cursedreverie1945

[cursedreverie1945]

I'm not dead or MIA. I'm on sick leave from work and staring at a screen sends the vertigo from an injury skyrocketing. Whee? Not.

Can't read or watch TV. Thank goodness for audiobooks.

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Y'all know I am not right in the head, right?

Moose!! Baby moose!!!

Rare photographs of Reinhard Heydrich's sons.

Heider and Klaus Heydrich.

IYKYK

*bats lashes*

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Since I haven't been able to post in a few days, here you go. This is a direct copy paste from the Guardian. Stillx hang on to your britches, this is a good one.

The Jewish boy who became a Nazi mascot: the extraordinary story of Alex Kurzem

When a Melbourne man claimed he survived the Holocaust by becoming a child mascot for the Nazis, he attracted worldwide attention – and scepticism. Now a documentary reveals new startling truths.

It is a story so remarkable that many struggled to believe it.

A mother tells her six-year-old son that soldiers are on the way to their house to kill them in the morning, and the family will die together. But the little boy does not want to die. Under the cover of night, he escapes the house and hides in the forest, where he watches as the troops round up the inhabitants. From his hiding place among the snow-covered trees, Alex Kurzem – a name he did not go by then – watches as his entire family is massacred.

The boy survives in the Belarus forest, enduring sub-zero temperatures for an unknown number of months. He forages for food among the strewn abandoned corpses. At night, he ties himself to the high boughs of trees to protect himself from wolves.

Kurzem’s story, which becomes even more extraordinary as it progresses, first became public in the 1990s, was published as a bestselling book in 2007, then accused of being a Holocaust hoax in 2012. The former TV repair man, by then retired and eking out a life on the poverty line in a Melbourne suburb, stood by his story for decades.

Now a new documentary, debuting on SBS on 8 February 2024, delves into the story of how a little Jewish boy could have possibly become “Hitler’s Jewish soldier”.

Returning to the Belarusian wilds, 1942: the emaciated boy is eventually captured by a patrolling soldier from a Latvian police battalion, one of the many paramilitary outfits acting as Hitler’s local Nazi SS enforcers in German-occupied Belarus. He is taken back to the battalion’s base, where it is decided he will be referred to as a “Russian orphan” and become their mascot. A miniature uniform is sewn for his tiny frame and he is supplied with a sawn off shotgun. He is given a new name – Uldis Kurzemnieks – and a new birthday: 18 November, Latvia’s day of independence.

Over the following two years he remains attached to the regiment, witnessing murder and atrocities committed against Jewish people and captured partisans. Throughout these years, the blond blue-eyed boy does as one of his early captors advised: he keeps his own Jewish identity secret.

“Inside I was crying rivers of tears,” Kurzem later remembered, recalling clapping and laughing with the grownup soldiers as he witnessed a young Jewish boy being tortured to death. But, casting his memory back to his fight for survival in the Belarus forest, he said: “I would have gone with the devil if he had taken me by the hand.”

As the war progresses, the battalion is absorbed into the Third Reich’s Waffen-SS. When Soviet troops begin to regain ground from Germany in occupied Estonia and Latvia in 1944, the boy is billeted for his own protection with the middle-class family of Riga factory owner, Jekabs Dzenis. The Dzenis family adopts him and, in 1949, they migrate to Melbourne together.

All the teenage Kurzem brings with him to Australia is his fake identity, a tattered leather suitcase – the contents of which would remain hidden for decades – and a deeply scarred psyche.

Dan Goldberg, the film-maker behind Hitler’s Jewish Soldier?, first got to know Kurzem when he was the editor of the Australian Jewish News 20 years ago.

“He was a highly traumatised individual and he was living in borderline poverty,” Goldberg says. “He had shut off his memories of the war for 50 years and kept it a secret. When he finally started telling his story, he was met with resistance from both sides. He had been living his life as a Latvian in Melbourne, and when he revealed his Jewishness, he was accused of being a fraud by both the Jewish community and the Latvian community. I think it was incredibly hard for him to take.”

