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NAZI COLLABORATORS

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Sharon

NAZI COLLABORATORS

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Dec 28 10 8:04 AM

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Konrad Kalejs: Target for Nazi hunters

Konrad Kalejs: Faces third deportation

To the people of Catthorpe in Leicestershire, Konrad Kalejs is a quiet old man who could sometimes be seen strolling around their quiet English village last year.

But to Nazi hunters, he is a former senior member of a death squad behind the killing of thousands of Jews during World War II.

Mr Kalejs, who is facing deportation back to Australia, was born on 26 June 1913, in Riga, Latvia.

Latvia fell prey to the Nazis

At the age of 22 he became a cadet in the Latvian Army Academy and four years later became a lieutenant in the Latvian army.

In 1940, following the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, the Russians overran Latvia, and Mr Kalejs joined the Red Army.

But a year later the Soviets were pushed out by the Nazis during Operation Barbarossa.

According to the evidence presented at a 1994 US deportation hearing, Mr Kalejs deserted his Red Army comrades and joined a pro-Nazi force called the Latvian Auxiliary Security Police.

The unit was also known as the Arajs Kommando after its leader Viktors Arajs, who was convicted by a German court and sentenced to life imprisonment in 1979 for committing wartime atrocities.

Nazis targeted Jews and gypsies

According to the US Justice Department, from July 1941 until at least June or July 1944, Mr Kalejs was a company commander and first lieutenant in the Arajs Kommando.

The Nazis' policy in the occupied Baltic states was to murder all Jews, gypsies and communist commissars.

After the Wehrmacht swept through an area, a mobile SS killing crew would follow shortly, hoping to catch victims unaware.

These mobile killing units were called the Einsatzgruppe or, in Latvia, the Einsatzkommando.

Arajs Kommando worked with the SS

According to the US Government's expert witness in the case against Mr Kalejs, Dr Raul Hilberg, a renowned Holocaust scholar and professor of political science at the University of Vermont, the Einsatzkommando assigned to Latvia had just 170 members.

So it relied on bands of local collaborators, such as the Arajs Kommando.

As company commander, Mr Kalejs would have been one of six or seven officers below Arajs and would have had at least 100 men under his direction.

Dr Hilberg said according to German documents, the Einsatzkommando with the Arajs Kommando and similar local groups murdered 29,000 people (90% of them Jewish) before 10 August 1941.

A few months later, in order to make room in Riga's Jewish ghetto for the thousands shipped out of Germany, 27,800 Jews were shot in the woods near Riga in the space of three days.

By January 1942, only 4,000 of the 70,000 Jews who were in Latvia at the beginning of the war were still alive.

The Arajs Kommando working with the Einsatzkommando was responsible for more than half of these killings.

Concentration camp duty

The Arajs Kommando also joined the SS in "anti-partisan activity", a cover for arresting and murdering civilians.

In addition, the Arajs Kommando, served as guards at the Salaspils concentration camp where inmates died primarily from inhumane conditions or being shot while trying to escape.

The Arajs Kommando was charged with guarding work details and preventing escapes at Salaspils, Latvia.

Mr Kalejs has always denied the accusations and says he was a farm labourer during the war.

What is not in doubt is that in 1945 Mr Kalejs moved to Denmark and five years later went to Australia as a refugee. He worked for the Australian Immigration Service, gaining citizenship in 1957.

He moved to the United States in 1959, and built up a successful property business, but in late 1984 the US Justice Department set its sights on him after being allerted to the allegations against him.

From country to country

In 1994 he was deported to Australia after a US court declared he had been a "key officer" in the murder of thousands of innocent people.

In 1995 he fled from Australia to Canada, but he was also deported from there two years later after a ten-month inquiry found he was implicated in the murder of 30,000 Jews in a Nazi slave camp.

He is thought to have moved to the UK in June last year and was traced two weeks ago by a US television team.

Catthorpe Manor in Leicestershire, where Mr Kalejs has been staying, is run by the Latvian Welfare Fund as a home for elderly Latvians.

The large property, set in wooded grounds with its own tennis courts and social club, caters for more than 100 elderly people in peaceful, luxurious surroundings.

Mr Kalejs will no doubt be making the most of the luxury because - as he admitted to a Sunday newspaper - he has no chance of peace for the time being.

Sharon Says... this man was in our hands three times, and three times was let go.. Shame on Canada.. Shame on Australia.. and the rest of the world for not bringing this killer to justice. Although now he will face God and we can do nothing to his man that compares with standing before the Lord on Judgement Day.

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Sharon

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Dec 28 10 8:39 AM

Vidkun Quisling

Vidkun Abraham Lauritz Jonssøn Quisling was a Norwegian politician and officer, commonly known as one of World War II's most infamous traitors. He held the office of Minister President of Norway from February 1, 1942, to the end of World War II, while the elected social democratic cabinet of Johan Nygaardsvold was exiled in London. Quisling was tried for high treason and executed by firing squad after the war.

The term "quisling" has become a synonym in many European languages, including English, for traitor.

Vidkun QuislingQuisling had a mixed and relatively successful background, having achieved the rank of major in the Norwegian army (some years before he had become the country's best ever war academy cadet upon graduation), and worked with Fridtjof Nansen in the Soviet Union during the famine in the 1920s, as well as having served as defense minister in the agrarian government 1931-1933. He was the son of the Lutheran minister and well-known genealogist Jon Lauritz Qvisling, and both of his parents belonged to some of the oldest and most distinguished families of Telemark.

On May 17, 1933, the Norwegian Constitution Day, Quisling and state attorney Johan Bernhard Hjort formed Nasjonal Samling (NS) ("National Unity"), the Norwegian national-socialist party. Nasjonal Samling had an anti-democratic, Führerprinzip-based political structure, and Quisling was to be the party's Führer, much like Adolf Hitler was for the NSDAP in Germany. The party went on to have modest successes. Iin the election of 1933, four months after the party was formed, it garnered 27850 votes, following support from the Norwegian Farmer's Aid Association, with which Quisling had connections from his time as a member of the Agrarian government. However, as the party line changed from a religiously rooted one to a more pro-German and anti-Semitic hardline policy from 1935 onwards, the support from the Church waned and, in the 1936 elections, the party got about.50,000 votes. The party became increasingly extremist, and party membership dwindled to an estimated 2,000 members after the German invasion.

When Germany invaded Norway on April 9, 1940, Quisling became the first person in history to announce a coup during a news broadcast, declaring an ad-hoc government during the confusion of the invasion, hoping that the Germans would support it. The background for this action was the flight northwards of the King and the government. Quisling had visited Adolf Hitler in Germany the year before, and was liked by Hitler, so Quisling's belief that the Germans would back his government were not entirely unfounded. However, Quisling had little popular support, and the Quisling government lasted only five days, after which Josef Terboven was installed as Reichskommissar (Commissioner), the highest authority in Norway, reporting directly to Hitler. The relationship between Quisling and Terboven was tense, although Terboven, presumably seeing an advantage in having a Norwegian in a position of power to reduce resentment in the population, named Quisling to the post of “Minister President” (as opposed to Prime Minister) in 1942, a position the self-appointed "Führer" assumed in 1943, on February 1.

Vidkun Quisling stayed in power until he was arrested May 9, 1945, in a mansion on Bygdøy in Oslo that he called Gimle after the place in Norse mythology where the survivors of Ragnarok were to live.

