists and white nationalists as ignorant working-class kids, some led astray because they dont know better the same stereotype my own relatives tried to use to deflect blame from my Nazi flag-displaying relation is wholly wrong. Americans have in their minds the image of a bunch of roughnecks with rifles holed up in compounds like Ruby Ridge when they imagine extremism. The research tells us that thats a mistake.

As Alexandra Minna Stern, a professor at the University of Michigan, writes in her book Proud Boys and the White Ethnostate, todays alt-right is more international, suited-up, and image-conscious than its predecessors. And according to Shannon Foley-Martinez a former white supremacist who now helps others escape hate many of those drawn to the movement are highly curious and intelligent, often grappling with major political questions. A very large percentage of people, particularly young people [who get radicalized] actually want to deeply engage with and grapple with big ideas. And a lot of times, that is part of their pathway in that need and desire was not being met anywhere else, she told PublicSource last year.

Looking at last years insurrection, many of those arrested came not from working-class families like my own, but from the so-called upper middle class. They include a realtor from Tennessee, a loan officer from Texas, and a CEO from Illinois. Richard Spencer the father of the modern alt-right and a self-described white nationalist has a masters degree from the University of Chicago. Donald Trump regularly touts his own Ivy League education. These are hardly hillbillies.

The white power structure of America has never been upheld by the working class, though certainly they played their part, often as the violent foot-soldiers of the movement. White Citizens Councils throughout the South upheld Jim Crow in the 1950s and 1960s, pumping money and political might into upholding segregation.

This is part of what made integrating Ole Miss a nickname for the University of Mississippi which is not a diminutive of the states name, but rather a nickname for a plantation mistress such a major battle of the civil rights movement. The school, though academically middling, served as a finishing school for the white aristocracy of Mississippi. It wasnt just any college; it was where future (white) leaders were sent to be trained to take their place as the men who ran Mississippi. Admitting Black students was as good as surrendering the future, and white Mississippi was not about to do that without a fight. Indeed, two men were killed in a riot when a Black man named James Meredith tried to register.

Even the Ku Klux Klan, which through much of the past half-century has been thought of as consisting of poor white trash, was founded by Nathan Bedford Forrest, a successful slaveholder and planter who was also a Confederate general. Yes, working-class Americans may serve as the foot-soldiers today just as they did during the civil war but they only do so in service to the true wielders of political power.

That is not an excuse for those who follow such poisonous ideologies though I certainly believe my other relatives thought it was. My distant cousin is a young man alone in his room, they reason, who cant even afford a place of his own in the foothills of the Appalachians. He is hardly Donald Trump, who is a much larger risk to national security. What harm can he really do with his isolated swastika?

And on that they may be right. But Timothy McVeigh was an itinerant young man who sold racist novels at gun shows before he blew up a federal building in Oklahoma City. We all have agency over our own thoughts and actions, and my cousin like every white supremacist before him has the agency over his.

That doesnt mean the decision is always straightforward. The reasons people gravitate towards white nationalism are varied and complex. Foley-Martinez says she and others like her have unprocessed trauma which contributes to their radicalization. Certainly, alienation and the desire for a sense of community and belonging are known to attract people to everything from gangs to the Klan. Yet not everyone who is traumatized or lonely ends up with a swastika hanging in their room. And certainly not every lonely and traumatized person attempts to violently overthrow the American government.

Every person who stormed the Capitol a year ago had family who loved them, who thought they were sweet kids who didnt know better. Ashli Babbitts grandfather called her an excellent patriot. People who knew Roseanne Boyland, the woman who had a heart attack and died that day while joining the insurrection, described her as a sweet girl. Ignoring those who join in with dangerous movements, however much we love them, is a luxury we can no longer afford.

We know now that both Ashli Babbitt and Roseanne Boyland showed signs of radicalization before January 6. Both were known adherents to the QAnon lie, with Babbitt wearing a T-shirt saying We are Q to an earlier event. Their families were aware of their beliefs, too: Boylands begged her not to attend the Stop the Steal rally that turned into a riot.

