Motherwell fans' sickening Nazi salutes at event to launch book on 'SS' hooligans

Grinning fans did Nazi salutes outside an SPL ground to mark the launch of a book glorifying football hooligans.

The notorious Motherwell Saturday Service - who call themselves the “SS” - organised the stunt on the steps at Fir Park. Last night, club bosses were examining the sick images and discussing whether to launch an investigation.

The SS initially hired a room at Fir Park for the launch of the book Dressers. But club bosses got wind of it and cancelled the bash. The ragtag bunch still managed to hold the event at the independent Fir Park Social Club, opposite Motherwell FC’s ground. Around 140 of the group posed for photos on the steps outside the Phil O’Donnell stand, with some doing “sieg heil” salutes.

Motherwell FC stressed that the event took part in the social club, which has no links to the football club. A spokesman said: “We are trying to be Scotland’s premier family andcommunity club and we are trying to portray a message that this the club is all welcoming to everybody – families and children. We condemn football violence in the highest possible way.”

The club do not know if the people at the event were regular fans. The spokesman added: “We don’t know any of these people. Because it’s outside the ground, it makes itdifficult for us to do anything. People can walk up and do anything.”

The spokesman added that the event was booked simply as a “book launch”. He said: “The club found out what the book involved was and cancelled the booking and told them to seek alternative premises. That was in the middleof the week leading up to the event.”

The Motherwell SS were named in tribute to Hitler’s ruthless Schutzstaffel squad, who carried out some of the worst atrocities of World War II. SS is also the initials of the name given for the book’s author, Stanley Smith. Promotional blurb for the book brazenly tells how it “chronicles the rise of one of Scotland’s original football casual groups, pioneering the fashion that was to become central to the Saturday afternoon fracas in town centres and at football grounds all over Scotland”.

Fir Park Social Club did not respond to repeated requests to comment.

Daily Record

Thanks to Anon for the heads-up

Philadelphia man ordered deported for serving as Nazi guard

The main entrance to Buchenwald

A U.S. immigration judge has ordered an 85-year-old retired steelworker deported to Austria, or any other country that will accept him, for serving as an armed Nazi death camp guard during World War II.

Anton Geiser and his attorney did not immediately return calls and an e-mail for comment on the decision announced Tuesday by the Justice Department. Judge Charles Honeyman issued the 14-page order out of Philadelphia on Monday. Geiser was born in what is now part of Croatia and came to the United States from Austria in 1956. He has lived in Sharon, about 60 miles northwest of Pittsburgh, since 1960. He became a citizen in 1962 and is married with three sons.

"As a Nazi concentration camp guard during World War II, Anton Geiser must be held to account for his role in the persecution of countless men, women and children," Assistant U.S. Attorney General Lanny Breuer said in a statement Tuesday. "The long passage of time will not diminish our resolve to deny refuge to such individuals."

A Department of Justice spokeswoman said Geiser was not in custody. He can appeal to the Board of Immigration Appeals in Washington.

Geiser has acknowledged being an armed guard who watched over and escorted prisoners at three Nazi death camps. He has argued that his service was not voluntary and that he was therefore eligible to emigrate under the Refugee Relief Act of 1953. Federal prosecutors have instead cited the 1978 Holtzman Amendment to the Immigration and Nationality Act to exclude citizenship and deport "aliens who persecuted any person on the basis of race, religion, national origin, or political opinion, under the direction of the Nazi government of Germany."

Geiser, an ethnic German, was drafted into the German army at 17 and served as an armed SS Death Head guard at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp near Berlin for much of 1943. He later was transferred to an SS officer training camp at Arolsen, where he escorted prisoners to and from the Buchenwald camp, where tens of thousands of Jews and others were exterminated. He was at Arolsen until April 1945. Geiser has denied harming any prisoners, though he has acknowledged having orders to shoot prisoners who tried to escape.

A federal judge in Pittsburgh revoked his citizenship under the Holtzman amendment, and he lost a U.S. Third Circuit appeal in 2008. The U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear his case last year.

The Philadelphia Inquirer

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

Sobibor survivor: 'I polished SS boots as dying people screamed'

Thomas Blatt (above) will give evidence at the trial of John Demjanjuk this week

Thomas Blatt testifies this week at the trial of John Demjanjuk. Here, he tells Tony Paterson of his life in the camp and an extraordinary escape

He is a small, energetic looking man with thick spectacles and white hair. He speaks English with a thick, slightly American accent. As he stands in the queue outside Munich's criminal court in his beige zip-up jacket, he looks like any ordinary pensioner with time on his hands. He might have come to watch justice being done merely as an impartial observer.

Yet Thomas "Toivi" Blatt is no ordinary senior citizen. Aged 82, he is one of the last people alive to have survived the hell of the Nazi extermination camps in which millions were systematically slaughtered by brutal German and Ukrainian SS henchmen during the Second World War.

Only 82 people survived the death factory camps of Treblinka, Sobibor, Belzec and Auschwitz-Birkenau in Nazi-occupied Poland. Thomas Blatt is one of them. He still has a bullet lodged in his jaw to show for it. He got it when he was shot in the face and had to "play dead" after a miraculous escape from Sobibor in October 1943.

This Tuesday, having travelled from his home in California, he will enter the witness box in the clinical surroundings of Munich's modern neon-lit criminal court and recall the horror he endured as a 15-year-old Jewish prisoner in Sobibor, where 250,00 people including his parents and his 10-year-old brother were murdered.

