Kubijovyč was an infamous Nazi collaborator, a founder of the 14th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS as head of the [Axis’s] Ukrainian Central Committee. In a 2012 paper in the Journal of Slavic Military Studies, Rudling, now a historian at Lund University in Sweden, describes Kubijovyč as “an enthusiastic proponent of ethnic cleansing” who wanted to establish an independent Ukraine without Jews or Poles.

“The formation of the Galician-Ukrainian division within the framework of the SS, is for us not only a distinction, but our responsibility that we will continue to [support] and maintain this active decision, in cooperation with the German state organizations, until the victorious end of the war,” Kubijovyč said on April 28, 1943, the day the division was formally established.

“This historic day was made possible by the conditions to create a worthy opportunity for the Ukrainians of Galicia, to fight arm in arm with the heroic German soldiers of the Army and the Waffen-SS against Bolshevism, your and our deadly enemy. We thank you from our heart. Of course we ought to thank the Great Führer of the united Europe for recognizing our participation in the war, that he approved your initiative and agreed to the creation of the Galicia division.”

After the war, Kubijovyč edited the first two volumes of the Encyclopedia of Ukraine, which downplayed the Galicia Division’s [Axis] ties. His family’s endowment was specifically for the purpose of completing the encyclopedia’s translation into English.

When Rudling and fellow historian Tyrik Cyril Amar questioned the propriety of Kubijovyč’s endowment in a 2015 article for History News Network, CIUS director Volodymyr Kravchenko accused them of “assaulting the dead” and “mudslinging … to conduct an information war in which the opponent is not convinced but destroyed.”

Kubijovyč was also pictured with Peter Savaryn on the cover of the 1976 book, The Politics of Multiculturalism by Manoly Lupul. The photo is of the signing of a contract between the CIUS and the Shevchenko Scientific Society of Europe to collaborate on the Encyclopedia of Ukraine.

Left image: Peter Savaryn (left standing) and Volodymyr Kubijovyč (center sitting) pictured here at the 1976 contract signing between the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies and Shevchenko Scientific Society of Europe to collaborate on the Encyclopedia of Ukraine. Right image: Volodymyr Kubijovyč (circled in red) gives a [Fascist] salute at the 14th Waffen-SS recruitment ceremony in 1943.

Events that happened today (October 10):

1895: Wolfram Karl Ludwig Moritz Hermann Freiherr von Richthofen, Axis field marshal, was born.
1935: A parafascist coup d’état terminated Greece’s Second Hellenic Republic and replaced it with the Kingdom of Greece (again).
1938: Abiding by the Munich Agreement, Czechoslovakia completed its withdrawal from the Sudetenland, now property of the Third Reich.
1942: Arnold Majewski, Axis cavalry officer, died immediately after receiving a bullet from a Soviet sniper.
1957: Karl August Genzken, Axis physician who committed numerous atrocities against concentration camp prisoners, was kind enough to drop dead.

In Fascist Italy, “Columbus Day” was created by Mariano Lucca, a failed politician turned reporter who interviewed Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini. It was likely intended to dismiss and normalize the well known atrocities that Columbus committed. Its introduction to Imperial America, however, was more complex:

To truly understand Columbus Day, one must learn about an important name in Italian‐American history: Generoso Pope.

In 1937, following the popularity and success of newspaper magnate Generoso Pope’s New York City Columbus Day Parade, President Franklin Roosevelt declared October 12th a national holiday commemorating Christopher Columbus’s “discovery of North America.” Although the Italian‐born, Brasilia‐affiliated explorer sailing under the Spanish Empire failed to ever set foot on the North American continent, Italians in America had accrued a kinship to the famed navigator.

[During the 1920s and ’30s, the Fascist Party in Italy courted Italian immigrant communities in the U.S., which they considered “colonies” of the [Fascist] state. The Fascists and their sympathizers helped organize the first U.S. Fascist convention in Philadelphia and lobbied to make Columbus day a national holiday. (Source.)]

While Pope’s Columbus Day Parade (starting in 1929) was not the first celebration of Columbus that New York had seen, his would quickly become a tradition there. While the establishment of a formal Columbus Day may seem to be an outwardly straightforward process, a deeper dive into Pope’s involvement with powerful political players reveals a profound meaning of the holiday that extends beyond the mere celebration of Columbus himself.

During the Depression Era, Pope was considered one of the most impactful political power brokers within the Democratic Party, and he would eventually be appointed the head of the Italian division within the Democratic National Committee by President Roosevelt himself. Pope owned seven Italian‐language newspapers as well as the radio station WHOM, and his flagship paper, Il Progresso Italo‐Americano, was the largest Italian‐language newspaper in the United States with a circulation nearing 200,000 copies (he had, notably, purchased the paper from a lesser‐known owner for the modern‐day equivalent of $261 million).

The source of Pope’s political power resided in his influence over the Italian‐American voting bloc through his newspaper empire, as Italian immigrants depended on his papers for a sense of community and for news written in their native language. Galvanizing the Italian voting bloc, Pope played a pivotal role in securing elections for various New York City politicians and judges.

But Pope also played a significant role in world affairs: He was considered one of the most influential fascist propagandists in the U.S. for Mussolini’s […] régime. To provide a few significant examples of his fascist status, Pope was a member of the fascist Lictor Federation and its predecessor, the Fascist League of North America (FLNA); he employed multiple known fascists; he was photographed performing a fascist salute in Rome in 1937; lastly, he was awarded the honorary title of Grand Officer of the Crown of Italy for his service to fascism in America.

Following the FLNA’s disbandment in 1929, the type of propaganda that was perpetuated within the U.S. began to shift from the domain of politics to that of culture, bolstering Italian nationalistic sentiments in immigrants and second‐generation Italian‐Americans to create, as one history of early 20th century Italian immigrants put it, a people “spiritually tied to fascist Italy by linguistic [and cultural] bonds.”

Following his first successful Columbus Day parade, Pope met in March 1930 with FDR, then governor of New York, to discuss the potential for a state holiday in celebration of Columbus. Although the idea was received favorably, Pope lacked the necessary political capital to get it enacted.

Four years later, following Roosevelt’s 1932 presidential victory, the fascist newspaper kingpin petitioned the president to reconsider his previous stance on the Columbus Day holiday. In a nod to Pope’s prolonged help to FDR through consistently favorable coverage in his papers, as well as to acknowledge recent race‐based hate crimes committed against Italian immigrants and a sign of appreciation for their turnout in the recent election, President Roosevelt declared October 12th a national holiday. With the establishment of Columbus Day, Generoso Pope had succeeded in solidifying Christopher Columbus’s place in U.S. history and within the minds of Italian‐Americans as a near‐mythic entity.

Columbus Day and Pope’s Columbus Day Parade were both founded with fascist ideologies in mind, which was clear and ever‐present at the New York City parades prior to World War II. At the 1936 parade, according to one account, prominent politicians were implored by anti‐fascists not to attend, as “local fascist papers have announced that uniformed Fascisti will participate in military formation.”

In 1937, when FDR declared Columbus Day a federal holiday, spectators at the subsequent parade allegedly cheered loudly and raised their hands in the infamous fascist salute when Italy’s fascist anthem, “Giovinezza,” was played. The next year’s parade, the New York Times reported, saw spectators shouting “Viva Mussolini” along the route.

When Mussolini’s Italy declared war on the U.S. on December 11, 1941, hundreds of known fascist sympathizers were quickly incarcerated by the government for their enemy activities. Fortunately for Pope, in the weeks prior to the war’s declaration, he had begun distancing himself from Mussolini’s fascism and even publicly declared “fealty to the U.S.” in an October 1940 New York Times article.

Though many of these incarcerated fascists were his known associates, Pope continued advising FDR and the Democratic National Committee regarding Italian‐Americans, particularly during the 1944 election. [Among other things, Generoso Pope also ordered mobster Carmine Galante to murder the antifascist journalist Carlo Tresca in 1943. Pope’s son, Generoso Jr., was a CIA officer who founded the National Enquirer with loans from Frank Costello and Roy Cohn, and ran the paper like an intelligence‐gathering network where two subjects were off limits: the CIA and the mob.]

(Emphasis added.)

In 1925, Benito Mussolini declared Columbus Day a national holiday in Fascist Italy:

(Source.)

Furthermore, Fascist Italy used a 1927 monument dedication in Richmond to spread propaganda and declared fake news about atrocities it was actively committing:

(Source. Footnote. On a related note, I read that a ‘Mussolini groupie’ donated the statue in San Francisco near Coit Tower.)

As early as 1936, the antifascist Italian‐American labor newspaper editor Girolamo Valenti warned that Columbus Day celebrations was furthering the cause of fascism. Additionally:

Italian‐Americans in RI commemorated the [WWI] Battle of the Piave River, the March on Rome, the Birth of [Ancient] Rome, and Columbus Day with fascist salutes, with a (controversial) 1937 Columbus Day parade in West Warwick even featuring Black Shirts marching in formation.

(Source.)

Events that happened today (October 9):

1907: Horst Wessel, SA officer and musician, was unfortunately born.
1908: Werner von Haeften, Axis lieutenant who failed to oust the Third Reich’s Chancellor, was delivered to the world.
1934: An Ustashe murdered King Alexander I of Yugoslavia and Louis Barthou, Foreign Minister of France, in Marseille.
1937: Somebody massacred nine Catholic priests in Zhengding, China who were protecting the local population from the advancing Imperial army.
1941: The Kingdom of Romania deported Jews to Transnistria. (Hence this day is known as the National Day of Commemorating the Holocaust in Romania.)
1945: Gottlieb Hering, SS commander involved in Action T4, took his long overdue dirtnap.
1947: Yukio Sakurauchi, Imperial Minister of Commerce and Industry, expired.
1959: Shirō Ishii, the Axis director of Unit 731 and later contributor to the U.S. biological warfare program, did a nice thing for once and dropped dead.
1974: Oskar Schindler, a moderate fascist who famously saved (but occasionally abused) hundreds of Jewish workers, perished.
1976: Walter Warlimont, Axis staff officer, died.
1988: Felix Wankel, Axis engineer and SS member, departed from the world.

Similarly to how there were both good Christians and extremely sinful Christians in relation to the Shoah, there were both good Muslims and deeply sinful Muslims with regard to it as well. It was common (maybe less so now) for Islamophobes to emphasize the anti‐Jewish Muslims, for example the 13th Waffen Mountain Division of the SS Handschar, but given the rise of the alt‐right it would be unsurprising if some Islamophobes would now prefer to emphasize the Jew‐friendly Muslims such as the Albanians.

In any case, while some ultranationalist Muslims did mistake the European Fascists for allies against colonialism, most Muslims didn’t want the snake oil that the Axis was offering. Many of them had the circumspection to tell that the Fascist colonialists were no better than their liberal counterparts, and Libya was a case in point.

What too many of us overlook is that the Western Allies weren’t the only ones holding colonies in North Africa. So was the Axis, giving many Muslims and Jews alike a common enemy:

France, an important colonial force in North Africa and Nazi Germany in Libya and later in Tunisia, enforced many anti‐Semitic laws against the Jews in 1940, including the Statut des Juifs, which was approved by Algeria and Tunisia, and in Morocco the Sultan Muhammad V approved the Moroccan version of Statut des Juifs. These laws forced Jews into labor, punishment, and isolation camps.

In 1942 at the Wannsee conference (Satlo, 2006: 26–27) plans for the final solution of the Jewish question exacerbated the situation for Jews all over the world, including northern Africa. The […] Fascist […] colonial takeover of Arab countries for strategic reasons also included the goal of exterminating Jews from these countries. Muslims, although generally unaware of the death camps in Europe, had the direct knowledge of Jews being interned in their own countries, but the Jews were perceived as the allies of the colonial forces and not necessarily Arabs.