Its hard to say what would have happened had Boyland heeded their warnings. Perhaps she would have realized shed been sold a bill of lies. Or perhaps she would have continued down the radicalization rabbit hole. Well never know.

Similarly, I dont know what to do about my relative. Hes a distant cousin I do not know well weve only met once or twice so intervening will likely do no good. Ideally, a gently challenging conversation would be broached by those close to him. But they seem blind, perhaps wilfully, to the danger he is in and the danger he represents.

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A year after the Capitol riot, my cousin has a Nazi flag on his bedroom wall - The Independent

NASA's Perseverance rover hopes to discover ancient life on Mars

NASA's Perseverance rover is equipped with two microphones, 23 cameras, seven scientific instruments, plus a drone helicopter.

USA TODAY

There have been many events, both big and small, that have shaped U.S. history.Among them, a Facebook post claims, is a secret U.S. program that recruitedNazis.

A modified version of thepopular meme of Homer Simpson vanishing into a hedge depictsSimpson bearinga swastika on one shoulder and an arm extended in a Nazi salute. "World War II: ends," reads the text above, which goes on to suggest former "Nazi scientists" subsequently shifted overto NASA, as illustratedbySimpson reemerging in a T-shirt emblazoned with the agency's distinctive logo and a red baseball cap with the America flag.

The sentiment within the comments seemedlargely accepting of the claim.

"What was the alternative for them?" asked one. "Since herr fuhrer (sic) liked to shoot people..."

"Art imitates life," wrote another sharing a GIF featuring images from the Marvel movie franchise of an evil Naziscientist character and a newspaper clippingwith the headline "Germany scientists recruited by U.S.".

USA TODAY awaits comment from the Facebook user who postedthe meme in the public group Official Flat Earth & Glove Discussion.

In 1945, the Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency, a subcommittee established by the Joint Intelligence Committee of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was tasked with retrieving German scientists, doctors and engineers who were identified as intellectually vital to the Third Reich.

Journalist Annie Jacobsen statesin a 2014 interview that this was prompted by the Allies'concerns overHitler's potential weapons arsenal.

"Fall of 1944, right after the Normandy landings, scattered among the Allies'troops are these little units of scientific intelligence officers and they're working to find out Hitler's biological weapons, his chemical weapons and his atomic weapons," said Jacobsen, author of "Operation Paperclip: The Secret Intelligence Program to Bring Nazi Scientists to America."

These intelligence officers eventually discovered while the atomic weapons program wasnot as advancedas initially feared, Hitler's biochemical weapons were. The hunt "for this scientific treasure and ultimately for the scientists themselves" thus ignited Operation Overcast, renamed Paperclip for the paperclips attached to the files of the most "troublesome cases," Jacobsen writes in her book.

The U.S. was not alone in this endeavor. Britain, France and especially the Soviet Union sought to enlist these German scientific experts, as well. A U.S.-Soviettechnological rivalry marked by the Space Race and Cold Warwould also serve as amotivation, and justification, for Operation Paperclip's existence.

By the fall of 1945, German scientists starting arrivingon U.S. soil. Not all the men recruited were Nazis orSS officers but the most prominent and valued among them were, having worked either directly with Hitler orleading members of the Nazi Party, such asHeinrich Himmler and Herman Gring.

Wernher von Braun, a rocket engineer, was instrumental in developing the first U.S. ballistic missile, the Redstone, and later the Saturn V rocket while serving as director of NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center. As a Nazi ideologue and member of the SS, hetraveled to the Buchenwald concentration camp, where he "handpicked slaves to work for him as laborers," said Jacobsen in a 2014interview with NPR.

