Capitalism in Decay

You likely already know why, given the circumstances, Moscow’s signature on the nonaggression treaty was inevitable, but it is rare for anybody to make a serious attempt to understand the treaty from the Fascist bourgeoisie’s point of view.

Quoting William Young’s German Diplomatic Relations 1871–1945: The Wilhelmstrasse and the Formulation of Foreign Policy, pages 264–5:

Having secured an alliance with [Fascist] Italy, [Berlin] became interested in obtaining an agreement with the Soviet Union concerning the status of East Europe. Despite his anti‐Soviet sentiments, the Führer understood that such an understanding would totally isolate Poland from the West, making it unlikely that Britain and France would militarily support the Poles during a German–Polish conflict.^243^

Hitler saw the British guarantee to Poland as a bluff, but the added benefit of a German–Soviet pact would guarantee a localized conflict instead of a European war.^244^ The idea of a German–Soviet agreement came from Ribbentrop, who was still in Hitler’s disfavor over the British reaction to Prague and seeking a way to endear himself to the Führer, in April.^245^ The Foreign Minister viewed a German–Soviet understanding as a guaranteed way to diplomatically force the Poles into agreeing to Hitler’s demands.^246^

He jumped at the opportunity as a way to retain his position as the Führer’s top diplomat.^247^ Those diplomats in the Foreign Office, such as Weizsäcker and Dirksen, who traditionally had argued for closer German–Soviet relations, supported such an initiative.^248^ The [Fascist] leadership [mis]perceived Stalin’s dismissal of Maxim Litvinov and appointment of Vyacheslav Molotov as Foreign Commissar as a sign of Soviet interest in a German–Soviet rapprochement.^249^

Thus, on 4 May 1939, the Wilhelmstrasse, under Hitler’s direction, investigated the possibility of closer relations by recalling Gustav Hilger, the Chief of Economic Affairs at the German Embassy in Moscow, to Berlin for consultation with Hitler and Ribbentrop.^250^ On 10 May, Hilger answered the Führer’s questions concerning the likelihood of a German–Soviet rapprochement at Berchtesgaden. Hilger gave the [Fascist] leader the impression that Stalin was willing to come to terms.^251^

Hitler, however, hesitated in making a diplomatic move towards the Soviet Union. He waited to find out the results of British and French diplomatic efforts to negotiate a triple alliance with the Soviet Union.^252^ Weizsäcker, impatient over the wait, suggested to Ribbentrop that Hilger approach the Soviet Foreign Commissariat to hint at Hitler’s desire for closer German–Soviet relations.^253^

In the meantime, the Wilhelmstrasse received signals that the Soviet Union was interested in a rapprochement.^254^ Therefore, on 29 May 1939, Hitler made the decision to employ the foreign service to pursue closer ties with the Soviet Union.^255^ Moscow, nonetheless, showed no immediate interest to begin negotiations.^256^ Thus, on 29 July, Ribbentrop directed Count Friedrich Werner von der Schulenburg, the German Ambassador to Moscow (1934–41), to inform Molotov that Germany was ready to take account of “all Soviet interests” in Poland and the Baltic states.^257^

While little diplomatic activity took place between Germany and the Soviet Union, the relations between Germany and Poland were quickly reaching the crisis point.

(It may be worth noting that Molotov said that the nonaggression treaty should be modeled on one signed with ‘Poland, Latvia, Estonia, etc.’)

Simply put, suspending Moscow in a state of neutrality allowed the Fascist bourgeoisie to prepare for its long‐term goals—most notably its invasion of the Soviet Union. The Fascist bourgeoisie could concentrate on annexing and occupying other countries, thereby building up its economies. Quoting from Martijn Lak in Industrial Collaboration in Nazi‐Occupied Europe, page 124:

When Hitler informed his subordinates in July 1940 of his intention to attack the Soviet Union the next year, it would have been even more [irrational] to undermine the occupied Western economies. Göring “now decided to milk the cow, not butcher her”.^46^ By means of the Auftragsverlagerung, military production could be increased considerably.^47^

But that is not all. Quoting V. Issraeljan’s and L. Kutakov’s Diplomacy of Aggression: Berlin–Rome–Tokyo Axis, Its Rise and Fall, pages 29 & 31–2:

In a long‐winded letter […] Hitler dwelt on German–Soviet relations as well, showing why it had been necessary to sign the Soviet–German treaty and touching upon other aspects of the relations between Germany and the USSR.

Speaking of the prospects of the war, he informed Mussolini that a decisive offensive would soon be launched against the Western powers. In conclusion, he re‐emphasised that sooner or later fate would compel [the Third Reich] and [F]ascist Italy to fight shoulder to shoulder.

This message made it clear that under no circumstances would [the Third Reich] agree to conciliation with the Western powers and that [it] was preparing for large‐scale military operations. However, Hitler said nothing about the time or nature of these operations. The letter showed that the [German Fascists] were unquestionably out to induce Italy to take an active part in their plans.

[…]

His utterances on Soviet–German relations are interesting. In the same breath that he justified the signing of a treaty with the USSR he emphatically underlined that he was “absolutely alien” to Bolshevism. “Germany and Russia,” he said, “were two different worlds, especially in their social structure.”** [The Third Reich] had only one ally and partner, and that ally and partner was Italy, he declared. This two‐hour tirade impressed Mussolini.

He reaffirmed that [Fascist] Italy and [the Third Reich] had common interests, stating that he “hated” Britain and France, and informed Hitler of [Fascist] Italy’s preparations for possible entry into the war. These preparations, he said, would be completed in three or four months at the latest, and after that he would “not be in the embarrassing position of seeing his comrade fighting and himself being limited to making demonstrations” although he, Mussolini, “was conscious of being of use to Germany in his rôle on the ‘left wing’ [read: by its side]”.

He added that he would have liked to do more than he was doing at the moment.* If the [Third Reich’s] offensive in the West was successful, Italy, Mussolini promised, would forthwith enter the conflict in order to hasten the outcome. If matters developed otherwise he would prefer to wait until Italy was fully prepared for war.

(Emphasis added in all cases.)

Other events that happened today (August 23):

1923: Two Fascists in Argenta murdered an antifascist priest, Giovanni Minzoni, fracturing his skull and beating him to death with clubs (probably on Italo Balbo’s orders).
1942: The Axis began the Battle of Stalingrad.
1943: The Axis lost Kharkiv to the Soviet Red Army after the Battle of Kursk.
1944: The Axis lost Marseille to the Allies. Meanwhile, King Michael of Romania dismissed the pro‐Reich government of Marshal Antonescu, who was later arrested; Romania switched sides from the Axis to the Allies.

I found out about the “American Banderite Network” because I wanted to learn more about a neo-Nazi Azov flag that recently appeared at the Ukrainian Independence Day festival in Toronto. It decorated the booth of a volunteer organization rooted in a private Facebook group, in which I found a picture (seen above) of the same flag at a pro-Azov rally in Toronto. This one is unusual because it’s the flag of the Azov Battalion, when it was still a proudly neo[fascist] unit, and features the sonnenrad and wolfsangel symbols that created PR problems for the Azov movement.

It turned out not to be the only time that Benson has shown up to an Azov solidarity protest in Canada with a skull mask and the more rarely seen flag of the Patriot of Ukraine, the neo[fascist] paramilitary organization that spawned the Azov Battalion. “Don’t think of me or Kievan Rus [i.e. Benson] as the ‘all powerful leaders.’ We are merely the ones who inspired the whole thing,” the “Romanian guy” once said about the ABN.

The Canadian Anti-Hate Network has reported that Ben Mockler, or “Aquila,” is a former member of the Church of Aryanity, not to mention a neo[fascist] “cult recruiter” and “active club” organizer in Ottawa “for the world’s largest white power gang.” Mockler appeared on the “Fashcroft” livestream with Boneface and Hammer. He asked Kent McLellan about the possibility of a neo[fascist]i coup in Ukraine when the war ends. “Like honestly, this is a situation I don’t even want to talk about, if that makes sense…” McLellan said. “That’s my answer, if you catch what I’m saying.”

Events that happened today (August 22):

1895: László Almásy, Axis aviator and explorer, was born.
1941: Axis troops began the Siege of Leningrad.
1944: Axis forces on Crete committed populicide against the inhabitants of Amari Valley.
1946: Döme Sztójay, Axis head of state, dropped dead.

Unaddressed is the claim that ‘Lenin’ smashed unions. Correct me if I’m wrong, but didn’t the Bolsheviks only destroy the anticommunist trade unions, while assimilating the socialist ones?

Events that happened today (August 21):

1934: Benito Mussolini met with Austrian Chancellor Kurt Schuschnigg in Florence. Meanwhile, an international Jewish conference in Geneva declared that the boycotting of the Third Reich would be redoubled until the rights of German Jews were fully restored.
1936: Fascist Italy accepted a French proposal to pursue a policy of nonintervention in the Spanish Civil War. Britain announced a similar policy to the Third Reich’s, warning that any attempt to interfere with British shipping in Spanish waters would be met with stern measures.
1937: The Spanish fascists captured Villacarriedo.
1940: Johann Schalk received the Ehrenpokal der Luftwaffe, while the ‘tree of liberty’, planted in Saverne after Alsace was restored to France at the end of World War I, was chopped down by members of the Hitler Youth.
1941: As the Axis captured the Ukrainian port city of Kherson and the Bila Tserkva massacre took place in Ukraine, Berlin ordered Army Group North to encircle Leningrad, believing that the loss of the symbolic capital of the Russian Revolution would deal a crushing blow to Soviet morale. Coincidentally, the Axis officially opened the Drancy internment camp in France and also commissioned the submarines U‐376 and U‐584. But less happily for the Fascist bourgeoisie, the communist activist Pierre Georges murdered Axis naval cadet Alfons Moser at the Barbès–Rochechouart metro station in Paris by shooting him in the back.
1942: The Guadalcanal Campaign: American forces defeat an attack by Imperial Japanese Army soldiers in the Battle of the Tenaru.
1943: The Axis lost both Kiska and Wewak.
1944: Canadian and Polish units captured the strategically important town of Falaise, Calvados, France, from the Axis. (Coincidentally, Dumbarton Oaks Conference, prelude to the United Nations, began.)
1945: The first major Imperial Japanese surrender ceremony in China took place at the Zhijiang Airport in Hunan Province.

