#nazi germany stories

[idepict]

Discover “One Life,” the heroic true story starring Anthony Hopkins, at BFI London Film Festival’s American Express Gala. Join us for a journey of bravery and inspiration.

[endmylifelad]

Kay I was just thinking about this, and it kinda got me giddy? Idk the words.

Listen. This has become a headcanon of mine in the last fifteen minutes.

Dick had a Roma accent when he first learned English - and no he did not know English. Just the basics. But after being in juvie and then attending school, he forced himself to get rid of it because people kept bullying him for it, and sometimes, on the very, very, rare occasion, when he absolutely loses it, the accent comes out when he’s yelling at whoever. That or when he’s super drunk and when someone brings it up, he gets super embarrassed by it and hides away for a bit because he’s super insecure and scared of it due to all the trauma that came with it. And no, for being the worlds greatest detective, Bruce never knew nor noticed.

Like Dick, Damian has an Arabic accent. But unlike Dick, Damian stays strong to it and threatens those who dare say a word to him about it.

Cass too has an accent, tho is rarely heard as she barely speaks and prefers to use sign language. Because if that, it’s pretty strong and it takes some by surprise. She doesn’t care when people say anything about it. She just smiles about it and even more so when Steph says she likes it and says it’s cute.

So yeah. These bitches have accents and stories behind them. Dick forced himself to get rid of his, Damian will murder you on sight, and Cass is perfectly fine with hers and doesn’t care what others say.

[thegetdownrebooter]

[augustameretrix]

aot season 4 being about the cycle of violence continuing wouldnt be bad if it werent done in the most stupid and offensive way possible

[quotesfrommyreading]

I think that for both my grandfathers the GDR was a kind of dreamland, in which they could forget all the depressing things that had gone before. It was a new start, a chance to begin all over again. The persecution, the war, the imprisonment, all the terrible things that Gerhard and Werner had been through could be buried under that huge pile of the past. From now on all that mattered was the future. And trauma turned to dream. The idea of building an anti-fascist state had a beneficial effect on both of them. Gerhad could devote himself to the illusion that GDR citizens were very different Germans from the ones that had once driven his family out of the country. And Werner could act as if he had always believed in Socialism. All wounds, all mistakes were forgotten and forgiven if you were willing to become part of this new society.

New faith for old suffering: that was the ideal behind the foundation of the GDR.

That is the explanation for the unbounded loyalty with which Gerhard and Werner were bound to that country until the bitter end. They could never unmask the great dream as a great lie because the lies they needed to live would have been exposed at the same time.

And their children? They were hurled into their fathers' dreamlands, and had to dream along whether they wanted to or not. They didn't know that founding ideal. And because they had nothing to overcome, nothing to hide, they found faith difficult too. They saw the poverty, the lies, the claustrophobia, the suspicion. And they heard their fathers' phrases as they raved about the future. Much of the power and the euphoria had gone. And the grandchildren? They were glad when it was all over. They didn't even have a guilty conscience at kicking the state. What did I get from the great dream? Small-minded prohibitions, petty principles and jeans that looked like elongated Youth Front shirts. The energy of the state had been used up in three generations. The GDR remained the country of old men, of the founding fathers, and their logic no longer made sense to anybody.

  —  Red Love: The Story of an East German Family (Maxim Leo)

[necrogfie]

the country human fandom is something .. they have like no canon medias, but they create stories that are so fucking funny tbh (like i just saw a tiktok of someone doing a sort of animation? where like the uk is hallucinating their ex bestfirend/lover after their married france for like ... their kingdom ?? and it's peak comedy)

[principiumindividuationis777]

A Cold War Fiction Story

In a personal library in East Germany, the year 1987, a man is furiously typing, on an old mechanical typewriter, so intent on his work that he is unaware that a man, the man's face unseen except for a cruel smile, is creeping up behind him, a cooking knife in hand.

