German neo-Nazi gang 'developed Monopoly-style game with death camps'

A neo-Nazi gang suspected of murdering 10 people developed their own version of the board game Monopoly featuring death camps and gas works.

Called "Pogromly" and intended for other far-right extremists the game has the names of four Nazi concentration camps instead of the railway stations found on the traditional Monopoly board. Players have the chance to buy Auschwitz, Dachau, Buchenwald and Ravensbruck, with each camp costing 4,000 reichsmarks, the currency used in Hitler's Germany.

A number of sets of the game were discovered in a garage used by the gang the self-styled National Socialist Underground amongst bomb-making equipment and unused nail bombs last month.

Players start on a square emblazoned with a swastika and also have the chance of landing on a numbers of squares marked with the SS emblem. The board also comes with pictures of Hitler and sinister looking Jews. It is thought the game is based loosely on events surrounding Kristallnacht. On the night of November 8, 1938, the Nazi's unleashed a violent pogrom against German Jews, destroying hundreds of synagogues and Jewish-owned business, and arresting 30,000 people, many of whom were sent to concentration camps.

The gang, apparently, produced dozens of Pogromly sets, which retailed on the underground far-right scene for about £42, as a way of supplementing their finances from 2000 to 2011. The games were sold by an associate of the gang Andre K., who has since been arrested, although, apparently, they suspected he was pocketing too much of the proceeds.

A report by the German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine said that gang members called other extremists to complain about the lack of money they were receiving from their colleague.

Pogromly comes as the latest lurid twist in the scandal surrounding the operations of the National Socialist Underground. Despite murdering nine men of immigrant background and a policewoman between 2000 and 2007, and conducting 14 bank robberies, police remained oblivious to the gang's existence.

It was not exposed until a botched bank raid last month led to two members committing suicide and the survivor handing herself into the police.

Daily Telegraph

Nazi vandal shock in park

Click on image for full-size

Mindless vandals have daubed a park with Nazi slogans and signs in the week the country stops to remember its war dead.

A shelter in Anchorsholme Park has been painted with swastikas – the terrifying symbol of the German Nazi Party who were responsible for the outbreak of the Second World War – and the Nazi salute of sieg heil, meaning hail victory. The party, led by Adolf Hitler, was the main fighting force against British troops during the war, and with Remembrance Day on Friday, the graffiti has left one resident disgusted with the vandals.

Jamie Young, from Anchorsholme, said: “I think it’s very offensive being less than a week until Remembrance Day. We have had so many problems in this part of town next to the Norbreck Castle Hotel and it has been a problem for a number of years. It almost seems the police and the council are powerless to deal with the issue and it’s most times of the day.”

Mr Young claims the area has issues with school children coming to the area at their lunch and causing trouble. He added: “It was only ten days ago a group of kids had a fight in the park. It’s a nightmare. It used to be really nice round here but it has gone downhill.”

Ian Coleman, president of Blackpool’s Royal British Legion branch, delivered a petition to Downing Street last week to lobby the Government to hand out stronger punishments to those defacing war memorials. He told The Gazette: “They can have no idea about what harm they’re doing if they lived through the war. Millions and millions of people lost their lives under that swastika sign and it should never rear its head again, especially in this country. Now I find out our locals are doing this and I find it abhorrent.”

Mr Coleman is now calling on schools to do more to educate people about the evils of the Nazis. He added: “This isn’t just graffiti, it’s a slight on anyone who died from this country and it’s a slap in the face for anyone who stands up for democracy. It’s a lack of understanding and education, possibly through schools and their own families not passing down what has happened.

“Education is a must because millions of people were killed under that swastika and so many more suffered soul-destroying injuries.”

Blackpool Gazette

Thanks to NewsHound for the heads-up

Hiding in plain sight: Germany's Neo-Nazis ditch skinhead look

Far-right groups are hoping to win votes by blending in with mainstream society – but they are still clinging to the hate crimes.

The summer fete was well under way in the normally sleepy village of Lübtheen in the Mecklenburg region of eastern Germany. Locals tending stalls outside low red brick houses offered home-baked bread and smoke-cured sausage. They hardly noticed the group of well-groomed young men in orangeT-shirts mingling with the crowd and distributing balloons and leaflets.

"The shirts they were wearing were exactly the same colour as those usually worn by Chancellor Angela Merkel's conservatives at campaign rallies," Ute Lindenau, Lübtheen's mayor, told The Independent. "Nobody had the slightest idea that the men were all neo-Nazis until after they had left and people had time to study their vile propaganda."

The new and almost covert style of canvassing was being practised by Germany's neo-Nazi National Democratic Party (NPD), which is fighting to retain parliamentary seats in key elections in the eastern state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern this autumn. The party first won seats there in 2006 after mounting a virulent campaign against foreigners. It also has seats in the east German state of Saxony

For Mrs Lindenau, the tactic was not much of a surprise. As a committed anti-Nazi and the mayor of a town known as a far-right stronghold of the east, she has watched the NPD gradually shed its skinhead image in an attempt to appeal to more voters. "These days the neo-Nazis are almost invariably polite and they make an effort to look respectable. They seem to have realised that the skinhead look is a vote loser," she said.

Mrs Lindenau's observations have now been borne out by Germany's Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BVS), the equivalent of Britain's MI5. In a report published last week, the domestic intelligence agency concluded that the country's far right had all but completely shed the aggressive skinhead image it was renowned for in the 1990s. "Members of the far right scene prefer to wear clothing or brands that orient themselves more towards general trends in youth fashion," the report noted. "The more noticeable skinhead culture is becoming increasingly less interesting for far right extremist youths."

But the less aggressive image adopted by the German far right has not resulted in a corresponding drop in violence. On the contrary, the BVS found that the number of neo-Nazis prepared to use extreme violence to convey their political message had increased dramatically, from 5,000 in 2009 to 5,600 last year. The report put the total number of far right extremists at 25,000 and noted that the number of far right crimes in the former communist east had risen by an alarming 40 per cent.

The kind of violence meted out by Germany's growing "autonomous nationalist" groups was graphically illustrated in March this year at the trial of members of a banned neo-Nazi group called Sturm 34. In a style reminiscent of the campaign mounted by Hitler's Nazis to make German towns and villages "Jew-free", Sturm 34 set about trying to make the east German town of Mittweida "insect-free and brown".

"Brown" is a German byword for Nazi. By "insect-free", the group signalled that it was out to rid the town of anyone who held a different opinion to its own. The court heard how the gang patrolled Mittweida and set about "insects" – mostly punk rockers and vagrants – with baseball bats and boxing gloves filled with sand to double the effect of face punches.

Sturm 34 persecuted the town's inhabitants for months before police finally intervened. In one particularly brutal incident the gang appears to have practised a favourite form of neo-Nazi assault called "kerb biting" in which the victim's lower jaw is smashed against a kerbstone with a kick from a steel-capped boot.

Experts on the far right say that in public the NPD's political core goes out of its way to distance itself from such behaviour in public. Many of its members have exchanged skinhead haircuts and boots for an almost preppy look.

Michael Weiss, the author of a new study on neo-Nazi dress codes entitled Hide and Seek, says the increasingly ordinary appearance of far-right extremists means they can often blend in at left-wing demonstrations or in sports stadiums. "These people no longer stand out," he said.

To recognise each other, neo-Nazis now resort increasingly to an array of about 150 secret codes, according to Mr Weiss. These include the number 88 on T-shirts or other garments. The eight represents the eighth letter of the alphabet, so 88 corresponds to HH, for Heil Hitler, a phrase banned in Germany along with the swastika.

Neo-Nazis have also started to wear the black and white Palestinian Kaffiyeh scarf – a garment once the preserve of the far left at demonstrations – in an attempt to signal that they are against Israel. "Their style incorporates elements from rock and pop culture. Neo-Nazis now have piercings," Mr Weiss said.

In Mecklenburg, where the NPD's popularity may be just enough to enable it to stay in parliament after this autumn's state election, the party's attempts to garner support have not been confined to a new dress code. The Social Democrat-run state government recently became so concerned about the party's attempts to infiltrate schools and youth groups that it insisted teachers sign a declaration pledging their commitment to democracy.

However some of the far-right party's politicians have not managed to hide behind the new guise of respectability. Sven Kruger, a building contractor who is also an NPD politician, has been exposed for using a sign to advertise his company which shows a sledgehammer smashing what looks like a Star of David. His premises were searched last year and prosecutors discovered photographs of German Jewish community leaders which were suspected of having been used as targets for pistol shooting practice.

