Hitler became German chancellor 90 years ago. The world is still recovering.

The events of January 30, 1933, instilled a still-persistent yearning for xenophobic totalitarian rule.

The Garrison Church in Potsdam, Germany, is notorious in modern German history as the place where Reich President Paul von Hindenburg, a former general resplendent in full uniform, medals and spiked helmet, symbolically handed over power to the new Chancellor, Adolf Hitler, on March 21, 1933. Photo courtesy of Creative Commons

January 30, 2023

By 

A. James Rudin

(RNS) — Nine decades ago today (Jan. 30), Adolf Hitler legally became chancellor of Germany. It’s often forgotten he gained that position without a successful insurrection, a violent coup d’état — or a rigged national election. 

But, in fact, in Germany’s legislative election in November 1932, Hitler’s National Socialist German Workers Party — the Nazis — gained only 33.7% of the vote. Even after Hitler became chancellor, in March 1933, his party was still a minority, garnering only 43.9% of the vote. 

The election set the stage for a catastrophic world war with tens of millions of deaths, including the mass murders of the Holocaust that nearly destroyed the global Jewish community. It poisoned many political systems with a bitter brew of hate and bigotry and instilled a long-lasting yearning among countless people for anti-democratic totalitarian rule.

In the Germany of 1933, the politically weak Weimar Republic was besieged by well-organized Communists and Nazis, hyperinflation and a lack of broad public support. Teetering on the verge of collapse, the fledgling republic could not withstand a Hitler incensed by his low vote total. He made certain the 1933 election would be Germany’s last until his suicide in late April 1945 and the crushing military defeat of Nazi Germany in World War II.

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In appointing Hitler chancellor, the ailing German president, Paul von Hindenburg, falsely believed that he and leaders of the aristocratic conservative political and business establishment — Germany’s ruling class — could control and “civilize” the fanatical Nazis.

After all, they told themselves, Hitler had been a lowly army corporal, not even an officer, in World War I. Before that he’d been an unsuccessful artist, a raucous “nobody.” Perhaps the only thing the German establishment liked about Hitler was his public expression of virulent antisemitism.     

But, of course, they utterly failed to rein in Hitler.

Their mistake in judgment was the more puzzling, and horrific, because the Nazi leader had clearly proclaimed his goal of ruling Germany as the “führer” — the ultimate dictator. Under his personal leadership, the Nazi Party would come to control all aspects of German life: Politics, culture, communication, industry, education, labor, family life, medicine, sports, science, economics and, of course, literature and religion.

A Nazi book burning in Berlin’s Opera Plaza in May 1933. Photo by Georg Pahl/German Federal Archive/Creative Commons

On May 10, 1933, more than 40,000 people gathered in Berlin to witness the burning of 25,000 books, including works by Ernest Hemingway, Helen Keller, Sigmund Freud, Albert Einstein, Thomas Mann, Jack London and Theodore Dreiser. The book-burning area, Berlin’s Opera Plaza, is now a historical landmark that includes the 1820 prescient prediction by the German Jewish poet Heinrich Heine: “Where they burn books, they will also ultimately burn people.”

It was Hitler’s policy to subordinate both Protestantism (Germany’s largest religious community) and the Roman Catholic Church to the political power of his party. But there was much more on the Nazi agenda — there usually is in a dictatorship.

The Nazis organized the nationalistic “Deutsche Christen” (German Christian) church, so antisemitic that it renounced the Hebrew Bible (what Christians call the Old Testament) as well as the New Testament Letters of Paul because of their Jewish authorship.

The Nazi leadership and its sycophantic clergy supporters reshaped Christianity into an Aryan religion cut off from its deep theological and historical Jewish taproots.

In her excellent book, “The Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany,” Susannah Heschel of Dartmouth College documents how Ludwig Müller became the Reichsbischof (Reich Bishop) of the Nazi Church. During the Third Reich, many despicable theologians, consumed with traditional Christian antisemitism, transformed Jesus, the Jew of Nazareth, into an antisemitic Aryan warrior.

They also created a Nazi form of Christianity that was the archenemy of Jews and Judaism. Infused with such religious hatred, it was only a short step for millions of Germans to agree with Hitler’s policy of killing every Jew under his control.

There are numerous photos of Christian clergy wearing ecclesiastical robes in public that feature the abhorrent Nazi swastika symbol as they proudly offer the stiff-armed Nazi salute.

FILE – A busload of arrested Jewish men are questioned by government officials before being taken away in Berlin on April 11, 1933, shortly after Adolf Hitler’s takeover of power in Germany. (AP Photo/File)

Heschel notes that in 1939, the Nazi regime established the Institute for the Study and Eradication of Jewish Influence on German Church Life. She focuses especially on the Institute’s academic director, the antisemitic theologian Walter Grundmann, who was responsible for developing the Nazi version of Christianity.

Some Christian leaders, led by the philosopher Karl Barth, founded the anti-Nazi Confessing Church. Their efforts, historians agree, were mostly tepid and ineffective. Confessing Church leaders focused too heavily on protecting Jewish converts to Christianity and not upon the desperate genocidal removal of Germany’s Jews.  

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After World War II was underway, the young Lutheran pastor and scholar Dietrich Bonhoeffer abandoned the Confessing Church to join the anti-Nazi underground resistance movement. He was captured, imprisoned for two years and hanged in April 1945, a month before the end of the war. Bonhoeffer has become a Christian martyr because of his courageous anti-Nazi actions.

Even though Germany’s sharp descent into Nazi darkness began 90 years ago, the lights of freedom of conscience, political democracy and religious liberty still remain dim in many parts of the world. That is the still-urgent warning and the tragic legacy of January 30, 1933.

(Rabbi A. James Rudin is the American Jewish Committee’s senior interreligious adviser and the author of “The People in the Room: Rabbis, Nuns, Pastors, Popes and Presidents,” and was recently knighted by Pope Francis for his ecumenical outreach to Catholics. He can be reached at jamesrudin.com. The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily reflect those of Religion News Service.) 