Quisling, along with two other Nasjonal Samling leaders, Albert Viljam Hagelin and Ragnar Skancke, were convicted and executed by firing squad. In later days, these sentences have been controversial, since the capital punishment was reintroduced to the Norwegian legal system during the end of the war, by the exile government, to handle the postwar trials.

Maria Vasilijevna, Quisling's Russian wife, lived in Oslo until her death in 1980. They had no children.

http://www.jewishvirtuall.../biography/Quisling.html

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Sharon

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Dec 28 10 8:50 AM

Hitler And The Grand Mufti Of Jerusalem: Origins Of Modern Islamic Anti-Semitism

The Mufti was one of the initiators of the systematic extermination of European Jewry and had been a collaborator and adviser of Eichmann and Himmler in the execution of this plan. ... He was one of Eichmann's best friends and had constantly incited him to accelerate the extermination measures. I heard him say, accompanied by Eichmann, he had visited incognito the gas chamber of Auschwitz.You've heard President Bush, experts like Robert Spencer and Daniel Pipes, and most of the right-side of the blogosphere refer to radical Islamists as Islamic fascists (Islamofascists). If you think that modern Islamist anti-Semitism and fascism is without historical basis, think again. All threads of modern Islamic anti-Semitism and the fascism of fundamentalist Islamic ideology can be traced back to Hitler.

Fascism: A system of government marked by centralization of authority under a dictator (Islamist ideology and the Mullahs), stringent socioeconomic controls, suppression of the opposition through terror and censorship, and typically a policy of belligerent nationalism and racism.

In his 2005 article in First Things, David G. Dalin quoted Gabriel Schoenfeld's 2004 book, "The Return of Anti-Semitism," writing:
It is possible to trace modern Islamic anti-Semitism back along a number of different historical and intellectual threads, but, no matter which one you choose, they all seem to pass, at one point or another, through the hands of one figure - Hajj Amin al-Husseini, Hitler's mufti, the viciously anti-Semitic grand mufti of Jerusalem and the leader of Muslim fundamentalists in Palestine, who resided in Berlin as a welcome guest of the Nazis throughout the years of the Holocaust (the one that Iran and Islamists all over the world claim never happened)
The following video provides a cursory review of the relationship of Adolph Hitler and the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem

From "The Mufti and the Führer," we have: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d51poygEXYU&feature=player_embedded

In 1941, Haj Amin al-Husseini fled to Germany and met with Adolf Hitler, Heinrich Himmler, Joachim Von Ribbentrop and other Nazi leaders. He wanted to persuade them to extend the Nazis' anti-Jewish program to the Arab world.

The Mufti sent Hitler 15 drafts of declarations he wanted Germany and Italy to make concerning the Middle East. One called on the two countries to declare the illegality of the Jewish home in Palestine. Furthermore, "they accord to Palestine and to other Arab countries the right to solve the problem of the Jewish elements in Palestine and other Arab countries, in accordance with the interest of the Arabs and, by the same method, that the question is now being settled in the Axis countries."

In November 1941, the Mufti met with Hitler, who told him the Jews were his foremost enemy. The Nazi dictator rebuffed the Mufti's requests for a declaration in support of the Arabs, however, telling him the time was not right. The Mufti offered Hitler his "thanks for the sympathy which he had always shown for the Arab and especially Palestinian cause, and to which he had given clear expression in his public speeches....The Arabs were Germany's natural friends because they had the same enemies as had Germany, namely....the Jews...."
Your take home message here is that there is a historical and factual basis for radical Islamists to be referred to as Islamic fascists, and they are indeed - anti-Semetic. Islamic fascists seek a world dominated and controlled by Islam (a global Islamic caliphate), the establishment of stringent socioeconomic controls (Sharia), suppression of the opposition through terror and censorship (infidels that fail to submit to Islam are to be killed), and typically a policy of belligerent nationalism (the ummah - the Muslim nation) and racism (anti-Semitism and, as stated by Iran's Ahmadinejad.

Hitler's Mufti. blockquote... It is possible to trace modern Islamic anti-Semitism back along a number of different historical and intellectual threads, but, no matter which one you choose, they all seem to pass, at one point or another, through the hands of one figure--Hitler's mufti, Hajj Amin al-Husseini, the viciously anti-Semitic grand mufti of Jerusalem and the leader of Muslim fundamentalists in Palestine, who resided in Berlin as a welcome guest of the Nazis throughout the years of the Holocaust.

http://www.freedomszone.c...d_the_grand_mufti_of.php

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Sharon

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Dec 28 10 9:14 AM

The Last Mountebank

Richard Griffiths

Louis Darquier de Pellepoix has always been a shadowy figure. He was commissioner for Jewish affairs under the Vichy government from May 1942 to February 1944, during the period of the most extensive round-ups of Jews for deportation, largely undertaken by the French police. But in most histories of Vichy, his name is merely mentioned, with little comment. He hardly features in the memoirs of his contemporaries. Even in works devoted to the Jewish question, we get no real picture of what the man was like.

In this fascinating and valuable book, Carmen Callil introduces us to the banality of evil. In comparison with Darquier, even Adolf Eichmann would have appeared charismatic. That such a man could achieve importance in wartime France tells us much about the Vichy regime which employed him, and about the German occupiers who imposed him on Vichy. We also gain some insight into the obscure motivations behind the activities of some of the monsters of that period.

Callil came upon her subject by chance. When she moved to London from Australia in the early 1960s, she went regularly to a psychiatrist called Anne Darquier. In 1970, Anne died. At the funeral, Callil noted with surprise that her name was in fact "Darquier de Pellepoix", though it meant nothing to her at the time. A couple of years later, watching Le Chagrin et la pitié, a film about Vichy France, she saw someone called Darquier de Pellepoix shaking hands with Heydrich, the butcher of the Jews. This set her off on years of research, which culminated in this book.

The author has discovered a great deal about Darquier's personal life, much of it at variance with the life story that the man made up for himself at various times. Louis Darquier (the aristocratic title "de Pellepoix", to which he soon attached "Baron", being an invention) was a monocled fantasist given to unsuccessful schemes for making money. In 1928 he married Myrtle Jones (or "Lady Workman-Macnaghten") from Tasmania, also a fantasist. Both of them floundered for money - and drank a great deal - during four years in England. A daughter, Anne, was born in Old Windsor and was entrusted to an English nanny who brought her up. The nanny was paid only sporadically, and after the couple moved back to France the money dried up altogether. Anne did not see her parents again until she was an adult.

In France, Louis continued his search for easy money. He became involved with the extreme right and was injured in the riots of February 1934. This led to his formation of an "Association of 6 February 1934", the first of many "patriotic" associations he founded, most of which were used as cash cows. By the late 1930s he had become a prominent anti-Semite and was being funded extensively by the Germans. In the first years of the occupation, Darquier emerged as one of the "Paris collaborators", pro-German and obsessively occupied with the "Jewish question". In 1942, the Germans imposed him on Vichy as a successor to Xavier Vallat, the traditionalist commissioner for Jewish affairs who, though strongly anti-Semitic, had taken a far less extreme line and assumed a far less pro-German stance.

Darquier's time as commissioner was marked by incompetence and venality. Vichy despised him, and even the Germans came to despair of him. He and his staff concentrated above all on the rich pickings to be made from the possessions of deported Jews. He spent much of his time theorising about the nature of "half-Jews", to provide further fodder for Nazi demands. His ineptitude and laziness were such that eventually the Germans dealt far more with René Bousquet, the head of police who was the chief organiser of the huge round-ups of Jews in 1942. In February 1944 Darquier was dismissed.