[…]

However, the story of colonization reemerges when the discussion of Arab camps surface in Muslim and Jewish narratives, and the two minor narratives emerge within their own minority status in witnessing both the colonial forces and the [Fascist] campaign. In other words, Jewish and Muslim identity struggled immensely through the time of the Holocaust from the fall of the Ottomans 1922, colonialism, and the oppression and Holocaust of native Arab/Muslim/Jewish narratives.

The historical accounts of Jews from Europe or Arab lands who tried to escape ended up in many death camps, and the Arabs who fought against the colonists and attempted to overthrow the colonial forces landed in camps in the Sahara and in some cases with Jews. For example, many Jews who had fled Germany in 1938–1939 were later captured in France and interned in Arab camps.

The camp at Hadjerat‐M’Guil was opened on November 1, 1941, as a punishment and isolation camp. It contained 170 prisoners, nine of whom were tortured and murdered in conditions of the worst brutality. Two of those murdered were Jews, one of whom had earlier been in a concentration camp in Germany but had been released in 1939 and had fled to France. This young man’s parents had become refugees in London. On learning of their son’s murder in the Sahara, they committed suicide (Glibert, 1988: 56).

[…]

Berkani’s testimony says that he and the Jews in the camp understood that Deriko was trying to get the Arabs to fight with Jews:

He gathered the Jews of the camp, who were previously mixed with the Europeans, and separated them from the French, or rather from the Europeans. This cursed Dériko prepared further provocations once again. Europeans were separate, the Arabs were separate, and the Jews too were separate. Now the Jews were also gathered in the first section. (Berkani, 1965: 44)

Berkani, a Muslim, sees Deriko’s tactic and writes the following; he observes astutely that the [Fascists] (Vichy) were attempting to create tension but that the Jews and Muslims (he changes from Arabs) had caught onto his divisive tactic.

There is no doubt that Dériko did this with the intention of seeing the Jews cut down and killed by the Muslims, since the Jews were not numerous. But the Jews realized his goal; the Arabs too realized the same thing. Commander Dériko expected that there would be fights between Arabs and Jews, but the opposite occurred: a friendly understanding spread between the two communities. Never could one have believed that the Arabs and the Jews in the first section of the camp would become real friends, even brothers. Whether you wish to believe it or not, they were moreover brothers in hunger, in suffering, in misery, in punishment/pain etc. […] in Dériko’s camp. (Berkani, 1965: 45)

(Emphasis added.)

Related: Remembering the Muslims Murdered at Auschwitz

Events that happened today (October 8):

1884: Walter Karl Ernst August von Reichenau, Axis Field Marshal who was partly responsible for the Babi Yar massacre, polluted the earth.
1888: Ernst Kretschmer, Axis psychiatrist, was born.
1910: Helmut Kallmeyer, Axis chemist who was involved in Action T4, forced his existence on us.
1939: The Third Reich annexed western Poland.
1941: During the preliminaries of the Battle of Rostov, Axis forces reached the Sea of Azov with the capture of Mariupol.
1943: Friedrich Schubert's paramilitary group executed approximately thirty civilians in Kallikratis, Crete.

In November 2022, the Ukrainian Youth Association, also known as “Soom,” (SUM—Spilka ukrayinsʹkoyi molod—or CYM—Спілка української молод) held its 20th World Congress in Hanover Township, New Jersey. Supposedly an “isolationist” attitude dominated: CYM, despite its plummeting membership, “should be for privileged people only.”

Well, they’re certainly right when they say that it’s for privileged people only, but not necessarily in the way that they had in mind. (I think that the photograph speaks for itself.)

Just over 50 delegates participated in the World Congress on behalf of CYM branches in Ukraine, Estonia, Germany, Belgium, Spain, Portugal, Britain, Australia, Canada, and the United States. After years of singing, “now a SUMivtsya,” (member of CYM) “tomorrow a fighter,” CYM adopted a new slogan for the upcoming year: “now a fighter.” In 2023 the organization vowed to commemorate the 140th birthday of Dmytro Dontsov (1883–1973), a fascist ideologue who translated Mein Kampf.

[…]

Longtime readers of the Bandera Lobby Blog may remember that George Borec, a veteran of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, the 1940s military wing of OUN-B, got a street in Penrith, Australia named after Stepan Bandera, and financed the construction of a nearby Banderite youth center in a suburb of Sydney. The local branch of CYM has since relocated to a newer building, where visitors are greeted at the front entrance by portraits of far-right OUN leaders (Bandera, Konovalets, Shukhevych, Stetsko) and Symon Petliura, a World War I-era figure whose military forces carried out pogroms against Jews.

I froze upon reading this.

According to historian Per Rudling, the “Roman Shukheyvch Ukrainian Youth Unity Complex” affiliated with CYM in Edmonton, Alberta was opened in 1973 with significant funding from the provincial government. In 2020, he explained, “The purpose of the complex, the OUN(b) press declared, was to ‘become a blacksmith’s forge, which will forge hard, unbreakable characters of the Ukrainian youth’ and to ‘raise and harden a new generation of fighters for the liberation of Ukraine…’”

Meanwhile, I reported that the federal government awarded the Banderites $279,138 to “repair” the complex in 2015, and CYM-Canada charged to the defense of the Ukrainian Waffen-SS monument in Oakville after it became the subject of an international news story.

They’ve been much more quiet about the recent “Nazigate” scandal…

CYM-Canada published this imagine in 2020 after the Ukrainian Waffen-SS monument in Oakville was vandalized with anti-Nazi graffiti.

‘KNOW THE FACTS, NOT THE ~~PROPAGANDA~~’. Finally we can agree with these anticommunists on something.

In 1991, SNUM was reformed as the official branch of CYM in Ukraine. From 2005 through 2016, it received over $400,000 in grants from the U.S. State Department via the National Endowment for Democracy. From 2016 until 2019, CYM and another, more radical OUN-B youth group in Ukraine were members of the Reanimation Package of Reforms Coalition, the “largest and most visible reform network” in the country, which has been funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development and Global Affairs Canada.

The NED…we meet again.

Events that happened today (October 7):

1866: Włodzimierz Halka Ledóchowski, Fascist sympathizer, was born.
1900: Heinrich Himmler, Axis commander and politician, stained the human race for all time.
1904: Armando Castellazzi, one of Fascist Italy’s professional footballers and managers, started his life.
1920: Georg Leber, Luftwaffe member, was delivered to the world.
1923: Irmgard Ilse Ida Grese, SS officer and concentration camp guard at Ravensbrück and Auschwitz… I don’t even want to say it. Just thinking about her makes me mad.
1940: Arthur H. McCollum proposed bringing Imperial America into the war in Eurasia by provoking the Empire of Japan into assaulting one of the U.S. colonies.
1944: During an uprising at Birkenau concentration camp, Jewish prisoners burnt down Crematorium IV (as portrayed in the excellent motion picture, The Grey Zone). Meanwhile, Helmut Lent, Axis night‐fighter ace, died having suffered injuries in a crash landing two days earlier.
2014: Siegfried Lenz, Fascist and Kriegsmarine draftee, expired.

(Mirror.)

The statement from the Governor General — the representative of the British Monarchy in Canada — concerned Peter Savaryn, who served as chancellor of the University of Alberta from 1982 to 1986 and in 1987 was appointed to the Order of Canada. The award is akin to the U.S. Presidential Medal of Freedom, and is considered the second highest distinction for Canadians, topped only by the Order of Merit available to all citizens of the British Commonwealth.

Responding to an inquiry from the Forward, the statement from Governor General Mary Simon expressed “deep regret” about Savaryn’s appointment. A spokesperson said the office is also now reviewing two other honors it gave Savaryn: the Golden Jubilee (awarded in 2002) and Diamond Jubilee (awarded in 2012) medals.

[…]

Hunka and Savaryn were both volunteers in the 14th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS, commonly known as SS Galichina or the Galicia Division. The unit, which was formed in 1943 out of recruits from the Galicia region in western Ukraine, was armed and trained by the Third Reich, and commanded by German SS officers. It’s accused of war crimes, including burning alive 500 to 1,000 Poles in 1944.

Related: Trudeau says Canada may finally make secret Nazi files public

Events that happened today (October 6):

1900: Willy Merkl, a mountain climber whom the Third Reich briefly sponsored, was born.
1916: Chiang Wei‐kuo, Japanese–Chinese Wehrmacht(!) officer candidate, was brought to the world.
1935: Fascist forces captured Adwa.
1939: The Battle of Kock became the final combat of the September Campaign in Poland.
1942: American troops forced the Axis from its positions east of the Matanikau River during the Battle of Guadalcanal.
1943: A paramilitary group in Crete burnt thirteen civilians alive during the Axis occupation of Greece.
1944: Units of the 1st Czechoslovak Army Corps entered Czechoslovakia during the Battle of the Dukla Pass. (This later became Deň obetí Dukly or Dukla Pass Victims Day in Slovakia.)
1945: Leonardo Conti, SS‐Obergruppenführer who was involved in the massacre of hundreds of thousands of disabled people, hung himself in prison… no comment.

In attempting to achieve a united front among Germany, Poland and Japan against the USSR, the [Imperial] Japanese were frequently reminded by the Poles that they had reached their agreement with the USSR not out of any genuine friendship but rather of the need to protect their rear against a Germany that was growing stronger every day. The head of Polish military intelligence, for example, stated on 12 December 1933:

Germany has rearmed itself at the present moment to a far greater extent than anyone assumes. The Polish General Staff is better informed in this respect than France for example.^54^

Despite the complaints in the [Imperial] press about Polish betrayal of the old relationship against the USSR, the Polish government demonstrated its difficulties eloquently by reaching a parallel non‐aggression pact with [the Third Reich] in January 1934. When asked about the reasons that lay behind the Nazi view of this episode by Mussolini in Venice in June, Hitler replied:

Ten years ago, Poland had been militarily stronger than Russia. But now she no longer was. She had concluded the pact with us out of fear of Russia.^55^

For the [Imperial] Army, the year 1934 was regarded by many as a target date for [Imperial] Japan to be in a position to catch up with the Soviet union and challenge it. Decisions were taken in 1932 to strengthen the attaché bureaux in Paris, Berlin and Warsaw and this was followed in the spring of 1934 by the appointment of outstanding officers to the attaché posts, Major‐Generals Ōshima Hiroshi in Berlin and Yamawaki Masatake in Warsaw.^56^

Both officers pressed their hosts to support a deepening of bilateral relations with the [Imperial] Army. The press pointed to the ‘rumour of Japanese–Polish collaboration’ in the course of 1934 and to claims about the existence of ‘the closest collaboration between the Japanese and Polish intelligence services — at least so far as Russia is concerned’.