Mr Blatt's testimony is expected to be crucial in deciding the outcome of what has been called the world's last Holocaust trial. The alleged former Nazi SS guard John Demjanjuk, a former Ukrainian citizen, who was extradited to Germany from Cleveland, Ohio last year, is accused of complicity in the murder of 27,900 mainly Dutch Jews who were gassed or beaten to death at Sobibor in the spring and summer of 1943.

Demjanjuk, who is 89 and suffering from numerous ailments, is refusing to speak at his trial, and follows the proceedings in court lying on a hospital stretcher with a baseball cap pulled over his eyes. He has denied complicity in mass murder.

Mr Blatt has not been able to identify Demjanjuk as having been one of the 100 Ukrainian guards at the camp, although he believes he was certainly there at the time he was a Sobibor prisoner. His testimony will nevertheless make it chillingly clear that anyone employed as a Sobibor guard was a vital cog in the machinery of genocide. "We were terrified of the Ukrainian guards at Sobibor. They were worse than the Germans – and I was there at the same time as Demjanjuk," he said.

Mr Blatt was born in Izbica, only 43 miles from the Sobibor death camp. A Nazi SS squad picked him up with his father, mother and young brother during a routine "Jew round-up" in April 1943. They were bundled into a truck. "The camp gate opened to reveal what looked like a beautiful village," he said. "We had heard what went on in there, but we refused to believe it. But I knew better, I was 15 and I realised that I was going to die," he added.

He remembers a man standing next to him peering through a hole in the truck's side at a group of Ukrainian guards equipped with bull whips. The man said, in Yiddish, how the place was "black" with them in reference to their black SS uniforms. Within a matter of seconds the Jewish prisoners were herded out of the truck and set upon by the screaming, whip-wielding guards who drove them up a path known as the "Himmelfahrtstrasse" or "road to heaven" towards the gas chambers.

"They mistreated us, they shot the old and the sick new arrivals who couldn't walk anymore. And they were the ones who drove the naked people into the gas chambers with their bayonets. They would come back with splashes of blood on their boots," Mr Blatt told The Independent on Sunday. "I often had to work a few feet away. If they refused to go on, they hit them and fired shots. I can still remember their shout of 'Idi siuda', which means 'come here'," he added.

Young Thomas saw his father being beaten with a club."Then I lost sight of him. I said to my mother, 'And yesterday I wasn't allowed to drink the rest of the milk, because you absolutely wanted to save some for today'. That strange remark of mine still haunts me today – it was the last thing I said to her. My brother stayed at my mother's side. They were all murdered in the gas chambers within the hour." A few weeks later, Thomas Blatt was forced to watch his best friend, Leon, being slowly beaten to death.

Middle-class Dutch Jews started being sent to Sobibor shortly after his arrival and the SS changed their tactics to trick them. "When a Dutch transport arrived, usually an SS man would hold a speech. He would apologise for the arduous journey, and said that for hygienic reasons, everyone needed to shower first. Then later they would be given jobs. Some of the new arrivals applauded. They had no idea what was in store," he recalled.

He survived only because the SS had executed a number of so-called "work Jews" at Sobibor the day before he arrived. The camp commandant was looking for replacements and 15-year-old Thomas pushed himself forward, pleading "Take me, take me!".

His jobs included polishing SS men's boots, sorting the clothes and shaving the hair off naked women prisoners before they were driven into gas chambers pumped full of exhaust fumes. It took up to 40 minutes for those inside to die. "We heard the whine of the generator that started the submarine engine which made the gas that killed them. I remember standing and listening to the muffled screams and knowing that men, women and children were dying in agony as I sorted their clothes. This is what I live with," he said.

He survived by supplying his Ukrainian tormentors with the gold coins he found in the victims' clothing after they were gassed. The guards used the money to pay for prostitutes. He tried to look healthy, strong and useful to avoid being murdered in the routine executions of the "work Jews". "I knew the Germans like it when you were clean and healthy looking," he said. "I watched out that my pants didn't get wrinkled and that they kept their creases and I always went around looking for possibilities to escape," he added. The chance came in October 1943 soon after a group of Jewish Red Army soldiers arrived at the camp. Within two weeks they had planned an uprising, which later became the subject of a book by Blatt The Forgotten Revolt, and an award-winning television film Escape from Sobibor. Thomas Blatt helped to kill 12 SS officers by tricking each one separately into believing that a fine leather coat had been saved for them from one of the Jewish transports. Prisoners armed with axes and knives killed the SS men as they arrived to collect their booty.

A breakout ensued. Jewish prisoners scaled the perimeter fence under a hail of gunfire from the camp watchtowers, which were still manned. The ones who got over the fence were blown up by mines that surrounded the camp. Mr Blatt escaped this fate because his jacket caught on the fence. He eventually got through the minefield by jumping through the pits in the ground caused by the explosions.

He and a friend bribed a Polish farmer to hide them under the floor of a barn in return for loot they took from the camp. But after stripping off some of their clothes and hiding them in a pit, the farmer decided it would be safer to kill them. The farmer shot at them and Thomas was hit in the face. He pretended to be dead and then managed to escape, spending the rest of the war hiding in woods or abandoned buildings and scavenging for food.