The Shadowy Russian Scheme That Dumped Nazis Into Ukraine


David Volodzko
Tue, May 3, 2022, 

Dmitry Serebryakov/AFP via Getty

Russian President Vladimir Putin claims he invaded Ukraine to “de-nazify” the country and “protect people” from “bullying and genocide.” Russians apparently believe him, too; about 68 percent think the purpose of the invasion is self-defense, while 21 percent say it has to do with de-nazification. Though some have been careful to acknowledge that Ukraine does indeed have a Nazi problem, the West has mostly responded to such claims with eye-rolling, rightly arguing that Putin’s so-called de-nazification is nothing more than an excuse for a blatant land-grab.

But there is one glaring point that has been largely overlooked in the discussion about Nazism in Ukraine: the fact that the country’s Nazi problem can be traced right back to Russia.

Moscow recently released a shady video of FSB forces allegedly “thwarting” an assassination attempt by Ukrainian neo-Nazis. The so-called assassins’ lair contained plenty of “evidence” that appears to have been planted, like a new-looking Nazi T-shirt and Sims games, apparently a mistake by Russian agents who had been instructed to bring Sim cards into the apartment but planted the video games instead.

Another item that was “discovered” was a book with a handwritten note, signed with “signature illegible,” suggesting the FSB had erroneously signed those words after having been told to leave an illegible signature. Like everything else, the book was probably a plant, but the signature isn’t as dumb as it looks.

That phrase has special meaning in the Russian ultra-nationalist community. It’s even the title of a grossly antisemitic animated film about a rat (a metaphorical Jew) who gets a job at an office using a reference with an illegible signature. Leonid Volkov, chief of staff for opposition leader Alexei Navalny, wrote on Twitter that the phrase is also tied to Vasily Fedorovich, author of the 2011 fascist manifesto and hate-crime how-to “White Laces.” As Die Welt reported in 2008: “Ukrainian hate groups are believed to be inspired by their counterparts in Russia... Russian skinheads help the local groups, sharing tips and video clips on how to attack and torture victims and how to safely leave the crime scene.”

Holocaust Memorial and TV Tower Attacked in Putin’s Sham ‘Anti-Nazi’ War

There are other forms of ultra-nationalist cultural inspiration that have bled into Ukraine from Russia over the years, including neo-Nazi football fan groups, mixed martial arts (MMA), and underground metal bands. The Russian neo-Nazi football hooligan and far-right MMA figure Denis Nikitin has been living in Ukraine for years, where he has been organizing MMA fights in Kyiv, and allegedly using MMA as a neo-Nazi recruitment tool. Another avenue for Russian neo-Nazis to meet and recruit Ukrainians has been the music scene, including the Russian metal band M8L8TX (Hitler’s Hammer), which frequently toured the Kharkiv area. “When you talk to the Nazis themselves,” said independent journalist Leonid Ragozin, “it turns out that they frequently attended those concerts.”

Russian nationalist Dmitry Dyomushkin at a press conference held by the Movement Against Illegal Immigration (DPNI) in Moscow on Feb. 16, 2011.
Alexey Sazonov/AFP via Getty

The Russian government has also allegedly played a direct role in sending neo-Nazi mercenaries to Ukraine. That includes Dmitry Demushkin, who has claimed that in February 2014, then-Russian Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin offered to make him the mayor of a city in Donbas if he would agree to lead his followers to fight in Ukraine. A year later, Wagner-affiliated mercenary and neo-Nazi Alexei Milchakov also claimed that he, fellow Russian neo-Nazi Yan Petrovsky, and others were paid by the Russian government to do mercenary work in Ukraine, where he has since founded the neo-Nazi mercenary group Rusich and made headlines by cutting the ears off enemy corpses.

To be fair, Ukraine does have a Nazi history all its own. The nation’s founding fathers were Nazi collaborators: Stepan Bandera was the leader of the far-right Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), Roman Shukhevych was a Nazi auxiliary police captain, and Yaroslav Stetsko once said he supported the “destruction of the Jews.”

The remnants of that kind of historical antisemitism linger to this day: There has been a recent spike in antisemitism in Ukraine over the past few years, including a neo-Nazi march in Kyiv in May 2021. But to the extent that such issues exist, there has been a targeted effort to address them—including in early February of this year, when the Ukrainian government passed a law criminalizing antisemitism.

The Azov battalion demonstrates in Kiev on Oct. 14, 2014, to mark the founding of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), a paramilitary partisan movement formed in 1943 to battle for independence against Polish, Soviet, and German forces in western Ukraine.
Genya Savilov/AFP via GettyMore

Then there’s Ukraine’s Azov Battalion, whose founding leader once said Ukraine’s purpose is to “lead the white races of the world in a final crusade … against Semite-led Untermenschen [subhumans].” But if Azov is an antisemitic, ultra-nationalist group, and ultra-nationalist influence comes from Russia, why is Azov fighting Russia?

“Throughout the aught years in Russia there were mass beatings of people with the ‘wrong’ skin color or eye shape,” Igor Eidman, the Russian sociologist and political commentator, wrote in September 2020. “But there were practically no political attempts on security officers, officials, oligarchs.”

That was until 2007, when “the Nazi golem began to get out of control of its creator. The Nazis actually switched to mass terror, destabilizing the country. They began to blow up and smash markets,” Eidman wrote. As a result, Russian authorities decided to shut down their pet Nazi project during the Euromaidan uprisings in Ukraine, because “the Kremlin decided that the nationalists could become a fighting force of protests not only in Kyiv, but also in Moscow. Therefore, in 2014, they tried to ship them to the slaughterhouse in the Donbas. And those who refused were imprisoned.”

This rhymes with statements by Demushkin, Milchakov, and others.

Eidman concludes that almost all Russian ultra-nationalist leaders suddenly became enemies of the state and were imprisoned from 2014 to 2015. Many subsequently fled to Ukraine. Alexander Parinov, who is wanted for planning the murder of a lawyer and journalist, is now reportedly a member of Azov. Sergey Korotkikh, who founded Russia’s largest ultra-nationalist group the National Socialist Society, is now a top Azov member. Roman Zheleznov of the far-right Restrukt movement, which hunted gays in Russia, also reportedly serves in Azov. Alexei Korshunov, a member of the neo-Nazi Combat Organization of Russian Nationalists (BORN), which is responsible for many killings, was suspected of killing antifa activist Ivan Khutorskoi and fled to Zaporizhzhia, Ukraine.