At the end of the war he escaped to Franco's Spain, where he lived until his death in 1980. He remained the spiteful figure he had always been. In 1978 he gave an interview to a French journalist in which he not only reiterated his venom against the Jews and denied the existence of the Holocaust, but also fingered his former colleague Bousquet, by then a successful French businessman.

Callil deals movingly with the ter- rible details of the treatment of the Jews in occupied France. Even more valu- able, however, is the picture we get of Darquier himself, whom the author rightly describes as "a mountebank and a chancer". Did he believe in all his anti-Semitic propaganda or was it merely another way of "making something of himself", by joining the one area of society - the pre-war anti-Semites - where he could cut a dash and, at the same time, tap sources of money?

Whether Darquier believed what he said or not, his sub-ordination of everything to his own interests had something childlike about it. Callil describes him as "playing games, pulling wings off butterflies, dispensing cruelty like liquorice water". It was the German conquest of France that gave Darquier the opportunity to deploy these characteristics on a grand scale. In providing such a detailed picture of one of the functionaries of the Nazi empire, Callil has brilliantly shown how such a system could encourage and promote nonentities who were prepared to mouth the neces- sary phrases, and to ignore the call of humanity
http://www.newstatesman.com/200604100041

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Sharon

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Dec 28 10 9:27 AM

"GIVE ME YOUR CHILDREN!"

A CONTROVERSIAL FIGURE

Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski's "Give Me Your Children" speech is a chilling example of the nightmarish aspects of the Holocaust. As head of the Judenrat of the Lodz Ghetto (or "Litzmannstadt Ghetto"), Rumkowski remains to this day a controversial figure. Within the Polish city of Lodz was held the second-to-largest concentration of Jews in Europe up to that time (the largest was Warsaw). Rumkowski was appointed "Eldest of the Jews" of the ghetto when it was established in Feb. of 1940. During his tenure, he was viewed with reverence by some and with disdain by others. Many saw him as a power-mongerer & quasi-collaborator. Teenaged-diarist Dawid Sierakowiak declares Rumkowski's words after a particular speech to be "The demagoguery of a man sick with megalomania." Sierakowiak unfortunately dies at the age of 19 in Lodz from complications due to starvation ("ghetto disease") - a passive murder induced by the German regime where they starved this potentially bright young star to death.
Emmanual Ringelblum, the famous diarist of the Warsaw Ghetto, mentions Rumkowski several times in his Notes from the Warsaw Ghetto...saying of Rumkowski (during a visit Rumkowski made to

Warsaw to secure doctors for Lodz), "...Chaim, or as he is called, "King Chaim", Rumkowski, an old man of 70, extraordinarily ambitious and pretty nutty."
Rumkowski spent much energy appeasing German demands and in the process, he set up a near-dictatorship within his "ghetto kingdom" - which became a starving slave colony. His ghetto became a grotesque model of society, complete with socio-economic classes of the "haves and have-nots" - where being "connected" could keep one from being deported or could allow one to obtain extra food or secure an administrative job - not unlike the "organizing" that was required for survival in concentration camps.

RUMKOWSKI: "THE CHAIRMAN"

There are those who see Chairman Rumkowski as a tragic hero who did only what anyone else would do in the same circumstances. It could be argued that he did not initially realize the true mission of the ghetto: a collective staging area for transports to the annihilation camps. The very first killing center, Chelmno or Kulmhof (German) was established to liquidate the inhabitants of Lodz. There, "gas vans" were used since in these early days, the concept of the permanent gas chamber was not yet developed. These hermetically sealed vans (Renault models) carried the victims to mass graves while the exhaust from the van's motor was piped into the van's cargo area. By the time the driver made it to the burial pits, all occupants within were usually dead.

Rumkowski zealously organized the ghetto to satisfy the demands of the Germans for order as well as quotas for deportations. He thought that he could insure survival of himself and some part of the ghetto population by producing war-goods for the German Army. This, it could be argued, smacks of collaboration. Rumkowski himself allowed for executions (hangings) and imprisoned "shirkers". He incorporated "fluxes" in food rationing to control the starving ghetto masses as the need arose. He set up a complex internal "government" complete with his own infamous "Jewish Police" and deportation department (i.e., Office for Resettled Persons). Paper money called "Rumkies" was even printed as well as work certificates, food coupons, etc. This bureaucratic structure helped maintain his control and by default, the control of the German authorities.

RUMKOWSKI AND HIS PEOPLE TRAPPED

Rumkowksi continually bombarded the people with a "you work - you live" ideology - the very mirror of the German deceit of "Arbeit Macht Frei" (Work Will Free You) which prevailed in the concentration camps and killing centers. Rumkowski and the Jews in the Lodz Ghetto were in a desperate trap. The decision was: Resist and be killed now? or Cooperate and try to survive even in the face of inhuman treatment, brutality, starvation & murder? The decision was made to not resist and Rumkowski personally made it known that resistance would be punished. A final and important factor must be also considered: most devout Jews believed that suffering at the hands of Gentiles - which had been already going on for centuries - was the defacto state of Jewry and thus accepted suffering at the hands of anti-Semites as manifestations of God's punishments - which all proved that they were indeed the chosen people. A word even existed for those times when anti-Semites in a given community would rise up, persecute and kill Jews: pogrom. There was a popular Jewish saying at the time: "If a Goy strikes you, bow your head and he'll spare your life". Such ideologies caused those who desired resistance (e.g., Zionists) to be seen as "less Jewish" and such ideas like resistance were condemned by most elder Jews.
We can argue today (with our "wonderful" 20/20 hindsight) that most of the Jews in Europe, by not resisting, made it easier for the Germans to implement "The Final Solution" (Endlosung). Is it therefore inconsistent to single out individual Jews such as Rumkowski for blame as collaborators? The question is daunting.
However, the power that Rumkowski held over his ghetto was enormous, and although no one today could possibly envy him, it must be said that initially he surely must have felt somewhat vainglorious. Rumkowski's zest for the administration of his ghetto has many dark facets - his immersion into the power he held displays a sort of megalomania - and the truth was that Rumkowski's power existed only by the blessing of the Germans.
Rumkowski engaged much energy to appease the Germans and subsequently retain his power. It is for this reason I feel Rumkowski must share a commensurable blame for the "cooperativeness" and productiveness his ghetto provided to Germany and therefore he was, what I would call a quasi-collaborator. The blame for the deaths of the Jews of the Lodz Ghetto however, shall forever be upon the perpetrators.
Had Rumkowski not been chosen as Eldest of the Jews in Lodz, someone else would have ...and this sets up the question of What would have happened had there been no Rumkowski? Would it have been better? Worse? The answer lies in the track-record of all major ghettos during the Holocaust: Ghettos were simply collective points (staging areas) for Jews to be transported to killing centers. Therefore all ghetto inhabitants were marked for extermination. Revolt within a ghetto did occur...the famous Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of 1943. Unfortunately it was too little, too late. The Germans moved in and militarily razed the ghetto there, killing nearly all the ghetto fighters. The German officer in charge, Josef Stroop, triumphantly reported at the end of the operation: The Jewish Quarter in Warsaw is no more!""

GHETTO CHRONOLOGY

There is a highly developed chronology of the Lodz Ghetto as well as Chairman Rumkowski due to the vast amounts of motion-picture film, photographs (many in color), diaries and personal recollections of both those who perished and those who survived. There exists also an official "Chronicle". This allows for intimate study, with much humbleness, of the struggle to survive in the Lodz Ghetto. Studying this fight for life compels us to appreciate the comparative rich life we live. A life that was denied those behind the walls of the Lodz Ghetto.