Finding new support

* Germany banned Hitler's National Socialist Party in 1945, but the neo-Nazi NPD was allowed to form in West Germany in 1964 and made some short-lived political gains during that decade, although it has never entered a national government.

The party found new support in east Germany after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and has since won seats in eastern state parliaments.

The government tried to ban the NPD in 2001, but the constitutional court overruled it. The NPD merged with another far-right party, the German People's Union (DVU) last year. It is estimated to have 6,600 members and 25,000 supporters, many of whom belong to other neo-Nazi groups.

Independent

Infidel leader praises the Protocols

The leader of the EDL's “Infidels” faction, John “Snowy” Shaw, has spoke out in support of the notoriously antisemitic book, the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion.

Hot on the heels of praise for the Book of Revelations, Shaw announced yesterday that his head is being turned by another historical document, the “The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion”.

With “the Protocols” Shaw has immersed himself in one of the most vile and dangerous forgeries of all time. According to Shaw, the book has already begun to make things “click” in his head, and he advises “all true British patriots take the time to read this”.

Despite the book being discovered as a forgery, it has long been viewed as definitive proof of a Jewish conspiracy by Nazis and anti-semites ever since. Adolf Hitler even had put it in the school curriculum in Nazi Germany. More recently, it was even among a selection of books that the BNP recommended for “patriots” during the 1980’s because they insisted it was still of historical interest.

The book is a crude record of the supposed minutes of a meeting of the Jewish community in the late 19th Century where plans for their world domination are discussed.

The book first surfaced in Russia in the early 1900’s and was used as a justification by antisemites to carry out pogroms against the Jewish community. It’s popularity spread as far as notorious Jew-Hater Henry Ford of Ford Motor car fame, who had a further 500,000 printed for distribution in the United States.

Having opened the book, Shaw is convinced by its authenticity. He is now adamant that both Jews and Muslims are conspiring together and that he “must stop them destroying our country”.

Hope not hate

Thanks to NewsHound for the heads-up

Pro-Nazi, Pro-Rape, Pro-Paedo Music in London

On 25 June and 1 Oct 2011, London's Slimelight nightspot plan to stage concerts by musicians with links to Fascism, Nazism and violent anti-Feminism






Warning - highly offensive content!

On 25 June 2011 a nightspot called the Slimelight in Islington, London, UK, plan to stage a concert that has attracted criticism over the involvement of musicians with links to Nazism. The headline band are an awful folk group called Sol Invictus, led by a singer called Tony Wakeford, who makes no secret of his past membership of the British Fascist party the National Front. Tony Wakeford was a founder member of Fascist bands Above the Ruins and Death In June, but says (on the Sol Invictus website) that his NF membership was the worst mistake he made. Tony Wakeford claims to have left his Fascist past behind him, but alot of people don't believe him, because still collaborates with racist musician Andrew King. Debate over the ethics of going ahead with this concert is divided between the small clique of fans, friends and members of these bands who bombard the WWW with comments claiming (usually without any proof) that (roughly summarizing) "they're alright mate", and anti-Nazis who present evidence showing that even if these bands aren't outright Nazis, at the very least they revel in displaying imagery that is highly offensive to victims of Nazism (1).

Slimelight manager Mayuan Mak told The Islington Gazette (newspaper) that "we would not tolerate an event that has a Neo-Nazi focus" (2), but Mayuan Mak is lying, because the Slimelight already staged concerts by Nazi performers Death In June, Luftwaffe and Non, and because, despite the ruckus caused by the Sol Invictus concert, on 1 Oct 2011 the Slimelight plan to stage a concert headlined by an electronic music group called Sutcliffe Jugend, who created their name by joining the terms "Peter Sutcliffe" (the name of a misogynist mass-murderer from Great Britain) with "Hitler Youth", while one of the support acts planned for 1 Oct is a convicted child sex offender and Nazi called Peter Sotos (3).

Sutcliffe Jugend is led by musician Kevin Tomkins, who is also an occasional member of another electronic music group called Whitehouse. Whitehouse leader William Bennett wrote a manifesto in the Belgian fanzine Force Mental (issue 1), also quoted in Flowmotion fanzine (issue 6), that explained how Whitehouse are "concerned with the struggle against the unhealthy Negroid influence in popular music". Whitehouse member Philip Best published a compilation (also featuring Sutcliffe Jugend) called White Power. Whitehouse member Peter Sotos was convicted for possessing child pornography after he was busted by Chicago PD for producing a fanzine called Pure, in which Sotos says "females are dogs whose only worth is as pawns for my pleasure" and describes death camps as "Triumphs of Nazism" (4). In a section called "Kiddie Torture" Peter Sotos describes "the sublime pleasure of child abuse" (sic), and shows graphic photographs of a man pleasuring himself over photographs of missing children (5). William Bennett also ran a record label called Come Organisation, who published a 10xC60 cassette box-set by Sutcliffe Jugend, entitled We Spit On Their Graves (extracts from which were reissued on CD by another UK label called Cold Spring Records), which features dozens of tracks which celebrate misogynist crime and Nazism (6+7). Many of the track titles from that release are named after women victimized by serial killers, refer in detail to murder techniques used by Peter Sutcliffe, and celebrate Nazism. Titles like "Storm Detachment Hitler", "SS 1982", "Reinard Heydrich", "Dictator Rule", "This Is Pommerenkke" and "New Camps" are some of the less offensive.

Debate about the morality of the music produced by the likes of Slimelight performers Peter Sotos and Sutcliffe Jugend is complicated, a little, by the defense put about by William Bennett, who (whenever anyone can be bothered to listen to him) argues against the huge weight of evidence provided by Pure fanzine and dozens of similar projects, that the ideas promoted by him and his friends do not come from National Socialist ideology, but that they come from a hyper-extreme interpretation of libertarian philosophy. William Bennett's self-justification takes libertarianism to the limits of self-parody, to an extreme in which the "rights" of the individual (as conceptualized in the Whitehouse track "Right to Kill") over-ride all rights and liberties due to all other people, period. William Bennett's self-justification distorts the meaning of libertarianism to equate the libertarian with the most psychotic libertine, who, through the broken lens of "Sadeian" cod-philosophy, identifies with "libertines" such as the Marquis de Sade, Ted Bundy, Peter Sutcliffe, and the Nazi war criminals who Bennett praised (in the Spanish music fanzine ADN) for enacting "glorious pleasures" rather than for their titular ideology. Bennett's defense is intellectually sub-zero, factually dishonest (as Bennett colleagues like Albin Julius are still Fascists), and a moot point when it comes to actual victims, because the bottom line is, legally and morally, that if some Nazi war criminals killed for "fun" rather than because they believed in Nazism... so what, they were still Nazi war criminals.

This is an issue of feminism and child protection as much as (if not more than) it is an issue of anti-Nazism, and attempts to discreetly stop these concerts at Slimelight, without publicity, have previously failed, which is (in case of asking) why the campaign's now gone public.

Both concerts are organised by promoter Gaya Donadio (who performs her own music under the name Anti-Child League). Objections to the Slimelight's entertainments license should forward this information to:

Licensing Service 
Public Protection Division
Islington Council
 222 Upper Street
London N1 1XR Tel: 020 7527 3031
Fax: 020 7527 3430

Email: licensing@islington.gov.uk

1 - http://www.whomakesthenazis.com/2011/04/weather-warning-shower-of-shit-expected.html
2 - http://www.islingtongazette.co.uk/news/online_campaign_attacks_controversial_islington_gig_1_914659
3 - http://3.bp.blogspot.com/--qZWk4oN0mg/TfItm4wzMMI/AAAAAAAAATM/y1iQuuTlwz0/s1600/newpicoct11.jpg
4 - http://www.uncarved.org/othertexts/pure.html (reprinted from OVO magazine)
5 - These photos are documented in a book called Apocalypse Culture (Amok Press 1988)
6 - http://www.artnotart.com/come/cassettes.html
7 - http://noiz.tripod.com/sutcliffe.html

Photo 1 - Tony Wakeford (far left of photo) at NF newspaper stall in London's Brick Lane
Photo 2 - Boyd Rice of Non wearing Swastika pendant and "Rape" T-shirt
Photo 3 - Advertisement for Sutcliffe Jugend and Peter Sotos at the Slimelight
Photo 4 - Front cover and Whitehouse feature from Flowmotion fanzine, issue 6
Photo 5 - Detail from Flowmotion 6
Photo 6 - White Power compilation packaging

Not for Profit at Indymedia

Galliano sacked over racist rant

Shamed designer John Galliano has been sacked by fashion giant Christian Dior — after Oscar winner Natalie Portman today declared she was appalled at his racist rants.