If you aren’t faint of heart or afflicted with battle fatigue, see this film as soon as possible, if you have not done so already. Not only is this an invaluable resource for getting a good idea of how the Fascists suppressed Libyans, but (with the arguable exception of the length) this is also a rare example of a film that does everything right: the story, dialogue, acting, music, pacing, cinematography, and other technical aspects are all more than satisfactory. There is not one aspect of this film that feels inadequate, unless you count the viewership.

Events that happened today (August 20):

1940: The Eighth Route Army launched the Hundred Regiments Offensive, a successful campaign to disrupt Axis war infrastructure and logistics in occupied northern China. (Coincidentally, Prime Minister Winston Churchill made the fourth of his famous wartime speeches, containing the line ‘Never was so much owed by so many to so few’.)
1942: István Horthy de Nagybánya, Axis Deputy Regent, died in a flight accident.
1943: The Axis submarine U‐197 was sunk in the Indian Ocean by a PBY Catalina of № 265 Squadron RAF; on the same day, the Axis submarine U‐670 sank in the Bay of Danzig after a collision with the target ship Bulkoburg. Meanwhile, the Empire of Japan and the Kingdom of Thailand signed a peace treaty, in which four provinces of Axis‐occupied British Malaya (Kedah, Perlis, Kelantan and Trengganu) were to be made part of Thailand. Thai administration would begin on October 18. Finally, Soviet Major General P. V. Bogdanov, who had collaborated with the enemy after being captured by the Wehrmacht, was recaptured and turned over to the Soviet counterintelligence service, SMERSH. Moscow would execute Bogdanov, along with five other former Red Army generals, on April 19, 1950.
1944: One hundred sixty‐eight captured Allied airmen, including Phil Lamason, accused by the Gestapo of being ‘terror fliers’, arrived at Buchenwald concentration camp. Meanwhile, the Battle of Romania began with a major Soviet Union offensive.
1985: Wilhelm Meendsen‐Bohlken, Axis fleet commander, expired.

By using metaphors of the “family” that were prevalent in Confucian philosophy, [Imperialists] could argue that their Asian neighbors owed them loyalty and obedience and this, in turn, could then justify stiff regulations separating [Imperialists] from their colonized subjects and at times brutal enforcement of [Imperial] rule.

While this discourse on “brotherhood” and “mixed origins” dominated the early years of the empire, advocates of a view of Japanese as “pure blood,” uncontaminated by their inferior Asian neighbors circulated as a minority view.

An ethnically distinguished national consciousness remained, nonetheless, very strong in the domestic consolidation, colonial policies and projections in Asia, and international relations with the West. As the crises in China intensified in the wake of the [Imperial] invasion of Manchuria and as the resistance of Koreans proved to be more durable than the “brotherhood” ideologues had imagined, “pure blood” advocates began to win the day.^32^

As total war erupted in China in 1937 and war with the U.S. began in 1941, [Imperial] racial discourse swung hard toward an articulation of Japanese racial superiority based on the idea of Japanese purity.^33^ During WWII, [Imperial] racial politics aligned with German racial ideologies and fueled the ideological battles among different races and nation‐states.

[…]

Hitler’s Mein Kampf was also studied by [Imperial] scholars and its first full translation was published in 1932.^38^ The American business community also became impressed by the propaganda effort, and Edward Bemays, a key CPI member who also published the book Propaganda in 1928, went on to build the first public relations industries in the U.S. Bemays stated that it was possible to “regiment the public mind every bit as much as an army regiments their bodies.”^39^

The [Imperial] government emulated the U.S. and [Reich] propaganda agencies, and multiple [Imperial] agencies were created and mobilized, including the Cabinet Board of Information, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, military propaganda specialists, Special Higher Police (Tokko Keisatsu) personnel, both public and private media, commercial advertisers, publishers, and writers who all worked to implant and disseminate [Imperial] Japan’s justification of imperial ventures against perceived internal enemies such as communists, socialists, anarchists, and Korean and Chinese nationalist subversives.^40^

[I]mperial ventures in China and other regions were also justified in order to prevent Western Powers’ intrusion in Asia and bring liberty for all Asians from the tyranny of white rule, though [Imperial] Japan’s racial narratives themselves instituted much of the same vision of racial hierarchy of the West that they supposedly disparaged.^41^

(Emphasis added.)

Events that happened today (August 19):

1923: Vilfredo Federico Damaso Pareto, one of Benito Mussolini’s educators, perished.
1934: The German referendum of 1934 approved Adolf Schicklgruber’s appointment as head of state with the title of Führer.
1941: The Third Reich and the Kingdom of Romania signed the Tiraspol Agreement, rendering the region of Transnistria under control of the latter.
1942: The Axis successfully repelled Operation Jubilee: the amphibious Allied assault on Dieppe, France.
1944: Paris, France rose against Axis occupation with the help of Allied troops.
1945: The Soviets landed on Maoka to deal with more Axis holdouts. (Coincidentally, the Kuomintang lost against the Communists in the Battle of Yongjiazhen and the Viet Minh, led by Ho Chi Minh, take power in Hanoi, Vietnam.)

In 2020, the Times of Israel published an optimistic article about Drobovych: “Ukraine’s memory czar tones down glorification of war criminals.” It included a picture of the new UINM director standing next to his Banderite deputy, Volodymyr Tylishchak, and NA co‐founder Ihor Kulyk. (Tylishchak is a contributor to the OUN‐B newspaper and part of the “Ukrainian Studies of Strategic Research,” which organizes the annual “Bandera Readings” in Kyiv. This event’s chief organizer, Yuriy Syrotiuk, is the OUN‐B affiliated director of political education for the far‐right Svoboda party, and has been friends with Tylishchak since college.)

[…]

“The course for the future starts from the past,” advised Patryliak, another TsDVR‐affiliated RPR expert on national memory, who once cited former KKK Grand Wizard David Duke as an “expert” on the “Jewish Question,” according to historian Per Rudling. Drobovych was only brave enough to say that Ukrainians should seek “the complicated truth about ourselves,” and “it’s not always a good one.”

In the spring of 2021, Anton Drobovych dared to denounce the annual Nazi march in Kyiv to celebrate the establishment of the Ukrainian division of the Waffen‐SS in 1943. Meanwhile, Pavlo Podobed, Oleg Slabospitsky, and their friend Roman Kulyk — a far‐right activist in the UINM who used to wear neo[fascist] clothing — visited Orest Vaskul, a 94‐year old veteran of the Ukrainian SS who died about six weeks later.

Slabospitsky, a board member of NUMO, shamelessly posed the question to himself on Facebook: “Why do I honor the veterans of the [Ukrainian SS] division ‘Halychnya’?” Waffen‐SS veteran Orest Vaskul received a state funeral in June 2021.

Prominent OUN‐B members such as Volodymyr Viatrovych, the former “memory czar,” and Serhiy Kvit, the former Minister of Education and Science, made sure to pay their respects. It turns out that Vaskul led the OUN‐B network in Ukraine from 1995 until 2010. Earlier this year, a street in Kyiv was named after him.

(Emphasis added, because I know that plenty of anticommunists still deny the neofascism’s privileged status in Ukraine.)

Events that happened today (August 18):

1890: Walther Funk, Reich Minister of Economics, was unfortunately born.
1912: Otto Ernst Remer, Axis general, burdened humanity with his existence.
1916: Neagu Bunea Djuvara, Romanian fascist, arrived to worsen the world.
1933: The Volksempfänger was first presented to the German public at a radio exhibition; the presiding Reich Minister of Propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, delivered an accompanying speech heralding the radio as the ‘eighth great power’.
1940: The Hardest Day air battle, part of the Battle of Britain, took place. At that point, it was the largest aerial engagement in history with heavy losses sustained on both sides.
1945: Some of the Axis’s last remaining troops prepared theirselves as Soviet forces landed at Takeda Beach on Shumshu Island and launched the Battle of Shumshu; the Soviet Union’s invasion of the Axis’s Kuril Islands commenced. (Coincidentally, Sukarno took office as Indonesia’s first president, following the country's declaration of independence the previous day.)

Briefly quoting Yuki Tanaka’s Hidden Horrors: Japanese War Crimes in World War II, pages 8–9:

The estimated death toll of each nation in the Asia‐Pacific War is based on official statements by those countries and other available data: 200,000 Koreans, 30,000 Taiwanese, more than 10 million Chinese, 2 million Vietnamese (mainly due to famine), 1.1 million Filipinos, 4 million Indonesians; 100,000 Malays and Singaporeans, 150,000 Burmese, and 1.5 million Indians (due to the Bengal famine of 1943). In addition, apart from soldiers who were killed in action, more than 60,000 Allied POWs and civilian detainees died.^23^

(Possibly NSFL.)