Ukrainian ultra-nationalists march through the center of Lviv on April 28, 2013, to mark the 70th anniversary of 14th SS-Volunteer Division “Galician” foundation.
Yuriy Dyachyshyn/AFP via Getty

So Russia helped foster and encourage ultra-nationalist groups to destabilize Ukraine, but when the Kremlin realized these same groups could be a destabilizing force in Moscow and cracked down on them, many fled to neighboring Ukraine. The end result being that you now have anti-Russian neo-Nazis in Ukraine of Russian origin.

“The Kremlin found that the ultra-right may pose a threat to political stability, not only to migrant workers and African students,” Alexander Verkhovsky, the director of the Russian think tank SOVA Center, which focuses on nationalism and racism in post-Soviet Russia, told the Daily Beast. “There were several waves of crackdowns. My hypothesis is that our authorities had some fears related to those who participated in the war [in Ukraine] and were returning back very frustrated.”

White Nationalists Are Tearing Each Other Apart Over Ukraine

Verkhovsky says while Russia has influenced Ukrainian groups, they did not create them. “Many Russian neo-Nazis and other ultraright leaders and activists, including militant ones, fled to Ukraine in various years,” he added. “Some of them, not all of them, became a part of the Ukrainian neo-Nazi milieu. But all Ukrainian neo-Nazi groups were created by Ukrainians.”

Political betrayal is only part of the problem. There’s a deep-seated ideological rift as well. “Our ultra-rights are white racists above all,” said Verkhovsky, adding, “Putin is seen as an enemy because he invites millions of non-Slavs from other countries, which is seen as an invasion. So he is seen as a national traitor.”

A soldier from the Azov battalion patrolling in Shyrokyne, Ukraine.
NurPhoto/Getty

This explains why, in a 2014 report by the Guardian, one Azov fighter was quoted as saying, “I have nothing against Russian nationalists, or a great Russia. But Putin’s not even a Russian. Putin’s a Jew.”

In a nutshell, this is how you end up with Putin claiming he wants to de-nazify Ukraine and remove its Jewish president, while also having Russian neo-Nazis in Ukraine claiming Putin is a Jew. Either way, Putin’s claim is clearly a case of the Nazi kettle calling the Nazi pot black.

How Nazi Billionaires Thrived in Postwar Germany

AN INTERVIEW WITH DAVID DE JONG

In Nazi Germany, industrialists built vast fortunes from slave labor and stolen Jewish property. In postwar West Germany, they were allowed to keep them — with denazification doing little to trouble those who had profited most from the regime.

Adolf Hitler holds a reception for leading figures in German business,

 including Dr Gustav Krupp (foreground), 1939. 

(Ullstein Bild via Getty Images)

10.31.2022
 Jacobin 

INTERVIEW BYONDŘEJ BĚLÍČEK

In 2019, the German tabloid Bild published shocking revelations about one of the country’s most powerful companies. Bild discovered that Albert Reimann — creator of a family business whose investment firm, JAB Holding, has majority stakes in brands from Dr Pepper to Jacobs Douwe Egberts — was a devoted Nazi who sexually abused, tortured, and humiliated slave workers in his business during World War II. The Reimann family fortune is estimated at €33 billion. The family decided to confront its dark past and donated millions of euros to nonprofit organizations devoted to helping religious and national minorities and seeking out the families of the war prisoners forced to work for the grandfather’s firm.

This was just one recent case showing how Nazi tycoons had been able to cover up their dark pasts in postwar West Germany. One of the journalists who dug into the archives to find out about this history was David de Jong. His new book, Nazi Billionaires, follows the story of men who became part of the Third Reich’s business and financial elite, making their fortunes by stealing Jewish-owned firms, banks, and other assets, as well as exploiting forced and slave labor in concentration camps during World War II. Companies like Siemens, Volkswagen, BMW, Daimler-Benz, Dr. Oetker, Porsche, Krupp, IG Farben, and many more cooperated with the SS, which built “satellite concentration camps” near these private companies’ factories and mines where slave laborers toiled in the most appalling conditions. While, after 1945, legal proceedings were launched against Nazi businessmen, almost none would be punished. Industrialists like Günther Quandt, Friedrich Flick, and Ferdinand Porsche were even allowed to keep their assets and continue business as usual. During the “economic miracle” of the 1950s in Germany, they made even bigger fortunes, and their family businesses remain among the most powerful in Germany. Some have even continued to support far-right political parties.

But how did the relationship between Adolf Hitler and the business and financial elite develop during the interwar period? And why were Nazi businessmen set free after the war, even though their activities were key to the regime’s operations? Jacobin’s Ondřej Bělíček spoke to De Jong about the fate of the Nazi billionaires.

ONDŘEJ BĚLÍČEK

Your book starts with the moment when Hermann Göring and Adolf Hitler invited industrialists for a meeting and asked them to donate huge sums to the Nazi Party. Sometimes it is said that Hitler used these businessmen for his own purposes, but in another sense, he was the figure that they were looking for. How would you describe the relationship between Germany’s financial and industrial elite and the Nazi Party?

DAVID DE JONG

I would agree that in a way most of the men that I write about were sheer opportunists. These families were already very rich before Hitler seized power in 1933, with the exception of the Porsche-Piëch family, which laid the foundations for their wealth during the Third Reich. They were leading business families during the German Empire, the Weimar Republic, the Third Reich, in West Germany, and still today in unified Germany. These businessmen looked to maximize profit, and they thrived in any political system. I would even argue that they would have somehow risen to the top even in a communist system. Their main goal was to maximize profit and expand their business empires and fortunes regardless of the political system.

These men became interested in Hitler and the Nazi Party once it had his first electoral success in Germany in September 1930. It was the period when the Great Depression hit Germany with a wave of discontent and unemployment. The entire business world hung in the balance, and that, for the first time, opened the door for Hitler to Germany’s business community, which had before mostly supported establishment conservative figures. It opened the door for them to have conversations, but they didn’t really start supporting Hitler until he came to power on January 30, 1933. In that meeting that you refer to, he promised them something that he initially delivered on, which is economic and political stability and the rearmament of Germany, which they greatly profited from. They made billions of reichsmarks that were flowing to them from their steel, machinery, and car companies that were retooled to produce weapons and war material.