Natalie — who is the face of a perfume made by Dior — slammed Galliano and said she would have nothing more to do with him. The Israeli-born beauty, 29, spoke out after we revealed shocking footage of Galliano declaring his love of Hitler and suggesting two women should be GASSED.

Christian Dior Chief Executive Sidney Toledano today said in a statement: "I very firmly condemn what was said by John Galliano, which totally contradicts the values which have always been defended by Christian Dior."

Galliano was suspended by the label last week after he was arrested for allegedly launching a vicious verbal attack on two people at the same Paris cafe where the video was filmed. The footage showed him directing vile abuse at two French and Italian customers. He told them: "People like you would be dead. Your mothers, your forefathers, would all be fucking gassed. I love Hitler."

A woman is then heard asking him if he had a problem. He added: "With you. You're ugly."

Asked where he was from, he said: "Your arsehole."

Natalie — who won best actress at the Academy Awards for Black Swan — said in a statement: "I am deeply shocked and disgusted by the video of John Galliano's comments that surfaced today. In light of this video, and as an individual who is proud to be Jewish, I will not be associated with Mr Galliano in any way. I hope at the very least, these terrible comments remind us to reflect and act upon combating these still-existing prejudices that are the opposite of all that is beautiful."

Last Thursday Galliano allegedly insulted Geraldine Bloch, 35, and threatened to kill her pal Philippe Virgitti, 41, in La Perle Bar.

Galliano, 50, turned up at a police station in the French capital today to deny all the charges against him and declared: "I'm no racist."

Ms Bloch has told cops he called her a "dirty Jew face".

None of those allegedly targeted by Galliano is Jewish.

Galliano, who was brought up in South London, has launched a counter-claim for defamation against Miss Bloch and Mr Virgitti.

A Paris detective said of the case: "The accused has insisted that he is not a racist, and certainly not anti-Semitic. On the contrary, he is taking legal action against his accusers."

Galliano's lawyer, Stephane Zerbib, has insisted the video has no value and that Galliano has never been anti-Semitic while working at Dior.

Sun

Thanks to NewsHound for the heads-up

Apple removes Nazi songs from iTunes

An outlawed Nazi marching song that weaselled its way onto iTunes called ‘Horst wessel lied’, has been removed from Apples iTunes.

The song was named after a Nazi party activist killed in 1930, and it was originally titled ‘Die fahne hoch’, which means ‘the flag up high’. The removal of the song coincided with the Holocaust memorial day. German media revealed that Apple was breaking German law by allowing Nazi anthems to be downloaded.

Amazon have also removed the song, along with all other tracks by Neo-Nazi bands.

Apple however have remained silent as to whether or not they have removed all other popular Nazi-era songs. Although a blacklisted track called ‘protection squad’ was removed by Apple for being dangerous to youths. Apple removed tracks which they class as overly sexual last year, however they seemed to remain unaware of ultra-nationalist songs being downloaded on iTunes.

Horst wessel lied is believed to be the unofficial anthem of the Nazis, and was banned by Germany at the end of World War II. Some lyrics in the song include, “Soon will fly Hitler flags over every street; slavery will last only a short time longer”

TechWatch

Thanks to NewsHound for the heads-up

Imprisoned Neo-Nazi claims he’s the victim of religious discrimination

Wigan Mike - tank-top nazi queen 2009

A Neo-Nazi prisoner jailed for encouraging people to ”destroy all Jews” claims he is the victim of religious discrimination – after being banned from wearing a ‘fascist’ necklace.

Michael Heaton, 43, who is a former leader of the British Freedom Fighters, was jailed last year for posting more than 3,000 hate-filled comments on far-right websites. But the Aryan Strike Force member has complained to prison chiefs at HMP Wymott, Lancs., after he was banned from wearing a Thor’s Hammer pendant.

He claims his rights are being infringed but prison bosses have ruled that the necklace has a ”fascist meaning” and ”Neo-Nazi overtones”.

In a letter sent to inmates’ magazine Inside Time, the ex-English Defence League activist complained he was being singled out for religious discrimination. He said: ”Moslems (sic) can wear hats in prison when nobody else can, Christians are allowed their crosses, so imagine my shock when I enquired about wearing my religious pendant and was refused. I am what is called an Odinist. So that I can feel nearer my god I requested to be allowed to wear my pendant.

”The reply I got was that my application had been refused on the grounds that the pendant ‘looks a little like a Maltese cross, which has a fascist meaning and neo-Nazi overtones’. To say I was shocked at this would be an understatement! Other religious groups are afforded the respect for their religious symbols in prison, so why not me? His (the governor) response was that Thor’s hammer is on the prison ‘banned list’. Surely this cannot be right? Is there anything I can do about it?”

Heaton, serving 30 months in jail for using threatening and abusive language likely to stir up racial hatred, claims that his pendant is an Odinist rather than a Nazi symbol. However, prison staff refused his request to wear it after learning that far-right groups have adopted the symbol as a depiction of aryan supremacy.

A trial at Liverpool Crown Court in June last year heard food packer Heaton, who has a scorpion tattoo on his neck, wanted to ”clear the country of all ethnic minorities”. He posted a series of racist comments on the Aryan Strike Force website including: ”Jews will always be scum and must be destroyed.”

He added: ”I would encourage any religion or race which wants to destroy the Jews, I hate them with a passion.”

Mike's Mummy keeps the nazi's room clean for when he returns from the clink

When cops raided his home in Greater Manchester they found large quantities of Nazi and Hitler memorabilia, a semi–automatic BB gun and a samurai sword.

Judge Stephen Irwin said: ”You wanted to start a race war. You were clearly filled with racial hatred.”

A Prison Service spokesperson said it would not discuss complaints made by individual inmates. He said: ”The provision of religious artefacts in prison is at the discretion of the governor following a thorough risk assessment.”

Norse gods Thor and Odin are worshipped by Odinists and Pagans but their symbols have been hijacked by many white supremacist and Neo-Nazi groups.

Heaton’s co-defendant Trevor Hannington, 58, of Cardiff, was sentenced to two years for six offences.

Small World News Service

The Village Where the Neo-Nazis Rule

Hitler salutes in the street and firing practice in the forest: Neo-Nazis have taken over an entire village in Germany, and authorities appear to have given up efforts to combat the problem. The place has come to symbolize the far right's growing influence in parts of the former communist east.

Horst and Birgit Lohmeyer have been working on their life's dream for six years, renovating a house in the woods near Jamel, a tiny village near Wismar in the far northeastern German state of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania. Birgit Lohmeyer writes crime novels, her husband is a musician, and both try to pretend everything is normal here in Jamel.

It wasn't easy to find their new home. The Lohmeyers spent months driving out to the countryside every weekend, heading east from where they lived in Hamburg, but most of the houses they saw were too expensive. Then they came across the inexpensive red brick farmhouse in Jamel. Slightly run-down, but not far from the Baltic Sea, the house sits surrounded by lime and maple trees, near a lake.

The Lohmeyers knew that a notorious neo-Nazi lived nearby -- Sven Krüger, a demolition contractor and high-level member of the far-right National Democratic Party (NPD). What the Lohmeyers didn't know was that other neighbors felt terrorized by Krüger. He and his associates were in the process of buying up the entire village.

Jamel is an example of the far-right problem that has plagued Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania for years. The rural region, once part of communist East Germany, has a poor reputation in this regard -- the NPD, which glorifies the Third Reich, has been in the state parliament since 2006 and neo-Nazi crimes are part of daily life. In recent months, a series of attacks against politicians from all the democratic parties has shaken the state. Sometimes hardly a week goes by without an attack on another electoral district office, with paint bombs, right-wing graffiti and broken windows.

Norbert Nieszery, leader of the center-left Social Democratic Party (SPD) in the state parliament, calls it an "early form of terror." Nieszery's own office windows have been smashed twice. State Interior Minister Lorenz Caffier of the center-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU) says he has registered a "new level" of right-wing extremist violence. He believes the NPD is trying to raise its profile through aggressive behavior ahead of the state parliament election in September. One local mayor requested police protection after receiving repeated right-wing threats. The Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, Germany's domestic intelligence agency, has warned that the NPD is becoming increasingly influential in local municipalities and that the neo-Nazis are trying to entrench themselves in daily life.

Mounting Concern About Far-Right Influence

Nowhere have they succeeded as well as in Jamel. If the right-wing extremists left, the village would be empty. Jamel is no longer just a problem at the regional or federal state level -- even Berlin is growing concerned about the situation.