The [Third Reich’s] military attaché in Warsaw, Major‐General Schindler, noted that ‘the bureau of the Japanese military attaché here operates as a sub‐office of the Japanese Intelligence Division by assembling all information gathered in Europe about foreign armies, and especially about Russia’ and that Yamawaki was the driving force behind this. ‘If the information reaching me is correct,’ he continued, ‘not only Lieutenant‐Colonel Fujizuka, but also General Yamawaki himself has an office in the Intelligence Section of the Polish General Staff’.^57^

He then went on to report that Le Temps carried fresh allegations about the signing of an agreement in December 1934 for collaboration between the two general staffs that included arrangements to collaborate over military training, aviation and infantry equipment. It was also claimed that in the event of war, they would exchange raw materials and military equipment and that Poland would look after Japanese interests at the League, from which Japan was due to depart finally on 27 March 1935.^58^

Schindler accepted that it was quite evident that there was an existing arrangement over training in the sense that exchanges and secondments were already an established fact. However, he did not believe that any agreement extended beyond benevolent neutrality to mutual exchange of goods and equipment in wartime.^59^

The former Polish ambassador to Tōkyō and minister of foreign affairs, Tadeusz Romer, always denied the existence of any treaty with Japan, though it would not follow that the General Staff would necessarily think itself bound to disclose any technical military arrangements, particularly if these were not committed to paper and signed by both parties.^60^

[…]

This suggests, therefore, that there had at least been some kind of oral agreement between the Polish and Japanese General Staffs about the Soviet Union, but it is quite likely that it was not consigned to paper, or at least not signed and that it was something limited to the knowledge of the military — a situation permissible in the [Imperial] system, if not the Polish.

It is also very clear that there was informal co‐operation between Polish and [Imperial] military attachés in different capitals outside Warsaw and Tōkyō. Polish military relations with the general staffs and staff officers from Sweden, Finland, the Baltic States and Rumania permitted [Imperial] Army officers to obtain information indirectly and directly from them all in the inter‐war period, as can be seen in the co‐operation in Riga in the 1930s between Colonel Onodera and Major Brzeskwinski.^69^

Though collaboration extended to exchange of information on Soviet codes and cyphers, there is absolutely no evidence that anything was said to the [Imperialists] about the Polish successes in reading the cypher messages sent by means of Enigma machines by the [Wehrmacht].

While efforts to draw Poland into the anti‐Comintern arrangement succeeded in so far as police co-operation about Communists was concerned, all efforts to try to persuade the Poles to move into a more active role proved in vain, in spite of the efforts of [Imperial] personnel in Europe. Warsaw continued to function as a centre for intelligence‐gathering about the USSR until 1939, when the Polish leadership firmly rejected [Berlin’s] efforts to reincorporate Danzig in Germany by negotiation and accepted Chamberlain’s guarantee.

The deal with the Soviet Union in August 1939 in the middle of the negotiations for an alliance among Japan, Germany and Italy sealed not only the fate of Poland and the Baltic States, but it also led to a highly disagreeable outcome to Soviet–Japanese confrontation over Outer Mongolia and a denunciation of Hitler for abandoning the secret agreement attached to the Anti‐Comintern Pact.

#Regrouping after the Destruction of Poland
The failure of [Imperial] mediation efforts and the elimination of the Polish state, coupled with the resentment at [Berlin’s] expedient arrangements with the Soviet Union, made it possible for Polish military officers who escaped via Rumania and Lithuania to France and Britain to continue to support the old arrangements with Japan, even after Japan joined the Tripartite Pact in September 1940.

The [Imperial] Army was forced to transfer its intelligence work directed toward the USSR from Warsaw to Riga, Helsinki and Stockholm, but succeeded in maintaining contact with Polish officers working underground after the Polish defeat, though many others were able to make contact with British, French and Soviet recruiters in countries like Rumania.

(Emphasis added.)

1912: Fritz Ernst Fischer, Axis doctor who performed medical atrocities on inmates of the Ravensbrück concentration camp, polluted humanity.
1921: Adolf Schicklgruber gave a speech in which he explained the NSDAP’s flag’s significance.
1938: The Third Reich invalidated Jews’ passports.
1943: Axis forces on Wake Island executed ninety‐eight American POWs.

The context for this was that Oswald Mosley formed a party called the British Union of Fascists in 1932. By 1936 he was having a hard time, he wasn’t doing as well as he thought [that] he was going to do, so Mosley had hit a roadblock, he was making no progress. He decided that one way of breaking through electorally was to galvanize anti‐foreign sentiment, anti‐Jewish sentiment, anything against the other, and the place to do that was the East End of London, which had brought everybody together.

The East End of London was always the melting pot of British society, and he could specifically target the Jewish population of the East End of London. So he decided, after a campaign of about nine months in which he was using his thugs to intimidate people, to smash windows, to come down here and say, ‘We can do this, look, we are going to take on the foreigner in British society!’ What happened?

Mosley, dilettante that he was, turned up late—he apparently was on his way to a wedding in [the Third Reich], his own wedding, presided over by Joseph Goebbels, and he decided that things weren’t going to plan. Local Labour dignitaries decided that things were getting too fraught and negotiated with the head, the commissioner of the police. Somebody called Commissioner Games [sic], and they decided to point the fascists in the other direction. So instead of trying to get into the East End, they marched away along the embankment.

Other events that happened today (October 4):

1881: Walther Heinrich Alfred Hermann von Brauchitsch, Axis field marshal and the Wehrmacht’s Commander‐in‐Chief, decided that life wasn’t shitty enough for us, so he had to come along.
1892: Engelbert Dollfuß, Austrofascist Federal Chancellor, plagued the earth.
1903: Ernst Kaltenbrunner, lawyer, general, and the Reich Security Main Office’s director, arrived so that he could embarrass the human race.
1976: Francis Joseph Collin sent out letters to the park districts of the North Shore suburbs of Chicago, requesting permits for the NSPA to hold a white power demonstration.
1997: Otto Ernst Remer, a Wehrmacht officer who was partially responsible for German neofascism, dropped dead.
2009: Günther Rall, Wehrmacht major and Luftwaffe aviator, expired.

Quoting Carl T. Schmidt’s The Corporate State in Action: Italy under Fascism, pages 135–6:

Yet despite the efforts of the Fascist régime to salvage property interests and promote recovery, Italy was in an unhappy condition at the end of 1934. For, after more than ten years of power. Fascism had been unable to solve Italy’s economic difficulties.

Mussolini was forced to admit: ‘We touched bottom some time ago. We shall go no farther down. Perhaps it would be hard to sink any lower. . . . We are probably moving towards a period of humanity resting on a lower standard of living. We must not be alarmed at the prospect. Humanity is capable of asceticism such as we perhaps cannot conceive.’^23^

Not long after, in inaugurating the Corporations, he announced: ‘One must not expect miracles.’^24^ Industrial production remained at low ebb, foreign trade still fell off, unemployment was at a distressingly high level and efforts to combat it had had little substantial effect. All this was very harmful to Fascist prestige.

Continued economic troubles and the inner pressures of Fascism impelled the Dictatorship to seek escape in foreign fields. War might be a kind of public works vastly more effective in reviving industry than anything tried before. With their attention focused on the glories of the battlefield, the people might be diverted from an uncomfortable concern over their domestic misfortunes. And certainly a military victory would solidify the Fascist movement and restore its fading glamour.

In this crisis, the rulers themselves would learn that the machine they had built under whose dominion men must live in constant spiritual tension, in fear and uncertainty is above all an engine of warlike enterprise.

(Emphasis added.)

For many Africans, this was the real start of World War II, and Fascism’s reputation in the liberal régimes would never be the same. Ethiopia was the only nation‐state in Africa to have successfully resisted European imperialism up until this point, and the invasion was so shocking to the world that even many otherwise profascist Japanese were appalled (for a while).

It cost the lives of at least 350,000 Ethiopians, involved numerous unpunished war crimes, and brought Europe’s two Fascist empires closer together, serving as an important inspiration to the Third Reich. Its importance can hardly be overstated, but I suspect that many of us know little to nothing about his tragedy thanks to Eurocentrist education.

Now, concerning the documentary: it is a bit crude and archaic at times, and being made for television it inevitably suffers from time constraints, but it is still quite good for beginners and anybody who is more orientated towards visual learning. It also provides examples of U.S. attitudes towards Mussolini pre‐1935, something that antisocialists rarely discuss.

Alternatively, Lion of Judah is an hour longer and is lush with precious archived footage, but it almost feels like a stereotypical nature documentary with its painfully long pauses between narrations, its lengthy shots of almost everything that the Italians and Ethiopians were doing (from dancing to pedestrianism), and the subtitles are difficult to read, but beggars can’t be choosers. (There are a few modern, amateur documentaries available, but I’m reluctant to recommend them given that the authors are centrist chumps.)

Further reading:

*The Invasion of Ethiopia – Mussolini’s […] Plan For Restoration of the Roman Empire*

Prelude to World War II

Click here for more.

My humblest request is that we not let the memory of this tragedy fade away. Where other educators have failed in their duty, we must not fail in ours.

Other events that happened today (October 3):

1894: Walter Warlimont, Deputy Chief of the Operations Staff of the Third Reich’s Armed Forces High Command, blighted the earth.
1904: Ernst‐Günther Schenck, SS doctor, joined him.
1940: The Vichy government promulgated the Law on the status of Jews, which reduced France’s Jews to second‐class citizens.
1942: An Axis V‐2 rocket reached a record 85 km (46 nm) in altitude.
1943: Axis forces massacred 92 civilians in Lingiades, Greece.

(Spotted here.)

Babi Yar is a giant, giant thing. It’s, you know… the Holocaust was essentially two parts: it was the death camps that’s represented by Auschwitz, and it’s the Holocaust by bullets which is just—it was just so often ignored, which is just taking Jews out in pits and shooting them, invariably with the help of local collaborators, and Babi Yar was when thirty‐three thousand Jews were killed in two days. In two days. Okay.

And, you know, there’s—Ukraine is filled with them. I mean, you know, my city Kharkiv has Drobytsky Yar, you know, fifteen‐thousand Jews in two days. It’s, it’s…it’s just, that’s how it is, and… but Babi Yar [is] the Auschwitz of the Holocaust by bullets. And it’s this giant, sprawling ravine—again, thirty‐three thousand bodies, you have to point [out], you know—um… and it has been the target of so much attempts at perversion from various sides.

In 2016, I believe, 2016 and 2017, um…during commemorations of Babi Yar, the Ukrainian government did this despicable thing, which is they put up a temporary display with the Ukrainian nationalists who assisted the [Wehrmacht] in killing the Jews. These people who ran newspapers with the most vile—that egged on Ukrainians to help with this [populicide]. […] It wasn’t enough to kill thirty‐three thousand people in two days. They, afterwards, they were running these […] newspapers saying, ‘Beware! There still may be Jews hiding in the city! Be vigilant for any survivors, lest there any who weren’t killed!’ Okay.

And these people—I mean, it just makes my blood boil—these people, you know, then listed them as victims, because eventually the [Axis] got tired of them and executed them too, these nationalists. And some people say [that] they were killed in Babi Yar, some people—there’s a lot of evidence that they weren’t actually killed in Babi Yar. But regardless of wherever they were killed, it would be like […] putting a memorial to the 9/11 hijackers at Ground Zero, ’cause technically they were killed there too. You know.

And the pain of it, and Jewish organizations stood there and they commemorated Babi Yar with this obscene, this obscene mockery, this perversion of a commemoration, and that’s just the tip of the iceberg, because Babi Yar does not have an actual museum complex, a comprehensive introduction: What is Babi Yar, what happened there, who killed who[m], who were the victims, who were the perpetrators.

(Mirror.)

On April 23, 1940 no more than two weeks after the [Fascist] invasion of Denmark and Norway, Himmler ordered the establishment of a Waffen SS unit which was to include volunteers from these two countries: The SS Standarte Nordland. The recruitment of Scandinavians to Nordland was designed to overcome the strict limits imposed on the growth of the Waffen SS by the Wehrmacht. The Wehrmacht had established a near‐monopoly on recruiting in Germany, forcing the Waffen SS to look outside Germany in its search for manpower.