This homicide is given a high priority by East German authorities, as the deceased had been a Stasi agent, having retired the previous year. Furthermore, the deceased, one Konrad Mueller, had remained active in diplomacy, and as he had paid a recent diplomatic visit, along with several others, to the United Kingdom, British agents insisted on participating in the investigation, according to the lead British investigator, Ronald Bruce, because they were concerned at the possibility that British agents or double agents could have been involved.

Bruce, whose name the German police said with some difficulty, was allowed to participate in the investigation, indirectly in response to liberalization from behind the Iron Curtain, under Mikhail Gorbachev. However, while Johann Lindmann welcomed him, insisting the East Germans had nothing to hide from the British, Georg Von Trapp who, like Lindmann, was a German investigator, refused to communicate directly with Bruce, having a deep distrust of the West, and would always insist that Bruce go through Lindmann.

Others involved in the investigation, officially or unofficially, were Wolfgang Schmidt, Pieter Stockhausen and a Stasi informant called Faure, a French Marxist intellectual who had defected to the Communist side of the Cold War.

Bruce had a contact in East Berlin, a seemingly deaf-mute beggar who was not what he appeared. Dismissed as an antisocial element, harrassed by authorities but pitied by those brave enough to ignore said authorities, the beggar, whose name was never given, was in fact a British asset, known only as "Number One", considered by many the foremost agent in MI6.

Number One pretended not to know Bruce, and Bruce gave him a coin, but it was a coin with a peculiar minting defect, intended to communicate with Number One that he was a fellow British agent, though Number One's smile indicated that he knew this already.

After winding through many alleys, eventually the two men, from opposing directions, met in one of the darkest and dingiest nooks, even as an ever-heavier rain began to fall.

Number One told a story regarding Konrad Mueller and the other investigators, as well as a legend of German espionage.

Without the slightest German accent, Number One told Bruce, "Konrad Mueller, the slain, was investigating the identity of the spy known as 'Goldfinch', the legend of whom is no doubt familiar to you."

"Goldfinch knew perfect German, French and English, they say, so when he appeared, at some time in the 1950's or 60's, no one knew his origins, but he was central to a conspiracy of West German and East German agents that involved reestablishing German supremacy over Europe. Details are scarce, even to me, but the plans involved something regarding starting conflicts with or between Slavic nations."

Continuing, Number One elaborated, "At a meeting in Berlin, at some point late in the 60's, though which side of Berlin is uncertain, Goldfinch, having hidden a weapon, eliminated all of his fellow agents, so that he and he alone knew of this plan for a sort of Fourth Reich. From there, he disappeared, and some questioned whether he ever existed, but my best information indicates that he does, or did."

"The men you are working with, this much you should know: Wolfgang Schmidt is too much drawn to drink, among other vices, and hides it poorly. He is likely soon to be removed as a liability to the East Germans. Pieter Stockhausen acts as if he had the intellect only to obey Lindmann, but he is more clever than he appears. [Georg] Von Trapp is what he appears, paranoid of anyone not German, while Faure has a great weakness for women fond of money- such women are not supposed to exist in Communist nations, officially, but of course they do- and he and Schmidt are notorious for their parties. As he is rather more clever than Schmidt, this may buy him his life, to the Stasi, despite his weakness."

"Lindmann, as you likely know, has ties to our own Labour Party, by reason of wishing for socialism in Britain," concluded Number One.

When Bruce read in East German periodicals, less than forty-eight hours later, how Schmidt had passed away, supposedly by his own hand, he knew that Number One's prediction had been accurate. As for "Goldfinch", the one detail Number One gave Bruce was, "He is what psychologists call a narcissist. He would have to leave some clue as to his identity, to prove that he could do so and still remain hidden, as mere arrogance."

With what seemed to be Lindmann's overeager assistance, to Bruce, the latter dug through old East German records, comparing notes with the British and French records already in his possession, noting any information from the last two decades that might be pertinent to the investigation. Finally, on a roll of film labeled "Goldfinch", in Bruce's possession, Bruce watched a slideshow of what was supposed to be a series of passport photographs taken of a young Goldfinch (or so rumor had it) in 1955, though what Bruce sees is unseen by anyone else.