Mr Blatt says he is not seeking vengeance. "I don't care if he [Demjanjuk] goes to prison or not – the trial is what matters to me," he said.

"The world should find out how it was at Sobibor. As the camp's last living perpetrator, Demjanjuk should confess, he knows so much."

IoS

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

Nazi hunter vows to bring last Hitler criminals to justice

Dr. Efraim Zuroff, chief investigator of Nazi war criminals for the
Simon Wiesenthal Center, talks to the media about his efforts to bring Nazi war
criminals to justice during a press conference at the Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles

They're now old, feeble, beloved by their children and grandkids - and accused of abetting the murder of millions

Six decades after the Holocaust, the world's leading Nazi hunter vowed Thursday to either bring the last of Hitler's war criminals to justice or pursue them to their graves.

"Contrary to public perception that it's too late, that's certainly not the case," said Efraim Zuroff, chief Nazi hunter for the renowned Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles. "We have three to five years until we won't be able to do this anymore."

Zuroff, director of the center's Israeli office, was at the center's Museum of Tolerance to release its annual report on the prosecution of some of the world's most evil men and women. He was also in town to promote his book, "Operation Last Chance: One Man's Quest to Bring Nazi Criminals to Justice."

The good news: Four of the center's 10 most wanted Nazi war criminals may soon stand trial. They include Ivan Demjanjuk, a former American accused of helping slaughter Jews in several Waffen SS death camps, whose trial in Germany begins Nov. 30. Also about to face justice is Sandor Kepiro, a Hungarian accused of helping to kill 1,200 civilians. And Charles Zentai, alleged to have helped kill Jews in Hungary, whose extradition from Australia was approved last week. And Heinrich Boere, an alleged hit man for the SS in Holland, now awaiting trial in Germany.

The Simon Wiesenthal report listed 706 ongoing investigations of Nazi war criminals in two dozen countries, including 85 new cases between April 2008 through March 2009. During that period, six Nazis were convicted in Italy.

The bad news: Many nations still refuse to prosecute aging Nazis. At the top of the most-wanted list is Alois Brunner, a key SS operative responsible for the deportation of 128,500 Jews to concentration camps. He may be in Syria. He may be dead.

"It's not that hard to actually find these people. It's not even that hard to find the evidence for these people," said Zuroff, who considers himself part detective, part historian and part political lobbyist. "What is incredibly hard is to get countries that are reluctant to bring Nazi war criminals to justice, to do the right thing and to bring them to trial."

Among the countries that got failing grades for not going after Nazis: Australia, Austria, Estonia, Hungary, Lithuania, Norway, Sweden, Syria and the Ukraine. Canada, which has never deported a single Nazi, scored a D.

The United States got top marks for helping bring 37 of the 82 war criminal convictions worldwide, while stripping 75 Nazis of their citizenship and deporting 56.

Rabbi Marvin Hier, founder and dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, said others may defend Nazi fugitives as old, feeble and forgetful and not worth prosecution. But they have been able to live fruitful lives, he said, while their victims did not.

"As long as a Nazi war criminal is still alive, they should know that there's someone looking for them," Hier said. "When you hunt a Nazi war criminal, all Nazi war criminals in the world feel vulnerable."

Holocaust survivors and their children agreed. Sol Teichman, his brother Samuel and their father were the only family members to survive the Nazi scourge. After surviving Auschwitz and a death march to Dachau where 6,000 fell, they were among the first Jewish refugees admitted to the U.S.

"We should go after them... they should not be forgiven," said Sol Teichman, 82, of Encino, a native of Czechoslovakia. "I lost 100 members of my immediate family... It's something I cannot forget, nor can I forgive."

"I want to see justice done," added the daughter of an 89-year-old Holocaust survivor in Camarillo, who asked that her name not be used. "I'd love to see 'em hang from a tree and let me at 'em."

Los Angeles Daily News

Former Nazi SS member charged with killing Jewish labourers

A 90-year-old former member of the Nazi SS has been charged with 58 counts of murder over the killings of Jewish forced labourers in Austria, officials said today

The man is suspected of killing his victims near the village of Deutsch Schützen in 1945, a statement from a German state court said.

"On 29 March 1945, the accused and his accomplices brought at least 57 Jewish forced labourers in several groups to a nearby forest area, where they had to give up their valuables and kneel by a grave," the statement said. "The accused and other SS members then cruelly shot the Jewish forced labourers from behind."

The court described the suspect as a "retiree from Duisburg", but German media reports have named him as Adolf Storms, a former member of the 5th SS Panzer Division, known as Wiking. The suspect is accused of shooting another Jew who could no longer walk during a forced march from Deutsch Schützen to Hartberg on the day after the massacre. The remains of the victims of Deutsch Schützen were found in a mass grave by the Austrian Jewish association in 1995. A plaque now marks the site.

Prosecutors opened an investigation of Storms at the end of 2008 after being alerted to his presence by an Austrian university student who had been researching the killings.

The chief prosecutor, Andreas Brendel, said it was still ongoing. So far, three former members of the Hitler Youth, who were helping the SS to oversee the march, have provided witness statements in Austria. A fourth former Hitler Youth member, now living in Canada, will be interviewed this week, Brendel told the Associated Press.

"There are two who witnessed the shooting of the individual Jewish victim, but there are no people still alive who were part of the other shootings themselves," he said. He added that statements had been made during an Austrian trial of others involved which could be used as evidence against the suspect.