In the end around 13,000 Danish citizens volunteered for [Fascist] armed service during the Second World War, some 7,000 of whom enlisted. The vast majority — around 12,000 — volunteered for the Waffen SS and the organization admitted around 6,000. The greater part of these Danes served in three different formations: Frikorps Danmark (The Danish Legion), SS Division Wiking and, after the disbandment of the so‐called legions in 1943, in SS Division Nordland. Approximately 1,500 Danish volunteers hailed from the German minority in southern Jutland and served mainly in the Division Totenkopf and to some extent in the 1st SS Brigade.

(Emphasis added, because nobody can excuse these anticommunists by saying that somebody ‘forced’ them to serve.)

Up until June 1941 recruitment did not make serious progress, but the [Axis] assault on the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941 made hitherto politically sceptical groups potential volunteers. The anticommunist theme now became dominant in recruitment propaganda designed to appeal to right‐wing nationalist groups who were not necessarily [Fascists].

Furthermore, physical requirements for volunteers diminished in subsequent years, as the engagement at the eastern front took a heavy toll in human lives. Right‐wing nationalist, but non‐Nazi groups were encouraged to enlist on the grounds that the war against the Soviet Union was a crusade to “protect Europe against Bolshevism”.

[…]

With 1,200 men Frikorps Danmark was sent to Demyansk south of Novgorod in May 1942. In less than three months the corps experienced the loss of close to 350 men who were either killed or wounded.^10^ After a one‐month refreshment and propaganda leave in Denmark the corps returned to the front in November 1941. Originally, Frikorps Danmark was supposed to join 1st SS Brigade in Byelorussia in its indiscriminate killing of civilians in areas associated with Soviet partisans.^11^

However, due to the deteriorating situation at the front both the 1st SS Brigade and the Frikorps were instead sent to frontline duty at the Russian town of Nevel, some 400 kilometers west of Moscow. In the spring of 1943 — as a consequence of further losses and inadequate reinforcements — the corps was down to 633 men and was withdrawn from the frontline.^12^

[…]

Naturally education of the rank and file was on a different level but incorporated nonetheless an endless number of ideological elements, from ordinary lectures in Weltanschauung to bayonet practice on Jewish‐looking cardboard figures.^26^ Correspondence also illustrates how several Danish volunteers identified with [Fascist] values.

But whereas it is easily shown how many Danish volunteers became radical anti‐Semites and otherwise ideologically inflamed, it is less easy to document the extent to which the Danish Waffen SS soldiers were involved in criminal actions against civilians and enemy POWs. Unfortunately, only a limited number of official documents related to the Waffen SS field units in question (such as war diaries and orders‐of‐the‐day) are available today. […] Nevertheless we can document a number of incidents.

During Frikorps Danmark’s first frontline engagement in the so‐called Demyansk pocket near Lake Illmen in northwest Russia, a trooper tells his diary that a [Soviet] POW was shot by a Danish Waffen SS volunteer, apparently because he stole cigarettes from the troops.^28^ The diary also mentions that a [Soviet] boy soldier around 12 was sentenced to death because he attempted to escape a prison camp.

Furthermore, evidence from different sources suggests that in a specific attack that included most of Frikorps Danmark a number of Russian POWs were shot in retaliation for the death of Frikorps commander von Schalburg. Von Schalburg was killed during the early phase of the assault and this apparently enraged the Danes. A Danish officer wrote home, “no prisoners were taken that day”.^29^

One especially brutal description, concerning the killing of a civilian Jew, also dates from the Demyansk period. It is one of the very few clear‐cut illustrations of how ideology and war crimes could be directly related. Thus another diary‐writing soldier notes the following:

A Jew in a greasy Kafkan walks up to beg some bread, a couple of comrades get a hold of him and drag him behind a building and a moment later he comes to an end. There isn’t any room for Jews in the new Europe, they’ve brought too much misery to the European people.^30^

After the disbandment of the Frikorps Danmark the men were transferred to the newly established Division Nordland and sent to Yugoslavia during the fall of 1943. Here they became involved in a very brutal fight with local partisans. On at least one occasion Danes from “Regiment Danmark” burned down an entire village from which shots had been fired, and despite finding no adult men there they apparently killed the inhabitants.^31^

The Danish officer Per Sørensen relates a story that might be addressing the same situation or perhaps one like it. In a letter that escaped censorship by travelling with a colleague to his parents, he brags about having killed 200 “reds” without suffering a single casualty.^32^

[…]

Another Dane, the doctor Carl Værnet, was among the doctors in [Axis] service who conducted medical experiments on inmates in the camps. During autumn 1944 in the Buchenwald concentration camp Værnet implanted an artificial “sexual gland” in 15 homosexual or effeminate male inmates in order “to cure them” from their “wrong” sexuality. The experiments were authorized by Himmler personally.

Though some of the prisoners submitted to Værnets “treatment” died, Værnet managed to avoid a post‐war trial, despite undergoing short internment and investigation by the Danish authorities.^39^

(Emphasis added in all cases. As always, the examples included in this excerpt were by no means the only ones from which to choose.)

Events that happened today (October 2):

1847: Paul von Hindenburg, conservative who helped promote the NSDAP to institutional power, was born.
1935: Benito Mussolini announced amid a large gathering of ministers, state secretaries and specially selected foreign dignitaries that war with Ethiopia was imminent.
1938: Alexandru Averescu, profascist Romanian, dropped dead.
1944: The Wehrmacht terminated the Warsaw Uprising.

Despite the just struggle of the Ethiopians for their liberation and the enormous support they enjoyed from Diaspora Africans and the worldwide condemnation of the fascist atrocities, however, the Allied Forces were insensitive to the Ethiopian cause at least till 1940 when Italy declared war on Britain. The British then were compelled to become objective allies of Ethiopia, but not necessarily genuine supporters of the Ethiopian cause.

In January 1942, the Allied leaders labeled Hitler’s government as ‘régime of terror’ and supported the idea of trying the Nazi war criminals while they were shy in condemning the fascist régime in Italy. In point of fact, both Hitler and Mussolini founded […] governments of the fascist type, shared [the] same ideology of jingoism, and were menace[s] to world peace and as such should have been treated equally. The difference between the two was that Hitler was a menace to the very existence of European nations while Mussolini was engaged in destroying a black nation and an island of independence in colonized Africa.

Adding fuel to the fire, long after Mussolini was ousted from power and Badoglio was appointed as prime minister by King Vittorio Emanuele, the Allied leaders, particularly the British, continued to ignore all charges of war crimes against Badoglio. By some secret machinations, Badoglio, who seemed to have promised the British to keep the peace and preserve stability in Italy, had become the ‘good guy’ in the eyes of the Allied Powers.

When the War Crimes Commission was established under the auspices of Britain on October 1943, Ethiopia was deliberately excluded from the Commission, due to fear, perhaps, that Ethiopians will demand the trial of the fascist criminals. In fact, Britain’s Foreign Office made all efforts to frustrate Ethiopian demands and the lobbying efforts of friends of Ethiopia and Sylvia Pankhurst in London. The efforts of Ethiopian officials in London, for instance that of Blatta Ayale Gebre during the formative period of the Commission and later in 1949 of Ato Abebe Retta was also frustrated.

For all intents and purposes, the British Foreign Office and the War Crimes Commission wanted to confine crime charges to the wars they were engaged in, i.e. beginning 1939 and not the 1935–36 Italo‐Ethiopian war. Ultimately, however, the Foreign Office reconsidered its position and decided to include the Ethiopian demand in June 1945 and subsequently invited allies to sign the London Agreement on August of the same year.

At long last, i.e. ten years after Emperor Haile Selassie appealed to the League, Ethiopia was in a position to establish the Ethiopian War Crimes Commission on May 1946 but it had encountered two major hurdles: 1) the Allied leaders were not willing to prosecute the [Fascist] war criminals; 2) Ethiopia did not have enough professional personnel who could gather data in regards to the fascist crimes and coherently present them before the War Crimes Commission.

One factor that contributed to the second deficiency was the systematic killings of the Ethiopian educated élite of the 1920s and 1930s. Thus, after Ethiopia established its own Commission, it took another eight months when Ato Ambaye Woldemariam submitted a report to the UN War Crimes Commission on behalf of Ethiopia.

[…]

Sometimes, history is indeed cruel. Marshall Badoglio, who ordered the use of poison gas against Ethiopians, without encountering any prosecution lived honorably and dignified, and in fact rewarded, till he died in 1956. Marshall Graziani, responsible for the 1937 massacres in Addis Ababa was tried by the Italian government in 1950, not for his crimes in Ethiopia but for his collaboration with the [Third Reich]. He served less than a year in prison although the pretentious and theatrical Italian court sentenced him to 19 years behind bars.

(Emphasis added.)

Events that happened today (October 1):

1878: Othmar Spann, Austrian protofascist, stained the earth.
1936: Francisco Franco was named head of Spain’s Nationalist government. (Coincidentally, the Central Committee of Antifascist Militias of Catalonia dissolved itself, handing control of Catalan defence militias over to the Generalitat.)
1938: Pursuant to the Munich Agreement signed the day before, the Third Reich commenced the military occupation and annexation of Czechoslovakia’s Sudetenland.
1939: After a month‐long siege, the Wehrmacht occupied Warsaw.
1942: USS Grouper torpedoed Lisbon Maru, not knowing that the ship was carrying British prisoners of war from Hong Kong.
1943: After the Four Days of Naples, Allied troops entered the city.
1945: Shizuichi Tanaka, the Axis’s Military Governor of the Philippines, took his own life.
1946: Nuremberg trials sentenced several leading German Fascists to death or imprisonment.
1959: Enrico De Nicola, President of Fascist Italy’s Chamber of Deputies in the early 1920s, expired.
1994: Paul Lorenzen, Fascist philosophist and mathematician, perished.

Pictured (from left to right): Neville Chamberlain, Édouard Daladier, Adolf Schicklgruber, Benito Mussolini, and Galeazzo Ciano before signing the Munich Agreement. Standing behind them are one unknown (possibly British) man, Henri Fromageot, Joachim von Ribbentrop, Freiherr Ernst von Weizsäcker, and Alexis ‘Saint‐John Perse’ Leger. Click here for more photographs.

Quoting A.J.P. Taylor’s The Origins of the Second World War, page 262:

It was no doubt disgraceful that Soviet Russia should make any agreement with the leading Fascist state; but this reproach came ill from the statesmen who went to Munich. […] [The German–Soviet] pact contained none of the fulsome expressions of friendship which Chamberlain had put into the Anglo–German declaration on the day after the Munich conference. Indeed Stalin rejected any such expressions: “the Soviet Government could not suddenly present to the public German–Soviet assurances of friendship after they had been covered with buckets of filth by the [Fascist] Government for six years.”

The [German–Soviet] pact was neither an alliance nor an agreement for the partition of Poland. Munich had been a true alliance for partition: the British and French dictated partition to the Czechs. The Soviet government undertook no such action against the Poles. They merely promised to remain neutral, which is what the Poles had always asked them to do and which Western policy implied also.

Andrew Rothstein’s The Munich Conspiracy is the perfect resource for learning more about this. Pages 70–2:

On September 26 [Adolf Schicklgruber] prepared the way for this by a speech at the Sportpalast in Berlin, in which raving abuse of Czechoslovakia and Beneš, with denunciations of the U.S.S.R. and threats of war, was interspersed with assurances that this was “the last territorial claim which I have in Europe”, expressions of friendship for Britain, France and Poland, and of personal gratitude to Chamberlain.