At the risk of stating the obvious, I would like to confirm that I have no interest in inciting hatred against ordinary Japanese—some of whom rightfully despise Japanese Imperialism!—nor do I want them to feel guilty by association. Most people within the Axis empires couldn’t help living under their bourgeois governments, which have values and interests that transcend national boundaries. As a matter of fact, there were significant numbers of non‐Japanese Asians who intentionally served Japanese Imperialism. For example, quoting Peter J. Seybolt in Chinese Collaboration with Japan, 1932–1945, pages 221–2:

Support for the argument that there was an internal struggle among Chinese concurrent with an external war against [the Empire of] Japan is found also in the statistics compiled by the Communists during the war. […] It would be tedious to recount these battles in detail, though sufficient information exists to do so.

Probably in none of them did [Imperial] troops constitute a majority of those confronting the Communists and their allies, and in only two—a “mop-up” in June 1940, and the devastating mop‐up in April 1941 in which 4,000 villagers were slaughtered—did the number of [Imperial] troops come even close to the number of Chinese collaborators.

(Emphasis added.)

To paraphrase something that I wrote earlier, I realize that some of this history may seem elementary, but I never see anticommunists even mention it, and I am willing to bet that you don’t either. I have little else to add.

Events that happened today (August 17):

1911: Martin Sandberger, SS functionary and Shoah perpetrator, was unfortunately born.
1942: German Army Group A established bridgeheads across the Kuban River while the Reserve Police Battalion 101 massacred 1,700 Jews were in the Polish village of Łomazy. (Coincidentally, U.S. Marines raided the Axis‐held Pacific island of Makin while the USAAF made its first air raid on occupied Europe, bombing railroad marshaling yards at Sotteville‐lès‐Rouen. These were somewhere around the same time that the Second Moscow Conference ended.)
1943: The Axis took down 60 bombers from the U.S. Eighth Air Force during the Schweinfurt–Regensburg mission, but it lost Sicily to the Allies as the U.S. Seventh Army under General George S. Patton arrived in Messina, Italy, followed several hours later by the British 8th Army under Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery. Somewhere around the same time that the first Québec Conference of Winston Churchill, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and William Lyon Mackenzie King began, the Royal Air Force commenced Operation Hydra: the first air raid of the Operation Crossbow strategic bombing campaign against the Third Reich’s V‐weapon program.
1945: At Talitzou by the Sino-Korean border, Puyi, then the Kangde Emperor of Manchukuo, formally renounced the imperial throne, dissolving the state, and ceding its territory to the Republic of China. (Coincidentally, Sukarno and Mohammad Hatta proclaimed the independence of Indonesia, igniting the Indonesian National Revolution against the Dutch Empire.) Meanwhile, the Third Reich’s last submarine, U-977, surrendered to the Allies.
1971: Siegmund Wilhelm Walther List, Axis field marshal, dropped dead.
1987: Rudolf Walter Richard Heß, leading members of the NSDAP, hung hisself in prison… I have no comment.

The riot at Christie Pits was a disaster that started in Toronto on the evening of August 16, 1933, when numerous pro‐Reich spectators at a baseball game repeatedly tried to provoke Jews and their (often Italian) friends with Reich symbols and slogans. The violence soon outgrew the baseball field and thousands, possibly as many as ten thousand, took part in the riot. Although nobody died because of the riot, many people required medical attention and it had significant consequences for Canadian law.

This is a surprisingly good (if somewhat cheesy) documentary on the riot, which involves interviews with elderly Canadians and even has some class analysis. My favorite quote:

‘Why can so many police be marshalled to suppress the communists and not the Swastika clubs?’

‘I am not prepared to make any public statement as to the disposition of my men.’

Speaks volumes, doesn’t it?

As I said last time, if you’d like a book on this subject then Cyril Levitt’s & William Shaffir’s The Riot at Christie Pits is a must‐read.

Other events that happened today (August 16):

1904: Minoru Genda, Axis aviator, was born.
1919: Karl‐Heinz Euling, Waffen‐SS captain, was unleashed on the earth.
1934: Rome ordered the 48,000 troops rushed to the Austro‐Italian border during the July Putsch to return to their regular bases. Meanwhile, Schicklgruber’s amnesty announcement went into effect, releasing the prisoners in time to vote in Sunday’s referendum.
1935: Representatives of France, Great Britain and Fascist Italy met in Paris to negotiate a solution to the Abyssinia Crisis. Haile Selassie offered new economic concessions to Italy, stressing that he would not accept a military occupation but would grant facilities for mining, road construction and railway operations.
1942: As the Soviets evacuated Maykop and Axis positions in Egypt were bombed by Yankee aeroplanes for the first time, the Kriegsmarine began Operation Wunderland with the objective of entering the Kara Sea and destroying as many Soviet vessels as possible. Meanwhile in Bilbao, Spain, a mass was held at the Basilica of Begoña to commemorate members of the Begoña Regiment who died in the Civil War. After the service there was some shouting between the Carlist and Falangist factions, and during the ensuing scuffle a Falangist threw two hand grenades and wounded thirty people.
1944: First flight of a jet with forward-swept wings, the Junkers Ju 287.
1945: Takijirō Ōnishi, Axis admiral, took his own life.

The core of the Germanization process was to destroy the Polish identity of the boys and girls. Barbara Mikolajczyk was an adolescent when the [Third Reich] took her and her sisters to Bruczkow, where the Nazis forced them to learn German. “The Germans always said that we must forget about speaking in Polish and about Poland,” Mikolajczyk said. They beat her and the other children when they spoke Polish.

Mikolajczyk now became Baber Mickler. Placed in a German home, she had to address a German woman as “Mama.“ Like other Polish children doled out to German households, Mikolajczyk received a fraudulent birth certificate and genealogy which the [Fascists] inventively composed for her.^47^

[…]

The [Fascists] examined Jan Sulisz, a Polish orphan, at Bruczkow and placed him in a school attended by German children. Forced to join the [Fascist] youth group Hitlerjugend, he, too, was cut off from his Polish roots. Interestingly, Sulisz, whose new name was Suhling, met Barbara Mikolajczyk and her sisters at a Germanization center in Salsburg. The SS gave Suhling to a [Fascist] business establishment from which he escaped. Unfortunately, he was caught and beaten. He survived the war to be reunited with relatives in Lodz.

A similar thing happened to Willi Nililek, who was sent to work in a [Fascist] factory. When he and his friends were caught speaking Polish, Nililek said, “They stuck us in the arms and back with needles. I was sick. The other two boys went crazy and were given ‘death pills.’”^49^

Despite the severe penalties involved, many Polish children continued to speak Polish. Jerzy Stickel, sent to a German institution in Ujazdow where he was treated as a German youth, was one of them. After the war, when Stickel learned he was Polish, German children got so angry with him they beat him up.^50^ In one institution, older Polish children used to wake up younger ones at night to use the Polish language and especially to recite their prayers so they wouldn't forget their heritage.^51^

“I could not reconcile myself to denying my nationality, so I went on talking Polish,” said Sigismund Krajeski, who was 10‐years‐old when the [Fascists] sent him to Gmunden, Austria. “For this I was often tied to a post and beaten, but as I was strong and refused to give in, I managed to stand it.” When German families came to the institution to select a child for themselves, Krajeski deliberately spoke Polish.

“Of course the resulting punishment was dreadful, but I preferred it to disgracing myself and going to a Hitler family. They had no success with me.” Indeed, they didn’t. Krajeski ran away and managed to return to his home in Poznan.^52^

There were several escapes from the [Fascist] Germanization center at Kalisz, where the [Fascists] appropriated a monastery from Polish monks to set up their racist school. According to Stanislaw Kulczinski, known as “Papa Stanislaw,” a handyman there, the [Fascists] brought thousands of children to Kalisz. Those who refused Germanization were beaten and deprived of food.

Zygmunt Swiatlowski, stubbornly refusing denationalization, was killed by the woman supervisor of the institution. “The children were always sad,” Papa Stanislaw said. “They lived in fear and were homesick, and the German supervisors felt nothing but hatred for them because they were nothing but little ‘Polacks’ and did not belong to them.”

Events that happened today (August 15):

1939: Twenty‐six Ju87 bombers commanded by Walter Sigel met unexpected ground fog during a dive‐bombing demonstration for Luftwaffe generals at Neuhammer. Thirteen of them crashed and burned.
1940: A Fascist submarine torpedoed and sunk the Greek cruiser Elli at Tinos harbor during peacetime, marking the most serious Fascist provocation prior to the outbreak of the Greco‐Italian War in October.
1941: Hungary’s leaders officially ended their large‐scale deportations because the Axis occupying forces in East Galicia did not want to handle more deportees. Elsewhen, an Allied firing squad executed Corporal Josef Jakobs at the Tower of London for his espionage on the Axis’s behalf.
1943: Superior Axis forces surround Cretan partisans during the Battle of Trahili, who manage to escape against all odds.
1945: Emperor Hirohito broadcasted his declaration of surrender following the Axis’s defeat in World War II; Korea gained independence from the Empire of Japan. Shortly before or after the broadcast, Korechika Anami, the Axis’s last remaining War Minister, committed suicide.
1953: Ludwig Prandtl, Axis physicist and aerospace scientist, expired.
1989: Minoru Genda, Axis aviator who helped plan the assault on Pearl Harbor, died.

Oleksandr “Bear” Kravtsov with an Adolf Hitler tattoo on his arm, and the “Vedmedi SS” posing with their flag in 2021, which has the Nazi SS slogan, “My honor means loyalty.” Circled left to right: a swastika necklace, a totenkopf tattoo on Kravtsov’s left hand, a Nazi-style eagle on the back of his neck, and more Nazi tattoos on his torso (14, 88, Celtic Cross).

[…]

Only Wars appears to have grown out of the Azov Regiment in the Special Operations Forces that formed the basis of the 3rd Separate Assault Brigade. This Azov brigade in the Ukrainian army, more overtly neo-Nazi than its counterpart in the National Guard, has overlapping leadership with the political wing and “street branch” of the Azov movement.