In 2007, Kurzem’s eldest son Mark published the story of his father’s life as a bestselling memoir titled The Mascot. Crucial to The Mascot’s narrative were two sepia photographs of a little blond boy dressed in a Latvian SS uniform, photographs that Kurzem had secreted away in that battered suitcase for decades.

The book attracted international attention. There was talk of a Hollywood film deal; Anthony Hopkins and Robin Williams’ names were tossed about. But Maris Lakis, a descendant of the Dzenis family, was furious that they were portrayed as being well-to-do Nazi supporters prior to migrating to Australia. He demanded Penguin pulp the book – but it was published anyway.

Lakis was raised regarding Kurzem – who he knew as Uldis – as a kindly adoptive uncle. In the film he alleges that Mark, who has since died, had “embellished a highly false story”.

In 2009 60 Minutes in the US ran a story on The Mascot. Watching at home in Los Angeles, alarm bells rang for the US academic Dr Barry Resnick, himself a descendant of Holocaust victims.

Together with the US forensic genealogist Colleen Fitzpatrick, who had exposed a number of previous Holocaust hoaxes, the pair set out to prove whether Kurzem’s story was false.

Much of Goldberg’s documentary deals with the pull and tug on both sides. A Belarusian family previously believed to be related to Kurzem are later found to not be related to him at all. Kurzem, for many years, stubbornly refuses to take a DNA test for reasons that aren’t ever clear.

It is not until a Nazi propaganda reel from 1943 resurfaces, showing footage of a boy referred to as “the mascot”, playing with Aryan children. Further research uncovers records of a massacre that took place on 21 October 1941 in the Belarus village of Koidanov – one of only two Belarusian words Kurzem was able to recall as an adult.

And then: the diary of a soldier in the 18th Kurzeme Police Battalion, held by Stanford University, is examined. On 12 July 1942, the soldier records, his battalion picked up a “foster son whose parents are unknown”. The boy was given the name Uldis Kurzemnieks. If Kurzem’s story was true, he had survived alone in the forest for eight months.

Goldberg concedes that there are still many unanswered questions surrounding the enigmatic Alex Kurzem. How did such a little boy manage to hide his Jewish identity? Why did Kurzem refuse to take a DNA test for so many years? He did finally do one in 2019 – and the test revealed that he was 100% Ashkenazi Jew and had living relatives.

An answer to the latter question could very well be undiagnosed PTSD. “I still feel like I’m two persons in one body, and they’re not getting along very well,” Kurzem once told a family member.

“I think what we can say with certainty is that the essence of Alex’s story is true,” Goldberg says. “The final irony was that he survived the horror of the Holocaust – and was felled by the scourge of Covid.”

Alex Kurzem died of complications from Covid-19 on 31 January 2021.

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Tagged by @reinekes-fox ❤️

Favorite color - purple

Last song - no clue it was off We Are Not Your Kind album by Slipknot

Currently reading - technically? DSM 5-TR damn thing is open and on my desk right now.

Last movie - Oppenheimer

Last show - Dead Like Me. I needed something I could just relax to.

Latest obsession- Politics and trying to keep my head from exploding and not get arrested for telling the wrong person to fuck off.

Tagging - @ninelshpet , @drcaviar and anyone else that wants to play along

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German POW’s await transport to England after their capture at Normandy - July 1944

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I have not watched this yet. So this is not a recommendation.

I will have to wait until tomorrow, as right now I'm crazy busy. I wanted to post it so I won't forget and thought some of y'all might want to.

What happened to nazi wives? Well, here we go.

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"Murderous little chin" himmler had one of the worst weak chins in the history of homo sapiens.

What's fascinating to me is that a weak chin isn't just cosmetically unappealing but can also cause health issues such as:

Sleep apnea

Trouble swallowing

Speech impediment

Temporomandibular joint disorder (TMJ, TMD)

Trouble chewing

Difficulty closing the lips or jaw

Difficulty breathing

Dental problems

I hope this murderous little twat had all of them.

I doubt the cigar smoking was occasionally. There are far too many pictures of him smoking a cigar that say otherwise.

In 1943 Heinrich Himmler was featured on the cover of Time magazine.

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This is something I never thought about. It's common knowledge that the nazis did book burnings and such. What I don't know is how much they did in countries that they occupied.