This was well calculated to impress: since the British Ambassador in Berlin, at any rate, had freely revealed the same train of thought passing through his mind for many months, and Hitler knew from many sources that Nevile Henderson was not alone.

He followed up the speech with a personal letter to Chamberlain on the 27th (which the Prime Minister received the same evening), arguing in the most reasonable tones against various criticisms of his terms, offering to guarantee the independence of the remainder of Czechoslovakia once the German, Polish and Hungarian minorities had gone, and finishing with an invitation to Chamberlain to “continue your effort, for which I should like to take this opportunity of once more sincerely thanking you”—in order to prevent “Prague” from bringing about a general war.^72^

The calculation was correct. Chamberlain snatched at the opportunity, and telegraphed next day to Hitler proposing an immediate Four‐Power Conference (i.e. including Italy). He had already informed the French Government, whose leaders were mainly concerned to get in ahead of Chamberlain (on the morning of the 28th) with an even more eager offer of co‐operation against Czechoslovakia—that it should be required to agree (on pain of losing any French support) to the immediate occupation by German troops of “all four sides of the Bohemian quadrilateral”.^73^

Hitler had only to choose: and he preferred the British precisely because it involved the public participation of Britain and France in the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia, at his dictation. Mussolini, who feared that a war might end in disaster, supported Chamberlain in a series of messages to Hitler.^74^

He sent the necessary invitations on the morning of the 28th; and the conference—Hitler, Mussolini, Chamberlain and Daladier—met on the afternoon of the 29th, sitting until the early hours of the morning of the 30th. Mussolini already had the draft of a settlement, which had been drawn up the previous day by the Germans, and passed on to him by the Italian Ambassador at Berlin: and at a suitable moment, after a preliminary statement by Hitler on the usual lines, Mussolini produced it as his own.

The draft provided for evacuation of the “Sudeten–German” territory, according to a map drawn up by the Germans, between October 1 and 10 and without the destruction of any existing installations: an international commission (of the four Powers with Czechoslovakia) to supervise the evacuation: a plebiscite to be held in “doubtful territories”, which until then would be occupied by international forces: and German troops to begin occupying “predominantly German territory” on October 1.^75^

After argument about the drafting of various passages, with intervals for meals, these points became the essential features of the Munich Agreement, signed on September 30. There were several additional points, designed to make the document more palatable to the public in Britain and France—since none of those present could have supposed that they would make the “carve‐up” more acceptable to Czechoslovakia.

Such were the provisions that the international commission should determine one particular zone which was to be occupied, the boundaries of which were doubtful at Munich: that there was to be the right of option for individuals: that Britain and France maintained the offer of an international guarantee of the new boundaries, made on September 19, and that [the Third Reich] and [Fascist] Italy would join it once the Polish and Hungarian minority questions were settled.

(Emphasis added in all cases.)

Other events that happened today (September 30):

1883: Bernhard Rust, Reich Minister of Science, Education and Culture, was unkind enough to exist.
1939: General Władysław Sikorski became the Polish government‐in‐exile’s prime minister.
1941: The Babi Yar massacre ended.
1942: Hans‐Joachim Marseille, Axis pilot, died.
1944: The Third Reich commenced a counteroffensive to retake the Nijmegen salient, this having been captured by the Allies during Operation Market Garden.
1946: A Chinese firing squad executed Takashi Sakai, the Axis’s governor of Hong Kong.

Moss: So, today, apologists and supporters of Bandera would say that this was totally just a strategic thing, but the fact is that they were very much ideologically — or, at least, became so by the time that World War II started, that the OUN was ideologically aligned with Nazi Germany. Just to give one example — one of the leaders of the OUN, which, he goes over to the OUN‐M camp, but, regardless — in the fall of 1938, he was in Canada, and he’s saying the world is divided into two different camps: one led by, quote, “the communist international Moscow under the control of international Jews,” and the other is the nationalist camp, including Fascist Italy and [the Third Reich].

And he even says, in 1938, “Our Canadian–Ukrainian democrats are afraid that Hitler will invade the Ukraine and that the Ukrainian fascists are in close alliance with Germany and Hitler. Actually, we Ukrainian nationalists will ally ourselves not only with Germany, but with the Devil himself as long as the Devil will help us.” And so Hitler was that Devil that they were perfectly willing to go along with. If the whole thing was to be strategic, that doesn’t really make sense because, obviously, Hitler had no intentions to liberate Ukraine, and there were signs of that at the time.

[…]

Moss: It gets worse when you consider that, about a week after [the Western Axis] invades the Soviet Union and OUN‐B tries to declare its own independent state without [Berlin’s] permission and Germany — the Gestapo — arrests Bandera and his first deputy, Yaroslav Stetsko, and brings them to Berlin. And the thing is, there’s this myth that, because they refused to retract their declaration of independence, they wound up in a concentration camp.

That doesn’t happen for months, until the end of the summer — Bandera and Stetsko are initially placed under house arrest, and then they’re allowed, actually, that’s even loosened and they’re just restricted to Berlin. So there’s this sort of ambiguous relationship over that summer, and the militias that the OUN‐B created, that they thought would be the nucleus of this revolutionary army or whatever, ends up becoming subordinated to the SS and plays a serious rôle in the mass shooting of Jews that summer as [Axis forces] push east into the Soviet Union and, particularly, Soviet Ukraine.

And so it’s actually only after the OUN‐B assassinates two key OUN‐M leaders just before [Axis troops] reach Kyiv that, I think it’s Heydrich orders, as a result of this assassination of these rival OUN leaders, that the [German Fascists] actually now finally come down pretty hard on the OUN‐B. And yet the leaders of the OUN‐B, Bandera and Stetsko and others who wind up in concentration camps, are treated as political prisoners, as are — I think there was a similar thing with Romanians and, essentially, these other [Axis] collaborators who got a little out of hand and were put in these concentration camps as privileged political prisoners.

And then, in the case of the OUN‐B and other OUN leaders, they’re released in the autumn of 1944. So, it’s all part of this myth that the OUN (and, particularly, the OUN‐B) only briefly had the strategic alliance with [the Third Reich], but then, once it became clear that the [German Fascists] weren’t going to support them, that they launched this big anti‐Nazi resistance. And it’s just simply not true because, even when Bandera is under arrest in Germany (or held under, basically, de facto arrest), he’s still encouraging his followers to collaborate with [the Third Reich].

The more you look into it, the more you can see that these myths about the OUN‐B being an anti‐Nazi resistance movement is just patently wrong.

(Emphasis original.)

Events that happened today (September 29):

1881: Ludwig von Mises, Austrofascist turned neoclassical liberal, rudely burdened us all with his presence.
1912: Michelangelo Antonioni, Axis journalist and draftee, was born.
1941: The Wehrmacht, with the aid of Ukrainian anticommunists, commenced the two‐day Babi Yar massacre.
1998: Bruno Munari, Axis artist, expired.

Description:

This week on the “Bandera Lobby Show” I was honored to be joined by John-Paul Himka, a leading historian of Ukraine, and the author of Ukrainian Nationalists and the Holocaust: OUN and UPA’s Participation in the Destruction of Ukrainian Jewry, 1941–1944. We scheduled this interview before the outbreak of “NaziGate,” but spent some time talking about the recent scandal in Canadian parliament and the Ukrainian Waffen-SS Galicia Division. If you haven’t already, consider buying Dr. Himka’s book(s) and check out his Academia website!

(Source.)

P.S.

Wanted to highlight this: Dr. Himka shares his opinion that concentration on veterans of Waffen-SS Galicia Division since the 1980s has "rather misled people... & in the meantime the 🇨🇦 government, 🇺🇸 government has been supporting OUN fronts for years in large amounts of money."

Events that happened today (September 28):

1937: The Boletín Oficial del Estado officiated the ‘Fiesta Nacional del Caudillo’, the first time that somebody referred to Francisco Franco as the Caudillo. Meanwhile, Mussolini and Schicklgruber spoke together at a famous rally in Berlin. While the League of Nations officially condemned the Imperial bombing of Chinese cities that day, two of the League’s members, Britain and France, balked at the Spanish Republic’s demand to condemn Germany and Italy as aggressors and allow arms exports to the Spanish government, fearing it would worsen the general situation in Europe.
1939: The siege of Warsaw ended. Coincidentally, Berlin and Moscow renegotiated their Spheres of Influence.
1941: The Drama uprising against the Bulgarian occupation in northern Greece commenced.
1944: The Red Army liberated the Klooga concentration camp in Estonia.

Pictured: ‘Representatives of the governments of Italy, Germany, and Japan sign the Three Power Pact, establishing the Rome–Berlin–Tokyo Axis. Seated left to right are: Galeazzo Ciano (Italy), Joachim von Ribbentrop (Germany), and the Japanese ambassador, Kurusu.’ (Source.)

Quoting Christian Goeschel’s Performing the New Order: The Tripartite Pact, 1940–1945:

On 27 September 1940, Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy and Imperial Japan signed the tripartite pact in Berlin. The signatories committed to ‘assist one another with all political, economic, and military means when one of the three Contracting Parties is attacked by a power at present not involved in the European war or in the Sino‐Japanese conflict’. The pact was a warning to the USA not to enter the wars in Europe and China. But [Washington] immediately saw the pact as the formal confirmation of Japan’s belligerence and so increased its military involvement in the Pacific.^1^

The tripartite pact built on existing treaties, including the military alliance between Italy and Germany, formalized in the 1939 Pact of Steel, and the German–Japanese Anti‐Comintern pact, concluded in 1936 and joined by Italy in 1937. Hungary, Romania, Slovakia, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia (the latter country albeit only for twelve days) and then the Independent State of Croatia joined the tripartite pact subsequently, but the three main signatories denied the accessory states equal rank, thereby perpetuating their idea of a strictly hierarchical world order.^2^

[The Third Reich’s] non‐aggression pact with the Soviet Union in late August 1939 had greatly upset [Tōkyō]. But as the June 1940 defeat of France by [the Third Reich] had demonstrated, the defeat of liberal democracy seemed within reach of the Axis powers.^3^

At first the alliance with Imperial Japan may looking puzzling, especially given that the German Fascists had mixed feelings on the Japanese, but given Imperial Japan’s fierce competition with liberal colonialism and its militant anticommunism, an alliance was too good to pass up:

Germany and Italy had previously maintained close links with China, but Japan’s increasing undermining of the liberal–internationalist order helped raise the possibility for the [Fascist] dictatorships to expand their territories.^5^

Pictured: ‘German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop (standing at right), addresses the audience gathered to witness the signing of the Three Power Pact, establishing the Rome–Berlin–Tokyo Axis. Seated from left to right are: the Japanese Ambassador Kurusu, Galeazzo Ciano (Italy), and German Chancellor Adolf Hitler.’ (Source.)

The signing of the pact was a triumph for Hitler. While he regarded the Japanese as racially inferior, he admired Japanese military achievements such as the 1905 victory over Russia. He saw an alliance with Nippon in strategic terms, or at least that is what he told his entourage in May 1942 when Germany, Japan and Italy dominated large swaths of Europe, East and Southeast Asia and North Africa.^23^ Moreover, because of his racist views, he did not agree with Japan’s aim to drive European colonial powers from Asia; yet in this case he was prepared to subsume his racist principles to strategic considerations.^24^

The pact’s signing in Berlin underlined Germany’s preponderant position in the alliance at the time. Despite the fanfare, reactions in Britain and the United States were cool overall. Joseph C. Grew, the U.S. ambassador to Tokyo, drily stated that the pact ‘may be a diplomatic success for Germany’, but he could not see how Tokyo would benefit from it.^25^

Soon afterwards, in January 1941, the American historian A. Whitney Griswold commented on the pact in Foreign Affairs. For him, the pact had been Germany’s brainchild. Europe still held the reins over East Asian matters. The Times, while warning against the tripartite powers’ aggression to conquer living space, judiciously commented that in ‘political geometry, the Axis is an unstable figure’.^26^

One conclusion that I find disagreeable—and I am well aware that I’m being iconoclastic for saying this—is that the Axis had ‘no common military strategy’. Even overlooking theaters such as North Africa, Greece, Yugoslavia, and the Eastern Front, the unimplemented invasions Kantokuen and Operation Orient suggest that that is at least questionable.