A prime example is Dmytro Kukharchuk, a battalion commander and leader of the National Corps political party, who wears an Only Wars patch on his combat vest, and has developed close ties to a charity in Chicago.

Events that happened today (August 14):

1890: Bruno Emil Tesch, Axis chemist who co‐invented Zyklon B, arrived to worsen life with his existence.
1934: Adolf Schicklgruber received a signed document containing Hindenburg's ‘last wish’, which was for the restoration of the Hohenzollern monarchy. Schicklgruber did not have the document published. Hermann Göring was injured in an accident outside Munich when the car he was driving collided with a truck on a narrow road. He sustained injuries to his back and cuts to his face and knees, but left the hospital the next day.
1936: Nationalist forces led by Juan Yagüe captured the walled city of Badajoz. Once inside, a savage repression known as the Massacre of Badajoz began, making headlines around the world. Meanwhile, Portugal accepted a French proposal for neutrality in the Spanish Civil War, an important step in the international nonintervention agreement France was seeking.
1937: The Battle of Santander began. Chinese warplanes attacked Imperial ships in Shanghai harbour, but most of the bombs missed their targets and struck civilian areas instead, killing over 1,000.
1940: Fascist administrator Gustav Simon abrogated the Constitution of Luxembourg, banned all opposition parties and made German the only official language there.
1941: Axis forces captured Krivoy Rog while the Third Reich commissioned the submarine U‐583. Meanwhile, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill jointly issued the Atlantic Charter, stating the Allied goals for the postbellum world as British bombers conducted an overnight raid on the railway yards at Hanover.
1943: Allied bombers flew a record distance, traveling 2,500 miles from Australia to carry out the first bombing raid on the island of Borneo, striking the Axis oil reserves at Balikpapan. Meanwhile, the Axis lost both the Battle of Roosevelt Ridge and the Battle of Belgorod. To make matters even worse for them, Rome was declared an open city by the Italian government a day after its twoth bombing, making the announcement in a radio broadcast by Stetani, the official news agency. Marshal Pietro Badoglio, the Italian Prime Minister confirmed the decision later in the day, offering to remove Rome’s defenses, under the supervision of the Allies, in exchange for no further bombing. Finally, the British submarine Saracen was damaged by depth charges from Italian corvettes off Bastia, Corsica and scuttled to prevent capture.
1944: The Osovets Offensive officially ended with the completion of Soviet objectives. Canadian and Polish troops began Operation Tractable, the final offensive of the Battle of Normandy. An Italian prisoner of war was killed during a violent conflict between Yankee soldiers and Italian POWs. Finally, the Axis submarine U-618 was sunk in the Bay of Biscay by British ships and aircraft.
1945: Emperor Hirohito recorded a radio message to the Japanese people saying that the war should end and that they must ‘bear the unbearable.’ That night the Kyūjō incident occurred, an effort by a group of officers to steal the recording and stop the move to surrender. The attempt would fail and the conspirators would commit suicide.
1947: The Western Allies completed the Buchenwald Trial. Of the 31 convicted staff members of the Buchenwald concentration camp, they executed only 11, and gave the rest prison sentences, most of whom they let out early.
1956: Konstantin Hermann Karl Freiherr von Neurath, Axis diplomat and war criminal, dropped dead.
1988: Enzo Anselmo Giuseppe Maria Ferrari, Axis businessman, expired.

Operation Gladio was also used to maintain [neo]imperialism in the global South, and, you know, one example of that—again, I have to credit Asa Winstanley—is that the right‐wing dictatorship of António Salazar in Portugal allowed Portugal to be a major Gladio base, which, um…which was called—it had its own army called ‘Aginter Press’, which trained terrorists for assassination operations, targetting liberation struggles in Portugal’s African colonies. So this went beyond just what was happening in Europe.

(Admittedly, some of what this video shares is nothing new, but having a reminder every now and then is fine.)

Events that happened today (August 13):

1866: Giovanni Agnelli, Axis businessman, was born.
1902: Felix Heinrich Wankel, Fascist engineer, was born.
1937: The Empire of Japan started the Battle of Shanghai.
1944: Axis troops began the pillage and razing of Anogeia in Crete that would continue until September 5.

(Mirror.)

Not only was the Third Reich’s treatment of Western Jewish prisoners of war relatively moderate, but they had a higher chance at survival than other Jews!

While little detail is known about their lives in captivity, it is known that this group of prisoners did not suffer the lethal force applied to Jews elsewhere in Germany and [Axis]‐occupied territories. This is a surprising fact. As Yves Durand (1999: 73) puts it in respect of French Jewish POWs:

It is most astonishing that French Jewish POWs, who were during the entire length of their imprisonment put up in the heart of the Third Reich, escaped the Holocaust, while their families remaining in France lost their lives. […] This is certainly one of the most surprising paradoxes in the way [Fascism] functioned and in the behaviour patterns of the population or the decision makers that were subjected to this régime.^2^

[…]

Within a sea of anti‐Semitic persecution, POW camps represented islands of protection for Western Jewish soldiers, making them ‘de facto the safest place for a Jew in the [Third Reich’s] sphere of influence’ (Overmans, 2005: 872).

That is certainly not to say that conditions for these POWs was good. Indeed, Reich officials not only tried to enforce a policy of segregation in the POW camps but sometimes also discriminated against these Jews through other means: corporal punishments, forcing them to perform dirty work such as cleaning latrines, forcing them to clear unexploded bombs, and denial of representative positions in their camps, among other worries.

Jewish POWs were also, quite understandingly, always afraid of suffering an early death. Indeed, there is some evidence that the Greater German Reich was probably planning to exterminate Jewish‐American POWs near the war’s disastrous end. Nevertheless, confirmations of discriminatory killings of these POWs are difficult to find:

At its worst, some newly captured Jewish combatants appear to have been executed on capture or transferred to concentration camps, although such accounts, often told by [gentile] prisoners who watched their Jewish comrades being taken away, may be speculative (Bard, 1994: 37–39; Foy, 1984: 130; Winograd, 1976: 17).

Mitchell Bard (1994: 77ff) details one definite instance in which 80 American Jews were sent to a hard‐labour camp at Berga, in which civilian Jews (who were victims of the Holocaust) also worked (also see Cohen, 2005). This constituted an action specifically aimed at Jewish POWs, even if once there, they did not receive treatment that was substantively different from that of [gentile] American POWs who had also been sent there for punishment.

Morris and Sugarman (2011: 336) mention the deaths of 12 Palestinian Jewish POWs in retaliatory action by [Axis] soldiers, although it is not clear whether this action was linked to the POWs’ faith. Direct retaliations, carried out after [Axis] soldiers were ambushed by POWs or civilians, were a common feature of the war.

Notice the uncertainty. While there is no doubt that some Western Jews perished in Axis POW camps, the discriminatory aspect is not always clear.

Let us compare this with how the Third Reich treated Soviet POWs, Jewish or otherwise:

In contrast, [the Third Reich] did not apply the laws of war at all to POWs from the Eastern front. Captured soldiers from the Soviet Union, who often arrived in captivity in an ill and under‐nourished state (Streim, 1982: 14), were either specifically targeted and killed because of their political or religious status, maltreated, or simply left to die until the spring of 1942, at which point more than two million prisoners had already died.

When it dawned on [the bourgeoisie] that no quick victory would be achieved on the Eastern front and that therefore the men deployed there were unlikely to return to their civilian jobs in the foreseeable future (Speckner, 2003: 177), the economic need for the labour of Soviet POWs took precedence over military aims, and it was determined to keep Soviet prisoners at least alive (Herbert, 1997: 141). However, this did not substantially change the nature of their fate.

Living and working conditions for Soviet POWs were dismal, and in the mining industry so bad that Ulrich Herbert (1997: 391) writes of ‘a continuation of the war of extermination by other means’. Beaumont (1996: 279) estimates that in total ‘probably over three million Soviet POWs were executed or died of starvation or overwork at the hands of the ideologically and racially obsessed [Fascist] régime’.

The author, Johanna Jacques, explored the commonest explanations for the stark differences in (mis)treatment, though he found none of them very convincing. Instead, he proposes something that is nearly worth quoting at length:

An alternative explanation emerges when one considers the fact that the war to the West remained ‘a political struggle’ (MacKenzie, 1995: 97), while to the East it was all‐out war. From the beginning, Hitler had regarded the war to the East not as ‘a formal battle between two states, to be waged in accordance with the rules of International Law, but as a conflict between two philosophies’ (Field Marshall Wilhelm Keitel’s Nuremberg testimony, quoted in MacKenzie, 1994: 505). Accordingly, [Fascist] propaganda described the conflict with the Soviet Union as one between two mutually exclusive worldviews, the Soviet one being branded ‘Jewish Bolshevism’ (Schulte, 1988: 228).

For Hitler (quoted in Streim, 1982: 27), this meant specifically that the army had to distance itself from the traditional point of view that still held fast in the West, according to which enemy soldiers were comrades‐in‐arms united by a shared set of values and a sense of professional solidarity: ‘The communist is before [the war] not a comrade‐in‐arms and after [the war] not a comrade‐in‐arms’. With nothing uniting the actors in this conflict, there was also nothing that called for restraint, as it was not the aim of the war in the East ‘to conserve the enemy’ (Hitler, quoted in Hartmann, 2009: 309, footnote omitted).

Schulte (1988: 150) in this respect writes that ‘documents from the highest level impressed on the [Axis] troops [on the Eastern front] that they were engaged in an ideologically based racial war of extermination […] that was by its very nature qualitatively different from the conventional war […] conducted in the West’. According to Hitler, the point in this war was not to win against the enemy, but to eradicate him once and for all (Streim, 1982: 27).