SPD member Wolfgang Thierse, vice president of Germany's federal parliament, the Bundestag, visited the village a few months ago. He spent half an hour in the Lohmeyers' living room and promised to support them in their fight against the neo-Nazis. So far, nothing has changed. Jamel has come to symbolize the fact that there are places in Germany where right-wing extremists can do virtually whatever they want.

When the Lohmeyers moved here in 2004, they started to fix up their country house and to make contact with the neighbors -- although not with the neo-Nazi Krüger. They were sure right-wing extremists wouldn't be the only people in Jamel.

Only gradually did they realize just where they had ended up. Plaster crumbled from many of the houses in the village and one roof had collapsed completely. Beer bottles, car tires and gas canisters were littered behind the bus stop. There were metal fences surrounding some properties and attack dogs strained against their chains in the front yards. No one bothered to remove the swastika scribbled on the sign at the entrance to the village.

Children Giving Hitler Salute

There were young men with shaved heads and army trousers in the village and Nazi rock music could be heard from across the fields on the weekends. Shots sounded from the woods, where the neo-Nazis practiced their shooting -- police later found bullet casings in trenches there. When the Lohmeyers walked through the village, children raised their hands in the Nazi salute.

Krüger has shaped the village. He grew up here, with a father who was known as a right-wing radical and who used to make his son salute each morning in the snow. Young Krüger was an outsider at school, an acquaintance remembers, and didn't find friends until he joined the skinhead scene. As a young man, he incited right-wing thugs to attack a campsite and spent time in pre-trial detention on suspicion of burglary. Still, for a long time, the Krügers were the only neo-Nazis in the village.

"Now," says Horst Lohmeyer, "they see Jamel as a 'nationally liberated zone'" -- a neo-Nazi term for places foreigners and those of foreign descent must fear to tread. The extremists took over the village in just a few years. They now own seven of the 10 houses and have driven out anyone who couldn't come to terms with them. They battered down doors and broke windows, slashed tires, flew the German imperial war flag and celebrated Hitler's birthday. In the 1990s, they stuck dead chickens on one family's garden fence with the warning, "We'll smoke you out."

The village emptied and Krüger encouraged his right-wing friends to buy the available houses. Few others dared to venture into Jamel anymore. Neo-Nazis greeted one couple that wanted to move there with "Piss off" -- and the couple's house burned down shortly before they planned to move in. One new property owner dared to set foot in the village only accompanied by police.

The Lohmeyers have made it their life's work not to let themselves be driven out of Jamel. Each year, they host a rock festival on a field behind their house. Governor Erwin Sellering of the SPD has been patron of the festival since 2009. Police fence in the area and guard the entrance, and in past years, things remained largely calm.

Help is Far Away

This summer, though, neo-Nazis jumped over the fence, yelling slurs and attacking concertgoers. Police stepped in and stopped the troublemakers. But police can't always protect the Lohmeyers -- the nearest station is 12 kilometers away.

Horst Lohmeyer sits in his kitchen, bent over a map, and runs his finger along the roads and through the towns -- Gressow, Neu Degtow, Grevesmühlen. It takes a quarter of an hour to reach the nearest police station. When Krüger got married this summer, the village was inundated with several hundred right-wing extremists from Germany, the Netherlands and Switzerland, including a number of high-ranking NPD politicians such as Stefan Köster, NPD party head for Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania.

Jamel has become a right-wing pilgrimage site -- they come from all over Europe to see the village where neo-Nazis call the shots. They celebrated Krüger's wedding until late in the night, with nationalist rock music and fireworks. The Lohmeyers lay awake in bed, frozen with fear.

Mayor Uwe Wandel is helpless in the face of the right-wing movement in his community. He sounds bitter when he talks about Jamel. "The police, the authorities, no one dares to intervene," he says. "The Nazis are laughing in our faces." Wandel says he has repeatedly asked the state government for help. The interior minister and a parliamentary delegation came by one time, he adds. "They stayed for 20 minutes, expressed concern -- then they left again."

No One Responsible

Jamel has become a lawless place, Wandel complains, and the authorities don't take decisive enough action against the right-wing extremists. He says Krüger is allowed to dump demolition waste and burn trash in the village with impunity. The head of the department of public order in nearby Grevesmühlen says higher-level officials at the district level need to tackle the problem. They in turn say the local authority is responsible for Jamel.

Krüger, meanwhile, has much bigger plans. He has been a member of the district council for the NPD since 2009 and has bought parts of a concrete factory in Grevesmühlen, which he uses for his NPD office and his demolition company. The company logo shows the outline of a Star of David being smashed; the slogan is, "We do the dirty work." Barbed wire encloses the factory premises and dogs bark. A sign above the entrance reads, "Better dead than a slave." Krüger prefers not to comment on the accusations against him. All he says is, "Nothing that's written about me is true. I don't stand a chance against the system."

Krüger has hired new employees in the last few months. He gets contracts from fellow members of the far-right scene, but also from local businesses. Mayor Wandel says he's appalled by how far these right-wing structures now extend. "I'm afraid of a second, third, fourth Jamel," he says.

Neo-Nazis placed a boulder at the entrance to the village. A plaque attached to the rock reads, "Village of Jamel - free, social, national." Signs next to it point the way to Hitler's birthplace ("Braunau am Inn 855 km") and to the formerly German cities of Breslau (now Wroclaw in Poland) and Königsberg (now Kaliningrad, Russia). No one has removed the rock. "We've given up on Jamel," Wandel says.

Only the Lohmeyers are left.

Spiegel Online

Football fan banned after hurling abuse at Muslims

A self-proclaimed "right- wing extremist" has been given a football banning order for making Nazi salutes and shouting a torrent of racist abuse at Muslim cub scouts after a Bristol Rovers match.

A court heard Martyn Howlett was walking down Muller Road in Horfield after watching Rovers play Norwich City with his family and friends when he made his shocking outburst. Bristol Magistrates' Court was told that the 43-year-old gestured at a British National Party badge he was wearing as he abused a group of Asian children having a picnic outside the 1st Bristol Muslim Scout group's headquarters.

Waving his arms in a Nazi salute and pointing to his badge, he shouted: "It's BNP, racist, fascism and Hitler", before launching into a foul-mouthed tirade in front of the frightened children. The court heard he then directed abuse at a young girl wearing a head scarf.

Prosecuting, Michael Hartnell said: "He was making hand gestures towards the children, and said they were out to blow something up. The children were scared and extremely concerned for their safety."

When asked what was wrong by Scout leader Sohail Javaid, Howlett repeatedly said: "This is our country, get out."

After police arrived, he said: "What is wrong with doing this? I am a right-wing extremist and I hate blacks."

The court heard Howlett, whose father Colin was the voice of Bristol Rovers on Radio Bristol for almost 30 years, had drunk about four-and-a-half pints of beer before the incident on May 1. On May 24 he was given a two-year conditional discharge after pleading guilty to committing racially aggravated disorderly behaviour.

Mr Hartnell told the court that Howlett, a Bristol Rovers season ticket holder for 37 years, had received a caution in 2008 for similar behaviour. Howlett, 43, who lives in Muller Road, Eastville, defended himself in court.

Magistrates gave Howlett a three-year football ban, which prohibits him from entering an area 750m around the Memorial Stadium on Rovers match days for three hours before kick-off and two hours afterwards. He is also banned from going to any football match in England or Wales, must surrender his passport to police before England away games, and not to travel to any towns or cities where Bristol Rovers or England are playing.

Bristol Evening Post

BNP Mayoral candidate has given speeches at meetings of pro-Hitler group

BNP candidate Culnane at Nazi meeting

Tess Culnane is the BNP candidate for Lewisham borough’s 2010 mayoral election and has been working an as aide at City Hall with the BNP’s London Assembly member Richard Barnbrook. Culnane recently spoke at the Bexley BNP Election Launch meeting, held on March 6, 2010. The BNP website reports:

‘The meeting also heard from veteran activist Tess Culnane who provided some details of her work with Cllr Barnbrook’.

Culnane certainly is a ‘veteran activist’, having been active in the BNP, the National Front (NF), and the British People’s Party. Culnane contested the 2004 Greater London Assembly election and European election for the BNP, and ran as an NF candidate in 2007 and 2008.

In addition to this, Culnane has also spent time supporting the British People’s Party (BPP) and speaking at their meetings. The BPP is openly pro-Nazi and sells busts of Hitler (‘A faithful statue of the Fuhrer’) via its website.

In 2007, Culnane spoke at the BPP’s St George’s Day meeting in Hove. Other speakers at the meeting included Michelle Renouf, a notorious promoter of Holocaust denial who used the occasion to praise the ‘bravery’ of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, President of Iran, for his devotion to denying the Nazis exterminated millions of Jews.

