World War Two
Published 8 Dec 2022Japanese planes bomb Calcutta when it is still being crushed by the weight of the Bengali famine. Adolf Hitler and Albert Speer are obsessively trying to increase war production so Germany can begin launching its vengeance weapon against Britain. The wars of resistance continue across the Balkans with continued brutality and a new resistance force emerges in Italy.
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December 9, 2022
V-1: Hitler’s Deluded Revenge Plan – War Against Humanity 090
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November 25, 2022
The Secret Radio in Auschwitz – War Against Humanity 088
World War Two
Published 24 Nov 2022In Auschwitz the inmates gathering evidence of Nazi crimes score two successes, while the RAF score a direct hit on Goebbels as they set Berlin aflame. In the Pacific the accidental sinking of the SS Suez Maru triggers a Japanese war crime.
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November 18, 2022
Baltic Peoples Join the SS – War Against Humanity 087
World War Two
Published 17 Nov 2022Hitler forces Himmler to betray his promise of independence for the Baltic states, despite giving the Waffen-SS 40,000 of their young men. Ion Antonescu of Romania decides to save the remaining Romanian Jews to save his own ass.
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November 16, 2022
The Real Reason for Hitler’s War – WW2 Specials
World War Two
Published 15 Nov 2022The murder of the Jews of Europe is not simply conducted alongside the military and political war aims of the Third Reich. For Hitler and the Nazis, the murder of the Jews of Europe is the military-political aim of the war. It confounds all logic, but in the twisted worldview of Nazi ideology, it makes perfect sense. This is a war on the Jewry.
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November 14, 2022
The Auschwitz Business Model – War Against Humanity 086
World War Two
Published 10 Nov 2022Hitler commemorates the twentieth anniversary of the failed Beer Hall Putsch, in Auschwitz 50 men are shot in celebration, and Arthur Liebehenschel replaces Rudolf Höss as commandant.
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November 12, 2022
The Final Bloody Chapter of Operation Reinhard – War Against Humanity 085
World War Two
Published 9 Nov 2022The genocide of the Jews of Eastern Europe concludes with Operation Harvest Festival — Aktion Erntefest when 42,000 are murdered in the Lublin district.
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October 31, 2022
Executed for Telling a Joke – October 30, 1943 – WAH 084
World War Two
Published 30 Oct 2022From a conference in Moscow the United Nations Alliance issues a warning to Nazi Germany about their atrocities, while those atrocities continue unabated.
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October 24, 2022
Another bombed city – war still not ended – October 23, 1943 – WAH 083
World War Two
Published 23 Oct 2022Trainload after trainload arrives at the slave and murder factories in Auschwitz, and a Fürstin is created in Kassel, while the United Nations War Crimes Committee UNWCC is formed.
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October 23, 2022
Stalin Agrees to the United Nations – WW2 – 217 – October 22, 1943
World War Two
Published 22 Oct 2022A conference in Moscow lays out some postwar plans of the Allies, but the war has to be won first. The Allies fight their way across both the Dnieper and Volturno Rivers, but the going looks like it’s going to be tougher after the crossings. Meanwhile, in the South Seas the Japanese change plans in the face of Allied advances over there.
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October 18, 2022
CENSORED: The Great Escape from Death Camp Sobibor – October 16, 1943 – WAH 082
World War Two
Published 16 Oct 2022The German Nazis and their helpers are facing increasing resistance, this week in Rome from the Vatican, and at the Sobibor extermination camp from their victims.
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October 13, 2022
The Nazis’ Justification for the Genocide – October 9, 1943 – WAH 081
World War Two
Published 12 Oct 2022This week the Nazis go on the record about their genocide of the Jews. Meanwhile the Jews in Denmark are coming closer to safety, and the Roman Jews are again at peril.
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October 4, 2022
Sweden: The Jews’ Salvation? – WAH 080 – October 2, 1943
World War Two
Published 2 Oct 2022As the Allies advance in southern Italy, the people of Naples join them in fighting the Wehrmacht. In Denmark, the biggest rescue operation of Jews thus far begins.