ONDŘEJ BĚLÍČEK

Hitler gave them the means to make more money and control anything they wanted in exchange for their loyalty.

DAVID DE JONG

He promised to make them more money, but also to protect their interests, because it was a very unstable period. Sure, it was about making more money, but that was always their bottom line. But now it was also really about reviving their companies, getting Germany’s economy back to where it was before World War I and Weimar.

ONDŘEJ BĚLÍČEK

In your book, you follow the story of a few main protagonists among the Third Reich’s financiers, industrialists, and weapons manufacturers, who exploited Nazi race policies and made huge fortunes. Could you describe the main practices that these people used to get what they wanted and make themselves the wealthiest and most powerful people in Nazi Germany?

DAVID DE JONG

There were three ways to profit from the Nazi system. I already mentioned weapons production, which was not criminal, although it was forbidden under the Treaty of Versailles. But from 1935 onward, with the introduction of the Nuremberg race laws, you see the sliding scale that devolves into criminality with the disfranchisement and expropriation of Jewish business owners and families.

Initially, it had this veneer of legality, where they coerced Jewish entrepreneurs to sign over their companies, for far below market value, to the men I write about. Or else these families wanted to sell their companies because they wanted to flee Nazi Germany. But then, as the 1930s go on, you see that it devolves into outright theft and robbery and seizure of Jewish-owned assets. They used the same practice in German-occupied territory across Europe, with business owners who were robbed just because the Germans had occupied their country. And the third way was the mass exploitation of forced and slave labor. After the German invasion into the Soviet Union in 1941, the mass deportation of forced and slave laborers from all across Europe to German factories and mines began. An estimated 12 to 20 million people were deported to work in Germany, and approximately 2.5 million people died due to the horrific working conditions in factories, mines, and labor camps.

ONDŘEJ BĚLÍČEK

The most shocking part of this story is the exploitation of the prisoners from concentration camps as a slave workforce for the private companies. To what extent did these private companies use slave labor — and what were the working conditions?

DAVID DE JONG

There were three ways German companies procured this labor. There were forced laborers who were mainly from Eastern Europe, who were deported by the millions through the German labor front, and paid much less than German laborers and kept in labor camps. Then there were prisoners of war. They were not paid. Thirdly, you had concentration camp labor. That was a collaboration of the SS with big companies like BMW, Daimler, Volkswagen, IG Farben, Siemens, Krupp, Dr. Oetker, and companies controlled by Günther Quandt and Friedrich Flick. These people were slaves, and the aim was to exterminate them through labor. These companies leased prisoners from the SS for four reichsmark per day for unskilled labor and six reichsmark per day for skilled labor. The SS built sub-concentration camps, or “satellite concentration camps,” as they were called, on factory complexes. These camps were guarded by the SS, and there was barely any medical attention and food for the captives. Prisoners were executed, hanged, or shot for the most minor infringements, and they were abused at their workplaces. They didn’t have any protective clothing, so they handled the machinery with their bare hands. There were the most awful working conditions you can imagine.

ONDŘEJ BĚLÍČEK

After the war, trials against the Nazi financial and industrial elite were prepared, and it seemed like justice would be done. But soon it turned out that almost none of the main culprits were sentenced to jail. Could you describe how the trials were initially set up and what determined the outcome of these trials?

DAVID DE JONG

It’s important to distinguish between two things. First, there were the Nuremberg trials. The first and main Nuremberg trial was a major success, and it was focused on the top political and military protagonists of the Nazi regime. And there was the plan to hold trials against industrialists, which would be similar to the first main trial. But the Americans were worried that the Soviets would turn it into an anti-capitalist show trial. At the same time, the British and the French were so economically weak that they didn’t want to put money into another massive tribunal. The Americans decided to go at it alone and staged eleven trials at Nuremberg.

Three of these trials were held against industrialists. They concerned Friedrich Flick and his managers, Alfred Krupp and his managers, and the entire executive board of IG Farben. Those trials were very well prepared, and justice was done. However, the American judges didn’t really get most of the dense evidentiary material, translated from German. The Americans limited the number of trials against industrialists because they didn’t want to put capitalism on trial. At that time, the Cold War was getting started, and the Americans made this policy decision where they wanted to rebuild West Germany as a democratically viable and economically strong state, which would act as a buffer against the Soviet Union and the encroachment of communism.Hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of Germans went free for their crimes.

I understand that policy decision, but where it went completely wrong, in my opinion, was when the Americans, British, and French handed over hundreds of thousands of suspected Nazi war criminals back to West German authorities for so-called denazification processes, which were very flawed legal trials that went on in western Germany between 1945 and 1950. It basically meant that hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of Germans went free for their crimes, because there was no interest on the German side to judge people on crimes that they themselves had committed and sympathies that they had held as well.

The denazification of Germany is a myth. It never took place. There was a continuation of money and power from Nazi Germany to West Germany, and also, to an extent, in East Germany, because former SS officers became high-ranking Stasi and party officials. But it was far more pervasive in West Germany, where — in whatever part of society, whether business, legal, medical, academic, or media — there was no denazification.

ONDŘEJ BĚLÍČEK

It’s shocking that the top leaders of Nazi Germany’s financial elite were allowed to continue doing business as usual.

DAVID DE JONG

Yes, totally. They were allowed to keep all their assets. Except, of course, apart from their assets located in Soviet-occupied East Germany, where the authorities expropriated them and took everything. But in West Germany, they were allowed to keep everything.

ONDŘEJ BĚLÍČEK

As for the trials, I found it odd that investigators weren’t interested in the brutal practices of the industrialists like exploitation of forced slave labor and running subcamps near their factories. Why do you think that was the case?

DAVID DE JONG

It was related to the fact that they didn’t want to put capitalism on trial. Similarly, that’s why they were allowed to keep all their assets, because business had to thrive in West Germany if they wanted it to be an effective buffer against the Soviet Union, and if Western Europe was to be revived again. I think the Americans were worried that, if they investigated the labor practices, it could turn against them, and they could be asked questions like, “OK, but what are you doing in your factories?” or “What about the exploitation of African Americans in your country?” That’s something they wanted to avoid at all costs.