THE "DUALITY" OF RUMKOWSKI

This webpage is highly opinionated. I realize that opinions are like...(well, you know). I believe Rumkowski existed with a sort of "duality". Certainly, Rumkowski greatly loved his people. He put every ounce of his being into what he believed was his life's calling - to help "his people" in a most terrible time. I believe Rumkowski did not initially realize or believe that Germany's agenda was the total annihilation of European Jewry and then probably world Jewry - although this very prediction was made by Hitler before the Riechstag in 1939. Yet, I believe that at some point and time, Rumkowski must have realized the truth about the "deportations" from the ghetto even though the Germans were diligent at keeping it a secret. This idea has never been proven and is still being debated to this day. There are statements he made to persons close to him that cause me to believe he knew something. If so, what a terrible burden for him to bear! It then opens the door to the idea that "The Chairman" must have had to exist in a form of duality: Trying to save lives on one hand and yet appeasing the German demand for blood on the other.
With respect to the life-saving side of Rumkowski's duality, "The Chairman's" past endeavors shows that he had dedicated his life for the care of unfortunates. Prior to the war, Rumkowski was a diligent pioneer in the welfare, education and care for orphans like his counterpart & friend who operated an orphanage in Warsaw: Dr. Januz Korczak. Korczak's story, however, is that of an absolute martyr. Korczak will be forever remembered because even though powerful people offered him his life while his children boarded the trains in Warsaw bound for "the unknown"...he refused to leave them and rode with them to their collective deaths within the inky blackness of the gas chambers of Treblinka.
As for the other side of Rumkowksi's duality? There is the power-mongerer, the megalomaniac - the lord of his "small kingdom" who (like his counterpart in the Vilna Ghetto, Jacob Gens) zealously responded to German demands. Gens was murdered by the Germans when he was no longer seen by them as necessary. In Warsaw, the head of the Jewish Council was Adam Czerniakow - when asked to carry out Nazi orders to deport a large portion of the Warsaw Ghetto to be annihilated in July 1942, Czerniakow committed suicide by ingesting cyanide rather than cooperate with "the authorities". By these examples it can be seen that even the Jewish leaders were ultimately powerless to stop the extermination process - the Germans wanted all Jews to die - but to offer a thread of hope, the Germans decided, would allow the whole process to occur with less panic & disorder. Throughout the Holocaust in the major ghettos, after nearly every action, the Germans would assure the Jews that it was the last one.
Rumkowksi believed that satisfying "the authorities" was in the best interest of survival - to do anything in order to hopefully save a few! His goal it was said, was to save 10,000 people. Keeping the Germans happy meant starvation & slavery - but it also meant a reduction or staving-off of mass deportations of the ghetto population into "the unknown" (even though the Germans, in their efforts to get Jews to board the cattle-cars claimed the Jews were being "resettled" for work, most ghetto inhabitants were instinctively frightened). Rumkowski's efforts to mobilize the ghetto into a production facility were indeed recognized as valuable by the Germans especially in light of the lack of skilled labor in the Reich and the Generalgouvernement. In the meantime, Chelmno ceased to exist as a killing center and for a while, the Germans allowed the ghetto to exist - but in appalling conditions. During this period (1943 to 1944), under the worst conditions, the inhabitants of the ghetto literally starved and slaved for Germany's war-effort - many people starved to death. Within the ghetto, textile mills and even armaments plants operated. German uniforms were manufactured. Thousands of German uniform insignias were hand-embroidered by young girls in the sewing shops. Boots, belts and rain gear were made by slave labor and contributed to the German war effort. Rumkowski held to his belief that the Jews in the Lodz Ghetto would not be destroyed because they were too valuable . His dream was to have a ghetto made up of only workers...and in so doing, stave-off the "deportations". In the end it was only a dream - or worse...a nightmare so horrible that I assure you that neither you nor I can hardly conceive it.

DEMAGOGUERY AND MEGALOMANIA

Rumkowski specialized in proclamations, memoranda and speeches in order to control the masses. His many speeches bolstered and also pressured the Jews into accepting the agenda he and his council, which was called the Judenrat had decided would be in the best interest of the ghetto. Rumkowski often employed threats. In a speech about rumor-mongering about what the true fate of the ghetto inhabitants was, he said, "Once again a gang of scoundrels is spreading rumors...I would like to murder them!....The stories circulating today are 100% false!...Nothing bad will happen to people of good will". In another speech, he non-ashamedly admits being active in selecting those to be deported, "...I assigned for deportation that element of the ghetto which was a festering boil...", and still in another, "...I will remove the troublemakers. .." and in another speech, "...I would gladly get rid of several thousand individuals from the underworld. I have detailed lists of these fellows...". These warnings were constant, "...stop dealing in food! Stop the conniving! Remember that when more deportees are demanded, I will put all the parasites on the lists!...". Then there are two incredible statements Rumkowski uttered during a speech while visiting the Warsaw Ghetto (to secure doctors from there): "..Dictatorship is not a dirty word. Through dictatorship I earned the Germans' respect for my work." and "My ghetto is my small kingdom". In the end with the final roundup during the summer of 1944, Rumkowski exclaimed: "Jews of the ghetto, come to your senses! Volunteer for the transports!"
As for continuing to work in slavery for Germany, he said in a speech, "...only work can save us from the worst calamity... and in another speech, "...work protects us from annihilation..." and - "A plan on the threshold of a new year! The plan is work, work and more work!".
Work did not save the ghetto. In 1944, realizing the war would be lost, Himmler ordered that the ghetto be liquidated. By this time, the famous killing center Auschwitz was in operation and the entire ghetto (along with Rumkowski himself - on one of the last transports) was transported there by rail.
There is much argument on how Rumkowski himself died - some have claimed he was killed by his own people in the rail car enroute to Auschwitz. Others say he was immediately separated upon arrival at the center, then taken away and executed by the SS. Another claim is that he was beaten to death by fellow deportees from Lodz while in the "dressing room" awaiting to be gassed at Auschwitz. It is estimated that there were only 10,000 survivors of the 200,000 Jews who lived in the Lodz Ghetto. Of this number, about 800 did not report for the final deportations and hid until the liberation by Russian forces months later.

THE SPEECH THAT ROCKED THE GHETTO

Let us go back to 1942. Rumkowski's crystal ball has shattered as he faces the first hard-core aktions by the Germans within his ghetto. He mounts a platform to present a speech before the crowd. He is depressed and teary-eyed. Only a few days before, the SS raided the ghetto's hospital and loaded the sick onto trucks, throwing some children onto the trucks from windows, the victims were never seen again - this was one of the first noteworthy aktions performed by the Germans up to now. The Germans had shown the Jews of Lodz that they had no scruples when it came to killing Jews. Now, something worse is in store, Rumkowski has received a chilling demand from the SS: deliver 24,000 people to the train station for deportation within the next 8 days. So, here on Sept. 4, 1942, about 2 years after the ghetto was established and with the killing center Chelmno's castle gates ready and open for business, Rumkowski, using a PA system, weepingly solicits the ghetto's populace to feed the killing center Chelmno with a first batch: children, old & sick so that those able to work may be spared. This speech is a compelling example of the horrifying situation the Jews of Europe, and particularly within the Lodz Ghetto, found themselves:

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RUMKOWSKI:
"A grievous blow has struck the ghetto. They are asking us to give up the best we possess - the children and the elderly. I was unworthy of having a child of my own, so I gave the best years of my life to children. I've lived and breathed with children, I never imagined I would be forced to deliver this sacrifice to the altar with my own hands. In my old age, I must stretch out my hands and beg: Brothers and sisters! Hand them over to me! Fathers and mothers: Give me your children!