When German authorities raided the suspect's home last December, they said he had invoked his right not to make a statement. He had denied involvement in the shootings to others.

He was interned in a US prisoner of war camp following the war, but was released in 1946. In the chaotic aftermath of the conflict, it was not uncommon for possible war criminals to slip through the cracks. The Austrian press has reported the man changed the spelling of his name after the second world war – a possible explanation of why he went undetected for so long.

Guardian

MoD investigates race hate on web

Facebook remarks said to be from serving soldiers - Comments follow row over Prince Harry video

The Ministry of Defence launched a fresh inquiry into racism in the army last night after the Guardian uncovered a series of extreme and offensive comments on the social networking site Facebook.

The racist remarks were posted by people claiming to be serving soldiers. One writer's espoused political idea was to "kill the paks", while another listed having an interest in "ethnic cleansing" and enjoying "SS marching music".

Many of the remarks referred to "Pakis" and "ragheads", and on one discussion thread someone from the West Midlands claimed there was deep-seated hatred of immigrants in the UK among many troops, who were, the writer thought, sick of seeing people burn flags and preaching hate on British streets.

The comments follow the publication of a video of Prince Harry last week in which the third in line to the throne described another soldier as a "Paki".

The prince's remarks drew widespread criticism from equality campaigners, and the Equality and Human Rights Commission demanded an inquiry. A spokeswoman said the watchdog would press the armed forces to dismantle its racist "barrack-room culture".

The Guardian has given the commission a dossier containing the comments from the social networking site.

Many of those who wrote on this Facebook site expressed support for the far-right British National party. One gave an army number and base before asking others on the message board: "Anyone fancy a spot of Paki bashing?"

Others joined a thread called "I'm a soldier why should i fight for stealing immigrant scum".

Equality campaigners said that the level of racism and extremism expressed underlined the need for the army to take immediate action.

"These comments show quite clearly that racism still exists within the army," said Mohammed Shafiq, chief executive of the Ramadan Foundation, a Muslim youth group. "There has undoubtedly been a huge change in attitude among senior ranks and ministers but this shows that has simply not trickled down to the rank and file ... If the army truly wants to start recruiting more people from an ethnic minority background this has got to be addressed as a matter of urgency."

The MoD said it would investigate the remarks, insisting it was committed to "a working environment which is free from harassment, intimidation and unlawful discrimination".

A senior military source told the Guardian that anyone found to "hold the views" expressed by those Facebook correspondents would be "hunted down and dealt with most severely" if it was clear they had not met the army's "required high standards of behaviour". The source added: "If these people are soldiers and do genuinely have these opinions I don't think there is any genuine soldier or officer who would want them in their army. But I know from my experience they represent a tiny, tiny percentage ... in the UK's armed forces."

The MoD claimed progress in tackling racism, saying the percentage of forces from an ethnic minority background rose from 5.9% last year to 6.3%, though the target was 8%. It aimed to employ forces staff "from all of the UK's diverse communities so we reflect the society we serve".

Guardian

The new spate of Nazi films

There is a disturbing tendency in recent films to offer a sympathetic portrayal of servants of the Third Reich

A spectre is haunting Europe. It wears jackboots, a swastika and a delicate tear-stained expression of angst-ridden introspection. And it's called the Touchy-Feely Nazi. It can be found in your local multiplex in a quartet of high profile movies - three of which are coming soon, one is already out - that take a fresh and sometimes bold new look at the Second World War almost exclusively and often sympathetically from the Nazi point of view. These movies are filled with stars (step forward Tom Cruise and Kate Winslet), they are primed for awardsseason kudos, and yet they speak of a profound and ultimately queasy shift in the way that we regard National Socialism, the Holocaust and Nazi Germany on screen.

Valkyrie is the biggest of these and stars Cruise as Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg, the leader of the failed plot to assassinate Hitler in July 1944, and a kind husband and father who hates the Führer just as much as he loves Germany. He's a man of action and nobility who is surrounded by a cast of equally honest souls, played with convincing sincerity by quality British actors such as Terence Stamp, Bill Nighy and Kenneth Branagh. In fact, with the exception of Hitler himself, and a few surrounding cronies, it's hard to find a nasty Nazi among them.

Then there's The Reader, with Winslet starring as Hanna Schmitz, a German tram conductor who becomes a concentration camp guard almost by default. She is, naturally, haunted by her part in the Nazi atrocities - and indeed Winslet plays her internal trauma with sterling conviction - but through her new relationship with a younger man (played by David Kross) and her love of literature, she has the chance to be partially redeemed.

We've already had The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, which took a look inside the unfortunate family of the sensitive camp commandant David Thewlis, who nobly tried to shield his innocent son, Bruno (Asa Butterfield) from the horrors of the Final Solution. And still to come is Good, the story of a gentle German university professor, John Halder (played by Viggo Mortensen), who joins the SS simply because it's easier than remaining politically neutral. Naturally, when a close Jewish friend, Maurice (Jason Issacs), begins to feel the sharp end of Nazi rule John begins to regret his decision. But it's too little, too late.

What these films share is a common revisionist tone, and an urge to be taken seriously as morally mature storytelling. Indeed they were collectively applauded last month in Newsweek magazine for being “remarkable” and “more than black and white”, and for refusing to take an unambiguous stance on the ideological perils of living in Nazi Germany. “Look,” these movies seem to say, “being a Nazi wasn't that easy, and furthermore not everybody caught the bug.” Bryan Singer, the director of Valkyrie, was even more explicit when he announced recently: “Nobody wants to believe that all of a people are indoctrinated into evil, into murder and such hate. Nobody wants to believe that. So I think Valkyrie will be inspiring to people. I hope it will.”