ONDŘEJ BĚLÍČEK

It’s often said that Germany confronted its dark past. The student movement of the 1960s is frequently cited as the moment when German society started to ask difficult questions. After reading your book, I’m not so sure if German society was that successful in this respect. You mention that the first major backlash against the family of one of the most powerful industrialists in the Third Reich, Friedrich Flick, happened in the mid-1990s. And only in recent years does there seem to be a wider debate about history of other major Nazis who built their empires during the Third Reich and continued to do so after the war. Why do you think this is happening now and not much earlier, for instance when the Cold War ended?

DAVID DE JONG

It’s because German business has never been forced to take any kind of moral responsibility for its crimes during the Third Reich. Sure, there were financial compensations, but they always negotiated that they didn’t have to admit any culpability or guilt for the crimes they committed. They paid money, but paying money is something different than actually coming out and taking responsibility for the actions in the past. The lack of responsibility has allowed these business families to sweep the history under the rug up to this day.German business has never been forced to take any kind of moral responsibility for its crimes during the Third Reich.

ONDŘEJ BĚLÍČEK

So when we talk about how Germany managed to confront its past, do you think it’s a myth?

DAVID DE JONG

If you look at a macro level then yes, they’ve reckoned with it pretty well. If you look on a micro level, nobody wants to talk about it. Nobody really wants to talk about what their grandparents did during World War II. This debate in the 1960s was more of a generational conflict. People who were born after the war became very critical toward power structures that were still in place. Very violent movements were formed from that debate, like the Rote Armee Fraktion, but they were mainly challenging the conservatism and the lack of historical reckoning that Germany had, which didn’t much occur in the business world, which was still a very conservative world. That reckoning really didn’t come until the 1990s or the 2000s. And in my opinion, it’s still far from being fulfilled.

ONDŘEJ BĚLÍČEK

How did German society react to the findings that recently appeared in the newspapers about the dark Nazi past of certain billionaire companies?

DAVID DE JONG

The problem in Germany is that the public has become a little bit desensitized to revelations regarding its Nazi past. You notice that people are inundated with such revelations on a daily basis. They have become used to them, and they aren’t shocked.

ONDŘEJ BĚLÍČEK

Some of the families of former Nazi businessmen took public responsibility for the past following pressure from media and the public. In your book, you particularly mentioned the damage control by the Reimann family business as an example of how to deal with findings about a firm’s dark past. Why do you think the steps they took are the best way to deal with it?

DAVID DE JONG

Because they’re transparent about the fact that their father and grandfather were committed Nazis. Also, they’ve renamed their foundation after their other grandfather, who turned out to be murdered in the Holocaust. My point is that there should be more of this historical transparency and taking responsibility for the past. But if you name your foundations after Herbert Quandt or Friedrich Flick or Ferdinand Porsche, who were committed Nazis or voluntary SS officers who committed war crimes on a large scale, than you can’t celebrate their business successes while leaving out their Nazi history.

ONDŘEJ BĚLÍČEK

What reaction did you get from the public on your book?

DAVID DE JONG

There have been two major developments since the book came out. First, the BMW foundation Herbert Quandt was inundated with angry letters from people who received money from that foundation but felt lied to because they had been given money in the name of a Nazi war criminal. So the foundation came out with a statement and promised change, but BMW is stuck between conservative shareholder Stefan Quandt, who honors his father, and angry foundation members, who are not very powerful but were very public about their anger. Second, Porsche is now negotiating with the heirs of Adolf Rosenberger, the company’s cofounder, who was pushed out of Porsche in 1935 and erased from Porsche company history for being Jewish. So they want to restore his place in Porsche company history. It’s also due to the fact that they have so many financial interests on the line right now, with the company going to the stock exchange and being valued at €80 billion, which is a massive amount.

CONTRIBUTORS

David de Jong is author of Nazi Billionaires.

Ondřej Bělíček is editor of Czech online daily A2larm.cz

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In this landmark work of investigative journalism, David de Jong reveals the true story of how Germany’s wealthiest business dynasties amassed untold money and power by abetting the …

Nazi Billionaires by David De Jong — Open Letters Review

https://openlettersreview.com/posts/nazi-billionaires-by-david-de-jong

By David De Jong Mariner Books, 2022. Journalist David De Jong spent years investigating the Nazi 

Leading American medical journal faces down its own history of endorsing Nazi race science

Titled “Nazism and the Journal,” the article is part of a series written by independent historians that focuses on biases and injustices that New England Journal of Medicine has historically countenanced

By JACKIE HAJDENBERG (JTA)April 4, 2024, 

A special exhibit at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, "Deadly Medicine: Creating the Master Race," explores how the Nazis developed racial health policies that began with the mass sterilization of individuals considered to be "biological threats." (Courtesy United States Holocaust Memorial Museum)

A leading American medical journal praised the Nazi Party’s medical practices in the 1930s and was slow to acknowledge Nazi Germany’s antisemitic abuse, according to a historical retrospective the journal is publishing this week.

The article, which has been published online and will appear in the Thursday print edition of the New England Journal of Medicine, addresses the publication’s history of endorsing Nazi race science.

“We hope it will enable us to learn from our mistakes and prevent new ones,” write authors Joelle M. Abi-Rached and Allan M. Brandt, both historians of medicine affiliated with Harvard University.

Titled “Nazism and the Journal,” the article is part of a series written by independent historians that focuses on biases and injustices that NEJM has historically countenanced. Previous entries have addressed eugenics and racism in medicine as well as diversity in medical residency programs.

The article concludes that the journal “paid only superficial and idiosyncratic attention to the rise of the Nazi state” until the end of World War II, even as competitors dealt forthrightly with the health implications of the Nazis’ persecution of the Jews.

According to the article, NEJM first mentioned Adolf Hitler in a 1935 article by Michael M. Davis, a leading figure in American health policy, and Gertrud Kroeger, a preeminent German nurse who was later revealed to be a Nazi sympathiser. In that article, the two praised the reorganisation of national health insurance in Nazi Germany uncritically and in a detached manner, Abi-Rached and Brandt write.