Hubertus Strughold, a physiologist and medical researcher, headed the German Air Force Institute of Aviation Medicine, known for its torturous medical experiments on inmates from the Dachau concentration camp. Strughold claimed ignorance of any such activity until after the war, yethe appeared among a list of 95 doctors at an October 1942 conference discussing their findings. In the U.S., he was chief scientist of the aerospace medical division at Brooks Air Force and has since been credited as the father of space medicine.

Walter Schreiber, a former Nazi general, also oversaw inhumane medical experiments involving bioweapons that resulted in countless of deaths. Following the war, he was captured by the Soviets but defected to the U.S. He worked for various government entities before finally settling in Texas atthe Air Force School of Aviation Medicine, Jacobsen writes.

While Schreiber would later serve as a witness during the Nuremberg trials, he, von Braun, Strughold and the rest of their fellow Nazis brought to the U.S. would never be held accountable for their own atrocities. Operation Paperclip remained secretthroughout much of the Cold War.

We rate this claimTRUE because it is supported by our research. Operation Paperclip was a secret initiative launched by the U.S. government to recruit German engineers, doctors, physicists,chemists and other scientific experts for U.S. technological advancement, especially in anticipation of the Cold War. Many recruited German scientists did work for NASA and various other government entities. They were not held responsible for their war crimes.

Thank you for supporting our journalism. You can subscribe to our print edition, ad-free app or electronic newspaper replica here.

Our fact check work is supported in part by a grant from Facebook.

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Fact check: Nazi scientists brought to U.S. in Operation ...

There was something unusual about the five men who walked into the Jewish-owned Lansburgh Bros. department store in Washington, DC, one December day in 1946. Four wore long leather coats and Tyrolese hats, and spoke German to the fifth man, saying they wanted to buy Christmas gifts for their families sweets for their children and unterwasche, or undergarments, for their wives.

They started a mild altercation after becoming frustrated with their inability to communicate with the staff, and in a climate where World War II was still on everyones minds, the local military police were called in to arrest them. Ultimately, the five were brought back to where they had come from a clandestine prison camp in northern Virginia known only by its address: PO Box 1142.

What no one knew least of all the many Jews who frequented Lansburgh Bros. was that the quartet in German dress were actually high-ranking Nazis who had been apprehended by the United States during the war, including Hitlers chief rocket scientist, Wernher von Braun.

The military brass at PO Box 1142 believed that if its Nazi prisoners received lenient treatment, they would divulge top-secret scientific information that would benefit the US in the Cold War against its new enemy, the USSR. The prisoners request to go Christmas shopping in the capitals largest department store went all the way to the Pentagon.

Not only was the request accepted, but the quartet got $1,000 in spending money and an escort a guard named Arno Mayer. In the strangest part of the story, Mayer and many of the guards playing good cop at the camp were young Jewish refugees who had fled an increasingly antisemitic Europe.

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The guards little-known narrative is spotlighted in a new animated Netflix short film, Camp Confidential: Americas Secret Nazis, directed by the Israeli husband-and-wife duo Daniel Sivan and Mor Loushy. The 35-minute film premiered on September 24.

A still from the new Netflix animated documentary Camp Confidential: Americas Secret Nazis. (Courtesy of Netflix)

At first the story sounded so bizarre and unreal we could barely believe it that [there was] a secret Nazi camp near Washington, DC, run by Jewish refugees, Sivan and Loushy wrote in an email. It took us some time to understand this is not a fictional story, but actually happened.

They reflected, This story involved so much absurdity, pain and double standards on behalf of the US we felt this story must be told, and brought to a wide public this hidden part of history couldnt stay buried, known only to history buffs. We believed it should be known to all and of course Netflix was the best stage we could dream of.

Due to the scarcity of archival footage from the top-secret camp, the film uses animation to tell the story. This includes an animated version of a young Mayer and his efforts to keep prisoners happy. In one scene, the ex-Nazis enjoy an indoor Christmas celebration while a bitter Mayer stands outside, refusing their offer to come in for a drink.

In a joint Zoom interview with The Times of Israel, the directors recalled their initial doubts about the accuracy of the story.