And yet is there not a danger that this urge to redress the balance, and this desire to tell morally intriguing tales from the Nazi side, comes at a price? Richard Evans, Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge University and the author of the definitive Third Reich historical trilogy, certainly thinks so. “There is a tendency, perhaps derived from the sources that film-makers use for these films, to show everyone as being very rational and reasonable,” he says. “Whereas only Hitler and just a few people around him - the top-level Nazis - are seen as absolute raving maniacs. And the fact is that Nazi ideology did go fairly wide and deep.”

Evans elaborates further, and points to plot holes in some of these movies - the child protagonist in The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, for instance, would have been well-versed in Nazi ideology and not the innocent that he was on screen. Von Stauffenberg, though clearly an icon to Cruise, had characteristics that would have made him wildly unpalatable to a modern audience, namely he was an anti-Semite and someone who held, “a mystical belief in an eternal sacred Germany”. However, the von Stauffenberg whom we meet on film is unquestionably heroic, and someone who meets his martyr's end with near Christ-like dignity.

Trudy Gold, the chief executive of the London Jewish Cultural Centre and senior lecturer in Jewish history, says that this revisionism is more sinister than just fact-fudging. “Personally, I find this need to explain Germany away very peculiar,” she says. “Obviously, when it comes to the Holocaust, it is important to understand the perpetrators, and the fact that they were human. But when you start approaching this gradation of evil, it becomes morally dangerous.”

The film-makers, naturally, are sensitive about being described as Nazi apologists, and Stephen Daldry, the director of The Reader, has been careful to distinguish between the atrocious actions committed by Hanna Schmitz (she locks hundreds of Jews in a burning church) and the essential humanity of her character. Similarly, Viggo Mortensen, the star of Good, says that the film is actually asking you, at every narrative step, to question your own moral judgments. Cruise, for his part, simply announced recently with classic Cruise-like idiosyncrasy: “When I was a kid I always wanted to kill Hitler.”

Nonetheless, the intellectual subtlety of these defences is often lost in the mechanics of a medium that's at the mercy of visual iconography (the leather coats, boots and swastikas all carry a giddy primal thrill - part of what Gold calls “the human compulsion to go to the dark side of the moon”). More importantly, a mainstream movie's essential need for empathetic protagonists will inevitably render saintly what was once demonic. “The question of who you empathise with in a film that involves people who, historically speaking, are difficult to empathise with is a very important one,” Evans says. “It does involves a certain simplification of moral complexities.”

It is thus ironic that the very same quality that distinguishes these movies - their ostensible moral complexity - is actually responsible for their moral simplicity. Their 21st-century need to see both sides of the story has, taken cumulatively, resulted in an unfortunate Nazi whitewash. And though their intentions may be clear and honest, these films and their film-makers are ultimately, like Blake's description of Milton, “of the Devil's party without knowing it”.

NAZIS ON FILM The story so far

Casablanca (Michael Curtiz, 1942)

Filmed while the outcome of the Second World War was very much undecided, Major Heinrich Strasser (played by Conrad Veidt, who himself fled Nazi Germany) is the model of eerie intimidation. “Do you mind if I ask you a kvestion?” he says, glaring at Humphrey Bogart’s Rick. “Vot is your nationality?”

The Young Lions (Edward Dmytryk, 1958)

Marlon Brando hams it up deliciously as the idealistic, blond-haired ski instructor with a penchant for the ladies who becomes a Nazi lieutenant stationed in Paris. He eventually asks for a transfer, is sent to North Africa and suffers a magnificent, spinning, rolling, bullet-ridden death scene.

Marathon Man (John Schlesinger, 1976)

Laurence Olivier is utterly sinister as Dr Christian Szell, a former concentration camp sadist, dubbed “the White Angel” of Auschwitz. In 1970s New York, he frets about his secret stash of diamonds, carries a retractable blade up his sleeve and can do terrifying things with a dentist’s drill. Remember,“Is it safe?”

Raiders of the Lost Ark (Steven Spielberg, 1981)

Major Arnold Toht (Ronald Lacey) is the giggling, leering, crazy-eyed SS hatchet man who calls women “Fräulein” and then tortures them with hot pokers. He meets an unfortunate end, however, when his screamingface is melted away by a floaty blue spirit from inside the Ark of the Covenant.

Schindler’s List (Steven Spielberg, 1993)

The banality of evil is masterfully underscored by Ralph Fiennes as Amon Goeth, a camp commandant who kills Jews for sport and because he can. Fiennes humanises Goeth with moments of eccentricity and doubt, but never once makes him sympathetic.

Times Online

Top Euro Nazi’s hate site run from terraced house...in Gravesend

A top Euro neo-Nazi leader has secretly set up home in Britain, The Sun can reveal.

Hungarian Zoltan Fuzessy, 35, uses his terraced house in Gravesend, Kent, as an HQ to promote his far-right movement. Fuzessy is vice-president of the Jobbik party, whose members freely boast of their hatred towards Jews and make sick jokes about the Holocaust. The party, called “the shame of Hungary” by the country’s PM, has paramilitaries who dress in black uniforms like Hitler’s SS and has close ties to the British National Party.

