Category Archives: Nazism

‘An insult to our name’: AfD urged to stop using Simson mopeds at events

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Descendants of Jewish brothers forced to sell company to Nazis say appropriation by German far right is ‘repulsive’

The Jewish descendants of a German motorbike manufacturer that was forced by the Nazis to be relinquished have voiced their repulsion at the appropriation of the vehicle by far-right populists.

Members of the family, whose ancestors were forced to flee Germany in the 1930s, say they consider the use of the bike’s name by the anti-immigrant Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) as a “mockery of our history”.

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German president honours victims of Nazi bombing atrocity on Guernica visit

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Frank-Walter Steinmeier travels to Basque town for remembrance ceremony marking ‘terrible crimes’ of 1937

Eighty-eight years after Luftwaffe pilots took part in the most infamous atrocity of the Spanish civil war, Germany’s president has visited the Basque town of Guernica to honour the victims of the Nazi bombing and to urge that the “terrible crimes” committed there are never forgotten.

Hundreds of civilians were killed and hundreds more injured on 26 April 1937 when planes from the German Condor Legion, operating alongside aircraft from fascist Italy, spent hours bombing Guernica on market day. Adolf Hitler had loaned the Luftwaffe unit to Gen Francisco Franco’s nationalist forces to help them in their coup against the republican government, and to allow Nazi Germany’s pilots to practise the blitzkrieg tactics they would later use in the second world war.

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Swiss theatre director told to withdraw book alleging Austrian politician mocked Holocaust victims

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Court fines publisher after Milo Rau falsely claimed that far-right former chancellor Heinz-Christian Strache sang a song ridiculing the six million Jews murdered by the Nazis

A Swiss theatre director known for re-enacting landmark trials has been told by a judge in Vienna that his publisher must withdraw a book in which he alleged that a far-right Austrian politician sang a song mocking the victims of the Holocaust.

On Thursday, Vienna’s regional court fined independent German publishing house Verbrecher Verlag €1,500 (£1,300) for publishing a book in which Milo Rau alleged that Heinz-Christian Strache, the former leader of the Freedom party (FPÖ), once sang a song with the line: “We’ll manage the seventh million”, a reference to the approximately 6 million European Jews murdered at the hands of the Nazi regime.

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Six great reads: rebels in Nazi Germany, how creativity works and Europe’s biggest pornography conference

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Need something brilliant to read this weekend? Here are six of our favourite pieces from the past seven days

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Old master painting looted by Nazis recovered a week after being spotted in Argentinian property listing

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Portrait of a Lady by the Italian master Giuseppe Ghislandi handed over by daughter of the late Nazi financier Friedrich Kadgien

Authorities in Argentina have recovered an 18th-century painting stolen more than 80 years ago by the Nazis from a Jewish art dealer in Amsterdam, a week after it was spotted by chance in a real estate listing.

The painting, the long-lost Portrait of a Lady (Contessa Colleoni) by the Italian master Giuseppe Ghislandi, was looted in the second world war. It was handed over on Wednesday to the Argentinian judiciary by the daughter of the late Nazi financier Friedrich Kadgien, Patricia Kadgien, who has been under house arrest with her husband since Tuesday.

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Old master painting looted by Nazis disappears from home in Argentina

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Search for artwork seen in estate agent’s photo continues after police raid on house finds tapestry hanging in its place

Argentinian police have said they will continue hunting for an old master painting looted by the Nazis and spotted by chance in an estate agent’s listing after a search of the property in the seaside town of Mar del Plata failed to uncover the work.

“The painting is not in the house … but we’re going to keep searching for it,” the federal prosecutor Carlos Martínez told local media. He said items that could be useful for the investigation, including two firearms, engravings and prints, had been seized.

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Old master painting looted by Nazis spotted in Argentinian property listing

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Dutch newspaper AD says it has traced Giuseppe Ghislandi’s Portrait of a Lady to house near Buenos Aires

More than 80 years after it was looted by the Nazis from a Jewish art dealer in Amsterdam, a portrait by an Italian master has been spotted on the website of an estate agent advertising a house for sale in Argentina.

A photo shows the painting, Portrait of a Lady (Contessa Colleoni) by the late-baroque portraitist Giuseppe Ghislandi, also known as Fra’ Galgario, hanging above a sofa in the living room of the property, in a seaside town near Buenos Aires.

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‘A common humanity’: the British families who tended graves of German soldiers

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Across the country men and women have cared for the resting places of their enemy’s fallen, finding peace and hope

For some, tending the graves was an act of reconciliation. For others, it was about acknowledging shared losses and shared grief.

Thousands of Germans who died in Britain during the first and second world wars were laid to rest in local graveyards. British people tended these graves for decades, even laying flowers and wreaths for their former foes.

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Rediscovered, a young English novelist’s warning of the Nazi threat

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Crooked Cross, Sally Carson’s ‘electrifying masterpiece’ from 1934, to be republished

Sally Carson was not an oracle or a prophet, just a young woman from Dorset, born in 1901. Yet she foresaw a dark and violent future for Europe and gave voice to those fears in a 1934 novel that is now being hailed as “an electrifying masterpiece”.

Carson’s book, Crooked Cross, predicted the scale of the Nazi threat and is to be republished for the first time this spring, ahead of the 80th anniversary of the end of the second world war. Controversial in its day, her novel had to walk a careful path to avoid the accusation that it was alarmist about the Fuhrer’s aims. A stage adaptation of her story was even censored, shorn of all its “Heil Hitlers”.

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Long-lost anti-fascist mural from 1930s restored and back on show in Mexico

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Philip Guston and Reuben Kadish’s The Struggle Against Terrorism revealed as some fear resurgence of fascism

A long-neglected 1930s mural in Mexico that warns about the rise of fascism has been revealed and restored – just as some historians say the world faces that threat once more.