Mor Loushy, co-director of the new Netflix animated documentary Camp Confidential: Americas Secret Nazis. (Courtesy of Netflix)

OK, it was probably like an urban legend, a myth, Sivan remembered thinking.

Loushy said that she could understand if it happened after the war, but to realize it [had already begun] in 1942 was shocking to us.

Daniel Sivan, co-director of the new Netflix animated documentary Camp Confidential: Americas Secret Nazis. (Courtesy of Netflix)

The directors credited producers Jono and Benjamin Bergmann with bringing the decades-old story to their attention and then confirming it by locating an archive of oral history interviews with some of the former guards.

The Bergmanns had originally learned about the story from a German journalist and colleague. In addition to the oral history archive, they also sought to find surviving guards to interview in real life. Because so much time had passed, they could only locate one Mayer.

Just days before Sivan and Loushy were to fly from Los Angeles to New York en route to interview him, they learned there was another survivor a fellow Jewish refugee, Peter Weiss. Finding him took some sleuthing.

As the youngest in the group, we had a hunch that Peter Weiss might still be around as well, the producers said in a statement. We ended up finding him believe it or not by going through all Peter [Weisses] in the New York phone book until we found one that was over 90 years old and originally from Vienna.

As it turned out, Mayer and Weiss knew each other.

Their shared experiences refugees from Europe and a secret to be kept from everyone in their lives created a very close bond at [the camp], the Bergmanns said. They stayed in touch and visited each other for many years after that.

It seems like Arno and Peter are the only survivors, Sivan said, noting that since the films release, he and Loushy have gotten a lot of messages from family members saying their dad was also part of [the camp] We discovered more and more stories of course, about people who already passed away.

It was Jewish refugees proficiency in German that got the army interested in them as interrogators. In the film, Weiss recalls proving his knowledge by quoting Goethe. Many were originally recruited for their language skills as part of the much larger group of Ritchie Boys European emigres who trained at Camp Ritchie in Maryland in such aspects as extracting intelligence from German prisoners of war.

At PO Box 1142, one guard tricked a German prisoner into thinking he was about to be gassed, which prompted him to divulge information. Intelligence obtained from the camp reportedly included the location of von Brauns subterranean V2 rocket factory at Peenemunde, which subsequently became the target of Allied bombings.

As the war neared its end, the geopolitics became complicated. Von Braun and 300 of his colleagues at Peenemunde were captured by the US and secretly brought stateside in contravention of official American policy first to an island in Boston Harbor, then to PO Box 1142.

We had very little information about rocketry, Mayer says in the film. Rocket scientists were essential to our war effort [in the Cold War].

A still from the new Netflix animated documentary Camp Confidential: Americas Secret Nazis. (Courtesy of Netflix)

The camp brass created a new position for Mayer morale officer and asked him to make life enjoyable for the prisoners, hoping this would get them to cooperate. He gave the prisoners newspapers to read, whiskey to sip and numerous games to play, including swimming, tennis, ping-pong and chess. He taught them horseshoes and discovered they loved volleyball.

[The guards] were all shocked, Loushy said. They didnt understand. They were so ready to go and fight in Europe, be really active saving their families. Yet they found themselves in the camp playing ping-pong with Nazis.

The Jewish soldiers knew about the evils the Nazis had committed, including against their families. The filmmakers stated that many of the soldiers had arrived in the US as enemy aliens and their US citizenship depended upon their military service.

Almost all [of us] were refugees from the Nazis, Weiss says in the film. We would have preferred to treat them as the war criminals they were. In the army, you can only follow orders. I tried to suppress my rage. He states that he was not fully aware of the enormity of what had happened under the Nazi regime, but notes, My grandfather, uncle, aunt, cousin, other relatives all died in the Holocaust, like so many others.