I had a suspicion something was going to befall us. I anticipated "something" and was always like a watchman: on guard to prevent it. But I was unsuccessful because I did not know what was threatening us. The taking of the sick from the hospitals caught me completely by surprise. And I give you the best proof there is of this: I had my own nearest and dearest among them and I could do nothing for them!

I thought that would be the end of it, that after that, they'd leave us in peace, the peace for which I long so much, for which I've always worked, which has been my goal. But something else, it turned out, was destined for us. Such is the fate of the Jews: always more suffering and always worse suffering, especially in times of war.
Yesterday afternoon, they gave me the order to send more than 20,000 Jews out of the ghetto, and if not - "We will do it!". So the question became, 'Should we take it upon ourselves, do it ourselves, or leave it to others to do?". Well, we - that is, I and my closest associates - thought first not about "How many will perish?" but "How many is it possible to save?" And we reached the conclusion that, however hard it would be for us, we should take the implementation of this order into our own hands.
I must perform this difficult and bloody operation - I must cut off limbs in order to save the body itself. I must take children because, if not, others may be taken as well - God forbid.

.

I have no thought of consoling you today. Nor do I wish to calm you. I must lay bare your full anguish and pain. I come to you like a bandit, to take from you what you treasure most in your hearts! I have tried, using every possible means, to get the order revoked. I tried - when that proved to be impossible - to soften the order. Just yesterday, I ordered a list of children aged 9 - I wanted at least to save this one aged-group: the nine to 10 year olds. But I was not granted this concession. On only one point did I succeed: in saving the 10 year olds and up. Let this be a consolation to our profound grief.
There are, in the ghetto, many patients who can expect to live only a few days more, maybe a few weeks. I don't know if the idea is diabolical or not, but I must say it: "Give me the sick. In their place we can save the healthy."
I know how dear the sick are to any family, and particularly to Jews. However, when cruel demands are made, one has to weigh and measure: who shall, can and may be saved? And common sense dictates that the saved must be those who can be saved and those who have a chance of being rescued, not those who cannot be saved in any case...
We live in the ghetto, mind you. We live with so much restriction that we do not have enough even for the healthy, let alone for the sick. Each of us feeds the sick at the expense of our own health: we give our bread to the sick. We give them our meager ration of sugar, our little piece of meat. And what's the result? Not enough to cure the sick, and we ourselves become ill. Of course, such sacrifices are the most beautiful and noble. But there are times when one has to choose: sacrifice the sick, who haven't the slightest chance of recovery and who also may make others ill, or rescue the healthy.
I could not deliberate over this problem for long; I had to resolve it in favor of the healthy. In this spirit, I gave the appropriate instructions to the doctors, and they will be expected to deliver all incurable patients, so that the healthy, who want and are able to live, will be saved in their place.
I understand you, mothers; I see your tears, alright. I also feel what you feel in your hearts, you fathers who will have to go to work in the morning after your children have been taken from you, when just yesterday you were playing with your dear little ones. All this I know and feel. Since 4 o'clock yesterday, when I first found out about the order, I have been utterly broken. I share your pain. I suffer because of your anguish, and I don't know how I'll survive this - where I'll find the strength to do so.
I must tell you a secret: they requested 24,000 victims, 3000 a day for eight days. I succeeded in reducing the number to 20,000, but only on the condition that these be children under the age of 10. Children 10 and older are safe! Since the children and the aged together equals only some 13,000 souls, the gap will have to be filled with the sick.
I can barely speak. I am exhausted; I only want to tell you what I am asking of you: Help me carry out this action! I am trembling. I am afraid that others, God forbid, will do it themselves .
A broken Jew stands before you. Do not envy me. This is the most difficult of all orders I have ever had to carry out at any time. I reach out to you with my broken, trembling hands and beg: Give into my hands the victims! So that we can avoid having further victims, and a population of 100,000 Jews can be preserved! So, they promised me: If we deliver our victims by ourselves, there will be peace!!!

(shouts from the crowd about other options....some saying "We will not let the children go alone - we will all go!!!" and such).

These are empty phrases!!! I don't have the strength to argue with you! If the authorities were to arrive, none of you would be shouting!
I understand what it means to tear off a part of the body. Yesterday, I begged on my knees, but it did not work. From small villages with Jewish populations of 7000 to 8000, barely 1000 arrived here. So which is better? What do you want? That 80,000 to 90,000 Jews remain, or God forbid, that the whole population be annihilated?
You may judge as you please; my duty is to preserve the Jews who remain. I do not speak to hot-heads! I speak to your reason and conscience. I have done and will continue doing everything possible to keep arms from appearing in the streets and blood from being shed. The order could not be undone; it could only be reduced.
One needs the heart of a bandit to ask from you what I am asking. But put yourself in my place, think logically, and you'll reach the conclusion that I cannot proceed any other way. The part that can be saved is much larger than the part that must be given away!"

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NOTE: The Jewish Police were given extra rations for themselves and their families for their participation in the round-ups. Those with "connections" used all means possible to have themselves or their loved ones exempted...but the quota meant that someone else go in their place. The conditions in the ghetto were so terrible that soon the grief over the children simply absorbed itself into the everyday horror of what was happening - slow and utter starvation. The people were in such terrible condition that the loss of the children simply became another price paid to the Germans for survival. To ease the blow, rumors were spread that the children were alive and being employed as helpers in gardens...though most figured the worst. On subsequent deportations, trainloads of clothing in sacks began arriving every day exactly 10 hours after the trains would leave. Ghetto currency ("Rumkies") and papers were found by those sorting out the clothing for re-distribution. How could this be, the people in the ghetto asked? Only one horrifying conclusion could be reached.
One person, who had survived by hiding among the sacks and had made the round-trip, told how the transports were taking the people to a slaughterhouse at Kulmhof (Chelmno) - but hardly anyone could accept that it was the truth.
Nearly a quarter million people were murdered at Chelmno.

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Sharon

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Dec 28 10 9:40 AM

The Nazi side of the Irish Republican Movement

Mary McAleese

The recent inflammatory comments made by Presidential hate-monger Mary McAleese has brought to public attention the issue of Nazism and anti-Semitism. As the world stopped to remember the Nazi genocide 60 years on from the Allied liberation of Auschwitz, it is fitting if we remember the allegiances between the citizens and government of what what was the Irish Free State, including their most radical front - Sinn Fein/IRA; and anti-Semitism/National Socialism.

de Valera's beloved Fuhrer

The sectarian and inflammatory comments made by Mary McAleese were as follows: (stated with reference to Nazis)

"They gave to their children an irrational hatred of Jews in the same way that people in Northern Ireland transmitted to their children an irrational hatred of Catholics, in the same way that people give to their children an outrageous and irrational hatred of those who are of different colour and all of those things,"

The implication of which is the Ulster Protestants are as abhorrent as Nazis, while Roman Catholics as victimised as Jewry, and thus Irish Republicanism's bloody struggle murdering thousands of innocent Protestants is perfectly justifiable. To oppose this would therefore be tantamount to supporting Nazism.

These comments were hardly surprising coming from someone whose republican terrorist sympathies have been no great secret. The reality of Irish treatment of Jews and their conduct during World War Two should cause Mrs McAleese to hang her head in shame rather than pontificate to others.