In September 2008, Culnane spoke at the BPP’s ‘Nationalist Unity Rally‘. Prizes in a raffle held at the event included ‘an original authenticated photograph of Hitler’.

Culnane has now returned to the BNP and in January 2010 the BNP website carried a post entitled ‘Welcome Back!’ which described her as a ’strong individual’.

BNP Facts

No time limit for Nazi convictions

Heinrich Boere at court in Germany last week

It is part of society's obligation to the victims to make a serious effort to hold Nazi criminals such as Heinrich Boere to account

There no doubt are many people who wonder whether the conviction this past week in Germany of 88-year-old Heinrich Boere for Nazi crimes committed during the second world war serves any useful purpose. They can point to the fact that more than 60 years have passed since he committed his crimes and that he was not a mass murderer, the likes of those who helped run the death camps or served in the infamous Einsatzgruppen mobile killing units. But a closer look at his case will show why his prosecution and conviction in Aachen were, indeed, justified and the life sentence he received so important.

A resident of Maastricht, Netherlands, Boere, the son of a Dutch father and a German mother, volunteered to serve in the Waffen-SS shortly after the Nazis occupied Holland. After service on the eastern front he returned home, where he voluntarily joined Sonderkommando Feldmeijer, a unit whose primary function was the murder of members of the Dutch resistance and those opposed to the Nazis. In the course of Operation Silbertanne (silver fir tree), at least 54 individuals were killed, three of whom Boere admitted shooting to death – Fritz Bicknese, Teun de Groot and FW Kusters.

After the war, Boere escaped to Germany for fear of prosecution – and, in fact, was sentenced to death in absentia by a Dutch court in 1949 for the three murders. Holland asked for his extradition from Germany, but he was the beneficiary of the Fuhrererlass, a law promulgated by Hitler granting German citizenship to foreign Nazi collaborators. Since Germany refused in principle to extradite its citizens to stand trial in other countries, Boere had no reason to fear the Dutch court. He could, in theory, have been prosecuted in Germany, but for more than five decades that was not the case. In this respect, he was spared by the unofficial local prosecution policy on Nazi war criminals, which usually refrained from prosecuting individuals who were not officers, even if they had personally committed murder.

About two years ago, however, the state attorneys in Dortmund, headed by Ulrich Maas, announced that they would seek to prosecute Boere and they successfully contested a decision that he was not fit for trial. And thus, in November 2009, the Dutch executioner found himself in a German court facing the charges which he had escaped for more than 60 years.

Boere's conviction and life sentence are therefore more than justified, but they are also highly significant for several additional reasons. The first is that the Boere case is a precedent for Germany, where there are other instances of foreign Nazi collaborators who escaped from their countries of origin for fear of prosecution and who have hereto never faced legal action in Germany. The most famous of these cases are those of a Dutchman, Klaas Carl Faber, and a Dane, Søren Kam. The former, like Boere, served in Sonderkommando Feldmeijer and was sentenced to death in Holland in 1947 for the murder of at least 11 individuals. In 1952, he escaped from a Dutch prison to Germany, which has refused all requests for his extradition and has so far failed to bring him to justice. The latter, who is accused of murdering Carl Clemmensen, a Danish anti-Nazi newspaper editor, also escaped to Germany and was treated in the same manner. Thus Boere's conviction will hopefully serve as a precedent which will be applied in additional cases.

Several more personal factors specific to the Boere case add to its significance. The first is that he never expressed true regret for his crimes. On the contrary, at his trial, he said openly that he was very proud to have been accepted as a volunteer for the Waffen-SS and that during the war, at no time did he ever feel he had committed any crimes. His defence of coercion based on "superior orders" was totally rejected by the court. In that respect, it was the son of his victim Teun de Groot (the oldest of 12 children who has the same name as his father), who astutely remarked to reporters that if Boere had truly been sorry for the murders he committed, he should have returned to Holland to face justice and serve his punishment.

The presence in the courtroom in Aachen of children of Boere's victims was also an opportunity to learn first hand of the devastating impact of his crimes on the families of those murdered. And their insistence that he be tried despite his age reinforces the significance of justice, even when long delayed, as part of the obligations of society to the Nazis' victims to make a serious effort to hold Holocaust perpetrators accountable. This elementary truth and the successful result of the proceeding send a powerful message that the efforts to bring Nazi war criminals to justice are still very worthwhile and just as necessary today as they have been in previous generations.

Efraim Zuroff - Comment is free

Rantings of a Nazi monster

Dr. Josef Mengele (second from left, with SS officials at
Auschwitz in '44) wrote his diary while hiding in Argentina

He stared at the deliberate German script in the tattered notebook -- the ravings of one of the most evil minds in history, and the killer of 100 of his family members.

"I don't want to touch it," he said.

The Orthodox Jewish New Yorker first laid eyes on the diary of Dr. Josef Mengele on Thursday at a Connecticut auction house. He bought the 86-page journal last week from the auctioneer after the document failed to attract a bidder at the $60,000 reserve price. The buyer has requested anonymity but agreed to speak to The Post about his reasons for acquiring the Nazi madman's innermost musings.

The buyer's grandmother, who survived Auschwitz, witnessed the "Angel of Death" choose prisoners to go to the gas chambers.

"People were terrified to even look at him," she told her grandson. "The SS soldiers were even scared to look at him."

Mengele, an SS officer and physician at the death camp in Poland, conducted nightmarish human experiments, including amputations, sterilization and surgeries without anesthetics. He was obsessed with twins and oversaw gruesome tests on 3,000 sets.

Mengele started the diary -- handwritten in blue ink in a school notebook bearing the image of children with a horse on the cover -- in 1960 while hiding out in Buenos Aires, Argentina. It does not mention Nazis, Hitler or the death camps. But it is filled with subjects near and dear to the mad doctor's cold heart -- eugenics, the superiority of the German race, the inferiority of women.

Mengele meanders from a discussion of aesthetics in "Dr. Zhivago" to a rant on how the mentally challenged should be sterilized so their "inferior genes" would not be passed on. His primary point is: "the simple and fundamental truth that human beings are not equal."

"Everything will end in a catastrophe if natural selection is altered to the point that the gifted people are overwhelmed by billions of morons (this might happen faster than you think)," he writes. He believes that "women's work has to depend on fulfilling a biological quota."

The contents turned the buyer's stomach.

"He shows no regret. No emotion," he said. "If people are looking for closure, they won't find it in this diary."

Mengele eluded punishment, dying in 1979 after a stroke while swimming at the age of 67. His body was exhumed in 1985 in Brazil and his identity confirmed through DNA tests seven years later.

"It's very emotional," said the buyer, who purchased the diary with his parents after reading about it in an Israeli newspaper. "It should have been written in red ink because it was written by a man with blood on his hands."

He said they felt the diary "must be preserved" and kept so "it doesn't fall in the wrong hands or get destroyed." They plan on donating it to a Holocaust museum. Some Holocaust survivor groups question the authenticity of the document and the morality of selling Mengele's handiwork for profit.

The auction house, Alexander Autographs, said it bought the diary from an American collector who observers believe acquired it from Mengele's son, Rolf, 65. Bill Panagopulos, president of the Stamford-based auction house, claimed he verified the diary, matching it with several authenticated war-dated letters and pinpointing the age of the paper, ink and notebook.

Rabbi Marvin Heir, founder and dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center -- whose namesake unsuccessfully hunted Mengele -- has been in close contact with the New York family that bought the document.

"I think this family did a very courageous thing," Heir said. "What would happen if Jews didn't secure documents? They would end up underground in the hands of an anti-Semite or destroyed. The choice is: Lose it, or retain it for history."

Mind of a madman

Entries from the 1960 diary of Nazi war criminal Dr. Josef Mengele, written while he was in hiding in Argentina:

'As citizens of the Western World, we should abhor the idea of recruiting gifted people from other countries. I also doubt that there’s any need to try because all significant steps of human history happened in Europe, and only Europeans or their descendants achieved them. ’

'Birth control can be done by sterilizing those with deficient genes. Those with good genes will be sterilized when the number of 5 children has been reached.'

New York Post

Antifascist Film Day at Bradford's 1 in 12

Click image for full-size

To commemorate the liberation of the survivors of Auschwitz, a day of antifascist films is being held at Bradford 1 in 12 Club on Saturday 23rd January. Drop in for one film or come and watch them all. There’ll be fab food throughout the day, as well as the Leeds Anarchist Black Cross bookstall.

Entry is free of charge, but donations are welcome, and any money made will go to support antifascist prisoners. Doors open at 12 Noon.