Also, in other counties, second hand sellers were often quite filled to the brim and not exactly well organized in many cases.

Excuse me while I go down a rabbit hole.

Edit - Well. That was a short lived rabbit hole.

Yes, they did ban books in other countries.

Here are some specific examples of banned books and authors:

Jewish Authors and Authors Deemed "Un-German":

Sigmund Freud, Albert Einstein, Thomas Mann, Heinrich Mann, Stefan Zweig, Oskar Maria Graf, Bertolt Brecht, and Oscar Wilde.

Authors with Pacifist, Socialist, or Communist Sympathies:

H.G. Wells, Helen Keller, Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, and Karl Marx.

Authors with Liberal or Democratic Views:

Walther Rathenau, Emil Ludwig, George Grosz, Otto Dix, Felix Mendelssohn, and Magnus Hirschfeld.

Other Targeted Books:

Books advocating for "art" that was considered decadent, constructivist, or bloodless

Books on sexuality and sexual education

Books critical of the nazi regime or supporting the Weimar Republic

Works by emigrants and authors from foreign countries perceived as attacking Germany

Works that denigrated the German Volk's history, spirit, and culture

Books by authors who were perceived as "un-German" or "Jewish intellectualists"

Book Burnings and the "Blacklist":

On May 10, 1933, university students in 34 German cities burned over 25,000 books, a symbolic act that marked the beginning of the regime's campaign against "un-German" literature.

The nazi regime created blacklists of banned authors and books, including a "Register of Jewish Authors" and a "Bibliography of Jewish Authors in the German Language," which contained thousands of names.

Librarians and students were often pressured to comply with the bans and remove books from libraries and shelves.

France, Paris, A German soldier at a second-hand bookseller on the banks of the Seine

(educational purposes only)

[cursedreverie1945]

You play as a worldfamous actor/actress in a losely preWW2 inspired world. You can choose to belong to the official state approved propaganda, support the resistance, or belong to the other side of this powder keg altogether! Patreon exclusive, another little project where I just bought six books for, for when I need a tiny break from boar!

Plans for the next update: choose a(n exotic) pet!

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I should not be allowed online between meetings. I just go looking for trouble.

Moose.

A white moose.

I bet this one doesn't have a squeaky voice or is a nazi. He's big tho. And since he is a moose, he could easily be called moose sized. 😁

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In memory of D-day , June 6th , 81 years ago, let us never forget.

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81 Years Ago Today: All major league baseball games are cancelled in light of the D-Day Allied Invasion of Normandy (June 6, 1944)

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On May 27, 1942, one of the most daring acts of resistance in World War II took place in Prague. Two Czechoslovak soldiers-in-exile, Jozef Gabčík and Jan Kubiš, trained by the British Special Operations Executive, ambushed and fatally wounded Reinhard Heydrich, one of the most powerful and feared figures in Nazi Germany.

Heydrich, nicknamed the “Butcher of Prague”, was the architect of the Final Solution, the brutal overseer of occupied Czechoslovakia, and a high-ranking SS officer. His reign of terror was marked by mass executions, forced labor, and ruthless suppression of resistance.

Operation Anthropoid, as the mission was called, was not only a military operation but a powerful message of defiance. Though Heydrich succumbed to his injuries days later, the assassination triggered brutal Nazi reprisals—most horrifically, the destruction of the village of Lidice, where men were executed, women and children deported or killed.

While the cost was staggering, Heydrich’s assassination disrupted the Nazi regime and galvanized the resistance across Europe. It remains a symbol of extraordinary courage against tyranny.

● Let us remember those who risked and gave their lives to confront evil.

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Today is D-Day +81 years. For some people, that’s a lifetime come and gone. For others, it’s a moment in history that we read about in books, and watch in films. For all of us, it’s a day that we stop and remember the ultimate sacrifices made by the men and women of our armed forces as they fought for freedom. It’s our job now, to keep their memories and their names, alive. To remind the world what they fought for, and that they did not die in vain.

Lest we forget.

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Ray Prohaska, WW2 era chocolate box ad

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Soviet and American troops meeting at the Elbe, 1945.