A still from the new Netflix animated documentary Camp Confidential: Americas Secret Nazis. (Courtesy of Netflix)

Newsreel footage is shown proclaiming the first actual pictures of atrocities in Nazi murder camps, including an appalled Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower surveying liberated Buchenwald, where tattooed slave laborers had worked on V2 rockets.

Mayer is quoted saying that the V2 rockets killed countless numbers of people in London and that building them required Jews arrested by the Gestapo. [Von Braun] knew what was going on. He knew there was an Auschwitz.

The film incorporates footage of von Brauns unlikely career resuscitation in the US decades later, as a well-respected NASA administrator. Clips show him overseeing the Apollo project to put the first man on the moon and getting cheered by crowds.

According to the film, the prisoners at PO Box 1142 were never charged with war crimes, and many went on to careers at NASA and the CIA. The camp was eventually bulldozed, and its former guards generally stayed silent about their duties there.

A sizable number of the guards went on to noteworthy achievements in later life. Weiss pursued a career in human rights law, including at the UN, where he helped regulate against torture. Mayer joined the faculty at Princeton and wrote several controversial books, one on the Holocaust and another on Zionism.

Weisss commitment to human rights and regrets over his work at the camp is reflected in his final comment in the film about the question of whether you can do bad things to achieve good ends. I would say if you do that, the end that you achieve is not worthwhile.

Excerpt from:

How European Jewish refugees wined and dined Nazi prisoners for US Army intelligence - The Times of Israel

When the Nazi death camp Chelmno began operations 80 years ago this month, a new phase of the Holocaust was launched in a small Polish village along the Vistula River.

At Chelmno, home to 35 families, the German SS pioneered methods of mass murder later deployed at death camps including Auschwitz-Birkenau. Known as Kulmhof in German, the killing site was also home to experiments in corpse disposal on an industrial scale.

In the Reichsgau or Nazi-made administrative subdivision of Warthegau, which surrounded Chelmno and included industrial Lodz, the Germans played elaborate shell games to deceive victims and bystanders. Tactics included issuing contradictory messages and forcing victims to send postcards with fake destinations.

The SS covered up where the Jews were going to, said historian Nicholas Terry, a senior lecturer in history at the University of Exeter. The theme of deception and secrecy allows us to see what it meant for the perpetrators, the bystanders, and the victims.

The first Jews gassed at Chelmno were deported from provincial ghettos during early December 1941. For many months into 1942, most Jews in the Warthegau regions 57 ghettos believed deportees were headed for labor and resettlement.

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Among Nazi death camps, Chelmno was the first to deploy gas. Inside custom-rigged mobile killing vans, vehicle exhaust was funneled into a sealed compartment where up to 50 victims were packed. At least 172,000 Jews were murdered at Chelmno during two periods of the camps operation, as well as 5,000 Roma and Sinti people.

Memorials at former Forest Camp at Chelmno, where victims were buried and later cremated, 2017 (Elan Kawesch/The Times of Israel)

To confuse the outside world as well as Jews imprisoned in the regions ghettos, some transports were sent back and forth between for example Germany, Lodz, and places east of Lodz, camouflaging Chelmno as the true destination.

These reports of Jews being resettled were widely believed outside Europe, Terry said. And at the end of the war, there was a hope against hope that more Jews had survived.

The German strategy of toying with the outside world inevitably led to degrees of self-deception among victims and bystanders, said Terry. For example, only after the Germans demanded the Lodz ghetto Jewish council hand over thousands of children for deportation did most Jews realize resettlement meant death.

War crimes investigators examine a burned-out mover van near Chelmno, of the type used by the SS to murder people (public domain)

The uncertainty has not been emphasized as much, in terms of the bystander responses, said Terry, adding that Chelmno has been overshadowed in general.

It is one of the best-documented killing sites, said Terry, pointing to German documents, among others, on materials used to make field ovens that cremated corpses. There are also a multiplicity of eyewitness accounts of gassings at Chelmno, said Terry, including one given by a Jewish prisoner who escaped the death camp in 1942 and fled to Warsaw.