Film Times:

• 12.30pm: Hitler – The rise of Evil – Robert Carlisle stars as history’s biggest bastard.
• 4.30pm: The Pianist - Adrian Brody stars in an epic story of survival in Nazi-occupied Poland.
• 7.30pm: The 43 Group – The inspiring story of the Jewish ex-servicemen and women who smashed Mosely’s fascists off the streets of post-World War 2 Britain.
• 8.00pm: Edelweiss Pirates – The true story of young antifascists taking on the Nazis in war-time Cologne.

NO PASARAN!

Antifa

Blackshirt women's children live with shame

Children of Blackshirt women, who joined Oswald Mosley's pro-Nazi British Union of Fascists, often feel that they have had to live with the burden of the guilt and shame caused by their mother's fascist sympathies

When I was 11, I was taken by my mother to visit her birthplace in Kennington, London. As we walked around my mother showed me where the air-raid shelters were during the war, but then she began telling me about the Blackshirt meetings. At 11 it did not mean much to me but it has played on my mind ever since.

I decided to reopen the case of how the Blackshirts attempted to recruit my mother. It led me to question how many British women supported Hitler during the war, and what was their fate?

"I could have ended up in prison," my mother said. And many of these women did.

Now aged 88, my mother told me about the ink factory she worked in as a young girl.

"At first I was packing ink, it was horrible. There I met Primrose, nobody liked her, but she invited me home. I met her family and I fell for it - they were trying to get me to be a Blackshirt."

In documentaries about the Blackshirts, the pictures I have seen are only of men, marching in the streets in their paramilitary uniforms. I knew about the daughters of the aristocracy, like Diana Mitford who married Oswald Mosley, but I had not realised that young girls, like my own mother, could have been sucked in too. But speaking to the historian Julie Gottlieb (author of Feminine Fascism) I was surprised to learn that the first fascist political organisation in Britain was actually founded by a woman.

"It was called the fascisti, then changed its name to the British Fascists and it was founded... in 1923, by a Miss Rotha Lintorn-Orman," she told me.

Until then the most prominent political movement for women had been the Suffragettes. One of the most influential Suffragettes was Norah Elam, who was in charge of propaganda and imprisoned for making inflammatory speeches on women's suffrage. Sent to Holloway prison in 1914, she shared a cell with Emmeline Pankhurst, leader of the British Suffragettes. But Norah Elam was imprisoned again during World War II, this time with Diana Mosley, wife of the fascist leader.

Like me, Norah's granddaughter and great-granddaughter Angela and Susan McPherson have been on a quest to find out more about their family's history. They knew little about the colourful past of their granny Norah.

"It was a bit of a shock," they told me. A bit of a shock indeed.

But women like my mother were not interested in politics, as Norah Elam was, so was it the comradeship or merely the appeal of the smart uniform that was the attraction? Julie Gottlieb described the Blackshirt uniform as "a great marketing tool, and an incredible draw particularly for the youth. Some historians call this period the battle of the shirts".

The party grew and even children were recruited to support Hitler's ideology. Diana Bailey, as a young girl in Bognor Regis, remembers her mother and father in their Blackshirt uniforms.

"We were told to paint slogans on the walls with 'Britain Awake' and 'Perish the Jews'. I was nine years old," she said.

Francis Beckett's mother Anne was also a young working woman, like my mother. Anne was sent along to Mosley's headquarters by the Pitman's Shorthand temp agency to work as a secretary.

"She wanted to be an actress but she made what she said was a dreadful mistake, she learnt shorthand. Pitman's sent her to Black House, HQ for the Blackshirts. She found it exciting. She was never a racist but worked amongst racists," Francis Beckett said.

It was at fascist headquarters that Anne joined the Blackshirts and met and later married one of the Blackshirt elite, John Beckett, Francis's father. John was sent to prison with Oswald Mosley during the war - and his family spent the rest of their lives living hand to mouth. A former Labour MP, John Beckett should have taken his place in the post-war Attlee government. Instead, he worked as a night watchman for Securicor.

Seeing how easily Francis's mother had become a Blackshirt, I asked my mother if something similar had happened to her, with her factory workmate Primrose and her fascist family.

"They were talking about these meetings - I thought they had got me there for a reason. They were talking about Mosley, so after this I left, and later gave in my notice at the ink factory," she said.

So after all these years I can stop imagining my mother sitting in the rows of a mass meeting, 'zieg heiling' their leader and being hauled off to Holloway Prison. But in talking to these families I can see how life could so easily have been very different for my family.

Diana Bailey continues to live with the consequences of her parents' actions - and says she will never lose her feelings of guilt.

"When Richard Dimbleby went into Belsen I felt the guilt of the whole of the world, I felt utterly responsible for what happened in those camps, because I did write 'Perish the Jews' on walls, it is something I will never get over."

* Mother Was a Blackshirt will be broadcast on BBC Radio 4 on Monday 4 January at 1100 GMT.

BBC

Auschwitz hero Denis Avey in line for Israeli honour

A former British prisoner of war who helped a Jewish inmate survive Auschwitz is being considered for a major honour, the BBC has learned

Denis Avey, 91, who lives in Derbyshire, helped save Ernst Lobethall, a German Jew from Breslau. He is being considered for the title of "Righteous Among the Nations" by the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem. The story emerged following a recent BBC investigation.

Mr Avey said it would be "marvellous" if he were chosen for the title, which is awarded to those who helped save Jewish people. It is an accolade previously awarded to the likes of Oskar Schindler, the German businessman who is thought to have saved more than a thousand Jews from the Holocaust and whose story was immortalised in the Hollywood film Schindler's List.

Some 22,000 individuals, mostly from central and eastern Europe, have received the treasured title so far, but if he is successful Mr Avey will become only the 15th British citizen to be honoured in Jerusalem's Garden of the Righteous. The standard is high, the conditions are rigorous and their research is only now beginning. In the end a commission headed by a retired Justice of the Supreme Court of Israel has to make the decision.

The authorities at Yad Vashem took up the case after BBC viewers and listeners contacted them directly on hearing his moving story.

Mr Avey described the news that he was being considered for the award as "fantastic". He was no ordinary British soldier and he became an extraordinary prisoner of war. He had fought with special forces against General Rommel's Africa Korps behind enemy lines in the desert. He was wounded and captured by the Germans, and the ship transporting to him to captivity was sunk. He escaped into the sea and survived the explosion of depth charges close by.

After 20 hours in the water he made it to land in southern Greece. He then hiked the length of the Peloponnese before being recaptured and sent to Germany as a POW. After two spells in a punishment camp and being sent to work down a mine, he was transported to a compound for British prisoners connected to a sprawling concentration camp. Its name - then unremarkable - was Auschwitz.

There the "fiery" soldier with red hair and a Van Dyck beard saw at first hand the suffering of the Jewish victims of Hitler's slave labour programmes. Although in the British camp they enjoyed better conditions, by day they worked alongside the Jewish prisoners.

He told the BBC how he had hatched an audacious plan to swap clothes with a Jewish inmate to smuggle himself into their sector of the camp. He fully intended to get as far as Birkenau, where the gas chambers and crematoria were constantly in operation, belching acrid fumes. He only made it as far as Auschwitz III, where he spent the night on two occasions. Detection, he said, would have meant death.

"They'd have shot me out of hand", he said. "I took a hell of a chance."

He was determined to bear witness with the intention of telling the world after the war. He recalled the camp as being "evil" like "Hell on earth". But it is for his part in helping Mr Lobethall, later Ernie Lobet, that he could yet be honoured. Through letters to his mother, Mr Avey succeeded in contacting Ernst's sister Susana, who had escaped to England before the war.

He arranged for cigarettes - as valuable as gold in the camps - to be sent to him, which he then smuggled in to Ernst in the Jewish camp. But he had always assumed that his erstwhile friend had died in the icy death march when the camps were cleared by the SS as the Russians advanced. Only after the BBC investigation did Mr Avey learn that Mr Lobethall had survived and that it was his smuggled cigarettes that had given him his chance.

The evidence corroborating Mr Avey's story appeared in a video interview that Mr Lobethall had given to the Shoah Foundation, which gathers the testimonies of the camp survivors. He had recorded it towards the end of his life in 1995. In it he described the soldier he knew only as "Ginger" who smuggled cigarettes, chocolate and even a letter from his sister in England into the Jewish camp for him. He said it was like being given the "Rockefeller Centre".

Trading the cigarettes for favours, Mr Lobethall had heavy soles put on his boots, and that saved his life during the death march in 1945 when tens of thousands had died. Anyone who stumbled had been shot.