Quoting James William Morley in Deterrent Diplomacy: Japan, Germany, and the USSR, 1935–1940, pages 182–3:

On [Tōkyō’s] intent in signing the pact, […] Konoe as well as senior Foreign Ministry and navy officials were sincere in not wanting war with the United States. At the same time, especially after Germany’s victories in Europe, they were not prepared any more than were the army or the right wing radicals in the media and elsewhere in the bureaucracy to defer to American opposition or possible German greed and let China or the former European colonies in Southeast Asia slip from their grasp.

The pact was designed to solve this problem, that is, to confirm [Berlin’s] lack of ambition in these areas and, without war but by presenting an appearance of a formidable German–Japanese military combination, to dissuade the United States from pushing its opposition to Japan to a military showdown.

(Emphasis added in all cases.)

The most important lesson that we should draw from this is that the Axis’s creation was not purely a matter of choice. Nobody coerced another power into agreeing to the alliance, but that is beside the point: the Axis was a consequence of capital’s need to expand. When the Great Depression devastated Imperial Japan’s economy, warfare was the escape hatch. Thus:

The organic weaknesses inherent in Japanese capitalism have made its life span particularly violent and explosive; have driven it to a continuous series of wars since the first Sino‐Japanese war in the 1890s; have driven it far along the road of economic autarchy and [militarism].

These weaknesses and contradictions are primarily four in nature: (a) Necessity of seeking all vital raw materials beyond its natural frontiers (Japan, up to 1941, had to import 80 per cent of the twenty‐five strategic raw materials listed by Fortune as necessary for modern war; one‐half its copper, zinc, tin and scrap iron had to be imported; one‐fourth its pig iron; one‐third its aluminum; three‐fourths of its iron ore; 90 per cent of its lead and all its mercury and nickel). (b) A weak economic base at home, lacking heavy industries (iron and steel, chemicals, etc.). (c) A dependency on its export trade abroad out of which to accumulate profits to purchase the needed raw materials. (d) An inability to accumulate surplus capital with which to develop and exploit foreign conquests and for foreign investment.

In order for [Imperial] Japan to survive at all it was necessary to take certain measures, both industrial and political, to overcome the weight of these initial handicaps. It is our ignoring of the important industrial changes that largely accounts for the underestimation of [Imperial] Japan’s power.

(Emphasis original. Source.)

While the author did not comprehensively address the problem of war, Daniel Guerin’s Fascism and Big Business gives us clues. Page 330:

Export industry complains that it has been sacrificed. In spite of subsidies from the dumping fund, [Fascist] exports are declining in all the foreign markets, and this is aggravated by the circumstance that world economy is itself in decline. In a memorandum addressed to Chancellor Hitler in June, 1937, the spokesmen of the export industry, particularly of the Rhenish‐Westphalian coal barons, state their grievances.^140^

Exports are strangled by all sorts of formalities that “transform the exchange of goods into a purely bureaucratic activity.” Export industry lacks raw materials: these are reserved almost exclusively for the armament industry. It lacks labor: “They insist on borrowing the best workers from certain branches of industry” in order to assign them to war or synthetic products industries. It lacks capital: it is unable to grant foreign customers the big credits made necessary by increasing competition. It lacks markets: the result of autarky is to isolate [the Fascist] economy from the world market.

“It has been shown,” the memorandum sadly notes, “that the foreign trade of the principal countries in the world does not necessarily depend on the German market.…” So the export industry demands that engines be reversed and contact resumed with world economy.

But—and they do not mince words—it is impossible “to bring back into the orbit of world economy an economy functioning to the detriment of the domestic value of its currency and carrying on solely such activities as rearmament and autarky.”

Thus, the additions of Ethiopia, the Saar Basin, the Rhineland, Austria, and Sudetenland could not possibly have satiated Fascist capital forever, and when the fascists won the Spanish Civil War on April 1939, there was nowhere else to turn but total war.

Other events that happened today (September 27):

1864: Andrej Hlinka, Slovakian fascist, was born.
1940: Julius Wagner‐Jauregg, Fascist eugenicist, dropped dead.
1942: Last day of the Matanikau action on Guadalcanal as United States Marines barely escaped after Axis forces surrounded them.
1944: The Kassel Mission (which aimed to destroy the factories of the engineering works of Henschel & Sohn, which built tracked armoured vehicles and their associated infrastructure) resulted in the largest loss by a USAAF group on any mission in World War II.
2006: Helmut Kallmeyer, a chemist involved in Action T4, took a long overdue dirt nap.

Such decorations seem to materialize expressions of prisoners’ attempts to maintain a distinct identity in the dehumanized cosmos of the camp or a way of recreating a kind of “self.” But what kind of “self”? Most decorative elements refer to characteristics to which prisoners could relate, such as nationality or their place of imprisonment. Except for the initials, inscriptions are mostly not of a very personal nature but refer to the experience of internment or even directly to the racist categories that the SS used for classifying the inmates.

The triangle, for instance—a paradigm symbol for the labeling of concentration camp prisoners—was omnipresent inside the camp, sewn on to every inmate’s shirt and usually combined with a letter referring to the prisoner’s nationality that pushed him/her into the Nazi racial categorization. It is one of the most frequently occurring symbols on altered or handcrafted tags (n = 16).

While it is difficult to determine why prisoners more often employed signs of the oppressive system they had fallen victim to than very specific personal details, the actual act of decorating a tag nevertheless constitutes an act of appropriation and personalization of an item that was originally conceived to mark the owner as non‐person without a name (Sofsky 1997:84).

I refrain from arguing that the decorations embody a conscious and deliberate counteraction by the prisoners in an attempt to recreate their destroyed identities—the psychological distress and disintegration have been comprehensively described by psychologist and Holocaust‐survivor Frankl (2004). However, I do think that these handcrafted items may constitute a probably unconscious re‐appropriation of the self.

Being reduced to a number, deprived of all personal belongings and being humiliated on a daily basis might have triggered in some prisoners acts of resistance. Against all intentions of the SS, some prisoners deployed their tags—maybe the only item they could call their “own”—to distinguish themselves from the dehumanized mass of numbers by connecting it to their pre‐camp lives (e.g., through their initials), or to strengthen a sense of belonging to a specific group of inmates by referring to a shared set of symbols (e.g., the abbreviation of the nationality).

This might not be so far‐fetched when considering the prominent place the prisoner number occupies in survivors' memoirs about recovering their identities in and after the camp (Graf 2015:249–250).

(Emphasis added.)

Events that happened today (September 26):

1877: Ugo Cerletti, Axis neurologist, was born.
1889: Martin Heidegger, Fascist philosophist, was delivered to the world.
1895: Jürgen Stroop, SS commander who led the suppression of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, made the mistake of living.
1942: Senior SS official August Frank issued a memorandum detailing how Jews should be ‘evacuated’.

Bertelsen, a former research fellow at the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, has in recent years cited Holocaust deniers to clear the name of Ivan Demjanjuk, the infamous Ukrainian [Axis] death camp guard.

According to historian Per Rudling, on page 296 of Shkandrij’s latest book, he also “insinuates that the convicted Sobibor death camp guard Ivan Demjanjuk (1920–2012) was framed by the German courts on the basis of ‘forged documents.’ Remarkably, considering that the study is published by a reputable academic publisher, Shkandrij lends credence to the evidently false claims of notorious Holocaust deniers in the Journal of Historical Review, which, Shkandrij maintains has ‘convinced some researchers that Demjanjuk was neither at Sobibor nor at Trawniki’.”

[…]

The last speaker needed no introduction for the CUSUR audience, and neither for many Bandera Lobby Blog readers. The “Last Word on the Matter” went to Lubomyr Luciuk, a Banderite professor at the Royal Military College of Canada, who got his blog deleted from the Times of Israel website after he publicly fantasized about throwing soup at the National Holocaust Monument in Ottawa. Like the Scottish OUN‐B leader Peter Kormylo, he is a Fellow of the Chair of Ukrainian Studies at the University of Toronto.

Last year, Luciuk self‐published a book, Operation Payback: Soviet Disinformation and Alleged Nazi War Criminals in North America, which his bio on the CUSUR program hailed an “instant classic.” This year, McGill‐Queen's University Press published a book on “Soviet Counterinsurgency Operations and the Ukrainian Nationalist Movement” that Luciuk co‐edited with Volodymyr Viatrovych, the OUN‐B’s former “memory czar” of Ukraine.

In his lecture, Luciuk of course did not talk about the role of OUN‐B and its Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) in the Holocaust, but made sure to mention “the Soviet agents” that “disguised themselves on false‐flag operations, pretended to be UPA, went in the villages, killed people, and then the UPA got blamed.”

In other words, “some of the stories you hear about villages being attacked by UPA, killing people, and innocents and so on, are true, except that they weren’t really members of UPA. They were Soviets in disguise.” In fact, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army butchered countless numbers of Poles, Jews, and other “innocents and so on.”

These people are essentially Holocaust deniers. For years, historians like Per Rudling have had these Banderites increasingly flailing, and on the defensive. To hear it from Lubomyr Luciuk, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has given them “the best chance ever to tell our story… so now is the time for us to win the memory war.”

Around this time, an old friend of Zaryckyj’s stepped outside to smoke several cigarettes, and among other things insisted to me that the KGB paid off John‐Paul Himka, the leading historian who wrote Ukrainian Nationalists and the Holocaust, a must‐read book published by Columbia University Press in 2021.

Events that happened today (September 25):

1937: The Chinese Eighth Route Army gains a minor, but morale‐boosting victory in the Battle of Pingxingguan.
1944: Surviving elements of the British 1st Airborne Division withdrew from Arnhem via Oosterbeek, escaping Axis forces.
1946: Hans Eppinger, Jr., Axis physician who joined the NSDAP (despite his Jewish ancestry) and performed experiments on concentration camp prisoners, took his own life.
1968: Hans Friedrich Karl Günther, the only leading racial theorist to join the NSDAP before 1933, was kind enough to drop dead.
1991: CIA asset and the Butcher of Lyon, Nikolaus ‘Klaus’ Barbie, finally kicked the bucket.
2005: Friedrich Peter, active Fascist, finally hit the dirt.

The elderly veteran, Yaroslav Hunka was honored during a session in which President Volodomyr Zelenskyy of Ukraine addressed the lawmakers to thank them for their support since Russia invaded his country, saying Canada has always been on “the bright side of history.” The Speaker of the House of Commons, Anthony Rota — who had compared Zelenskyy to Winston Churchill — recognized a “veteran from the Second World War who fought for Ukrainian independence against the Russians and continues to support the troops today even at his age of 98.”

The assembly then rose to applaud a man in a khaki uniform standing on the balcony, who saluted, according to this screenshot from Canadian television.

The man was identified as Hunka by the Associated Press, which published a photograph showing Zelenskyy smiling and raising a fist during the ovation.

The AP caption described Hunka as having “fought with the First Ukrainian Division in World War II before later immigrating to Canada.” The First Ukrainian Division is another name for the 14th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS, the military wing of the [NSDAP]; the unit was also called SS Galichina.