Dad-of-two Fuzessy runs a website promoting Jobbik from his modest family home. The site, on which he is described as “head of international relations”, carries streams of bile-filled postings by members including a host of anti-Semitic attacks.

One comment, denying the Holocaust happened, read: “Gassing? Appears to have been delousing.” Another said Jews were “full of lies” about the atrocities committed by Nazis and had “miscalculated” the reaction they would get. A third sick comment bragged about giving Asian immigrants “a whack around the head” and then asking them if they felt like staying in Britain.

When The Sun confronted Fuzessy at his house he claimed he was not racist, saying: “My party is radical but it is patriotic, not nationalist. Millions in Hungary support us. Those who call us Nazi are just Communists.”

Fuzessy, who insisted he was not claiming benefits, refused to say when he had moved to Britain or what motivated him to come. Minutes later the sick racist comments were removed from the website. But The Sun can reveal Fuzessy has held meetings with UK-based extremist leaders, including BNP chairman Nick Griffin, who was the star speaker at a Jobbik rally in front of 5,000 supporters in Budapest last month.

Last night Gravesend’s Tory MP Adam Holloway said: “Any website which is anti-Semitic or racist in tone or content should be investigated.”

Hungarian MEP Viktoria Mohacsi said: “It is Nazism and it is serious.”

The Sun

I escaped from a death camp

Death camp escapee Eddie Weinstein

In December 1941, when I was 17, the Germans turned Losice, the Polish town where I lived with my parents and younger brother Israel, into a ghetto. The overcrowding was unbearable. We couldn't go out to buy wood or coal, and there was no medicine. Any Jew caught outside was killed.

Three months later, I was taken to a labour camp 30 miles away. We had very little food and slept in unheated barracks. We got sick with colds, fevers, sores and lice. After 23 days, I escaped with a friend, Michael Rak. We hid in a barn during the day and at night we made our way home. The Jewish police came for me, but I was in hiding, so they arrested my mother. My father was afraid I would be killed, so he went in my place.

In August the following year, the Germans surrounded the ghetto. We had to assemble in the square. There were wagons waiting. They told the women and children to climb on board and made the rest of us line up in rows. It was chaos. The SS took some people off the wagons and shot them. When the wagons left, they told us to start marching. They were shooting at us to make us go faster. I saw my mother following one of the wagons; I never saw her again.

We reached a freight rail station on Sunday. Everybody was begging for water. Some people were screaming, so they killed them. On Monday morning, a train arrived and they pushed us into the cattle cars. Israel and I stationed ourselves near an air vent but the car quickly filled up and people were fainting. We realised we would die and reacted in the only way possible: we pushed ourselves up on other people's heads and managed to get out. I don't know how. The SS realised they couldn't push more people in, so they added more cars. My brother and I were in one of them.

The train stopped after about three hours. The name of the station was Treblinka. We knew this was our final destination, but we could never have imagined what they would do to us there. We could see a water pump, and people were breaking open the little windows and jumping, trying to get water. Every one was shot. They were sorting people and taking them to a large building. We had no idea what it was or why hardly anyone was coming out. We didn't know they were being gassed.

They told us to pull the dead bodies out of the cattle cars. We worked all night. By morning, there was no more room for the dead, so they dug three large pits.

I was queueing to get water when one of the SS men shot me. My knees buckled and I collapsed in a puddle of blood. The bullet went right through me, four inches from my underarm. Israel cleaned me up but I was begging him to call the SS man to finish me off. He hid me among the packages in the building where the clothes were kept. He said he was going to get water, but he never came back. He was 16. I don't even have a photograph of him.

After three days, I sneaked out. I couldn't move my hand, but the injury wasn't permanent. Seven boys from my town were still alive and I joined their group, sorting clothes. The things I saw still haunt me. A dozen infants waiting next to a pit of burning bodies while the SS man went for his lunch. A woman who was too sick to stand being taken to the "hospital". The hospital was a big pit, where all the rubbish was on fire. The sick and wounded were taken there, shot and thrown in.

On September 10, an empty train arrived. One of the boys loading it, Lejzer Mordsky, was from my town. He let me in, along with my friend Gedale Rosenzwejg and another boy from Losice, Michael Fishman. They buried us in a pile of coats, then stuffed the carriage with more clothing. The SS checked the train was full, locked the doors and left. About 20 miles down the road, we broke the windows and jumped. Somehow we got back to our town, where they had made a second ghetto. Nobody believed us when we told them what was happening in Treblinka. My father escaped from the labour camp two weeks later, and we went into hiding. I joined the Polish army after the Russians liberated us; in January 1945 I was on the frontline.

Fewer than 100 survived Treblinka. I am the last one. The will to live is stronger than anything else; I never gave up. Maybe I'm meant to be alive to tell the story. This is the last generation to hear first-hand from survivors. In 10 years, there won't be any of us left. People should know what happened to us.

Guardian

Daily Telegraph Part Deux

This article was submitted by one of our readers, Hexapla. We welcome any contributions from our supporters (as long as those contributions conform to the law and are in reasonably good taste). Please send your articles to us via email.

BNP candidate boasts of fighting Britain and about his pro-Nazi and slave-owning family

Daily Telegraph Part Deux

Many people have been outraged by The Daily Telegraph providing the BNP’s only London Assembly member, the Mein Kampf-reading Richard Barnbrook, his own blog in their My Telegraph section.