The mural, which is titled The Struggle Against Terrorism, covers a 40ft wall in a colonial courtyard in Morelia, Michoacán, and depicts a history of persecution and resistance from biblical times to the modern day.

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Third of young adults in UK ‘unable to name Auschwitz or any Nazi death camps’

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Lack of knowledge about Holocaust identified as well as level of denial and disinformation seen on social media

A third of young adults in the UK are unable to name Auschwitz or any of the other concentration camps and ghettoes where the crimes of the Holocaust were committed, according to a study.

Other growing gaps in knowledge – especially among those aged 18-29 – were also identified, as part of a major international survey in countries including the US and UK.

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‘Discovered’ diaries of British socialite Unity Mitford reveal Hitler relationship

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Diaries, believed to be genuine, chronicle 139 pre-war meetings between antisemitic aristocrat and Nazi leader

The diaries of an antisemitic British socialite who was obsessed with Adolf Hitler and struck up a personal relationship with the Nazi leader have been discovered, according to the Daily Mail.

The leather-bound journals, which had been lost to historians and unseen for eight decades, appear to reveal the extent of Unity Mitford’s relationship with the dictator.

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‘Homecoming’ show for artist Frank Auerbach to be held at Berlin gallery

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Exclusive: First show of figurative painter’s work to be displayed in city he fled in 1939 to escape Nazi regime

Frank Auerbach is to be the subject of what has been billed as a homecoming show in Berlin, at which some of his final paintings will be displayed in the city he fled as a child.

Auerbach, who died in November last year, never had a show in the city of his birth, which he left due to persecution by the Nazis. Both of his parents were later killed in Auschwitz.

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Court rules former Nazi camp guard, 100, can face trial in Germany

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Gregor Formanek is charged with aiding and abetting 3,322 murders at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp

German authorities are pressing for a 100-year-old former Nazi concentration camp guard to face trial almost 80 years after the end of the second world war.

The higher regional court in Frankfurt said on Tuesday it had overturned a decision by a lower court under which the suspect had been deemed unfit to stand trial.

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Bella Ciao: a brief history of the resistance anthem sung to Viktor Orbán

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A look at the origins and appeal off the song MEPs used to serenade the Hungarian PM in Strasbourg

“This is not Eurovision,” said the speaker of the European parliament, Roberta Metsola, as she tried to silence leftwing MEPs greeting the visiting Hungarian prime minister, Viktor Orbán, with a rowdy rendition of the classic anti-fascist anthem Bella Ciao.

The bang-your-fists-on-the-table motif at the heart of this earworm of a ditty – whose title means “Goodbye, beautiful” – may indeed sound like something cooed through dry fog by a spandex-clad blond at the European song contest. But the story it tells reaches far deeper into the continent’s history than the annual kitsch music extravaganza, telling an age-old tale of the left’s determined struggle against political oppression.

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Show shines light on overlooked artist who made UK’s first Holocaust memorial

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Work of German-Jewish sculptor Fred Kormis, who fled Nazis in 1930s, is subject of exhibition in London

The work of an overlooked German-Jewish artist who created the UK’s first memorial to victims of Nazi persecution is to be the focus of an exhibition that shines light on the unreported aspects of his life.

Fred Kormis, who fled Germany in the 1930s and later became a British citizen, was described by the Wiener Holocaust Library in London as a forgotten émigré artist who played a unique role in Weimar culture and 20th-century British art.

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Dutch row over which victims of Nazis get ‘stumbling stone’ plaques

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Commemorations of 45 people ‘experimentally’ gassed reveal dark moments in the Netherlands’ history

They call them stumbling stones – little brass plaques in the pavement marking addresses where Holocaust victims once lived.

As the Netherlands marks 80 years of liberation, a row has sprung up about placing Stolpersteine for 45 Dutch political prisoners – Jewish activists, communists, critical Christians – who were “experimentally” gassed by the Nazis at the Bernburg psychiatric clinic in Germany in 1942.

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German court rejects appeal by ex-Nazi secretary over role in 10,500 murders

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Irmgard Furchner, 99, was found guilty in 2022 of being an accessory to killings at Stutthof concentration camp

A German court has rejected an appeal by a 99-year-old woman who was convicted of being an accessory to more than 10,500 murders during her role as a secretary to the SS commander of the Nazis’ Stutthof concentration camp during the second world war.

The federal court of justice upheld the conviction of Irmgard Furchner, who was given a two-year suspended sentence in December 2022 by a state court in Itzehoe, northern Germany.

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German court fines senior AfD politician €13,000 for using banned Nazi phrase

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Björn Höcke, party’s candidate to lead Thuringia state, found to have deliberately used SA slogan in 2021 speech

A German court has fined a leading member of the far-right Alternative für Deutschland party for using a banned Nazi phrase at a political rally, in a high-profile trial just months before an election in which he aims to become a state leader.

The state court in Halle convicted Björn Höcke, the firebrand chief of the AfD in the eastern region of Thuringia, of deliberately using a slogan associated with the Nazi party’s paramilitary wing, the SA, in a speech at a campaign event in May 2021.

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Berlin wants to give away Joseph Goebbels’ countryside villa

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Berlin’s finance minister says property owned by Hitler’s propaganda minister will be demolished if taker not found

Berlin’s government is offering to give away a villa once owned by Adolf Hitler’s propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, hoping to end a decades-long debate on whether to repurpose or bulldoze a sprawling disused site in the countryside north of the German capital.

“I offer to anyone who would like to take over the site, to take it over as a gift from the state of Berlin,” Berlin’s finance minister, Stefan Evers, told the state parliament, the German Press Agency reported.

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