By that time, Jews were already banned from a range of prestigious jobs, including at public universities, and Jewish doctors faced restrictions on their ability to practice medicine.

“There is no reference to the slew of persecutory and antisemitic laws that had been passed after the Nazis assumed power in January 1933,” Abi-Rached and Brandt write. “Davis and Kroeger sympathetically described the requirement that insurance physicians complete 3 months of compulsory service at newly established labor camps in rural areas.”

Abi-Rached and Brandt also found that the Journal “enthusiastically praised German forced sterilisation and the restrictive alcohol policies of the Hitler Youth.” A 1934 article about sterilization, titled “Sterilization and Its Possible Accomplishments” is still available in the journal’s online archive.

The Third Reich had enacted the Law for the Prevention of Offspring with Hereditary Diseasesin 1933, requiring the forced sterilisation of people with certain mental and physical disabilities. By 1935, the Marital Health Law banned marriages between those deemed “hereditarily healthy” and those who were not — the same year Nazi Germany stripped Jews of citizenship and prohibited them from marrying non-Jews.

The medical journal did not acknowledge Nazi war crimes until 1944, with the publication of an editorial titled “Epidemic Starvation” about the dire conditions in concentration camps in Eastern Europe.

“Mass starvation has rarely, if ever, been distributed so ruthlessly or so systematically to civilian populations as has been the case in occupied Europe in the present struggle,” the authors wrote in the 1944 article.

By contrast, Abi-Rached and Brandt found that a competing publication, the Journal of the American Medical Association, or JAMA, “frequently informed its readership about the detrimental impact of Nazi rule on medical practice,” including by “detailing the persecution of Jewish physicians, including the restriction of their practice and access to medical education.”

NEJM only issued one “explicitly critical piece” in 1933 titled “The Abuse of the Jewish Physicians,” which was a short notice appended to an article about a surgical treatment for tuberculosis.

Abi-Rached and Brandt note that Davis and Kroeger’s article was challenged by a letter to the editor which, they said, “showed sympathy for the Jewish doctors.” (They also note that despite praising Nazi practices, Davis himself had Jewish ancestry.) But the letter in question primarily focused on the threat of socialized medicine. Other articles published in NEJM at the time, they noted, were “overwhelmingly about the compulsory and oversubscribed sickness insurance system, ‘socialised medicine,’ and ‘quackery,’ not the persecution and mass extermination of Jews.”

The publication’s first overt condemnation of the Nazis’ medical abuses did not appear until 1949 after Leo Alexander, a Viennese-born American Jewish psychiatrist and neurologist, compiled evidence to use against Nazi doctors at the Nuremberg trials. Alexander also wrote part of the Nuremberg Code, which provides legal and ethical guidance for scientific experimentation on humans following revelations about Nazi experiments on Jews.

In the 1960s and onward, the New England Journal of Medicine published additional articles documenting the medical atrocities committed by the Nazi medical establishment, as ethical standards became increasingly widespread.

Reflecting on the journal’s omissions during the Holocaust, Abi-Rached and Brandt grasp for explanations and arrive at ones that they say have implications for contemporary scholarship about medicine.

“Part of the answer lies in denial, compartmentalisation, and rationalisation, all of which depend on structural and institutional racism — deep historical, often unrecognised, bias and discrimination that serve the status quo,” they write.

ARYAN NATION RISING REDUX

Nazi flag on Alberta property triggers complaint to RCMP: A ‘slap in the face to Canada

’
Karen Bartko 

GLOBAL NEWS

6/5/2021

A formal complaint has been made to Alberta RCMP after a version of the Nazi flag was flown at a property northeast of Edmonton.

© Supplied A Nazi Hitler Youth flag flying on a property near Boyle, Alta. in May 2021.

The Hitler Youth flag was spotted on a flagpole south of Boyle, at a rural property along Highway 831, with a sign out front saying "Licenced Vehicle Inspections Station."

"The swastika is a symbol, for the Jewish community, of terror and of genocide," said Jaime Kirzner-Roberts, the director of policy for Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Center for Holocaust Studies (FSWC).

"I can't think of any other symbol that is so dark and frightening to our community as the swastika."

Read more: After taxi was spray-painted with swastikas, northern Alberta community rallied to help owner

The Flag of the Nazi Party is red with a black swastika on a white circle; whereas the modified Hitler Youth flag has a white horizontal stripe through the middle and narrow border around the universally recognized symbol of racist hatred

.

© Provided by Global News

The Hitler Youth was a mandatory indoctrination organization for 14- to 18-year-old Aryan boys under the Nazi Party in Germany. It appropriated many Boy Scouts activities while also teaching military practices, with the intent of shaping future soldiers and pushing the party's racist views among younger generations.

News of the flag reached FSWC — a Jewish human rights organization based in Toronto — on Thursday. Kirzner-Roberts said a post containing images of the flag were sent to her in the morning.

"I was immediately concerned. And the first step that I took was to see whether the details were accurate," she said, explaining she contacted Boyle RCMP, who she said confirmed it was a Nazi flag.

She asked if a criminal investigation had been launched and was told no, because a formal complaint hadn't been file. So she did just that.

"Our position is that flying a Nazi flag is clearly hate motivated. And according to the Criminal Code of Canada, it is illegal to promote hatred.

"So we certainly urge the RCMP to investigate the matter as a hate-motivated crime," she said to Global News.

Read more: Montreal mayor shocked after Nazi flag displayed during May Day protest

The property is in Athabasca County. A statement said council and administration are aware of an inappropriate flag.

"Athabasca County prides itself on being a warm and welcoming region," said a statement from Reeve Larry Armfelt.

"This type of display, and the messages it sends, has no place in our communities."

The county said the matter has been referred to the RCMP.

Alberta RCMP said officers spoke to the property owner on Wednesday night.

"The flag was taken down voluntarily, and our investigation continues as to whether this is criminal or not," a statement from Const. Chantelle Kelly with RCMP media relations said.

Play Video
Vehicles vandalized with racist graffiti in southwest Edmonton

Since the Second World War, the possession of swastika flags and other Nazi symbolism is forbidden in Germany.