We only have to look back to the first Irish holocaust memorial day on 26th January 2003 when Justice Minister Michael McDowell openly apologized for Irish wartime policy that was inspired by "a culture of muted antisemitism in Ireland," which discouraged immigration by Europe's shattered Jews. He said that "at an official level the Irish state was at best coldly polite and behind closed doors antipathetic, hostile and unfeeling toward the Jews."

Eamon de Valera

Sixty Years ago on the 2nd May 1945 just at the close of World War Two the political leader of the Irish Free State and embodiment of the Irish Republican movement failed even to be discreet in his support for Nazism. Eamon de Valera, the survivor of the 1916 Easter rising (a track record for helping German war efforts), saw fit to sign a petition of condolence at the German legation in Dublin to express his grief on the death of Hitler. Furthermore, he went to personally commiserate with the Nazi representative in Eire, Dr Eduard Hempel on the death of their beloved Fuhrer. Later on the Dublin mob vandalised the British High Commission and the US embassy on news of the Allied victory, both countries being outraged at Ireland's attitude and actions.

Eire's Nazi sympathiser and President McAleese

Please note this event took place a full three months after the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp and the revelation of the full horror of the Nazi genocide, and was only two weeks after British troops had liberated Bergen-Belsen, accompanied as it happened by an Irish doctor. There could be no possibility that de Valera and the Dail were unaware of the Nazi treatment of Jews, and yet the leader of supposedly neutral Ireland still wished to pay his respects to one of the most evil men in the history of the world. It was a display of support that no other national leader on earth made. At the time it was defended as a diplomatic gesture but was one that not even General Franco was insensitive enough to make.

It is clear that de Valera was sympathetic to the Nazi slaughter of Jews, and still willing to be open about it when it was clear that there would be no comeback for Nazi Germany and no united Ireland on the back of an axis victory and the bayonets of the SS. It is interesting to note that de Valera's visit was publicly applauded in the Irish press by Irish republican supporting literary gem, George Bernard Shaw.

Eoin O'Duffy

Eoin O'Duffy rose to prominence as Chief of Staff of the IRA at the time of the Civil War and was commander of the Monaghan brigade and later IRA Chief of Staff. At this time, as pro-treaty he split with de Valera. As the first Chief Commissioner of the Garda Siochana (Irish police force), Eoin O'Duffy turned himself into Ireland's answer to Mussolini being leader of the 100000 strong fascist Blueshirts movement (Army Comrades Association) which he renamed the National Guard. This organisation echoed Hitler's SA movement and based its marches, flags and salutes (Hail, O'Duffy) on those in use in Nazi Germany.

O'Duffy and his Irish Fascists

In 1933 O'Duffy was the founder of the Fine Gael Party which developed from the Blueshirts, and was thus leader of the political opposition to de Valera's Fianna Fail party. A year later he was ousted from the leadership when he proposed an invasion of Northern Ireland. Fine Gael saw itself strongly in the mainstream of European fascism and this can clearly be seen in the words of John A. Costello who later became leader of Fine Gael and Prime Minister of the Irish Republic. Speaking in the Dail he said "The Blackshirts have been victorious in Italy and Hitler's Brownshirts have been victorious in Germany, as assuredly the Blueshirts will be victorious in Ireland". During the Spanish Civil War O'Duffy led the 700 strong pro-Franco Irish brigade, but the Spanish fascist was not impressed by his fascist colleague O'Duffy's drunken antics and disbanded them.

Saluting the Irish Fuhrer

During World War Two (Still known in the Republic of Ireland as the Emergency) O'Duffy took a great interest in Nazism with which his Peoples National Party was closely aligned. He even went to the extent of sending an offer to Hitler saying that he would raise a "Green Legion" of Irishmen to fight on the Russian front. As a Nazi collaborator he spent time in Germany discussing with the Nazis in true Irish Republican fashion precisely what he could do to assist in Hitler's campaign against Britain. The 'Green Duce' that had modelled himself on Mussolini and supported Hitler died peacefully in 1944 and was buried with a state funeral in Glasnevin cemetry in Dublin, alongide other heroes of Irish Republicanism such as Daniel O'Connell, Roger Casement and O'Duffy's former comrade Michael Collins.

The "Green Duce" - leader of Fine Gael Blueshirts

Irish Anti-Semitism

This of course was not the only manifestation of Irish sympathy for Nazism which led to them being rebuffed scornfully by the USA, that prevented their qualification for Marshal Aid, and delayed their entrance into the United Nations until 1957. During the War officials of the Irish Free State were outrageous in their racist anti-Semitism which was openly tolerated by the Roman Catholic hierarchy and common currency in Irish society. Indeed Hitler's racial criteria for keeping out the Jew were still being used in Eire 8 years after Hitler's death. A 1953 memo from the Dublin department of Justice argues that vetting refugees into the Republic should be on a similar basis to that 'adopted for the admission of non-Ayran refugees' in 1938 and 1939. The Department of Justice went on to depicte the eastern European Jews applying for asylum as a danger to the Irish State. "There is strong anti-Jewish feeling in this State which is particularly evident to the Alien Section of the Department of Justice." They went on to write 'Sympathy for the Jews has not been particularly excited at the recent news that some thousands are fleeing westwards because of the recent round-up of communist Jews who had been prominent in Government and in government service in eastern European countries.'

When in the Dail in 1943, Oliver J. Flanagan praised Hitler for ridding Germany of Jews claiming, "I doubt very much if they are human!", he was not challenged by any other member. Later in a speech to the Dail he said "There is one thing that Germany did and that was to rout the Jews out of their country. Until we rout the Jews out of this country it does not matter a hair's breadth what orders you make. Where the bees are there is honey, and where the Jews are there is money." Flanagan was soon to join Fine Gael and remained a T.D. for them until 1987 briefly becoming Minister for Defence in the late 1970's. In 2004 Fine Gael leader Enda Kenny T.D. eulogised the memory of the nazi monster on the resignation of his son from politics "Charlie Flanagan continued the long tradition of service given by his late father Oliver J. to the people of Laois/Offaly in exemplary fashion." An exemplary Jew hater indeed! J.J. Walsh T.D. who had been a minister in the Cosgrave government was another high ranking anti-Semite who described Irish Jews as a "gang of parasites".

Anti-Semitism and praise for fascism was also rife within the Roman Catholic hierarchy. The main body organising support for Franco was the Irish Christian Front (I.C.F.) a broad based pressure group which , in the early months of the Spanish civil war organised massive demonstrations and had, initially at least, more widespread support than the Blueshirts. The Front's founders were Patrick Belton, who was formerly a T.D. for both Fianna Fail and Fine Gael as well as being an ex-Blueshirt, and Alexander McCabe, formerly elected for both Sinn Fein (pre-1922) and Cumann Na nGaedheal and later to be a member of Eoin O'Duffy's pro-nazi People's National Party. At one I.C.F. rally in Cork in September 1936 40,000 people assembled to hear Monsignor Patrick Sexton, Roman Catholic Dean of Cork, blame the Spanish civil war on "a gang of murderous Jews in Moscow". Beside him stood Alfred O'Rahilly, the future president of the University College of Cork, and Douglas Hyde, the future president of the Irish state who up until introduction of the Euro has his head on the Irish £50 note.

This track record of democratically elected and clerical Jew-baiting was certainly foundation for the fact that only 30 European Jews fleeing persecution were given asylum before the war, none during it, and only a handful afterwards, and that there was consistent government opposition to granting any asylum. Even a year after the close of war, with the memory of the concentration camps fresh in the Irish public's consciousness, the Department of Justice was still vehemently opposed to Jews entering Ireland. In August 1946, the Minister of Justice refused to admit 100 Jewish orphans found at the Bergen-Belsen death camp.