Just then, someone forced his door, doing so almost silently. The lights went out but still the reflection of the remaining light, on a knife, was visible, and some commotion was heard.

Finally, Pieter Stockhausen seemed to be in poor health, but was feigning illness, and next we see him, he is arriving in an airport in London, England, with his name given as "Jon Finch", and among his possessions to be examined by airport officials, a cooking knife, among other cooking utensils, very much like the one that had ended Konrad Mueller.

[commoneater]

Eleanor's Story: Life After War

I’m starting off my Sunday fringe viewing by taking in Eleanor’s Story at the Royal Albert Arms. This is my second show at the arms this weekend. I was here yesterday when I was watching Dungeons and Shakespeare. It’s not the greatest of venues for seeing plays. There are a lot of posts and pillars set in the middle of the room. This means ther is a lot of partially obstructed viewing. Soundwise…

[randomtimes-com]

How the Nazis created Fanta

The soda was made from apple fibers and a cheese by-product….

February 1944. Berlin is attempting to recover from American aerial bombing, although life, industry and daily activities continue on the city’s outskirts. Also in farmhouses, where a mix of ex-convicts, Chinese laborers, and other workers fill glass bottles of a cloudy, brownish liquid, in what was one of Coca-Cola’s makeshift bottling operations. In short, they are making Nazi Germany’s…

[thatlittleegyptologist]

Out of curiousity, do you think most national museums are participating in the same kind of thing that the British Museum is, i.e. holding onto items that they stole in conquest / archaeological items that other nations are requesting back?

I always wonder if we should be looking at the bigger picture rather than just this one spotlighted issue (not that the spotlight isn't important in raising the issue originally).

oh goodie we're digging up stuff I wrote from 2 years ago...yay

Okay, for starters, let's look at how you've phrased your question. Currently, the heavy implication is that this is all the BM is (i.e. it only holds colonial loot and contested items), which is false. Yes, it does hold colonial loot from the British Empire. No one is disputing that. It also holds contested items such as the Parthenon Marbles and the Rosetta Stone. What it also holds are many items taken from digs where the country in question permitted them taking them, and then also gifts and other such non colonial requisitions.

Mostly, I need to stress, because as someone who's adjacent to museums this drives me insane: Framing all museum collections as Bad and only containing Bad Items from Bad Deeds doesn't give you the full picture and if you don't have the full picture you can't really address the issue of repatriation properly. It's the classic 'All or Nothing' mentality and I'm begging people to seek nuance on complex topics such as this. Also governments suck and so hearing repeated 'well museums suck because XYZ' means they're more than happy to simply defund them, which they already are doing and that's not helping stuff like repatriation either.

In short, if you're asking does any other museum have a law like BM63 (I wrote 68 in the post because...I'm bad at numbers)? Not as far as I'm aware, no. The BM is unique in that instance where the government literally created a law to prevent it from divesting of its collection.

Do other national museums hold colonial looted artefacts and contested items? Yes. Lots of them. All over the world.

Germany's Neues Museum holds the bust of Nefertiti, which is contested.

The Louvre in Paris has multiple Italian artworks that were stolen in the 1790s that Italy wants back.

The Horses of St Mark's (in Venice) were stolen from Greece by Constantine in the 1200s. (Not really all that contested but they were definitely stolen).

Yale University holds numerous items from Machu Picchu. The 1911 dig had permission from the Peruvian Government, but the items were supposed to be returned. I believe (don't quote me) that less than half were originally. They have subsequently been returned, but this is not an uncommon story.

There's a bunch of Nazi looted artworks that are in museums that need to be returned to their rightful owners.

The MET museum in the US and everything it got from Douglas Latchford (this is ongoing, with some repatriations having already happened)

The National Museum of Australia also got caught out by that guy.

To be fair, the MET Museum has a problem with looted artefacts in general from the 70s onwards as they tried to compete with the European collections and thus ended up gaining a lot of 'not properly provenanced artefacts'. There was a gold sarcophagus they returned only recently that was looted from Egypt post-2011.