[The Third Reich] thus approached its relation to its Eastern and Western enemies in two fundamentally different ways: To the East, local populations as separate entities were to disappear through eradication or assimilation, with [the Third Reich] expanding into their territory, while to the West, relations between the enemies as separate entities were expected to outlast the war, hatred being understood merely as a symptom of current hostilities that should not replace mutual respect as the fundamental characteristic of relations.^18^

(Emphasis added in all cases.)

There is more, of course (including an explanation for why the mistreatment of Western Jewish POWs was not harsher), but for the sake of brevity I would prefer to end this excerpt here. Suffice to say, do not let anybody mislead you into believing that the Fascists opposed communism and (liberal) capitalism with equal ferocity (or—G‐d forbid—that the Fascists somehow opposed capitalism more than communism).

ETA: In case somebody needs it, here is a WWII museum corroborating the author’s conclusions, and here is the Sydney Jewish Museum doing likewise.

Events that happened today (August 12):

1916: Ioan Dicezare, Axis fighter pilot, was born.
1944: Waffen‐SS troops massacred 560 people in Sant’Anna di Stazzema. Coincidentally, other Reich troops finished the week‐long Wola massacre, during which time they massacred at least 40,000 people indiscriminately or in mass executions… on the other hand, the Axis did lose Alençon to General Philippe Leclerc de Hauteclocque’s army (the first city in France to be liberated by French forces), but knowing that is not enough to make me feel better.
1973: Karl Ziegler, scientific Patron Member of the SS, perished.
1983: Theodor Burchardi, Axis Admiral, left the world.
2013: Hans‐Ekkehard Bob, Luftwaffe pilot, finally expired.

Neo[fascists] and ultra[rightist]s in Berlin, Madrid, and Zagreb went the extra mile with graffiti dedicated to Denys Prokopenko (and in one case, the WBC [‘White Boys Club’, not Westboro Baptist Church]). “For us it’s a great honor that Denis has come from our movement,” explained “Dynamo Hooligans,” an Instagram page with almost 12,000 followers that shared the internationally coordinated congratulations from “our comrades,” and quoted the Azov commander: “Ukraine belongs to us. Brave, real and loyal. Who have chosen honor and courage.”

Prokopenko mural by German neo[fascists] in Berlin, 2023

Two days later, another version of this Prokopenko quote was projected before an audience at Stanford University: “Ukraine belongs to us. Bold, genuine and faithful. Who choose honor and courage.” It was the second time since last year that representatives of the Azov movement — including Kateryna Prokopenko, who is married to “Redis” — spoke at the élite private university in California. This time, ironically enough, the Azov delegation met political scientist Francis Fukuyama, who is famous for writing about the “end of history.”

(Emphasis added, because I am sure that plenty of antisocialists still take Francis Fukuyama seriously.)

Reminder that there are antisocialist intellectuals supporting Ukrainian neofascism:

The UVF counts among its partners “Razom for Ukraine” in New York City, which has an advocacy arm that co-organized the Ukraine Action Summit. Razom gave Kozatsky a warm welcome in New York, and once organized a protest in Lower Manhattan at which demonstrators chanted, “Azov! Azov! Azov!” Razom volunteers recently created a video on behalf of the Association of Azovstal Defenders’ Families led by Kateryna Prokopenko. “Razom Advocacy” has strong ties to the Eurasia Center of the Atlantic Council, one of the most influential think tanks in Washington.

Perhaps most despicably, a handful of Jewish antisocialists are either overlooking or explicitly denying the threat of neofascism in Ukraine. For example:

Vladislav Davidzon, incidentally a nonresident senior fellow at the Eurasia Center, has emerged as one of the most shameless apologists for the Azov movement.

In response to an article by Lev Golinkin (“Why did Stanford students host a group of neo-Nazis?”), Davidzon wrote an outrageous and bizarre “open letter” to Golinkin, in which he declared “as a proud Eastern European Jew,” simply lying to gullible readers and willful ignoramuses, “There exists no serious neo-Nazi threat in Ukraine. None at all. This is a phantom fear lurking within the minds of various fantasists and neurotics.”

Projecting, and giving the game away, Davidzon actually chastised Golinkin to “stop telling fairy tales about Nazis.”

Events that happened today (August 11):

1938: The Empire of Japan lost to the Soviets in the Battle of Khasan.
1940: Under the aegis of the Italian consulate in Monaco, a mass to commemorate the liberation of the internees of Saint‐Cyprien and Vernet, officiated by Don Luigi De Biasi (himself a former Saint‐Cyprien prisoner), was held in Monaco’s Principality.
1943: Luigi Petrucci, the Italian ambassador and authorized minister in the NDH, and General Mario Robotti, the commander of the Second Italian Army and administrator of all annexed and occupied Croatian territories, held a meeting discussing questions concerning the relationship between Fascist Italy and the NDH. Meanwhile, Brazilian police apprehended the Axis spy William Marcus “Willy” Baarn in the small town of Gargau.

Pictured: Karl Haushofer (left) and Rudolf Hess (right).

Quoting Carroll P. Kakel’s The Holocaust as Colonial Genocide: Hitler’s ‘Indian Wars’ in the ‘Wild East’, pages 12–6:

Lebensraum became an important element of Wilhelmine politics largely due to the work, ideas and influence of Friedrich Ratzel (1844–1904). A well‐known geographer, writing at a time of German imperial growth and conquest in Africa, Ratzel invented the term ‘Lebensraum’ in the context of his own biological theories (or what he called ‘bio‐geography’).

He was one of the founders of the Pan‐German League, was instrumental in formulating the demand that Germany acquire new ‘living space’ (or, as he liked to put it ‘elbow room’), and was a leading pre‐World War I advocate of Lebensraum imperialism.

In his 1901 book, Lebensraum, Ratzel [mis]applied the Darwinian struggle for existence to humans, expressly noting the extermination of the American Indians and other ‘less civilized’ peoples by Euro‐American conquerors. Rather than projects of trade or exploitation of ‘native’ labour, he favoured settler colonization as the most effective way to find new ‘living space’ for an expanding population, as well as wars of conquest, which ‘quickly and completely displace the inhabitants, for which North America, southern Brazil, Tasmania, and New Zealand provide the best examples’.^15^

[…]

While admitting (and regretting) that it was too late for a German colony in an already‐settled North America, he favoured southwest Africa as a site of German colonization. Ratzel’s thinking was also influenced by an American‐inspired romantic, peasant‐oriented agrarianism; his notion of ‘colonization’ called for the conquerors of new ‘living space’ to ‘obtain’ agricultural lands from the indigenous inhabitants for direct, small‐scale farming by the settler occupiers.^18^

Like many late nineteenth‐ and early twentieth‐century intellectuals, Ratzel did not develop or evolve his ideas in isolation. At the turn of the twentieth century, in fact, he was part of a growing transatlantic dialogue between politics and geography — a dialogue that included the American historian Frederick Jackson Turner.

For his part, Ratzel had complimentary things to say about Turner’s recently formulated ‘frontier thesis’ of American history, a thesis which celebrated the irresistible march of ‘white’ Anglo‐Saxon civilization across the North American continent, the ‘colonization’ of America’s ‘Great West’, and the ‘frontier’ as the incubator for ‘Americanness’.

[…]

Widespread early‐ and mid‐twentieth century German support for Lebensraum imperialism was principally due to the work, ideas and influence of Karl Haushofer (1869–1946), a student of Ratzel and a geography professor at Munich Polytechnical University (where his father, Max, had been a colleague of Ratzel’s).

A retired Bavarian general, World War I veteran, and holder of a doctorate, Haushofer — building on Ratzel’s ideas, work and arguments — reconfigured Ratzel’s ideas about geography and political history into a new formalized system of political thought, called ‘geopolitics’.

As the prophet of the new ‘geopolitics’, Haushofer envisaged the new discipline as the study of Raum (space) for the German nation‐state. ‘Geopolitics wants to be, and must be,’ he wrote, ‘the geographic conscience of the state.’^24^ In the 1920s and 1930s, Haushofer became the foremost German geopolitician of the Weimar (1918–1933) and Nazi (1933–1945) eras.

[…]

At the University of Munich, one of Haushofer’s devoted students was Rudolf Hess, an early convert to the fledgling [NSDAP] and party leader Adolf Hitler’s private secretary. Through Hess, Haushofer was introduced to Hitler. In 1924, Haushofer visited Hitler and Hess in Landsberg Prison (where the [NSDAP’s] leaders were serving time for their part in the failed Beer Hall Putsch of November 1923, a [Fascist] attempt to topple the pre[fascist], [pseudo]democratic Weimar Republic).

Haushofer visited Hitler and Hess numerous times to ‘educate’ them (Haushofer’s word) in the theories of geopolitics and Lebensraum. Privately, via Hess, he fed the [Fascist] leader his ideas about ‘living space’ and ‘just wars’ of expansion and conquest. In turn, not surprisingly, many of Haushofer’s ideas found their way into a new book titled Mein Kampf (My Struggle) which Hitler was dictating to Hess during their Landsberg incarceration.

(Emphasis added.)

Events that happened today (August 10):

1874: Antanas Smetona, Lithuania’s parafascist head of state, was unfortunately born.
1944: As the Battle of Guam effectively ended, the Battle of Narva ended with a defensive Axis victory.
1979: Walther Gerlach, Axis nuclear physicist, perished.
1999: A Los Angeles neofascist, Buford O. Furrow, Jr., shot up a synagogue and later murdered a Filipino postal worker.
2012: Ioan Dicezare, Axis pilot, expired.