This race hatred should be no surprise given the recent history there had been, of pogroms against Jews in Ireland, such as in Limerick in 1904 when Roman Priest Father John Creagh incited the local population against "blood-sucking" Jewish money-lenders. His sermons brought about a two-year trade boycott of Jewish businesses that was accompanied by harassment and beatings and resulted in the almost total departure of the 150-strong Limerick Jewish community.

Eire's Axis Neutrality

During the course of World War Two the Irish Free State remained officially neutral. In 1938 a year before the outbreak of war de Valera took control of the three treaty ports of Queenstown, Berehaven and Lough Swilly making them unavailable for British and thus allied naval operations. These ports were of such significance to allied naval activities that the US ambassador to Eire, David Gray urged President Roosevelt to seize them.

Without the free access to ports and seaways around Northern Ireland operations would have been near impossible, as was later testified to by President Eisenhower who said, "without Northern Ireland I do not see how the American forces could have been concentrated to begin the invasion of Europe. If Ulster had not been a definite, co-operative part of the British Empire and had not been available for our use I do not see how the build up could have been carried out in England". In 1943 Churchill paid a similar tribute to Northern Irelands contribution in the face of the Irish Free State's hindrance and obstruction: "Only one channel of entry remained open. That channel remained open because loyal Ulster gave us the full use of the Northern Irish ports and waters and thus ensured the free working of the Clyde and the Mersey".

One and the same cause

The veneer of neutrality during the war thinly veiled popular sentiment which though divided was often openly pro-Nazi. Poet John Betjeman, while working for the British High Commission in Dublin during the war stated with regard to the Irish people that they are: " either anti-British, anti-German and pro-Irish (faintly a majority)…pro Irish and pro-German (about 48 per cent)…the Irish papers are all anti-British…and the best-selling writers are pro-German".

As far as assisting the Nazi war effort the Irish did play their part. Not being obliged to black out they assisted German bombers in the blitz on Belfast and Liverpool. British intelligence was also aware that Dingle bay and the inlets on the coast of county Kerry and Cork were open for use for the refuelling of German u-boats in preparation for attacks upon Allied convoys and shipping, which of course represented the life-line of Britain and the Allied cause. Until relatively recently there was still a German pub near Dingle called Krugers which was testimony to this activity.

Sinn Fein/IRA

With specific reference to Sinn Fein/IRA there is much to say about the open link with Nazi philosophy and Nazi Germany. At the beginning of the 20th century Arthur Griffith, the founder of Sinn Féin, published anti-Semitic articles in the republican United Irishman newspaper. At the outset of the war in 1939 Sinn Fein/IRA refered to her "victorious European allies" - referring to Nazi Germany and the other axis powers. In February 1939 Nazi agent Oskar Pfaus travelled to Ireland to liaise with prominent IRA terrorist Jim O'Donovan the IRA Army council do discuss options for co-operation and agreed that the IRA would assist the Nazis through a program of sabotage and espionage.

At the declaration of war in 1939 Sinn Fein/IRA responded by attacking targets in England - also receiving financial support for their enterprise by support from Irish American Clan na Gael. It is interesting to note that on the day Britain and Germany went to war that the first soldier to be shot was by the IRA in Belfast. Nazi Agents Ernst Drohl and Herman Goertz arrived in Ireland in 1940 to assist and co-ordinate the Sinn Fein/IRA fifth column.

In April 1942 RUC Constables Thomas Forbes and Patrick Murphy (Roman Catholic father of 10) were murdered in two separate attacks by an IRA gang as a part of the IRA's pro-Nazi subterfuge. The gang of 5 were sentanced to death with only leader Tom Williams getting the noose. Joe Cahill, later to be prominent IRA Chief of Staff, and the other three escaped the rope following direct intervention from Hitler's Pope Pius XII. At his death in July 2004 Cahill was lauded as a hero by Roman Priest Des Wilson and former Irish Taioseach (Prime minister) Albert Reynolds.

Joe Cahill's coffin carried by Sinn Fein/IRA terror leaders

Sean Russell

IRA Chief of Staff Sean Russell offered his terrorist services to Hitler in keeping with the Nazi philosophies of his organisation. Sean Russell had been in contact with the Nazi regime from 1936 and travelled to Berlin in May 1940 to receive bomb making and sabotage training and was in talks with the German foreign ministry regarding further avenues of co-operation and mutual interest which would support the Nazi war effort against Britain. His aim would be to foment a rising in Northern Ireland using the Roman Catholic population.

Following the fall of France in 1940 Germany had planned "Operation Kathleen" in which Sinn Fein/IRA would act as go betweens and a fifth column to persuade the Irish Free State to invade Northern Ireland and facilitate the mass landing of German invasion troops at Larne and Londonderry. They would assist the Nazis in occupying Northern Ireland as a stepping stone into the rest of the UK as part of their planned invasion. Russell and prominent Sinn Fein/IRA activist and Nazi collaborator Frank Ryan were dispatched on a U-boat to Ireland by the Nazis in operation Taube which failed due to Russell's death (an inglorious life commemorated by a statue by the Irish National Graves Association in Fairview Park, Dublin in 1951).

Nazi U-Boat - IRA Chief Sean Russell's Funeral Parlour

Russell received a Nazi burial at sea complete with Swastika and full military honours. Recently his statue was decapitated by anti-fascists in protest at an open Nazi being publicly commemorated. Following this the Simon Wiesenthal Centre in Paris called for the statue to be left unrestored as an "enduring symbol of Ireland’s shame". The Irish government over which Mary McAleese presides has committed itself to rebuilding this revolting statue to the glories of the third reich and to a monster who would be reviled for the fascist and traitor he was if he had lived in any other country.

Nazi collaborator Sean Russell's statue in Dublin damaged by anti-fascist activists, Dec 2004
An "enduring symbol of Ireland’s shame" (Simon Wiesenthal Centre)

The key-note speaker at the IRA's Sean Russell commemorative rally in 2003 was Mary Lou McDonald, the Sinn Fein/IRA Dublin candidate for the European elections. That she had delivered an eulogy to a pro-Nazi stooge should have caused to her to be eaten alive by her rival candidates: imagine the consequences of a British politician rededicating herself to the cause of Oswald Mosley. Instead, the matter was never raised during the campaign that followed, lest it seem unseemly. She was duly elected to the European parliament, the only Euro-MP who retrospectively favours collaboration with the Nazis.

Sinn Fein/IRA's Mary Lou McDonald openly spoke in favour of IRA Nazi Chief and Collaborator Sean Russell

The facts about Russell's tenure as Sinn Fein/IRA Chief of Staff as well as his death are crystal clear. As British cities were relentlessly bombed during the Luftwaffe Blitz, Russell dispatched bombers of his own to England. Explosions killed civilians in cities such as Coventry while industries and military installations in Northern Ireland were targeted, all at a time when the Free World was fighting a war of survival against Hitler's armies. Russell and the IRA's terrorism in support of the Nazi war efforted led to him being honoured in Berlin and his presence on the U-boat.

Frank Ryan

The German foreign ministry sent Ryan a second time (Taube II) in which he was to use his extensive political, media and trade union contacts in Ireland to stir up opposition to England. He was at the same time to approach the Irish government and suggest that the German invasion of Britain would be an opportune moment for the seizure of Northern Ireland. Ryan said he believed Irish prime minister, Eamon de Valera, would back the plan and handed German agents a list of 23 people whom he said would be reliable contacts in Ireland. They included IRA commanders and Maud Gonne, muse of the poet W. B. Yeats.