Canada doesn't have any laws on the books restricting ownership or display of Nazi flags, but hate laws give police the right to intervene if they are used in the communication of hatred. In modern times, the Nazi flag has been embraced by neo-Nazi supporters and sympathizers.

Read more: Hate crime in Canada: do our laws allow a white nationalist rally?

Kirzner-Roberts said the flag represents more than just hatred towards Judaism.

"People that fly this flag often hate the Black community and other communities in our country. And I would say that they hate Canada as a whole - you know, our country fought a world war to defeat the Nazis," she said.

"We lost many of our soldiers, many, many were injured. This is such a profound slap in the face to Canada and Canada's values.

"So we are really hoping that the RCMP will conduct a thorough investigation into this matter."




Read more: ‘This is Nazi f****** America!’: North Carolina woman confronts her neighbour over Swastika flag

Global News attempted to reach the property owner several times on Thursday, but was unsuccessful.

— With files from The Canadian Pres

Mass Protests Against the Far Right AfD in Germany

By Thomas Klikauer, Danny Antonelli 

February 2, 2024

Source: Originally published by Z. Feel free to share widely.

Source: screenshot of Germany’s main public TV station’s news, 27th January 2024

It’s early February in 2024 and on the last 3 weekends in January hundreds of thousands of Germans took to the streets and rallied against the far-right AfD. Many politicians, intellectuals and ordinary voters are convinced that the AfD, Alternative für Deutschland (Alternative for Germany), is a true Neo-Nazi party.

In popular parlance the party is also referred to as:AfD = Alternative für Dumkopfe (Alternative for Dummies)
AfD = Abyss for Deutschland
AfD = Aus für Demokratie (The end of democracy)
AfD = Alliance for Demagogues
AfD – Alle faschisten Deportieren (Deport all fascists)

Since the recent Wannsee 2.0 scandal came to light, the AfD is even more widely regarded as a Neo-Nazi party. In 2018 CDU-boss and arch-conservative Friedrich Merz declared, “the AfD are Nazis.”

More recently, the regional CDU leader of Germany’s largest state of North-Rhine-Westphalia and state premier Hendrik Wüst said, “this is a Nazi party.”

A court decided that it was justifiable to call the AfD’s most powerful Führer, Björn Höcke, a Nazi. The AfD’s party deputy, who has no real power but is the pretty face of neofascism, Swiss resident Alice Weidel, has been called a Nazi-Schlampe or Nazi bitch and a court decision allowed that moniker to stand.

Last month, Weidel was forced to fire one of her advisors who had taken part in that secret Wannsee 2.0 meeting where plans were aired to force the elimination or deportation of anyone with a non-Aryan heritage.

It all began in 2013 with a handful of staunchly neoliberal and anti-EU professors of economics who founded the AfD. But today, the AfD is more right-wing than ever before.

To get to where they are today, in 2022 the AfD replicated Hitler’s Night of the Long Knives. Even though nobody was killed, apart from a few character assassinations, the party purged anyone who could possibly move toward the center or be open for compromise with other parties.

This purge eliminated the party’s last moderates. The ideological cleansing of the party took place in the East-German city of Riesa at the AfD’s 2022 party congress. The neofascist core group eradicated the original non-fascist neoliberals and severely weakened the party’s conservative-reactionary wing.

Riesa 2022 strengthened the völkische (read: Neo-Nazis) forces within the party. By 2023, the traditional internal AfD fights between neoliberals, conservatives, and right-wing extremists had ended.

After that, inner-party disputes largely centered around inconsequential issues like which party candidates should be put on a list so they could be elected.

By the end of 2023, in virtually all of Germany’s recent elections as well as in public polling, the AfD was at a historic high, sitting at 20% to 24%, as reflected on German TV’s famous Sunday question that asks Germans: “Which party would you vote for if election day was next Sunday?”

Germany’s normally apathetic political landscape might well have accepted the AfD as a new (neo-fascist) normal for Germany. But then the wave of street protests began. Dramatically, the protests have had their first victory against the party, causing their defeat in an election in Thuringia.

For years, the AfD has been under intense scrutiny by the security services as well by Germans who remember the atrocities carried out by the Nazi regime.

Meanwhile, rafts of analytical acuity have also been applied to the AfD ever since its foundation. Early in its history, the AfD planned the destruction of the CDU, since 1945 Germany’s traditional conservative party. They failed.

Most recently there have also been passionate debates about the possibility of banning the AfD. This has arisen because the AfD has increasingly failed to camouflage its Neo-Nazi ideology.

However, at the moment there is a rather paradoxical development: the simultaneous radicalization and normalization of the AfD. Today it is no longer unthinkable to imagine a political scenario in which the AfD becomes the leading force on the right of Germany’s political spectrum.

Particularly in the former East-Germany, where the AfD is a very serious contender. In the eastern states it might even replace the conservative CDU.

In 2023, the party celebrated its 10th anniversary. In those 10 years the AfD moved even more to the right of the conservative CDU and neoliberal FDP. AfD founder Alexander Gauland was eliminated, and at the same time the simple-minded Beatrix von Storch, great-grandaughter of Hitler’s Finance Minster, has mostly been sidelined – but not for her statement advocating for the shooting of refugees at Germany’s borders!

With Gauland gone and Storch weakened, the Völkisch, i.e. Neo-Nazi, wing of the AfD runs the show. The AfD’s Neo-Nazi wing was only in its nascent stage after the foundation of the AfD. Initially, it played no visible role in the party.

The AfD’s Führer is the cunning hardcore Neo-Nazi Björn Höcke who spread his Nazi ideology under the self-assumed and camouflaging name of Landolf Ladig.

At the beginning of the AfD his Neo-Nazi wing was extremely marginal in terms of quantity and quality. But over time he was able to shape and develop them into a very strong contingent. Today they are “the” absolutely dominating force inside the party.

Since the Riesa congress in the summer of 2022, there is no doubt that the Völkische-Neo-Nazi wing has taken over the AfD’s leadership. The other two currents (reactionary and neoliberal) continue to exist, but their remnants must subordinate themselves to the Neo-Nazis.

Under the Neo-Nazis, anyone making public statements is obliged to use Neo-Nazi buzzwords such as Umvolkung or population exchange, as well as to promote the neo-fascist ideology of racial identity.