I realize that it sounds elementary to most of us, but given the presence of some who are still willing to miscategorize the People’s Republic of China, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, and other people’s republics as ‘fascist’, I think that this point needs to be restated, this time more emphatically.

Quoting Daniel Guerin’s excellent Fascism and Big Business, page 63:

The idea of the class struggle, the basis of proletarian socialism, is at first not understood by the petty bourgeois. For him, unlike the worker, the capitalist exploiter “remains anonymous, unperceived, hidden behind the curtain of free transactions.”^21^ When he defends his threatened interests, he does it with the same mentality as the capitalist [whom] he opposes: one individual struggling against another individual. There is a conflict of interests; there is no class struggle.

The petty bourgeoisie struggles against some individual haut bourgeois, but never the haute bourgeoisie as such.

While many petty bourgeois may be critical of the haute bourgeoisie, they are never against it in any meaningful way. For them, the haute bourgeoisie simply needs some tuning: for example, a more fascist mindset, which entails more respect for small businesses (at least the small businesses of the most preferred racial group, anyway).

Since most (if not all) of the petty bourgeoisie dreams of furthering its opulence, which necessitates eventually graduating to the haute bourgeoisie, it would be nonsensical for the petty bourgeoisie to seriously and meaningfully oppose its richer counterpart. (Microbusinesses consisting entirely of one person are an arguable exception.)

Guerin continued:

The position of the middle classes between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat explains why they tend to condemn all class struggle—that waged by the bourgeoisie against the proletariat as well as that waged by the proletariat against the bourgeoisie.

They are persuaded that class collaboration is possible, that there is a general interest above all antagonistic interests. And by general interests they mean their own interests, intermediate between those of the [haute] bourgeoisie and those of the proletariat.

They dream of a “state above classes,” which will not be in the service of either the proletariat or the bourgeoisie, and consequently will be in their own service. But while the proletariat proclaims the reality of the class struggle between capital and labor, the [haute] bourgeoisie carries on the class struggle behind the mask of “class collaboration,” and often succeeds in turning the middle classes away from socialism.

(Emphasis added in all cases.)

Somebody might claim that the People’s Republic of China follows a similar pattern with its tolerance for billionaires, but this is a superficial analysis. The haute bourgeoisie in Italy and Germany institutionalized fascism to preserve its class and reinforce its political power, which was why capitalists such as Alfried Krupp received no punishment until Allied occupation (and even then only trivially).

The PRC’s bourgeoisie, which has less political power, is only shrinking despite whatever highly conditional tolerance that it receives. Class warfare against the bourgeoisie never came anywhere close to an official policy in the Fascist empires, but it did in the people’s republics. This is only one of the many reasons why we cannot categorize the PRC or the other people’s republics as ‘(neo)fascist’.

Events that happened today (August 9):

1936: Jesse Owens won his fourth gold medal at Berlin’s Summer Olympics.
1940: The Axis‐aligned Kingdom of Romania introduced new antisemitic laws, based on the Nuremberg Laws, using a ‘biological conception of the nation’ to define who was a Jew and forbidding intermarriage between Jews and Christians.
1942: An Imperial Japanese Navy cruiser force surprised and defeated the Allied naval forces that were protecting Allied amphibious forces during the Battle of Guadalcanal’s initial stages.
1944: The Vyborg–Petrozavodsk Offensive, the largest offensive launched by Soviet Union against Finland, ended to a strategic stalemate: both Finnish and Soviet troops at the Finnish front dug to defensive positions, and the front remained stable until the war’s end.
1945: As the Red Army invaded Axis‐occupied Manchuria, the United States B-29 Bockscar launched the atomic bomb, Fat Man, on Nagasaki, massacring 35,000 people simultaneously (including 23,200–28,200 Japanese war workers, 2,000 Korean forced workers, and 150 Axis soldiers).
1948: Hugo Boss, Axis businessman, perished.
1957: Carl Clauberg, Axis physician who sterilized women for a living, died.

(Mirror.)

Within Franco’s repressive system there was a specific procedure applied to Republican women (Espinosa 2002; González‐Ruibal 2014). They suffered a specific violence as consequence of their political activity during the Republic or because they were the wives, mothers, sisters or relatives of Republicans (Nash 2015; Sánchez 2009; Solé 2016).

The different repressive strategies used against female groups by Spanish fascism were motivated by the perception of women as second‐class citizens and therefore inferior to men.

According to Francoist ideologues like Juan Antonio Vallejo‐Nágera, women intellectually inferior and unreliable and used social revolutions to unleash their sexual appetite and cruelty (Vallejo‐Nágera and Martínez 1939).

The consideration of women as subaltern led to the application of different types of punishment that not always implied death (Solé 2016). On the one hand, it could be physical, through the execution, torture and rape of women (Richards 1999; Preston 2011) first during the war and later in Franco’s prisons (Rodrigo 2008).

On the other, it could also be psychological, by eliminating aspects of their femininity through the shaving of their hair and their public exposure after having ingested castor oil, which caused them severe diarrhoea — the alleged purpose was to ‘throw communism out of their bodies’ (Richards 1999, 58–59).

Republican women were caricatured as prostitutes (Gómez 2009), due to their efforts to achieve emancipation and equal rights during the Republic and their struggle against patriarchal culture and Catholic morality (Nash 2015). After the war, many women that had been left destitute and were marginalized due to their Republican credentials were driven to prostitution (Casanova 2002).

[…]

According to the available testimonies, a priest went to the site with the new authorities in order to give extreme unction to the detainees. For that purpose, he placed a crucifix in front of each of the victims to be kissed. When the priest asked Josefa Fernández Catena, known as ‘La Galla’, to kiss the crucifix, she refused to do so.

In response, the priest hit her mouth with the cross and broke her teeth. In the group of civilians executed in the Romanzal stream at least two women were pregnant:

“La Galla” had her teeth broken […] she was pregnant […] she said when she was going to be executed: “you will not kill one, you will kill two”^5^

“We do not know if the child was born dead or not. They said the child was born dead, but we never found out”^6^

(Emphasis added.)

Events that happened today (August 8):

1881: Paul Ludwig Ewald von Kleist, Axis field marshal, worsened life with his presence.
1940: Wilhelm Keitel signed the ‘Aufbau Ost’ directive.
1944: The Third Reich executed Axis field marshal Job Wilhelm Georg Erwin Erdmann von Witzleben for planning to murder the Chancellor. Coincidentally, the Allies successfully killed Waffen‐SS tank commander Michael Wittmann and his crew.
1945: France, Imperial America, the United Kingdom, and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics signed the London Charter, establishing the laws and procedures for the Nuremberg trials.
1969: Otmar Freiherr von Verschuer, Axis eugenicist who misinformed students (including Josef Mengele) for a living, finally perished.
2003: Dirk Hoogendam, SS officer, finally dropped dead.

Plans for the fascistizzazione of colonial agriculture resulted in the introduction of systematic practices of forced labor and recruitment. Throughout the 1920s, labor recruitment was organized by the concessionaires who generally offered temporary seasonal occupations, from one to six months, mainly to male laborers.

Initially, labor recruitment drew upon the communities living in nearby Janaale.^85^ As laborers frequently abandoned colonial plantations to return to their villages, concessionaires extended their search for labor to northern areas, especially in the regions of Buur Hakaba and Baydhabo.^86^

There is little archival evidence on how labor recruitment was carried out by private concessionaires in the 1920s. Surely, successive colonial governors admitted that this “chaotic and disorganised recruitment” generated degrees of “resentment” and “disruption” into the lives of sedentary riverine communities.^87^

It also seems likely that the search for new recruits coupled with labor mutinies in the concessions generated a considerable movement of laborers in the area. In this way, the colonial government estimated that overall, between 1924 and 1929, about 100,000 laborers had been employed for some time in colonial estates in Janaale.^88^

In 1929, the colonial government drafted a new labor contract with the aim of regulating labor mobility, which by then was seen as the major obstacle to the development of the colonial economy.^89^

Modeled on the resettlement scheme implemented at SAIS [Società Agricola Italo‐Somala], the new contract introduced a quota system. This required each community living in the proximity of cultivations to provide concessions with a certain amount of laborers for a fixed and renewable term.

Moreover, the new contract called for the recruitment of entire farming families, rather than single laborers, in the hope that this would hinder labor mutinies.^90^ To facilitate this process, the fascist régime began arranging forced marriages.^91^

[…]

The resettlement of entire farming families in private concessions would create, Barile claimed, a new ethnic group whose offspring will constitute the future generation of laborers of the fascist “Greater Somalia.” It was further argued that the resettlement scheme provided many impoverished families with an opportunity to improve their standard of living.^94^

But, as at SAIS, employment in private concessions became questionable: laborers were required to work six days per week, harvesting commercial crops while devoting the remaining time to their own crops; laborers’ retribution was allocated by piecework; a laborer’s piecework was not transferable to another; and the completion of piecework did not necessarily provide laborers with salaries.^95^

In the 1970s, social historian of Somalia, Cassanelli, collected vivid memories of abuses and coercion in the colonial plantations, bitterly remembered by Somalis as the tragic “years of colonya.”^96^

Although the [Fascists] have later denied these charges before an international commission of the United Nations, reports about the abuses in colonial plantations were well known among colonial circles and brought the colonial government under closer scrutiny in the 1920s.^97^

Critiques came from within the Fascist Party. The federal secretary in Mogadishu, Marcello Serrazanetti, for instance, published a review of slavery‐like conditions in colonial plantations in 1933, where he accused the colonial government of offering little assistance to laborers; of promoting forced marriages that were often arranged before the resettlement scheme; and, more generally, of covering up the abuses laborers endured in the concessions.^98^

It seems likely that the assistance the colonial government provided to concessionaires went beyond the regulation of labor recruitment. Colonial police was also used to hinder laborers’ mutinies, to chase laborers who had abandoned the fields, and to bring them back to the concessions.^99^ Sometimes, colonial assistance was also sought for punishing laborers.