Later on with a German direct invasion of Britain no longer likely, Taube II needed to be revamped. German troops were to be on standby in Brest, France, ready to be smuggled into Ireland to stiffen Irish resistance. It was Ryan's task to ensure that the Germans would be welcomed as allies and liberators. Ryan died in February 1944 and was buried under an assumed name in Dresden.

Ryan and Russell were not alone in "Nazi/IRA". In his very candid memoir, the late Paddy Devlin admitted that during the war there was a great degree of sympathy for the Nazis inside the IRA in Belfast. Devlin recalled that while in Crumlin Road jail he and his comrades enthusiastically plotted the advance of the Germans into the Soviet Union on a map in their prison cell. Each time news came through the radio about Nazi victories he and the other IRA inmates would cheer to the rafters.

Contemporary Anti-Semitism

Anti-semitism in Ireland continues to this day with recent condemnation by the Simon Wiesenthal Center for not including a specific reference to antisemitism in a new UN resolution on religious intolerance it submitted in October 2003 to the UN General Assembly Third Committee. A further act of Irish Jew-hate in the withdrawal of the UN anti-semitism statement was interpreted by the Wiesenthal centre as an Irish attempt to "delegitimise the Jewish people". In a recent letter to Taioseach Bertie Ahern the Wiesenthal centre expressed the opinion that "Ireland is the only World War II neutral to have never confronted its dealings with Nazi Germany". Currently there is much concern regarding the state supported Hunt museum in Limerick which stocked its collection with items taken from Jews which were trafficked by the Nazis.

In another contemporary case, Francis Stuart (1902-99), an Irish writer and member of Aosdana (an affiliation of creative artists in Ireland), who wrote in one of his books: "The Jew is the worm that got into the rose and sickened it," received a Saoi (Gaelic for 'wise one') award in 1996 (the highest honour the Republic of Ireland can give an artist). He was also known for his antisemitic radio broadcasts made during World War II.

Gerald Goldberg, who was Lord Mayor of Cork in 1977, received death threats and as a result he considered leaving Ireland. A synagogue in Cork was fire-bombed at the time. Israel's relations with Ireland were strained for many years because of the issue of Irish peacekeepers being injured or killed while serving in Lebanon. Protests, appeals and antisemitic comments/abusive phone calls were often received during those years by Jewish community offices.

Conclusion

Overall the role of the Irish Republic and the IRA in relation to Nazism has been shameful and humiliating. Mary McAleese should be ashamed. If she wants to look for Nazis maybe she should look closer to home. This is an example of why as law abiding innocent victims of fascist terrorism we do not trust Sinn Fein/IRA nor the Irish government.
http://www.victims.org.uk/nazi.html

Nazi IRA man's statue beheaded

By David Lister

THE Irish Republic has been forced to confront the legacy of its neutrality during the Second World War after anti-fascists attacked a memorial to a pro-Nazi IRA leader.

A statue to Sean Russell, who died on board a German U-boat in 1940, was left headless after an attack by youths in Fairview Park in Dublin.

As the group that looks after the statue admitted that it is almost certainly beyond repair, the Simon Wiesenthal Centre in Paris called for it to be left unrestored as an enduring symbol of Ireland’s “shame”.

Shimon Samuels, director for international affairs at the centre, the world’s largest Jewish human rights organisation, told The Times: “It’s a blot on the history of Ireland, but blots have to see the public light.”

He described the statue’s desecration as “an opportunity for Ireland to confront its past”. He said: “We’re not iconoclasts but I think the destruction of something like this has a meaning, and we would ask for it to be left there as a lesson of what Irish neutrality was all about.”

Ever since his death in 1940, the issue of Russell’s collaboration with the Nazis has been a divisive subject in Ireland. Republicans claim that he was merely following in the footsteps of some of the country’s most celebrated rebel leaders by enlisting foreign assistance at a time of British vulnerability, but others are repelled that Russell was plotting with Germany when Hitler was publicly promising that Jews across Europe would be eliminated.

Trained in sabotage techniques near Berlin, Russell’s mission was to foster a coup in the Irish Republic and to attack British military installations in Northern Ireland. The only thing that stopped him was his death from a perforated ulcer 100 miles off the coast of Co Galway, on August 14, 1940.

Admitting responsibility for breaking the head and right hand off the statue on December 30, the anti-fascists said that they could “no longer tolerate the shameful presence of a memorial to the Nazi collaborator . . . Russell sought to overthrow the Government of Éamon de Valera by fomenting terror and sabotage in the shipyards and munitions factories in Northern Ireland. In Belfast, IRA volunteers were ordered to help the Luftwaffe to bomb their own city at the cost of nearly 2,000 dead and thousands made homeless.”

The Irish National Graves Association, which tends the graves of dead republicans across Ireland, said that the damage was almost certainly too extensive for the statue to be repaired.

However, Matt Doyle, the association’s secretary, said that it would replace it with a new monument, probably a bronze bust. A new statue would cost up to €10,000 (£7,000), but will require planning permission from Dublin Corporation.

Mr Doyle said that the association had received letters and telephone calls from people expressing their outrage at the desecration. “The monument is not to any Nazi or member of the Third Reich. It is to Sean Russell for what he did in the cause of Irish freedom,” he said.

But Kevin Myers, the veteran columnist, wrote in The Irish Times: “He contacted German intelligence in February 1939, days after Hitler had publicly promised that in the event of the war the Jews of Europe would be exterminated. It is too shaming for words.”

http://www.timesonline.co.../world/article411647.ece

IRA plotted with Nazis to invade Northern Ireland

A PLOT by the IRA to link up with the Nazis to invade Northern Ireland during the Second World War was disclosed in secret service files published by the Public Record Office yesterday.

According to the MI5 records, Germany parachuted a spy into Southern Ireland in 1940 to assess the feasibility of the plan after being approached by the terrorist group.

But the plan was foiled after the spy, Dr Hermann Goertz, aka Heinz Kruse, or just "K", was arrested a year later by the Irish government.

The memorandum, written in 1943, read: "On the 5th May 1940 Goertz landed by parachute at Ballivor, Co Meath, Eire. Earlier that year the IRA had been in touch with the German SS through the intermediary of Stephen Carroll Held.

"Held had visited Berlin with a proposal from the IRA for an attack on Northern Ireland by the Germans to be supported by 5,000 IRA recruited in Eire and Northern Ireland.

"Goertz's mission was to examine this proposal and to obtain. . . the military information on which the joint attack by the Germans and the IRA on Northern Ireland could be based."

The report says that he met Stephen Hayes, then leader of the IRA in Dublin, but the meeting was raided. While money, a radio transmitter and a German airman's cap were seized, along with the manuscript of the plan, codenamed Kathleen, Goertz escaped.

For the next year Goertz, who had been arrested as a spy and deported before the war, lived in a number of IRA safe houses. During that period he was approached by a member of the Irish Army, Maj Gen McNeill, a fascist, the files say.

It is believed he was hoping to resurrect some kind of Fascist "Blueshirt" organisation with the help of the Germans. At first, British intelligence believed that McNeill's involvement meant that the Irish Government was collaborating, but its investigation showed he was acting independently.

The operation and McNeill's attempt to link up with the Nazis came to nothing when Goertz was arrested in November 1941.

http://www.telegraph.co.u...de-Northern-Ireland.html

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