The Bible Museum in the US has...stuff it shouldn't (there's a lot and I'm not listing it).

*voice dripping with derision* Whatever the Hobby Lobby is up to

I could go on!

Focusing solely on the BM is a result of a US-Centric mindset, and a pervasive anglophone bias in things people will read. (Or in other words: It's fun to shit on the Brits and most of you only read English anyway.)

This has the unfortunate effect of making it seem like the BM is only museum in the world doing this, and they're not. Not in the slightest. Many museums, national or not, will have colonial looted items if that country has, at any time in the past, waged expansionist wars against other nations, no matter how brief. If your local museum has artefacts from Not Your Country there's a good chance they were looted! Again, I stress that many many artefacts that left places like Egypt were part of agreements with the Egyptian government (called partition agreements) whereby the Egyptian government took first pick of artefacts from a dig and then the dig organisers could take the rest. This hasn't happened since UNESCO World Heritage Convention 1975, which prohibits new artefacts from leaving countries which is also why I will bonk on the head with a cardboard tube anyone who says Archaeologists/Museums are still stealing things.

So yeah, if you're looking at repatriation, you'll be much better looking at the bigger picture and understanding how all this came to be in the first place than you'll ever be making memes about the BM stealing things on the internet.

[autistic-yuri]

I can’t believe Hitler put together art shows to make German men submissive and breedable

[quotesfrommyreading]

At first, the German invaders did little to disturb ordinary life in the Netherlands. They took over the reins of power (appointing Arthur Seyss-Inquart as Reichskommissar in charge of the civil administration), but the structure of government and the operation of services such as the police, the school system, shops, churches and businesses remained more or less the same. Anti-Jewish measures ramped up over time almost imperceptibly: exclusion from air-raid shelters; an 'Aryan Declaration' for members of the Civil Service; a requirement for the registration of all Jews. Then, from February 1941, mass arrests began, slowly at first. Those whom the Heromas had brought to apparent safety in their own country were now under threat, and the translations and new posts in the universities they had once provided were no longer of use.

From November 1941 onwards, regular ads were placed in the bottom left-hand corner of the classifieds page of the local paper. Next to announcements from the dentist, the fashion boutique and the concert hall, there were notices such as this:

J. F. HEROMA

PHYSICIAN

CHANGE OF CONSULTATION HOURS

On Krispijn at 11 am daily, apart from Saturdays

PRIVATE CONSULTATION

daily from 1.30 to 2 pm

Where it mattered, people knew what these messages meant.

Across Holland, as the occupation gained in intensity, networks were being constructed to resist the Nazis: delicate lines of trust that connected couples like the Heromas in Dordrecht to distant others whom they had never met. These webs often clung to the holdfasts of pre-war society, such as medical associations, student fraternities, churches and political groups. Jan Heroma was a doctor and a member of the Social Democratic Workers' Party and also the friend of many Jews in the academic world. This made the house at number 14 Dubbeldamseweg a point of intersection. The little car that the Heromas owned made them unusually mobile, so that journeys between the houses of patients, sometimes far out into the countryside, traced fragile, invisible strands.

 —   The Cut Out Girl: A Story of War and Family, Lost and Found (Bart van Es)

[commiearabgirl-2]

One day we'll look at the map of Israel the same way we look at the map of nazi Germany. We'll look at the Israeli "citizens" the same way we look at nazis and we'll look at Netanyahu and Bin Gvir the same way we look at hitler and himmler. We'll look at the US and the UK and all those who supported Israel the same way we look at Spain and Finland and those who supported and collaborated with the nazis.

We'll look at organizations like Hamas and the PFLP the same way we look at the Italian, French and Soviet partisans, and we'll look at those who condemn them the same way we look at nazi news headlines authorized by Joseph Gobbels.

One day this will all be history. It will be the history of liberty, the story of how Palestine was freed from the river to the sea, and how against all odds the powers of evil were destroyed by the will of the people.