At Chelmno, Jews were taken to a dilapidated schloss, or castle, and greeted in the courtyard by the so-called squire of the manor.

For the first time in the Holocaust, people were told they must take disinfection showers before the journeys next stage. After being forced through a narrow corridor in the basement, victims were packed into what appeared to be a small room.

Jews en route to Chelmno death camp from Kolo, where they transferred to a narrow-gauge rail and wagon cars (public domain)

Before people had time to react, the wagon was sealed and the engine started. After a 20-minute drive through town to the Forest Camp, the asphyxiated victims were unloaded and buried by Jewish prisoners. Every few weeks, the team of prisoners was executed to ensure secrecy.

The role played by Chelmno in the Holocaust was pivotal, researcher Chris Webb told The Times of Israel. For example, the camps first commander Herbert Lange was an absolute pioneer in the development of gas vans.

An amateur historian, Webb has researched Chelmno and the threeAktion Reinhard (Operation Reinhard) death camps Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka for more than 40 years. His books include The Chelmno Death Camp, co-authored with the late Artur Hojan.

The only difference between Chelmno and the Aktion Reinhard camps is that Chelmno used vans instead of static gas chambers, said Webb.

German soldiers help deport Jews from Zychlin ghetto to Chelmno death camp (public domain)

After the three Reinhard camps surpassed Chelmnos capacity for murder in the summer of 1942, SS officers reinvented the village-based killing center with a new task: Germany might not win the war, so evidence of the Final Solution specifically corpses had to be exhumed and destroyed at death camps and hundreds of mass graves throughout Eastern Europe.

At Chelmno, Paul Blobel of the SS carried out gruesome experiments involving flamethrowers and incendiary bombs. Eventually, he settled on using railroad tracks stacked with layers of corpses and firewood. Methodically, Blobel created improvised crematoria that were more sophisticated than crematoria at the Reinhard camps, said Terry.

Chelmno is arguably the most obscure death camp, but there are more physical traces of the Holocaust at the village than exist at most killing sites, according to experts.

Schloss manor house converted into part of the death camp at Chelmno, as seen in 1939, two years before the SS began using mobile killing vans on-site (public domain)

Theres more to see at Chelmno than at Treblinka, said Webb, referring to the Aktion Reinhard camp where 900,000 Jews were murdered. At Treblinka, no structures associated with the genocide stand today. Decades ago, 17,000 quarry stones were placed atop the mass graves to evoke communities destroyed there.

By way of contrast to Treblinka, Chelmno remains largely as it looked during the war, including the church where victims were held overnight during summer 1944 transports from Lodz. The manor house was blown up by the Nazis in 1943, before the camps second phase of operation, but the basements foundations and a staircase have been excavated.

From the perspective of Terry, Chelmno is a spatially diffused site with a staggeringly multi-staged killing process, he said. Its almost a misnomer to call it a camp. Its an extermination site.

Despite Chelmnos confusing layout, it was easy for villagers to piece together what took place there, said Terry. In the spring of 1942, townspeople witnessed victims falling out of an overturned gas van. For months, stench and smoke wafted in from the Forest Camp cremation pyres, while the camps German guards were billeted with families in town.

War crimes investigation photo of Jewish victims belongings left at the Kolo synagogue, where Jews were imprisoned overnight before transport to the Chelmno death camp (public domain)

Chelmnos SS officers worked toward the Fuhrer Nazi-speak for administrators to anticipate and execute Hitlers orders beforehand. When it came to solving the Jewish question, Chelmnos leaders improvised the transition from open-air massacres in the east to what became death camps with fixed gas chambers, a more centralized and discreet model.

At Chelmno we saw there was a degree of decentralization and improvisation in the genocide of European Jews, said Terry. Regional authorities could improvise or experiment.