Through the use of these framing techniques, it has become obvious that the AfD’s right-wing radicalization has not harmed the party. Rather, the opposite is the case.

Absurdly, the AfD is more right-wing than ever and is also stronger than ever. In the East-German state of Saxony, for example, the AfD is currently at 35% of voter popularity.

Characterized by a strengthening of its Neo-Nazi self-confidence, AfD members themselves have noticed this rather astutely, further boosting their adherence to Neo-Nazi doctrine.

Not surprisingly, mini-Führer Björn Höcke has recently praised what he calls “the party’s ideological consolidation”. Appropriately, the AfD’s top candidate for the upcoming EU election in June 2024, Maximilian Krah, calls his party the “post-Riesa AfD”. Both of them acknowledge and support the far right radicalization of the AfD.

The leap into Neo-Nazism as “the” ideological strategy is working out well for the AfD – rather brilliantly actually. At the same time, their success cannot be seen without the current unpopularity of Germany’s progressive-environmental-neoliberal (SPD-GREEN-FDP) government.

The government’s downward trend in popularity has been strongly supported by Germany’s conservative mass media. The combined force of German conservatism (CDU) and corporate mass-media (Springer) has hit the present government hard and has inspired the AfD.

It has also generated mass support for the AfD as it successfully pretends to be the only true opposition to the government.

This occurred at the same time as the – seemingly – unstoppable normalization of the AfD. The AfD has been able to benefit from the current widespread displeasure about Germany’s so-called traffic light coalition. This has been shown in recent elections in the states of Hessen and Bavaria. In other words, there are currently a few trends that are favorable for the AfD.

The AfD was indeed starting to be perceived as a normal party until its Wannsee 2.0 scandal and its plans for the forced deportation of millions. According to recent public polling, about 27% of voters consider the AfD to be a “normal party”.

In 2016, when the AfD was much more moderate, it was only 17%. In other words, as it becomes more and more Neo-Nazi it is somehow increasingly regarded as a normal political party.

One of the reasons for the public support of the AfD can be found in the fact that the party appears much more disciplined than other parties to the outside world. The AfD’s very own replication of Hitler’s Night of the Long Knives in 2022 has worked in favor of the party. Those who used to challenge the AfD’s Neo-Nazis internally are gone. There is no longer any opposition to the monolithic ideology promulgated by the leadership.

The few internal conflicts that remain no longer penetrate the Putin-inspired iron wall of fear to the outside world. The AfD also offers what on the surface seem to be unifying issues. For example, it takes a different position on the the war in Ukraine than almost all of Germany’s democratic parties.

What works for the Putin-loving AfD is the fact that an increasing number of Germans think that Germany’s federal government is undertaking way too few diplomatic efforts to end a war that Putin wants to extend in order to recover all of Russia’s “lost” territory.

Like the All-Russian Political Party “United Russia”, the AfD remains nationalistic. And it also benefits from the fact that voices critical of Germany’s current government have found an audience inside the AfD.

Recently, the AfD has also received support from Germany’s conservative CDU. What Germany’s conservatives don’t realize is that they are not helping themselves by taking up AfD-related issues and topics. The result is that the conservative CDU/CSU are stagnating in public polls.

Largely by taking up the AfD’s issue of migration, the CDU’s indirect support has moved Germany’s Overton Window of politics to the right. In other words, the AfD is harvesting the seeds of what the CDU/CSU is planting.

The AfD also pretends to offer a stand against billionaire predatory capitalism. This is nothing new as regards political “hall of mirrors” techniques. Historically, Germany’s Nazi party of the 1930s, called itself “socialist” as in “National Socialist German Workers’ Party” (NSDAP).

The illusion created by the names “socialist” and “workers” had its desired effect and attracted those disaffected by the inability of the leftist parties of the day to unite against the fascist right.

Once the NSDAP came to power, thousands of real socialist workers were beaten, tortured, and killed while Germany’s capitalist oligarchs and business elite thrived.

As in the 1930s, so in the 21st Century: the AfD is married to a strict neoliberal ideology. For example, the AfD is against any tax increase for the wealthy. On the whole however, the AfD remains a so-called single issue party. The issue that is their bread and butter is migration.

This plays well into the fear of Germany’s petit bourgeois middle class. For those with right-wing tendencies, the question is not so much whether and how social and economic policies will impact them. The easy answer to every question is: migration.

As a consequence, the AfD exploits the insecure very successfully in their fear of losing out by shouting the Big Lie that mirrors their tortured thoughts: “Migrants will replace me, take my job, take my house, take my car… .”

Self-negativity contains a belief of not being able to win something – not even something small. Unlike in the 1920s, this has nothing to do with class consciousness. Instead, it has a lot to do with xenophobia and – as so often in Germany – with race consciousness.

Meanwhile, it is not even clear whether more people in Germany’s population are actually moving toward the far right or not, compared to, let’s say, a few years ago. Germany’s all-important and most recent Mitte Studies supports this conclusion. At the same time, other surveys contradict the Mitte’s findings.

The problem for the democracy-loving parties is that the recent electoral success of the AfD is showing that there is growing support for Germany’s far right.

This is true almost everywhere, particularly in the eastern portion of Germany. Furthermore, the AfD remains particularly strong among the middle-aged and increasingly also among young voters. On the other side of the coin, Germany’s pensioners are reluctant to support the AfD.

One might even say that if the 60-to-70 year olds currently getting monthly payments from the federal government would support the AfD, an absolute majority for the AfD would already be within reach in some East German states.

At some point in the near future the recent mass rallies against the AfD will show whether or not the seemingly unstoppable growth of the AfD has finally been halted. The next three elections – for the EU’s parliament in June and in the three East-German states of Saxony, Brandenburg and Thuringia later in the year – will also be important indicators for the increasing (un)popularity of the AfD.


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Thomas Klikauer has over 800 publications (including 12 books) and writes regularly for BraveNewEurope (Western Europe), the Barricades (Eastern Europe), Buzzflash (USA), Counterpunch (USA), Countercurrents (India), Tikkun (USA), and ZNet (USA). One of his books is on Managerialism (2013).