However, Richard Barnbrook isn’t the only BNP acolyte with his very own Daily Telegraph blog. Carlos Cortiglia, a BNP member who stood as a BNP London Assembly candidate in 2004, has had his own Daily Telegraph blog for roughly a year. Proudly boasting on his Daily Telegraph blog that “I am a BNP supporter”, Carlos Cortiglia’s blog sometimes reads as an online BNP propaganda sheet crowned with the seeming legitimacy of the Daily Telegraph masterhead. And, Carlos Coriglia’s writing activities don’t stop here. Quite recently, in an article for the London website of the BNP, Carlo Coriglia told us of his attendance at a meeting of the notorious anti-Jewish Croydon branch of the BNP.

Fighting against Britain, support for the Nazis during World War 2 and slave owning

In an interview with The Nation newspaper about Argentinean immigrants to England (though he was born in Uruguay) , Carlos Cortiglia admits to volunteering to fight for the Argentinean military dictatorship against Britain during the Falklands war. We provide Carlos Cortiglia’s original Spanish interview with the English translation:

Original from here.

“Soy argentine oriental, o dicho de otro modo, uruguayo de nacimiento, y me siento muy ligado emocionalmente a la Republica Argentina. En 1982 me ofreci como voluntario par ir a las Islas Malvinas”.

Translation:

"I am Argentine East, in other words, Uruguayan by birth, and I feel very emotionally linked to Argentina. In 1982 I volunteered to go to the Falkland Islands”.

So, here we have Carlos Cortiglia admitting in his own words that he fought against Britain. So, why is he in the UK as a BNP member, writer and past candidate? In 1982 Argentina was under the tight grip of a fascist-supporting military dictatorship. Desperate to shore up its nationalist credentials, the military junta invaded the British Falkland Islands, claiming them as Argentinean territory. 258 British soldiers and sailors lost their lives in the recapture of the Falkland Islands. Another 777 British soldiers and sailors were wounded, some of whom died of their injuries after the war. Yet the BNP fielded Carlos Cortiglia as a candidate for the London Assembly and to this very day permits him membership of the BNP. If it is true that Carlos Cortiglia fought against British forces, then there is the possibility that Carlos Cortiglia killed British soldiers and sailors. This aside, Carlos Cortiglia would have been involved in the illegal armed occupation of British sovereign territory.

Not only this, but Carlos Cortiglia tells us how his family in Uruguay supported the Nazis during World War 2 in their fight against Britain and that his family owned slaves! He further recounts how he met in the 1970s former Nazi officers, including SS commanders in Montevideo, Uruguay. This is one hell of a BNP member!

The mind of Carlos Cortiglia

And, we have some interesting snippets from the mind of Carlos Cortiglia as it pours out of his Daily Telegraph blog. He tells us that the attack on the Stephen Lawrence building (named after the Black teenager Stephen Lawrence, murdered in a racist attack by a pro-BNP gang) was a “prank”. Claiming to be a Catholic, he accuses the Church of England of being “a backwards organisation”. He also accuses British Hindus of “inbreeding”. Not only this, but incredibly Carlos Cortiglia argues for the racist re-colonialisation of Africa, arguing that “Africa would be much better off under European rule” (I guess this is why his family owned slaves!). He also seems to have a latent anti-American streak, peppering one of his postings with terms such as “American stupidity” and “American incompetence”. Further, many of his postings are obsessed with the British government and media being involved in some great anti-Russian conspiracy (interestingly, he questions the genetic relevance of Anglo-Saxon identity, which will no doubt get Carlos Cortiglia into a lot of trouble with his BNP mates). In another posting he complains that, given his name, people mistake him for an Italian or Spaniard, not recognising that he comes from a White Uruguayan/Argentinean background).

Join the campaign!

Anti-fascists have launched a campaign to get The Daily Telegraph to stop hosting Richard Barnbrook’s racist BNP blog. We urge that this campaign be expanded to removing Carlos Cortiglia’s BNP blog also hosted by The Daily Telegraph.

Some of us are trying to put pressure on The Daily Telegraph to reconsider. You can join that campaign by emailing your protest to telegraph@blj.co.uk, telegrapheditorial@telegraph.co.uk or the Letters page at dtletters@telegraph.co.uk joining the Facebook group and spreading the word about the Telegraph's irresponsible behaviour.

¡No Pasarán!

See also here and here.

Jewish group condemns award to former Nazi doctor

Germany's top Jewish organization on Tuesday condemned a medical organization's decision to bestow its top honor on a prominent physician who was once a member of the SS and the Nazi party.

Dr. Hans-Joachim Sewering, 92, was one of four physicians honored with the top award of the Professional Association of German Internists, known as the BDI, on March 30. Der Spiegel magazine publicized the tribute in this week's edition, noting that in 1933 Sewering joined the SS, a paramilitary organization loyal to Nazi ideology. He joined the Nazi party a year later.

"This is absolutely the wrong signal and it's a scandal," said Stephan Kramer, general secretary of Germany's Central Council of Jews.

He said Sewering's Nazi past was well known _ having led him in 1993 to publicly decline the presidency of the World Medical Association. The World Jewish Congress had threatened to lead a boycott of the international association.

The BDI, which has some 25,000 members, issued a statement defending its decision and saying that Sewering had been investigated by German prosecutors and was never charged.