"They fell like flies," he recalled in the video.

A special commission in Jerusalem will determine on the basis of the evidence whether Mr Avey receives the honour and becomes one of the "righteous". Successful or not, his remarkable story is now getting the attention it deserves.

"This title is really a very high honour," says Irena Steinfeldt of Yad Vashem. "Apparently this story touched people. Denis Avey never knew this (Mr) Lobethall. He could just as well have said 'I am a prisoner of war, I don't know when I will see my family, I am in no position to help anyone else.'. It is a noble and extraordinary act."

After the war Mr Lobethall made it to the United States, and enjoyed a successful and prosperous life. And despite being drafted into the Korean War, he remained a man of "unfailing good cheer" until the end of his days, according to a life-long friend who also heard the original broadcast and contacted the BBC. He died in 2002 and never found out the real name of the soldier he called "Ginger" whose buccaneering spirit gave him a chance to live.

BBC

Children of Hate - Fighting Back Against Racist Parents

Sixteen-year-old Stephan Mills rejected his father's racism despite years of indoctrination.
Psychologists say that is more common than many people think. Stephan's mother says that
thanks to her ex-husband, Stephan "had to relearn [how] to be a civilized human."

When Stephan Mills was 10 or 11, his father sat him and his older sister down after supper one night and told them that if they ever became emotionally involved with someone of color, he would kill them.

"I just nodded in agreement," said Stephan, now 16.

The incident seemed normal to a boy who for years had been steeped in his father's bigotry. Arthur Kemp, a South African white supremacist who has ties to British and American hate groups, indoctrinated his children with racist and anti-Semitic beliefs from the time they were very young. Stephan mostly adopted those views as his own. Several years ago, however, he rejected all that his father stood for. The experience would radically change his life and lead to his ongoing estrangement from his father, who's now divorced from his mother and believed to be living in England.

"Stephan's resentment toward his father is based partly on the fact that, in his sister's words, he had to relearn to be a civilized human," said his mother, Karen Mills. (Karen and Stephan Mills live near Johannesburg, South Africa, and the Intelligence Report interviewed them by phone and E-mail).

There was a lot to relearn. Arthur Kemp "was a very involved and doting father" when his children were small, Karen Mills said. He read to them often, carefully choosing books he felt would reinforce his ideology. Among them were the original "Noddy" series, English children's books that featured Golliwogs, dark-skinned caricatures that were later removed from the text because they were deemed racist. In one of Kemp's favorite Noddy books, the Golliwogs steal Noddy's car. Kemp enjoyed telling his children that the Golliwogs' theft of the car amounted to typical behavior for blacks.

But it wasn't only in books that Kemp found justification for his racism; post-apartheid South Africa offered plenty for him to complain about. "He tried to imprint on the children how bad Africa and everything here was," Karen Mills wrote. After striking workers toppled trashcans, for instance, "Arthur took the children into the main streets of the town and made them walk among the rubbish."

He also forbade socializing with non-white children. If they arrived at a friend's party to find that a black child had also been invited, Kemp made his children go home. When Stephan was six, his father reluctantly took him and his sister to swimming lessons at a public pool where one of the children turned out to be black. "He told us to get out and that we were leaving," said Stephan, who now uses his mother's maiden name. "I was still pretty young so I didn't really understand what was going on."

Kemp's attitude didn't change even when his children's health was at stake. When the family was living in Britain, he plucked his 6-year-old daughter, Joanne, from the dentist's chair rather than allow her to be treated by an Indian dentist, Karen Mills said. As a result, she suffered for three days with a tooth abscess.

When his children grew older, he allowed them to listen only to "white resistance" bands. Rap, especially, was prohibited. Although baseball caps, sneakers, baggy pants and big T-shirts were in fashion, he considered these items "ghetto nigger" clothing and wouldn't let his children wear them. He also relished showing them articles and statistics that purported to prove that blacks were inferior. He contended that blacks could never be race car drivers because they have poor depth perception, that they cannot swim because their bones are too dense, that they are not as intelligent because their brains are smaller.

"The children were actively encouraged to be vocal about their views and to challenge their peers," Karen Mills wrote. "In Stephan's case in particular, this resulted in him being ostracized and made an outcast as he followed his father's lead."

Stephan said he had few friends until his first year of high school. At times, he suffered from depression because his father's brainwashing had so alienated him from his peers, his mother said.

"I wasn't really someone that people wanted to hang around with," Stephan said. "They regarded me as weird because I was constantly talking about Hitler."

Karen Mills said she initially went along with her husband's views to please him, but the marriage grew troubled as he devoted himself increasingly to far-right politics. She refused to read his opus on white superiority, March of the Titans: A History of the White Race, and criticized him in front of their children.

With his marriage collapsing, Arthur Kemp became violent, especially toward Stephan, Karen Mills said. Once, when Stephan was about eight, he hit his son's face until his nose bled and blood spattered on the bedroom wall, she said. He stopped only when the maid's screams brought Karen rushing into the room and she pulled Kemp off Stephan. Later, Kemp allegedly beat Stephan while his mother was at work. The backs of Stephan's legs were so swollen that he could not bend them to get into his bath. "If you ever hit my child again," she told Kemp, "I'll kill you."

Still, she did not report the incidents to the police. "You try to block it out because maybe it's more than you can deal with," said Mills, a lawyer who now works for the South African government. "You hope that it'll resolve itself and turn a blind eye."

Kemp dismissed the allegations from his former wife in an E-mail to the Intelligence Report. "It is all a pack of lies from a mentally ill person," he wrote. "I am disappointed that you would stoop to exploiting a person with severe psychological problems in this way." Karen Mills responded that Kemp has always claimed she's mentally ill simply because she disagrees with him.

Mills still feels guilty for allowing her children to suffer what she now sees as both physical and emotional abuse. "Why couldn't I do something?" she asked. "I just never stood up to him."

Kemp's persistence in forcing his beliefs on his children — along with his disengagement from their lives as he immersed himself in white nationalism — led them to question their father and the values he espoused, Karen Mills said. In a September 2008 post on the anti-racist site Lancaster Unity, Stephan called his father a "racist ass" and said he should be deported to South Africa. He wrote: "I remember almost every night when we would ask for a bedtime story (when most NORMAL fathers would read their children a normal book) he would instead tell us stories about how the white race was all supreme and then read us chapters from his horrible book "March of the White Titans" [sic]. Well dad if you ever read this or even hear about it I just wanted to let you know that I HATE YOU!! You have no idea what i went through at school because of you, you twisted my mind and made my entire childhood a horrible misery."

As his wife and children lost respect for him, Kemp withdrew further from the family. Karen Mills believes that's because they no longer fit his image of the model right-wing family that would help him achieve his political goals. "His political beliefs are the absolute be-all and end-all of his life," she said. "I think the reason why he's cut the children off is they don't conform to his political beliefs and aspirations."

Instead, "he began to seek out people who admired him and particularly his book," she recalled. "The admiration, and in particular the view of him as this great right-wing academic, became his main driving force."

He left the family in November 2006. "Picture this situation," Stephan wrote in November 2008 on Lancaster Unity. "I am fast asleep on thursday morning and when i wake i find that he is gone and then i receive a phone call from him telling me he is on a flight to London… THIS ASSHOLE DIDNT EVEN HAVE THE MANNERS TO SAY GOODBYE TO MY FACE!! I have not seen my father in now [a]bout two and [a] bit years."

Karen Mills said Kemp has had almost no contact with his children since the divorce. "I don't think there's any way that Arthur could fix the broken relationship with Stephan," she said. Nonetheless, "Stephan has gone through something of a catharsis." In addition to his posts on Lancaster Unity, he chose to discuss his father when he was assigned to give a school speech on someone who had influenced him — only he said his father's influence had been entirely negative. Now, his social life is improving, and he has resolved to be as unlike his father as possible. "I am stuck with some of his traits and characteristics — Mom used to joke with me that I have the Kemp laziness gene — but definitely not his political views," he said.

Yet there's no bringing back the years he lost to his father's hate. "You," he wrote to him in the September 2008 Lancaster Unity post, "will never understand what you have done to me."

Southern Poverty Law Center

Twisted History

When an article of mine looking at the role of African, Caribbean and South Asian troops in the British army during the two World Wars was published on Remembrance Sunday, some people criticised me for “re-writing history in favour of the BME community.

So I thought I’d see what the BNP had to say on the subject, by way of comparison. To be totally honest, I hoped to find ammunition for another article like my original “They’re taking our Spitfires!” After all, making your political opponents look ridiculous is often a good way to defeat them.