The comparison to Winston Churchill is actually quite suitable, but not for the reasons that they had in mind.

Related: Leader of Canada’s House of Commons apologizes for honoring man who fought for Nazis. Quote:

“I particularly want to extend my deepest apologies to Jewish communities in Canada and around the world. I accept full responsibility for my action,” Rota said. […] Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s office said in a statement that Rota had apologized and accepted full responsibility for issuing the invitation to Hunka and for the recognition in Parliament. “This was the right thing to do,” the statement said. “No advance notice was provided to the Prime Minister’s Office, nor the Ukrainian delegation, about the invitation or the recognition.”

Make of that what you will.

ETA: ‘His Waffen SS unit bombed children at Toronto's largest Ukrainian community center on Canadian Thanksgiving back in 1949. Few days on the front page, then never spoken of again.’

Incredibly enough, in late 1943, the [Third Reich] commissioned the construction of 200 CR.42 biplanes to the FIAT factory. These aircraft were to be used as bombers for anti‐partisan operations. 73 aircraft were effectively built and transferred to the Luftwaffe, equipping the Nachtschlachtgruppe 9 (Night assault group) that operated in Yugoslavia and central Italy.

Although the contents of this article may seem trivial to some, I felt compelled to share this because the findings don’t jive well with the stereotypical oversimplification of Fascist Italy’s military consisting of poorly equipped weakling. This is a good reminder.

Events that happened today (September 24):

1884: Hugo Schmeisser, Axis arms designer (whom, I’ve read, frequently influenced Schicklgruber and Göring’s decisions), started existing.
1922: Ettore Bastianini, Axis aviator, was born.
1945: Hans Geiger, Axis physicist, expired.
1978: Freiherr Hasso Eccard von Manteuffel, Axis general who was born into a Prussian noble family and eventually lectured at the United States Military Academy at West Point, mustered up the decency to finally drop dead.

Pictured: Eleftherios Venizelos hunched over a table to sign this treaty with Fascist Italy. Benito Mussolini stands to his left.

Quoting Penelope Kissoudi’s The Balkan Games and Balkan Politics in the Interwar Years 1929–1939: Politicians in Pursuit of Peace, page 40:

The first initiatives in the improvement of Greek–Italian relations were taken by the dictator Pangalos in the years 1925 and 1926. [160] After the collapse of this régime, the [Rome] hastened to propose a treaty of arbitration between Greece and Italy. The 1926 Greek–Italian trade agreement paved the way for closer financial collaboration and provided the possibility of future political agreement. [161]

While an autocrat intentionally improving his government’s relation with Fascist Italy may be unsurprising, what is notable is the continuity between the autocracy and the pseudodemocracy that followed. Indeed, relations with Fascist Italy only continued to improve after the autocracy collapsed.

In July 1927, the Greek Foreign Minister Andreas Michalakopoulos and George Kafandaris, Minister of Finance (from 1926 to 1928), paid a visit to Rome. They both aspired to closer financial cooperation with Italy as well as [Fascist] support of the Greek demand for a bank loan from the League of Nations. [162]

Greek–Italian relations entered a new phase when, by the end of 1927, Michalakopoulos, returning to Athens from Geneva, took the opportunity to meet Mussolini. [163] Discussions between the Greek Foreign Minister and the Italian Premier paved the way for the Greco‐Italian treaty of September 1928 agreed by Venizelos and Mussolini. [164]

Venizelos, for those of us unaware, was a Liberal politician whom the Entente supported against Greece’s monarchy, which was neutral in World War I. Since most Greeks had no interest in getting involved in another war, Venizelos’s régime had to exercise a reign of terror to discipline the general population. It may be hard to believe that the commoners preferred monarchism over Liberalism, but it makes sense given how the Entente imposed a Liberal régime on Greece, which, unlike the monarchy, was pro‐war. This is why the author’s assertion that ‘much of the country was behind him’ (again?) should be treated with caution.

That aside, it should be striking that a Liberal Minister of Finance deliberately sought closer financial cooperation with a Fascist state.

The preservation of friendship with Britain and France, the re‐establishment of relationships with Italy and the Balkan neighbours and agreement with Turkey took precedence over all other issues. […] Venizelos […] focused on respect for the territorial status quo. He was opposed to revisionism and [now] dedicated to peace except in case of unprovoked attack. He aspired to avoid foreign entanglements that would either align Greece with some of the great powers or might compel it to rely upon a great power. More significantly, the establishment of friendly relations with Balkan neighbours was priority. [168]

Page 41:

One of the most difficult tasks Venizelos had to accomplish was to persuade London, Paris and Belgrade that the establishment of diplomatic relations with Rome signified no alienation by Athens of its traditional friends. He made clear from the beginning that he would utilize the potential agreement with [Fascist] Italy to compel Yugoslavia to waive excessive claims on Greece and to accept his own conditions for a treaty between the two sides. [169]

Although the prerequisites for successful negotiations between Rome and Athens had been well prepared by Foreign Minister Andreas Michalakopoulos in late 1927, Venizelos's initial effort towards the restoration of good fellowship between [Fascist] Italy and Greece did not initially meet with a positive response. [170] Nonetheless, Greek–Italian relations would be soon restored due to the strong determination of the Greek premier.

The appointment of Alexander Karapanos, former ambassador in Rome, a man who was highly esteemed by the [Fascist] government, as Foreign Minister was the first sure step in achieving Greek–Italian rapprochement. [171] For this reason, it was a suitable time for the Greek premier to meet Mario Arlotta, the [Fascist] Ambassador in Athens, and discuss with him his intention to visit Rome for the purpose of concluding a Greek–Italian agreement. His visit to Rome was to be followed by a visit to Paris. [172]

Venizelos aspired to remove obstacles and dissipate Mussolini’s doubts. He was successful. During Venizelos’s visit to [Fascist] Italy, Mussolini expressed unqualified satisfaction with the initiative taken by his Greek opposite number and the unambiguous attitude of Greece towards [Fascist] Italy. [173] The two sides thus entered into fresh negotiations and the draft of the treaty submitted to the [Fascist] government was fully accepted. [174]

The Greco‐Italian treaty of amity, reconciliation and juridical settlement was eventually agreed in Rome on 23 September 1928. [175] The discussions between Venizelos and Mussolini were aimed at a political rapprochement that could ensure the vital interests of both sides. In consequence, the talks focused particularly on unreserved [Fascist] support for Greece at diplomatic level and on relations between Greece, France and Britain. [176]

The desire for the preservation of good relations between Greece and the great powers and unconditional cooperation with their satellites in the Balkan peninsula stimulated the Greek premier to reject on principle any tempting proposal for a treaty of alliance with Italy. Thus [Rome] did not get all it wanted, but [Athens] got much of what it wanted. Venizelos’s subsequent visit to Paris was designed to reassure the French government that there was no thought of rescinding the agreement with France, which had settled matters touching on Greek war debts. [177]

Page 42:

On 30 September 1928, Venizelos left Paris and travelled to London. Baron Oliver Harvey, British diplomat, in his report on Greek–British relationships, made at the request of Lord Cushendun, who was Foreign Secretary in Chamberlain’s absence, emphasized two crucial points. The first concerned the positive position of the British government on the Greek–Italian treaty, while the second touched on London’s concern for the interests of British companies in Greece. [179]

Venizelos met no serious difficulty in persuading the British rulers of his good intentions. The British government realized that the rapprochement between Greece and Italy, under the terms of the League of Nations, was no threat to British interests in the eastern Mediterranean. [180] Sir Percy Loraine stated, in late 1928, that he had no doubt about Venizelos’s reliability and his good intentions.

(Emphasis added in all cases.)

Events that happened today (September 23):

1861: Robert Bosch, Axis industrialist, was born.
1890: Friedrich Wilhelm Ernst Paulus, Axis field marshal (who failed miserably in his assault on Stalingrad), was rude enough to exist.
1916: Aldo Romeo Luigi Moro, Axis university student and draftee, was born.
1942: The Matanikau action on Guadalcanal commenced: U.S. Marines assaulted Axis units along the Matanikau River.
1968: Pio of Pietrelcina, fascist cleric, expired.

The colonial administration of the liberal era went to great lengths to reach out to Libyan notables, an approach known as the ‘politica dei capi’. This approach culminated in 1919 with the passage of the Libyan Statutes that extended Italian citizenship and afforded a measure of political representation to ‘native’ élites, though identifying who was ‘native’ in the Libyan territories was open to the interpretations of those taking census data, often with little knowledge concerning the ethnicities and identities of peoples in the region (Dumasy 2004–2005, 11–34).

Critics condemned this approach as expensive and ineffectual since it placed individuals with questionable influence on the Italian payroll while limiting direct state control to a few urban centres on the coast. Following Mussolini’s 1922 March on Rome, the colonial administration rejected conciliatory approaches and denounced previous treaties with regional élites in favour of military action to increase the territory under direct control of the [Fascist] state.

The use of violence escalated after 1926 when the military campaign known euphemistically as the ‘reconquest’ of the Libyan interior began in earnest, during which Italian forces (mostly composed of Eritrean troops) instituted a reign of terror.^3^ Assuming the direct complicity of the entire population, they rounded up tens of thousands of civilians and placed them in internment camps in an effort to isolate armed rebel groups.

The capture and execution of the Sanusi military commander Omar al‐Mukhtar in 1931 in the remote oasis of al‐Kufra gave proof to the effectiveness of this wave of military actions (Labanca 2002, 2005, 2012).

Despite this broad shift in the style of colonial rule, one can identify a measure of continuity from the liberal to the fascist era, especially in the period before the ‘reconquest’ began in earnest. The conciliatory approach to colonial rule that characterised the liberal administrations and the willingness to employ violence that characterised the fascist era often coexisted; it seems more useful to think of the Italian approach to colonial rule as shifting along a continuum of violence instead of switching from one mode to the other.

Even while the liberal administrations in the first decade of occupation focused their attentions on the establishment of power‐sharing relationships, they remained prepared for direct military action (Labanca 2012, 99). Even the idea of a ‘reconquest’ emerged before the transition to the Fascist administration under Federzoni’s predecessor as Minister of Colonies, Giovanni Amendola. Likewise, the practices that characterised a liberal style of colonial administration did not end abruptly in the early 1920s.

Colonial governors continued to negotiate with notables even as the military destroyed villages in the Libyan interior, and Mussolini engaged in a public relations campaign in an attempt to deflect international condemnation for the treatment of civilian populations.^4^

(Emphasis added.)

Events that happened today (September 22):

1882: Wilhelm Bodewin Johann Gustav Keitel, Axis field marshal, stained the earth with his existence.
1905: Eugen Sänger, Fascist aerospace engineer, was delivered to the world.
1906: Ilse Koch, Axis war criminal, arrived to worsen life.
1939: The Third Reich held a farewell parade in Brest‐Litovsk.
1941: On the Jewish New Year Day, the SS massacred 6,000 Jews in Vinnytsia, Ukraine. (Those were the survivors of the previous massacred that took place a few days earlier in which about 24,000 Jews were executed.)
1957: Soemu Toyoda, Chief of the Imperial Japanese Navy General Staff, expired.
2000: Saburō Sakai, Axis naval aviator, died.