The rest is here:

80 years ago this month, Nazis invented industrial murder at quiet Chelmno - The Times of Israel

In this era of civil unrest and partisan politics, its harder than ever for cops particularly black cops to do their jobs. In this excerpt from the new book Beaten Black and Blue: Being a Black Cop in an America Under Siege, Ray Hamilton, 42,reveals his experiences working as a mixed-race cop in San Ramon, Calif., east of Oakland, as well as his early days serving in Washington DCs tough Sixth District.

A big part of my story is that Im black and white, and that puts me right in the middle of all the race and policing issues.

And, yes, Ive dealt with different aspects of racism. On a routine traffic stop, people might say, Oh, you just stopped me because Im black.

Really? Because Im mixed race, and sometimes, you cant tell what I am.

On the East Coast, they thought I was Puerto Rican, and here in California, they dont know what I am. Theres no box to put me in, which I think is true for a lot of people. So when that happens, I call people out on that. I ask them, Could it be that I stopped you because your tail light was out, or your tags expired a year ago, or you ran a red light? It couldnt be anything like that?

That usually turns things around.

I never saw myself as looking tough or like a thug; I had curly hair and an olive skin tone. But when I was a teenager, I got stopped by the gang unit in Dallas a true felony stop with guns drawn and everything.

Put your hands on the steering wheel!

Whoa, I thought. What in the world is happening?

Youre in a gang!

No, I wasnt, and I never was. However, my cousin was in a gang, and he used to get caught up in all kinds of criminal stuff. He ended up getting shot five times, and died.

All of that really turned me away from being in a gang or doing anything criminal.

Instead, I ended up in the military. I was in the Air Force working for the Department of Defense on Bolling Air Force Base. At the time, I was working as a sports and recreation assistant, creating extracurricular events for the Air Force community.

I believe how you do your job is more of a calling than what your job actually is. And for some reason, after the military I decided I was going to apply to the DC Metro Police Department. They werent hiring at the time, and several people advised me not to join that dirty police department. I applied anyway, and I waited. I waited for two years. Most people apply to multiple departments to increase their odds of being hired. Me? I only applied to one. I believed I was supposed to work there. Eventually, after their hiring freeze was lifted, I became one of 35 people hired out of 10,000 candidates.

Thats how I started my career with the police 10 years ago.

When a person of color calls me a racist, I feel bad for them. Its like theyre conditioned to believe people treat them a certain way because theyre black.

When a person of color calls me another person of color a racist, I feel bad for them. Its like theyre conditioned to believe people treat them a certain way because theyre black. I want to say to them, Wait a minute. You dont want me pulling you over because you have your hair in cornrows, you have tattoos, youre smoking a blunt, but you dont want me to assume youre a gangster, right? You dont want me to assume that, but thats one of the first things that comes to mind. But thats not reasonable for me to do that. Thats me judging you, and you dont want me doing that. Why judge me?

During the recent riots, I was accused of being an overseer, someone who watched over slaves. Another time, someone accused me of being like the Nazis marching the Jews off to the concentration camp trains, as if I were marching people off to be killed. I was surprised by that. It really does get that dirty sometimes.

When I have on riot duty gear or the uniform in general I remember Im not here representing myself; Im here to try to keep some kind of peace. When Im wearing either one, I dont represent myself or my own ideas and thoughts. Im there to protect whatever brothers and sisters are around me.

Were not there to control people. They should feel free to protest all they want. I may even agree with them, but I dont agree with all the methods. And I cant let a few opportunists cause this thing to become a mob and be unlawful.

I think its important to hold that attitude.

Recently, a couple of guys on the line took a knee. No, no, brother! You cant take a knee when youre on the line, whether you agree with them or not. You cant take a knee because that puts everyone else at risk now. Its very awkward. Its not the time, and then it looks like were not standing together.

When Im in the uniform, Im there for a greater purpose. That purpose is to keep some kind of peace and maintain some kind of order, and to do that, you have to show some kind of solidarity.