Pictured: Four colonial military police (zaptié) who worked on behalf of Fascist Italy in Somalia. Dated 1939.

Although the colonial government assisted and facilitated labor recruitment and surveillance in the plantations, its relations with Italian concessionaires did not come without problems.

Officials in the field often complained that the brutality and violence concessionaires inflicted upon laborers compromised the results and credibility of the entire project of valorizzazione in Somalia. Reporting on labor relations in the plantations, one political officer asked for the colonial government’s intervention in favor of Somali laborers.

In this way, the officer explained, “the population would believe that the government endeavours to promote their wealth and not their destruction”; “it [was] only through these [development plans] that we can justify our presence in the colony in political and economic terms.”^100^

Yet, these critiques remained isolated voices. In fact, the officers that tried to oppose the concessionaires, like Federal Secretary Serrazanetti, were later removed from their posts.^101^

(Emphasis added. See here for more on Somalia under Fascism.)

Events that happened today (August 7):

1926: Spain and Fascist Italy signed a Treaty of Friendship, Conciliation and Judicial Settlement.
1937: Emil Nolde, Fascist artist, was born.
1942: The Battle of Guadalcanal began as the United States Marines initiated the first American offensive of the war with landings on Guadalcanal and Tulagi in the Solomon Islands.

[I]f you look at the formation of NATO, first of all, NATO was explicitly designed as an anticommunist alliance, much like the Fascist project emerged explicitly as an anticommunist project, and it began with the rehabilitation […] of various unsavory forces in Europe, including figures like the [para]fascist António Salazar, the dictator of Portugal, who was one of the founding of NATO, right?

And then Amílcar Cabral, who was leading revolutionary struggle in Guinea‐Bissau and other places, wrote that they would find weapons of war from Portugal, from Germany, from Spain, from across the NATO bloc. So there was an implicit, already then, an implicit understanding that NATO is an extension of the colonial project, and a kind of collectivization of the colonial project.

Events that happened today (August 6):

1944: The Axis continued brutally suppressing the Warsaw Uprising; the Gestapo, fearing of another uprising, ordered a round‐up of all able‐bodied young men in Kraków.
1945: The Empire of Japan was devastated when the United States B‐29 Enola Gay dropped the atomic bomb ‘Little Boy’ on Hiroshima, massacring approximately 70,000 people (mostly civilians) instantly, and some tens of thousands died in subsequent years from burns and radiation poisoning.
2001: Wilhelm Mohnke, Axis general, finally perished.

(Just to clarify, I do not mean to insinuate that these were his only inspirations; they most certainly weren’t, as anybody who regularly reads this subcommunity can attest.)

Quoting Carroll P. Kakel’s The Holocaust as Colonial Genocide: Hitler’s ‘Indian Wars’ in the ‘Wild East’, pages 17–8:

During his youth, Hitler had been fascinated by the ‘American West’, its ‘frontier’, and its hardy pioneer settlers. His initial awareness of the ‘Wild West’ and the American assault on ‘native’ indigenous populations came from his lifelong reading (and rereading) of Karl May, the German cowboy Western novelist who wrote about the American frontier.

Like many young people of his generation, Hitler became enthralled by May’s popular tales of the American ‘Wild West’ and its ‘Indian wars’. At school, the young Adolf often led his classmates in war games and pranks.^35^

Hitler’s former teacher, Dr Eduard Huemer, attributed this aggressive youthful behaviour to an excessive addiction to Karl May’s Indian stories.^36^ As an adult, Hitler himself attributed a drop in his school marks to the time when, as an adolescent, he started to become absorbed with May’s novels.^37^ After attending a 1912 lecture in Vienna by the novelist, the young Hitler became caught up in the ‘May cult’ and grew to be one of Karl May’s greatest admirers.

Hitler’s fascination with May and his ‘Wild West’ novels never faded, becoming a lifelong addiction.^38^ During the election campaign of October 1932 (for the forthcoming 6 November national elections), Hitler admitted to still being thrilled by Karl May’s cowboy and Indian stories, with their tales of the ‘Wild West’ and its ‘Indian wars’.^39^ For inspiration, Hitler read all 70 volumes of May’s works shortly after becoming German chancellor in January 1933.^40^

German Chancellor Hitler kept vellumbound volumes of May’s works on a special shelf in his personal library. A visitor to the Obersalzberg, Hitler’s Bavarian mountain retreat, in 1933, noticed that the majority of books in the Führer’s modest first‐floor room were May’s adventure stories. When German officers, in the spring of 1940, objected to his military plans, Hitler overrode all their objections, observing that ‘They should have read more Karl May!’^41^

During one of his famous wartime monologues, he insisted that every German officer should carry one of May’s ‘Indian books’ (Indianerbücher). At the height of the fighting on the Eastern front, in fact, **the Führer ordered 300,000 copies of May’s books printed and given to German troops to help defeat the Russians (who, after all, fought like ‘Indians’).^42^

Thanks to the influence of Karl May, in Hitler’s spatial imaginary, the Nazi ‘Wild East’ had become the American ‘Wild West’, and the ‘Russian [insert slur here]’ had become the ‘savage’ American ‘Red Indians’.**

(Emphasis added. Plenty more U.S. sources of inspiration for the Third Reich can be learned in Mr. Kakel’s book.)

Events that happened today (August 5):

1944: While Polish insurgents were liberating an Axis labor camp (Gęsiówka) in Warsaw, thereby freeing 348 Jewish prisoners, the Fascists in Wola meanwhile commenced the worst massacre in Poland’s history, taking 40,000–50,000 civilians and POWs over the course of a week. Coincidentally, at least 1,104 Japanese POWs in Australia attempted to escape from a camp at Cowra, New South Wales; 545 temporarily succeeded but later either suffered homicide, committed suicide, or were recaptured.
1998: Otto Kretschmer, Axis naval officer, expired.
2000: Tullio Crali, member of the Fascist ‘Futurist’ movement, expired.

By 2018, the RPR drafted legislation co‐sponsored by Hanna Hopko, deputy OUN‐B leader Oleh Medunytsia, and other members of parliament that served to rehabilitate veterans of the OUN and its Ukrainian Insurgent Army. When Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko signed the law, they fulfilled one of the stated goals of the RPR Coalition: “Update the legislation on rehabilitation of victims of political repression.”

Defending History, a website dedicated to combating Holocaust revisionism in Eastern Europe, noticed a statement from the UINM that “clearly indicates work on the law was funded by USAID under one of its projects in Ukraine.”

[…]

A written response from Zelensky arrived in the next ten days after the round table, and said that a memorial for Ukrainian heroes was already underway. Yaroslav Yurchyshyn, a member of parliament since 2019, deputy chair of the “Holos” party, and former “advocacy manager” of the RPR Coalition (2014–16)—in addition to a founding member of the OUN‐B’s Youth Nationalist Congress!—helped Mykhailova to clarify that this was referring to a separate project that stalled.

Yurchyshyn wrote to the Minister of Culture and Information Policy, whose response disappointed the nationalists, because he conflated the Pantheon of Heroes with plans for a National Military Memorial Cemetery in Kyiv, and said the project should not glorify individuals but virtues.

This “misunderstanding” would not get in the way, assured Alina Mykhailova. Two months later, in a lengthy speech to Ukraine’s parliament on Constitution Day, Volodymyr Zelensky announced his support for establishing “the Pantheon of Heroes and the National Military Cemetery” and “the reburial of all our heroes buried abroad in Ukraine.” Two days later, the RPR Coalition reiterated that these sites are part of its USAID‐funded “Vision of Ukraine 2030.”

In July, the Minister of Culture and Information Policy said that he has consulted Western colleagues on the Pantheon of Heroes and other memorials. He emphasized that “they always start with the phrase, ‘do not repeat Soviet monuments.’”

(Emphasis added.)

Events that happened today (August 4):

1876: Giovanni Giuriati, Fascist lawyer and politician, burdened the world with his existence.
1893: Fritz Gause, professional Fascist apologist, polluted the Earth with his presence.
1913: Johann Niemann, SS officer and deputy commandant of Sobibor camp during Operation Reinhard, was unleashed on humanity.
1936: Ioannis Metaxas, Greek parafascist, suspended parliament and the Constitution and established the 4th of August Régime.
1940: Ze'ev Jabotinsky, Hebrew fascist, perished.
1944: A tip from a Dutch informer lead the Gestapo to a sealed‐off area in an Amsterdam warehouse, where they found and sadly arrested the diarist Anne Frank, her family, and four others. (Coincidentally, the Finnish Parliament, by derogation, elected Marshal C. G. E. Mannerheim as President of Finland to replace Risto Ryti, who had resigned.)

Like Massaro, “Gandalf” is a celebrity in the world of NAFO, the “vociferously pro-Ukraine, anti-Russia troll operation” on Twitter. Illia Samoilenko, apparently still in Israel, reached out to NAFO in January. The “69th Sniffing Brigade,” an off-shoot of NAFO, has partnered with Azov One and raised tens of thousands of dollars for them. Just today, this NAFO outfit posted an Azov One video about their joint campaign, featuring “Tork” from the Azov Regiment with straight edge tattoos on his neck.

An image posted by “Gandalf” in New York, and screenshot from Azov One video for NAFO

What other allies does Azov One have in its corner? For starters, there is “Ukrainian Signal,” a self-described “creative production” and “film club” that has partnered with USAID, the historically CIA-linked U.S. Agency for International Development, to “produce and present modern Ukrainian culture and artists worldwide through movie screenings, exhibitions, live performances, and gatherings. We aim to build a vision of new-wave Ukrainian culture artists in the world.”