Nerik Mizzi […] openly support[ed] [Fascist] imperialism by supporting [the Fascist] war effort in […] Abyssinia.^31^ Mizzi’s views can be quoted directly and extensively from MALTA, the newspaper he edited. This was written in Italian and constantly propagated Italian culture, the cause for the official use of the Italian language in Malta and constant praise for the […] fascist government and its policies.^32^ Ivan Vassallo, who describes Mizzi as an Italian imperialist, offers a very comprehensive digest of Mizzi’s views, but fails to mention the British documents which show the extensive financial support that Mizzi received from the […] fascist government.^33^

Henry Frendo states that many Nationalist Party members loved Italy and generally admired Mussolini,^34^ and we can find many instances of open and public Maltese support for fascist Italy. For example, after the assassination attempt on Mussolini’s life in 1926, the Maltese Casa del Fascio in conjunction with the [Fascist] consulate organised several religious services to commemorate the event. In a Te Deum ceremony held in Saint Catherine’s Church in Valletta, a prominent Italian Jesuit, Vincenzo Furci, praised the Duce and extolled his virtues.^35^

Another example is when several Maltese contributed to the ‘Oro per la patria’ campaign started in December 1935 after Italy lost a significant amount of gold reserves during the Abyssinian War. They included the son of Arturo Mercieca, Vittorio Mercieca, the Italian Consulate Legal Advisor Dr. A. Stilon de Piro (later interned), and Rosa Maria and Anna Mallia who were daughters of Carlo Mallia, once a Nationalist Minister and president of the King’s Own Band Club.^36^ Nerik Mizzi made a donation as well, but his party did not.^37^

[…]

It is also clear from the British government’s intelligence report that Mussolini himself pledged financial support to Mizzi. We already know that Mizzi had met with Mussolini twice in his lifetime—once in 1931 and again in 1936.^53^ On 12 November 1936, Mizzi was in Rome and lodged at the Hotel Continental where he requested a meeting with the Duce. Mizzi met Mussolini on 30 November and requested, amongst other things, adverts and subscriptions for MALTA, and these demands were met.

Mizzi also asked for signed photos of the Duce, of Badoglio and H.E. Debono. The newspaper subscriptions were meant for institutes and bodies such as Casa del Fascio (the Italian funded Malta based clubhouse [yes, a clubhouse])^54^ and the cultural institutes.^55^

[…]

The early 1930s had started with Britain tightening its grip over Malta, but it was first the socialists who were purged before the British authorities turned towards Mizzi and the irredentists. In 1932, the Prevention of Seditious Propaganda Ordinance was passed. This was a bill enacted by the Imperial Government to prevent the possession and dissemination of any radical and political material and, in 1933, this bill would be used to purge socialists.

The socialists were also charged with the importation of foreign propaganda and trials led to the dissolution of the Socialist League. Mizzi and his collaborators were in government, however, and their widespread support meant that it would have taken more work to purge them. […] Mizzi was arrested in May 1940 while at the MALTA office in Valletta, expelled in 1942, but returned to Malta from Uganda in March 1945. Once returned, a rehabilitated Mizzi re‐took his post in the Council of Government.^83^

(Emphasis added.)

While this next bit isn’t especially important, I… well… maybe after reading it you’ll understand why I’m including it here:

On 8 September, around fifteen fascists gathered at a demonstration in Ħamrun where they started chanting fascist songs. A crowd of street children soon gathered and starting molesting them, with the leader Victor Savona injuring his forehead in the process, probably from being hit or pushed to the floor.^67^

…no comment.

Events that happened today (September 21):

1894: Anton Piëch, Fascist lawyer, was born.
1934: A large typhoon struck western Honshū, Japan, killing more than 3,000 people.
1939: The Iron Guard murdered Romanian Prime Minister Armand Călinescu.
1942: On the Jewish holiday of Yom Kippur, Axis scum sent over 1,000 Jews of Pidhaitsi to Bełżec extermination camp, while in Dunaivtsi, Ukraine, other Axis scum massacred 2,588 Jews. At Yom Kippur’s end, the Third Reich ordered Konstantynów’s Jews to permanently move to Biała Podlaska.
1944: Artur Gustav Martin Phleps, Axis lieutenant general, died in combat.
2012: Børge Willy Redsted Pedersen (a.k.a. Sven Hazel), Axis soldier, expired.

In 1936, the Liechtenstein Homeland Service merged with the more moderate Christian Social People’s Party to form the Fatherland Union (Vaterländische Union, VU), bringing pro‐Nazi views into the political mainstream.⁵ The VU’s party paper, Liechtensteiner Vaterland, joined with German newspapers to publish personal attacks on Jewish individuals living in Liechtenstein.⁶ Despite this disreputable activity, its leader, Alois Vogt, later became Deputy Head of Government in a coalition of national unity with the Progressive Citizen’s Party in 1938.

Another important [Fascist] organisation was founded in March 1938 — the National German Movement in Liechtenstein (Volksdeutsche Bewegung in Liechtenstein, VDBL).⁷ Membership of this group peaked at just below 500. Under the leadership of a local composer and carpenter, Rudolf Schädler,⁸ the party passed sensitive information about Liechtenstein to the Volksdeutsche Mittelstelle, a […] body responsible for promoting [Fascism] to ‘ethnic Germans’ outside the Reich. The newspaper of the VDBL, Der Umbruch (The Upheaval) published overtly pro[fascist] and anti‐Semitic messages in support of its primary objective — union with Germany.⁹ Some VDBL members even joined the […] SS.¹⁰

[…]

The Volksdeutsche Mittelstelle made some contingency plans for an Austria‐style Anschluss, and lower‐level officials in the bordering Austrian towns conspired with Liechtenstein [Fascists] to plan the 1939 coup, but the [Fascist] leadership, including Foreign Minister Ribbentrop and Hitler himself, saw no real benefit in gobbling up their tiny neighbour.¹⁴ What’s more, many [Fascist] business leaders based in Liechtenstein actively opposed Anschluss because they enjoyed the country’s low tax rates and its usefulness as a neutral business hub.¹⁵

With no diplomatic pretense or widespread popular support to justify annexation, Hitler contented himself with the hope that Liechtenstein would one day willingly apply to join his empire.

[…]

As the [Third Reich] collapsed between the rapidly converging Eastern and Western fronts, 462 soldiers of the First Russian National Army, a collaborationist unit of the […] Wehrmacht, forced their way through a closed border post and into Liechtenstein. Their objective was not conquest, but shelter. Rather than being compelled to return to the Soviet Union, where they would certainly be punished, they were granted asylum in Liechtenstein by the ‘staunchly anti‐communist’ Prince Franz Josef II.²⁴

Liechtenstein’s sudden outburst of munificence on behalf of these soldiers of the Reich contrasts sharply with its reluctance to shelter Jewish refugees fleeing from the Holocaust. Only 230 Jewish refugees were allowed to settle in Liechtenstein in the twelve years from 1933 to 1945.²⁵ The barrier to entry was gradually ratcheted up amid fears that the presence of too many Jews would bring down the ire of the Third Reich and stoke anti‐Semitic discontent among the people (i.e., outbursts of [Fascist] violence).

In addition to its reticent approach to Jewish refugees, Liechtenstein actually partook in some [Fascist] atrocities. An international commission of historians formed in 2001 found that forced labour had been used on the Liechtenstein royal family’s estates in [Fascist] Austria and that the family had made purchases of stolen Jewish land and property.²⁶ Liechtensteiner companies, meanwhile, sold important automotive components and anti‐air shells to the Wehrmacht.²⁷

(Emphasis added.)

Events that happened today (September 20):

1880: Ildebrando Pizzetti, Fascist composer, was born.
1925: After a long delay, Rome finally opened its first underground rail line: the Villa Literno–Napoli Gianturco railway.
1935: Berlin newspapers published photos of five new U‐boats, the Reich’s first public admission to having any.
1941: Lithuanian fascists and local police commenced a mass execution of 403 Jews in Nemenčinė.
1945: Eduard Wirths, chief SS doctor who performed experiments on prisoners, committed suicide in captivity… I have no comment.
1993: Erich Alfred Hartmann, Axis pilot, dropped dead.

Like the euthanasia crimes of [Fascism], the murder of tuberculosis patients in special facilities had a long backstory. As early as the 1920s, lung specialists and other experts responsible for treating tuberculosis paved the way for decisions and actions under [the Third Reich].

Ultimately the decisions of the 1920s culminated in the comprehensive monitoring of tuberculosis patients, their forced transfer to such special facilities and finally their killing through deliberate neglect, including inadequate nutrition. What is more, by constructing the tuberculosis patients as ‘deviant sociopaths’, these experts helped engender social norms that encouraged their exclusion, which prepared the ground for more radical actions under [German Fascism].^7^

[…]

The First World War was also a positive reference point for some doctors whose thinking was particularly radical. They learnt that the situation of war and crisis favoured those social developments that they advocated. A striking example is provided by Berthold Kihn. In 1932 the psychiatrist and later director of the special facility for ‘deviant’ tuberculosis patients in Stadtroda published a paper in the Allgemeine Zeitschrift für Psychiatrie, a major psychiatric journal.

Shortages during the First World War had also had their good side, Kihn proposed: the Hunger Years ‘truly cleaned out things among inmates of insane asylums’, an allusion to the nearly 70,000 psychiatric patients who starved to death in German health facilities between 1914 and 1918.^28^ The naval blockade by the Entente Powers had led to major supply bottlenecks in the German Reich, which had most affected the weakest members of society.

Government food officials and facility directors had calculated that supplies for the ‘insane’ should be diverted in times of emergency to social groups regarded as more important. Belinda Davis, among others, has studied the hierarchy in the food supply: the military were at the top, followed by population groups important to the war effort, such as industrial workers; at the very bottom were the ‘useless’ inmates of prisons and other penal institutions.^29^

Thus, as Davis shows, there was a sharp divide between ‘food for the strong’ and ‘food for the weak’. Here was much more than a philosophy, well before the [Fascist] takeover of power, that was based on a differential valuation of human life. Such considerations, I contend, ultimately led to the actions of a relatively small group of lung doctors and psychiatrists who rapidly rose to leading positions and, like Kihn, after 1933 organized and implemented the forced incarceration of tuberculosis patients.

[…]

We do not know precisely how many tuberculosis patients lost their lives to negligent care and patient murder. The special facilities did not maintain separate statistics for deliberate deaths and, additionally, there are large gaps in the available records. We can, however, estimate those figures. Through the files preserved from Karthaus, for example, we know that of the 391 persons with tuberculosis committed to that special facility between 1939 and 1945, about 20 per cent died.

While that figure includes instances where the patients died of tuberculosis, this number suggested a death rate much higher than the peacetime death rate among psychiatric inmates. According to official medical statistics, prior to the First World War and in the interwar period the annual mortality rate for those admitted for psychiatric reasons was 7 to 8 per cent.^99^

We therefore have reason to conclude that between 1933 and 1945, a considerable proportion of forcibly interned persons with tuberculosis died as the result of deliberate starvation. If we assume 12 per cent excess mortality, then of the approximately 30,000 patients interned in the special facilities, up to 4,000 would have died as a result of the conditions of their detention rather than from their disease.

(Emphasis added. Note the continuities between the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich.)

Events that happened today (September 19):

1909: Ferdinand Anton Ernst Porsche, bourgeois Fascist, was born.
1939: The Battle of Kępa Oksywska concluded, with Polish losses reaching roughly 14% of all the forces engaged.
1940: Witold Pilecki was voluntarily captured and sent to Auschwitz concentration camp to gather and smuggle out information for the resistance movement.
1944: The Battle of Hürtgen Forest commenced, and would become the longest individual battle that the U.S. Army has ever fought. (Coincidentally, the Moscow Armistice between Finland and the Soviet Union was signed, which officially ended the Continuation War.)