That said, I also want to build a rapport with the community I serve. When I was in DC, especially in the project area, I was dealing with a different mindset. And I knew you had to meet them where they were and build that relationship. The beat I had was a very rough four blocks where there were murders, drug deals, you name it. I had a partner, a white dude from Arizona. Hed never been around that many black people, and this was an all-black neighborhood. When we walked that beat, my partner kind of walked behind me. You could visibly tell he was scared. I had to explain to him, Dang, man, theyre gonna pull your card if you walk behind me. Dont do that. If they see youre scared, theyll respond in a bad way. You gotta walk beside me, not behind me.

Since Im in the middle black (and white) and blue I find myself walking the line.

I know some officers have bad attitudes about the communities they serve. Yes, its often a racial divide. Some of the white cops had a different outlook. They even made patches: Were not stuck here with you; youre stuck here with us. And sadly, yes, I have heard some of the guys refer to black people as savages. Im thinking, My gosh, how are you going to deliver or render any kind of justice or service to this community if you refer to them as savages?

So, Im trying to win over the white officers and the black community.

Sadly, I do understand why some people hate us.

On one occasion, a black officer stopped a guy who was a known criminal. Everybody knew he dealt drugs, and he had drugs on him. But the officer demeaned him, I guess trying to teach him a lesson in front of the other people in the area. He made him kneel down on the concrete (that hurts), and he had him down there for more than five minutes. The crowd felt like the cop was showing off and abusing his authority. So, they started name-calling called us the slang term for cops, twelve, called us FEDS, called us all kinds of names. I believe when you name someone like that then theyre no longer a person. Like calling someone a savage or shouting out, F twelve either side of the argument theyre no longer a person.

Not too long after that, we caught a guy on a very minor misdemeanor charge, riding a dirt bike in the city. These rough riders would ride dirt bikes and ATVs in the city, and the cops would chase them. I caught this one guy, and we were just going to write him up, get his fingerprints, and process him out, but this guy had a $10,000 wad of bills on him. He claimed it was from his family business. But I know that most businesses usually dont transport cash in their waistbands. I needed to hold the money until he could bring down receipts to prove it was earned through that business. He started yelling at me that he wanted to see it put in the evidence bag. I was surprised. Did he think I was going to steal it? Apparently yes, because other cops in my district had been fired for misconduct. No wonder he didnt trust us!

I can sometimes understand the lack of trust from the community, but when you dont feel you have the support of your leaders, thats when it gets really hard. When I was on the riot team in DC, we werent able to wear our full riot gear because it looked too aggressive. Here in California, its more of the same. During one of the riots, I was hit with a bottle, and we had to shoot a rubber round back at that person. Then, we had to use tear gas to disperse the crowd. Three days later, they took away our tear gas. I was recently deployed to Sacramento, and we were told that if protesters break the windows at City Hall, we should let them.

Even in Oakland, we had to let them loot a Target, a 7-Eleven store, and a car dealership.

I know all the violence and looting are coordinated, because I saw someone watching us and monitoring our movement. Then, he called it to his fellow rioters. Not being able to do anything or take any action when laws are being broken and officers are being hurt? Thats demotivating. You end up getting what we call 4 percent. Some officers go out on duty, but they wont be proactive, and they give less than 100 percent because its a reaction to feeling powerless and not being supported. Theres also a threat of being sued by someone, even if the officers are just defending themselves. Its very disheartening.

While I grew up feeling like I never had to be anyone but who I was, these days, I feel like I am always being forced to pick a side. I try to identify with the people I work with, and I also try to identify with the community Im policing. I dont want them to feel like I said, that Im just here as an overseer. Im not here to fine you and arrest you, but I have a job to do. It can be hard to feel so stuck in the middle.

Reprinted with permission from Beaten Black and Blue: Being a Black Cop in an America Under Siege by Brandon Tatum, published by Bombardier Books (2021).

See the article here:

Mixed-race cop on policing in 2021: Ive been called racist and a Nazi - New York Post