[apas-95]

It must not be understated how much WW2 was sold to the people of Germany as a war against, principally, the tyrannical Soviet Union - against who the Third Reich, while carrying out the Holocaust, manufactured stories of supposed atrocities, attempted to accuse of genocide, and whatever else. It was sold, principally, on the anticommunism agreeable to fascists, conservatives, liberals, social-democrats, anarchists, trotskyists, and whichever other segments of Germany's vibrant prewar leftist mileu would offer their condemnations of the USSR as just as bad as the Nazi state, really - that was the line by which they sold the genocide.

[thehmn]

I love how many stories there are from WWII where people survive encounters with nazis, even the gestapo, simply by bullying them and claiming to know important nazi members.

I’m listening to the podcast A Very Secret Life where a man tells his dad’s story. He was part Danish, part German, and worked as a spy for England. He was very valuable to the Brits because being part German and being able to speak perfect German meant the nazis trusted him. He almost got caught during a mission in Germany but managed to escape simply by yelling at the German police and saying he had some very important stuff to deliver to their superiors so they better call their damn office and then they’d see who was in trouble!

When he finally escaped to Denmark the gestapo showed up at his mom’s apartment looking for him and she did the same thing. She was full blooded German and stated shouting at them about her important cousin who outranked all of them and she even chased them all the way down the stairs and started kicking their cars until they left. That meant nobody suspected her of secretly being a nazi supporter after the war despite being German because everyone remembered her chasing the gestapo away.

It’s such a classic scenario when you base a system on fear. I’ve heard of western soldiers in the Middle East who backed out of a situation because someone threatened to get them in trouble with their superiors. Will any military ever learn to stop being so mean to their people they end up spending more time trying to avoid their own bosses than anything else?

[perfectlyvalid49]

Today is January 27th, which is International Holocaust Remembrance Day, and I'd like to get some stuff off my chest.

First, I'd like to take a minute to point out that it is not Yom HaShoah, which is the day Israel (and by extension large portions of the Jewish diaspora population) uses as Holocaust Remembrance day. Yom HaShoah is on the 27th of Nisan, a date that was selected to commemorate the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, centering Jewish resistance in our own story. That date was selected nearly five decades before the UN picked January 27th, which was selected to center our white saviors who came to liberate Auschwitz. This is utter bullshit. And no excuses for not being able to handle a moving date on the Gregorian calendar - April 19th would be the Gregorian equivalent, and it was not selected.

Having said that, given how many infographics I've seen over the last four months about how people are increasingly denying or doubting the Holocaust, I figure any day that acknowledges it is a good thing, so yeah, let's take two days to remember. I think it's worth it.

So given that this is the Holocaust Remembrance Day that centers our goyishe friends, let's talk about how our goyishe friends should observe the day.

1. It is likely that you never learned a lot of details about the Holocaust. Holocaust education usually boils down to, "and the Nazis put Jews in camps in order to kill them, and a lot of Jews were killed in gas chambers, and about 6 million died in all." Go learn some details. Read or watch an account from a survivor.  Learn about the medical experiments, or the death marches. Learn some details about what the gas chambers were actually like. Try to understand the horror. Learn about the SS St. Louis or the Evian conference in 1938 where almost every country on Earth decided it was better to let the Jews die in Germany than to allow them into their own countries.

2. On that note, take the time to understand that anti-semitism neither began nor ended with the Nazis, and that even the "good guys" were incredibly antisemitic.Try to recognize that the antisemitism that was present where you live right now in the 1930s didn't just disappear, it just went into hiding. Think about where it might be hiding now.

Basically, because this is the Holocaust Remembrance Day for the goyim, I want to focus our remembrance of what happened on the goyim. What did they do? What could they have done to help? Why didn't they? We can come back in May for more Jewish focused learning, but the Holocaust could not have happened without A LOT of willing goyim, and I think we should spend the day remembering them and their actions.

And as a side note: if you happen to read this and you've chosen to spend the day engaging in Holocaust denial or Holocaust inversion, then know that my hope for you is that something happens in your life to teach you empathy and basic human decency. And I hope it isn't pleasant for you.