Of course I didn’t expect to find anything about non-white troops fighting for Britain in the two World Wars; but I was surprised to find nothing about the white British troops in those wars either. There’s a picture of Churchill on the home page, but no profile – though figures of legend such as Hereward the Wake get one – and he’s not one of the “British Giants”. The section on defending us from invasion has a Spitfire picture, but while there’s an article on Boudicca, there’s no Battle of Britain.

Potteries historians note there’s no RJ Mitchell, nor James Brindley and Josiah Wedgwood. I guess Wedgwood’s politics were wrong, as social and political reformers are notable by their absence. Whole political movements are missing too – nothing on the Chartists or Suffragettes, and for a party supposedly all for the working class, no mention of the Levellers, the Tolpuddle Martyrs or the Jarrow Marchers.

Art and literature are clearly for wimps – Shakespeare gets a mention but not Dickens, Jane Austen, George Eliot or the Bronte sisters; no Wordsworth or Tennyson, and no sign of Dr Johnson (another snub to Staffordshire!). There’s a serious lack of the “Christian heritage” the BNP claim to defend too, but lengthy articles full of glossy illustrations on the “Gods of the Ancient Britons” and Anglo-Saxon gods. No Quakers, no Methodists – all that social reform and concern for justice and the poor must be totally the wrong values for the BNP!

And I thought that was about it – a version of history ending with the British Empire at its height full of the sort of uplifting stories of powerful men taught when a quarter of the globe was coloured pink – a sort of “Boys Own Yarns” meets “1066 and all that”. The makings of a witty little item, perhaps.

But it’s not that simple, and not actually funny at all when you look a bit deeper.

On every page of this site, there’s a flyer for a book called “March of the Titans” by Arthur Kemp. If you click on this, you can buy the book via the BNP’s merchandising site, or you can read it on line. If you do so, you’ll find the whole of human history twisted to support the following:

“revealed in this work is the one true cause of the rise and fall of the world’s greatest empires – that all civilizations rise and fall according to their racial homogeneity and nothing else – a nation can survive wars, defeats, natural catastrophes, but not racial dissolution”.

Arthur Kemp moved to Britain from a murky past in South Africa in 1996 and is responsible for writing the BNP’s education and training manuals and the content of their website. He also runs the party’s merchandising arm, Excalibur.

If you are under any doubts at all about the ideology still at the heart of the BNP, you’ll find it within the pages of Kemp’s book, in all its ugliness. Note that this isn’t just a link among many other links – it’s an integral part of the BNP’s history section. Some items on the main site are lifted straight from it – “British Genius” is simply Kemp’s list of clever white folks with the non-Brits cut out.

Still, it might not have done the BNP’s reputation much good to include Kemp’s analysis of the Second World War, where sympathies seem to be very much with the Third Reich. He’s full of praise for Nazi science and medicine, and their banning of vivisection, but draws a discreet veil over the issue of how such “progress” was made with the frequent use of unwilling human “guinea pigs”. Here are a few extracts on what Kemp calls the “Second Great Brothers’ War”.

Dunkirk – HITLER LETS BRITISH ESCAPE

By 26 May – 16 days into the campaign – the Allied army in the north was trapped along a coastal enclave next to the town of Dunkirk. For reasons which have never been explained (the most common belief is that Hitler wanted to let the British escape so as to facilitate a peace with them at a later stage) the German panzers were deliberately stopped outside the town.

So it was that when Winston Churchill became prime minister of Britain on 10 May 1940, his first act the next day was to announce that German cities would be targeted for bombing attacks. The same month the first German cities were bombed by British aircraft. The German air force however avoided bombing British cities, concentrating on the strategically more important airfields and ports, launching the first of these major raids during August 1940.

The Blitz STARTS IN RESPONSE TO BRITISH AIR RAIDS

In the interim, British bombers had been raiding German cities for almost four months: finally, after a bombing raid on Berlin itself, Hitler authorized the Luftwaffe to start bombing British cities in return.

Nazi atrocities are given a sinister positive gloss: note the phrases “granted euthanasia” and “mercy killings” for the murder of disabled people.

In all, some 5,000 retarded and deformed children were granted euthanasia by the German government before the end of the war – with each case being individually reviewed by a specially appointed committee. The policy of administering euthanasia to retarded and deformed children was then also extended to incurably insane adults. Thanks to the German habit of keeping meticulous records, the exact number of incurably insane adults granted euthanasia is known: 70,273. Although the adult euthanasia project was conducted in secret, it was impossible to conceal such things from the German public, and by 1941, news of the mercy killings had been leaked. Growing public pressure on the Nazi government forced the abandonment of the program in that year.

The Concentration Camps

Nazi Germany is however most known for its concentration camps, and particularly those in which large numbers of emaciated and dead prisoners were discovered at the end of the war, and which have become synonymous with any image of that era. The first concentration camps were set up soon after the Nazis came to power, with the best known being Dachau, which is situated to the north of Munich.

These camps were in fact large prisons, and the prisoners were sentenced by civil courts to fixed terms of imprisonment which depended upon the crime committed. These crimes could be overtly political – membership or activism in the banned Communist Party was common – but was also extended to all other crimes, including conventional criminal activities such as theft or robbery. Eventually homosexuals were also interned: although this would only occur quite a while later.

All things said, to have been a Jew in Nazi Germany could not have been a pleasant experience: but, as the over 4.3 million claims against the post war German state from Jews who suffered as a result of this persecution, (by 1998 the German state had paid out over $50 billion in reparations), certainly far fewer died than what is most often claimed. Increasingly, all the evidence urges a complete revision of this aspect of the history of World War Two.

The effect of the Jewish factor was a primary reason for the outbreak of the war and lay behind much of the Allies’ double standards when reacting to German and Soviet aggression at the beginning of the war.

So much for Griffin’s claim to have left the bad old days of Holocaust denial and anti-Semitism behind him; this book so keenly promoted by the BNP also says:

The well known Jewish propensity for business and the ability to accumulate vast amounts of money – a phenomena well known to this day – was the source of much original anti-Jewish feeling.

Whether by deliberate plan or accident, the situation has arisen whereby Jews have ended up dominating the mass media forms of both the USA, and to a slightly smaller extent, of Western Europe. The ownership of the mass media by a small group of Jews is well documented and full details are easily obtainable on the Internet. Given the long association between Jews and assorted left-wing causes, varying from hard-core Communism to all manner of pro-Black activities, it is therefore not surprising that the mass media then also mirrors an uniformly pro-non-White message in its portrayal of current events and opinion. This Jewish domination of the mass media means that what is generally construed as ‘public opinion’ is in fact always presented in a way which is as sympathetic as possible to Jewish interests.

This Jewish domination of the media can, and does, have serious consequences, so vividly illustrated by the 11 September 2001 attacks on New York’s World Trade Centre and the Pentagon in Washington, D.C.. These events were triggered exclusively by the unflagging US support given to Israel against the Palestinians. The fact that the USA – and much of the West – continues to support Israel at any cost – including the deaths of thousands of its own citizens – is the surest evidence yet of the power of the Jewish lobby in both the mass media (which generates ‘public opinion’) and of the Jewish lobby’s famed control over the US government, and to a lesser extent, the governments of Western Europe.

Note particularly the claim that “These events were triggered exclusively by the unflagging US support given to Israel against the Palestinians”. Consider for a moment what our local BNP councillors might have to say if such a comment was made by, say, a Muslim student union officer…

And in case you think it’s just the Jews Kemp despises, here are a few words about Christianity, from the people who are telling us they are the true defenders of the faith:

The introduction of Christianity has to count as the single greatest ideological catastrophe to ever strike Europe.

So it was that Christianity came to be the dominant religion of Europe – the first religion to convert by mass murder. The original White religion had never tried to convert followers upon pain of death, and had never waged a war in its name – and as such it was psychologically unprepared to do battle with a Middle Eastern religion which engendered a genocidal fanaticism amongst its followers. Once the Christians had run out of pagans to kill, they turned upon themselves in a violent and bloody fratricidal conflict which saw the Church split and the various protagonists kill each other in a crazed blood lust.

I ’m an agnostic, and my point here is not to defend Christianity, or for that matter Judaism or British strategy in World War Two; it’s to highlight the BNP’s hypocrisy. Their enthusiasm for our “Christian” heritage and sudden keenness to see it promoted in schools is surely exposed here as just another means to divide “us” from “them”.

Remember that this book was written by one of Nick Griffin’s right-hand men, who strongly influences party ideology. The new website might look pretty flashy, but it’s just a new set of sheep’s clothing for the same very dangerous wolf.

Pits'n'Pots - The Radical Press