According to Ukrainian Signal’s co-founder and head of fundraising, they have raised over half a million dollars since March 2022, “primarily focusing on assisting the ‘Azov’ brigade of the National Guard of Ukraine.” Since October, and “with the support of USAID,” Ukrainian Signal has organized film screenings throughout Europe, including Berlin, Paris, London, Rotterdam, Warsaw, Vienna, Dublin, Prague, Lisbon, Barcelona, Vilnius, and Amsterdam. They allegedly achieved “a complete sellout of tickets for almost all screenings.” Proceeds went to the Signal Fund, the “official partner fund” of the Azov Regiment and Azov One.

Events that happned today (August 3):

1912: Fritz Hellwig, Fascist politician, was born.
1936: It was an awkward moment for the Fascists as Afro‐American Jesse Owens won the 100 metre dash, defeating Ralph Metcalfe, at the Berlin Olympics.
1940: Fascist forces invaded British Somaliland.
2008: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn died.

Quoting from Peter Fritzsche’s Life and Death in the Third Reich:

In April 1939 new federal legislation withdrew the protection of rent‐control laws from Jews. Now landlords could evict their Jewish tenants if municipalities guaranteed another form of housing.

In order to isolate Jews and free up apartments, local [Fascists] contemplated “Jew houses” and other detention centers. Although most “Jew houses” were not established until the war, officials forced Detmold’s 100 Jews into six Jew houses, on Sachsentrasse 4 and 25, Paulinenstrasse 6 and 10, Hornsche Strasse 33, and Gartenstrasse 6, as early as April 1939.^119^

Alexander Karn’s Amending the Past: Europe's Holocaust Commissions and the Right to History, page 95:

On May 10, 1939, the Law on Tenancies with Jews legalized the eviction of Jewish tenants by Aryan landlords, but the commission report also notes that 44,000 apartments in Vienna had already been Aryanized prior to that time. Jews who were evicted were reassigned to new and generally inferior quarters, which they typically shared with several other families.

Later, those who had not escaped or emigrated were sent to “holding camps” before their final transit to the east. Aryanization of apartments continued until April 1945, and the commission documented a total of 59,000 expropriations in all.^38^

(Emphasis added in both cases.)

Events that happened today (August 2):

1897: Karl‐Otto Koch, Axis SS officer, arrived to make life worse for us.
1928: Fascist Italy signed a ‘Treaty of Friendship’ with the Ethiopian Empire. Oh dear…
1934: President Hindenburg, who praised Adolf Schicklgruber for his ‘gallant personal intervention’ which had ‘rescued the German people from great danger’, perished. Consequently, Adolf Schicklgruber became Germany’s Führer.
1943: The Fascists were extremely unhappy to learn that Jewish prisoners staged a revolt at one of the deadliest Axis death camps: Treblinka, where approximately 900,000 persons perished in fewer than 18 months. Meanwhile, the Axis destroyer Amagiri rammed the Allied Motor Torpedo Boat PT‐109, sinking it.
1945: Pietro Mascagni, Fascist composer, died as the Potsdam Conference ended.
1980: Neofascists bombed the Bologna Centrale railway station, massacring 85 people in Bologna and wounding over 200.

Today is the 79th anniversary of the night when the Axis massacred 2,897 Roma in Auschwitz. They were part of the 220,000–500,000 Roma & Sinti whom the Axis massacred in a tragedy known as the Porajmos. It was, in brief, another way for the white petty bourgeoisie to maintain its economic standing.

Related:

The oppression of the Roma & Sinti varied throughout the Third Reich

Alsace, France became a testing ground for the Third Reich’s anti-Roma policies

The persecution of Rom & Sinti in Fascist Italy

West Germany’s Federal Court ruled that a 1940 deportation of Roma was not a racist atrocity

(“Human rights” being a euphemism for régime change. Unless, of course, you define ‘human’ exclusively as ‘white cishet capitalist man’.)

The Azovites met concurrently with ultra-conservative U.S. Representative Joe Wilson (R-SC), who chairs the U.S. Helsinki Commission, and Kevin Rudd, the liberal Ambassador of Australia to the United States and former prime minister. They also met with Paul Massaro, a senior policy advisor to the Helsinki Commission and provocative NAFO celebrity who has proudly championed the Azov movement.

[…]

According to the AADF, one goal of the trip has been “building cooperation with American human rights defenders.” In this regard the mission has been absurdly successful, starting with the Helsinki Commission. Yulia Fedosiuk also held a meeting with Rachel Denber, deputy director of Human Rights Watch, which has in the past singled out the Azov battalion for “credible allegations…of torture and other egregious abuses.” Furthermore, the Azov trio met with Céline Boustani, the president of the Human Rights Foundation, a “right-wing regime-change lobby group that uses rich oligarch money to fund right-wing coup-mongers” according to journalist Ben Norton.

Later the Azov delegation met with Oksana Markarova, the Ambassador of Ukraine to the United States, and discussed future cooperation between the AADF and the Embassy of Ukraine. For this they were joined by Veronika Velch — the wife of Ukrainian filmmaker Oleg Senstov and the “senior director of advocacy” for Juleanna Glover, “widely considered one of the most powerful women in Washington” according to Wikipedia. Meanwhile, the infamous neocon Bill Kristol, co-founder of the Project for a New American Century, chimed in on Twitter, “It was an honor to meet Sgt. Fedosiuk, Yulia, and Kateryna Prokopenko yesterday in Washington, and truly inspiring to hear from them.”

Events that happened today (August 1):

1878: Konstantinos I. Logothetopoulos, director of the Axis’s collaborationist government in Greece, was born.
1932: Meir Kahane, Hebrew neofascist, was unfortunately born.
1933: The Third Reich executed the antifascist activists Bruno Tesch, Walter Möller, Karl Wolff and August Lütgens in Altona.
1936: The Olympics opened in Berlin with a ceremony presided over by Adolf Hitler.
1943: The Axis survived mostly unscathed as the Yankee airforce failed to destroy Romanian oil fields through Operation Tidal Wave.
1944: The Warsaw Uprising against the Axis occupation broke out in Poland.
1946: Moscow executed leaders of the so‐called ‘Russian Liberation Army’ for their collaboration with the Axis.
1967: Richard Johann Kuhn, fascist biochemist, expired.

The [parafascist] period was a less pleasurable experience for those who were defeated. Half a million Republican soldiers were interned in concentration camps (Rodrigo 2005). Of these, 90,000 died of starvation, disease or torture.

The [parafascist] régime established over a hundred concentration camps, forced labour camps, prisons and detention centres. The dictatorship [of the bourgeoisie] worked out a programme aimed at transforming Republicans into law‐abiding citizens of the New Spain (Gómez Bravo 2009). This included different levels of punishment, all of which were permeated with religious ideology.

[…]

Ditches were dug to delimit the camp, but seemed to have been largely symbolic: in some places they were only 20 cm deep. The latrines were located in a conspicuous place, visible from everywhere in the camp and the surrounding area (Figure 8, № 1, north east of the barracks).

These took the form of a simple irregular ditch dug through the hard shale, 30–50cm deep and c 2m [sic] wide (Figure 9). According to the orders issued by the concentration camp service, latrine ditches should be two metres deep and one metre wide (López Rodríguez 2006: 189); the wide shallow form they actually took would have made them totally unhygienic, spreading an awful smell through the camp and increasing the chances of disease in an undernourished population.

The most abundant item found in the latrines and perimeter ditches was the tin can: 90% of which were of either tuna or sardines. There were many potsherds, a lid from a tin pot and several military mess tins, which show the military character of these institutions. Evidence for medicines was plentiful: 22 ampoules, two bottles of peroxide, a tube of antiseptic cream, and many fragments of medicine bottles, some of them for intestinal diseases.

[…]

The archaeological investigation endorses surviving accounts from a type of place notorious for its inhuman repression. The daily diet was confined to a single tin of sardines shared by two or more prisoners, combined with a piece of bread and a watery soup.

Only 18 tiny fragments of bones have been identified, confirming that the inmates had virtually no access to meat—as opposed to internment camps of other nations (cf. Demuth 2009: 175). If the number of those who starved to death was not greater, this was due to the fact that many received food from relatives (in clay and tin pots as the ones we found). Lack of family could equal a death sentence.

Testimonies collected from former camp inmates describe the latrines as an instrument of “moral destruction” (Lafuente 2002: 148) as well as infection. The abundance of medicines is seemingly at odds with a population of mostly young adult people who should be the least affected by illness: but it was precisely the condition of imprisonment that favoured contagion.

When prisoners were treated like animals, showing a skill by doing specialized work was a way of counteracting the prevailing ideology. Historians have studied similar tactics of resistance, but they have invariably focused on artists and intellectuals (Agramunt 2005).

(Emphasis added.)

Events that happened today (July 31):

1884: Carl Friedrich Goerdeler, Fascist sympathizer, was born.
1887: Hans Freyer, head of the German Institute for Culture in Budapest from 1938 to 1944, was unfortunately born.
1932: The NSDAP won more than 38% of the vote in German elections.
1941: Under instructions from Adolf Hitler, Axis official Hermann Göring ordered SS General Reinhard Heydrich to ‘submit to me as soon as possible a general plan of the administrative material and financial measures necessary for carrying out the desired Final Solution of the Jewish question.’ Meanwhile, the Battle of Smolensk concluded with the Third Reich capturing about 300,000 Red Army prisoners.
1945: Pierre Laval, the fugitive former leader of Vichy France, surrendered to the Allies in Austria.
1980: Ernst Pascual Jordan, Fascist theoretical and mathematical physicist, expired.