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October 3, 2022
Nazis Go Fascist Hunting – WAH 079 – September 25, 1943
World War Two
Published 2 Oct 2022The Wehrmacht continues Operation Axis and its slaughter of Italian soldiers. In Western Europe, the situation of the Jews becomes increasingly precarious, especially so in Denmark.
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September 20, 2022
Hannah Arendt in postwar Germany
In Quillette, Roger Berkowitz discusses what Hannah Arendt found when talking to Germans after the Second World War, which she characterized as their collective “escape from reality”:
In 1949, when Hannah Arendt (1906–1975) went to Germany as part of the New York-based Jewish Cultural Reconstruction Commission, she was struck by the way the Germans showed an “at times vicious refusal to face and come to terms with what really happened”. This “escape from reality”, as Arendt named it, meant that the reality of the Holocaust and the death factories was spoken of as a hypothetical. And when the truth of the Holocaust was admitted, it was diminished: “The Germans did only what others are capable of doing”.
The Germans, at times, simply denied the facts of what had happened. One woman told Arendt that the “Russians had begun the war with an attack on Danzig”. What Arendt encountered was a “kind of gentleman’s agreement by which everyone has a right to his ignorance under the pretext that everyone has a right to his opinion”. The underlying assumption for such a right is the “tacit assumption that opinions really do not matter”. Opinions are just that, mere opinions. And facts, once they are reduced to opinions, also don’t matter. Taken together, this led to a “flight from reality”.
The focus of Arendt’s lifelong engagement with the human flight from reality was her encounter with ideologies, specifically Nazism and Bolshevism. In The Origins of Totalitarianism and other texts (especially her essay, “On the Nature of Totalitarianism“), Arendt defines an ideology as a system that seeks to explain “all the mysteries of life and the world” according to one idea. Nazism is an ideology that blames economic disaster, political loss, and the evils of modernity on the Jews — inhuman flotsam who must be exterminated to allow a master race to flourish. Bolshevism, on the other hand, “pretends that all history is a struggle of classes, that the proletariat is bound by eternal laws to win this struggle, that a classless society will then come about, and that the state, finally, will wither away”. The bourgeoisie are not simply class traitors, they are a dying class, and killing them only supports a law of history. As ideologies, both Nazism and Bolshevism insist on explaining the events of the world according to theories “without further concurrence with actual experience”. The result, Arendt argues, is that such ideologies bring about an “arrogant emancipation from reality”.
Because an ideology “looks upon all factuality as fabricated”, it “no longer knows any reliable criterion for distinguishing truth from falsehood”. As reality recedes, ideologies organize society to transform their ideas into living reality. If antisemitism as an ideology says that all Jews are beggars without passports, the fact of wealthy and established Jews must be eliminated. If Bolshevism says that the bourgeoisie are corrupt, they must admit their corruption or be killed. The realization of such ideological realities can be accomplished, of course, through terror.
But even before a totalitarian movement takes power and mobilizes the secret police in the machinery of terror, ideological movements can employ propaganda to deny and nullify facts, or change them. The Nazis, she writes, “did not so much believe in the truth of racism as desire to change the world into a race reality”. Similarly, the Bolshevist ideology that classes were dying was not something real, but something that had to be made real. The purges and terror that Stalin unleashed were supposed to “establish a classless society” by exterminating all social groups that might develop into classes. In both instances, the purpose of the ideology was to transform a mere opinion — race consciousness or class consciousness — into the “the lived content of reality”.
The point, as Arendt concludes, is that “ideological consistency reducing everything to one all-dominating factor is always in conflict with the inconsistency of the world, on the one hand, and the unpredictability of human actions, on the other”. What ideology demands is that man — an unpredictable and spontaneous being — cease to exist as such, that all humans be subjected to laws of development that follow ideological truth. That is why the turn from an unreliable reality to coherent fantasy requires an absolute elimination of human spontaneity and freedom.
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September 19, 2022
Albania – Hitler’s Latest Ally? – WAH 078 – September 18, 1943
World War Two
Published 18 Sep 2022The German Nazi Genocide of the Jews surpasses four million deaths, while the Soviet Union and US step up oppression against some their own citizens.
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