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.
Continue reading...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”.
Continue reading...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.
Continue reading...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.
Continue reading...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.
Continue reading...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.
Continue reading...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.
Continue reading...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.
Continue reading...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.
Continue reading...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.
Continue reading...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.
Continue reading...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.
Continue reading...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.
Continue reading...Police in Upper Austria province said the four were laying white roses at Nazi dictator’s birthplace
Four Germans were caught laying white roses in memory of Adolf Hitler at the house where the Nazi dictator was born in western Austria on the anniversary of his birth, and one gave a Hitler salute as they posed for photos, police have said.
Hitler was born on 20 April 1889 in Braunau am Inn. After lengthy wrangling over the future of the house where he was born, work started last year on turning it into a police station — a project meant to make it unattractive as a pilgrimage site for people who glorify Hitler.
Continue reading...Documentary on deportation of 48,000 Jewish Amsterdammers during Holocaust prompts city to act
On 8 August 1944, an Amsterdam tram took Anne Frank from Weteringschans prison, past the “secret annexe” where she had hidden from the Nazis, on the start of a journey to her death.
It was one of a series of Dutch night trams that deported 48,000 Jewish Amsterdammers during the Holocaust, trams commissioned by the Nazis and paid for with the Jewish wealth they stole.
Continue reading...Les Jeux Olympiques: Miroir des Sociétés opens ahead of Paris Olympics and puts previous games in context of conflicts and injustices
From the Nazi stadium propaganda in 1936 Berlin to the 1968 Mexico City podium protest of medal-winners Tommie Smith and John Carlos, who were expelled from the competition after raising their gloved fists in a Black Power salute against racial injustice, the Olympic Games have held a mirror up to some of the darkest moments of 20th-century history.
Now, as the Paris Olympics prepares to open this summer against a backdrop of war from Ukraine to the Middle East – with Emmanuel Macron saying Russia will be asked to observe a ceasefire in Ukraine during the Games – a new exhibition in Paris takes an unflinching look at the social and geopolitical impact of the Games over the last century.
Continue reading...Nazi materials among items retrieved by FBI from house of gunman who killed self after wounding four people
The FBI said the gunman who opened fire inside a Walmart in Ohio on Monday, wounding four before killing himself, may have been “at least partially inspired by racially motivated violent extremist ideology”.
It confirmed two of the victims were white and the other two were Black.
Continue reading...Eighty-five years after the ‘brutal prelude’ to Nazi crimes, the emphasis falls on contemplating its influence on the present day
It has long been the most delicate day in the German calendar, 9 November. It brings a balancing act of remembrance for the state-sanctioned murderous devastation of the Nazi pogroms across the country in 1938, and, 51 years later, the overnight collapse of the most famous barrier in the world, the Berlin Wall.
Both had international repercussions which are still felt today. The former dominates the nation’s collective memory.
Continue reading...Louis Feutren joined a nationalist group in occupied France and went on to teach at a prestigious Dublin school
There was never any mystery about the fact that Louis Feutren, a French teacher at St Conleth’s school in south Dublin, was a Nazi collaborator.
He had a taste for violent punishments and bizarre humiliations that terrorised pupils. He liked to reminisce about the second world war, when he had joined a Breton nationalist group that fought on the side of Germany. And he showed pictures of himself in uniform.
Continue reading...Anthony Rota steps down after meeting with party leaders in Ottawa having invited Yaroslav Hunka to special session
The speaker of Canada’s parliament has resigned after inviting a Ukrainian Nazi veteran to attend a special session of parliament, and then calling the man a “hero” amid two standing ovations.
Anthony Rota stepped down as speaker on Tuesday after meeting with party leaders in Ottawa amid growing cross-party calls for his resignation.
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