An investigation by Munich prosecutors into Sewering, "who has never denied that he joined the SS and the NSDAP (Nazi party) as a young man ... was closed in 1993," the organization said.

In a statement, BDI President Wolfgang Wesiack said that Sewering made decades-long contributions to the "freedom of the medical profession" in Germany and the national health service. That statement made no mention of his Nazi-era past, but noted that the elderly doctor was not able to attend the award ceremony.

When the controversy surrounding his past came up in 1993 with his election as president to the World Medical Association, Sewering did not dispute his involvement with the Nazis.

But he denied a further accusation that in 1943 he had knowingly approved the transfer of a 14-year-old mentally retarded girl to a place where she was killed under the Nazis' euthanasia program.

Sewering asserted that the Nazis had stopped the killing of the mentally retarded in 1941. He said the Roman Catholic nuns at the clinic where he worked would not have agreed to the transfer if the girl was to be killed.

A year later, the United States put Sewering on their "watch-list" of possible Nazi criminals, barring the prominent doctor from entering the country. The Bavarian justice ministry, however, noted amid further accusations in 1995 that prosecutors had investigated Sewering and found no grounds for any criminal charges.

Still, Kramer said that Sewering's membership alone in the SS and Nazi party should have been reason enough for the BDI not to honor him.

"It shows a certain mentality and a certain attraction to the Nazis _ it is more than someone who just floated with the crowd," Kramer said.

Fox News

Nazi 'Dr Death' may be in Chile

The most wanted Nazi war criminal still thought to be alive, Dr Aribert Heim, is likely hiding in southern Chile's Patagonia region, leading Nazi-hunter Efraim Zuroff said today.

Heim, nicknamed Dr Death for killing hundreds of inmates at Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria with injections of petrol or poison direct to the heart, has been on the run for 46 years since evading police in Germany in 1962 prior to a planned prosecution.

An Austrian doctor with Adolf Hitler's dreaded police unit, the SS, Heim removed organs from victims without anesthetic. He even kept the skull of one man he decapitated as a paperweight. Heim would be 93, though his family claims he died in 1993.

Mr Zuroff, director of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre in Jerusalem who has tracked down dozens of fugitive Nazis over nearly three decades, believes he has narrowed his search.

"Chile is one of the more likely possibilities," he said from Jerusalem.

"Part of the reason for the interest in Chile is the presence of his daughter, who lives in Puerto Montt. He may be in Patagonia, but at this point there's nothing definitive," he said, listing Argentina and Brazil as other possibilities.

Puerto Montt, 1058km south of the capital, Santiago, is the gateway to Chile's remote, picturesque Patagonia region of glacial lakes, towering snowcapped peaks and volcanoes that are a magnet for adventure tourism. Hundreds of Nazis sought refuge in Latin America after World War II, many lured to Argentina thanks to the open-door policies of General Juan Domingo Peron, who had fascist sympathies, as well as to Chile and Brazil. Josef Mengele, the Angel of Death at Auschwitz, escaped to Argentina and also lived in Paraguay before he died in Brazil in 1979.

Mr Zuroff said Heim has kept on the move in recent years, and sees his capture as the ultimate prize of the world's remaining fugitive Nazis. He thought he had located Heim in Chile in August, but it turned out to be a false alarm.

"He is the most important war criminal most likely to be alive," Mr Zuroff said. "He murdered .... tortured hundreds of inmates, he used body parts for experiments. In that respect you could say he's a symbol of the Nazi's perversion of science, of medicine."

Holocaust survivors remember Heim relishing seeing the fear of death in the eyes of his victims. After administering lethal injections, he would time death with a stopwatch.

At age 93, the time to catch Heim is running out.

"Our fear is that one of the worst criminals of the Holocaust, a person who personally murdered hundreds of innocent people, will have eluded justice," Mr Zuroff said. "This is something that will only encourage future genocide and mass murderers, and something which we find to be a travesty of justice."

News.com

People like him voting BNP

Arguments have raged over the decision by local newspapers in London to accept an advertisement from the British National Party last week. Searchlight is more interested in the “wholesome” white family that featured in the ad alongside the slogan “People Like You Voting BNP”.

For a start the adults of the family will certainly not be voting BNP in the London elections on 1 May. That’s not because they don’t support the BNP – they do. This is the family of Nick Cass, a longstanding BNP organiser and local election candidate, from that well known London suburb of … West Yorkshire! In this year’s elections he is standing for Kirklees Council as the BNP candidate in Mirfield.

In the newspaper ad, Cass is wearing a dark jacket. When he appeared in the Sky TV programme BNP Wives in January, he was having a massage, which gave us the chance to find out whether his nazism was more than skin deep. For prominent on his right arm, between shoulder and elbow, is a “tree of life” tattoo.

This symbol, also known as the life rune, is a favourite among nazi groups worldwide, several of which have adopted it as their logo. Under Hitler it was the symbol of the SS Lebensborn project, which encouraged SS troopers to have children out of wedlock with “Aryan” mothers and kidnapped children of Aryan appearance from the countries of occupied Europe to raise as Germans. To white supremacists today the tree of life signifies the future of the “white race”.

The BNP’s slogan also is not quite what it seems. In fact it was copied from the Front National in France, the leader of which, Jean-Marie Le Pen, has convictions for hate crime and Holocaust denial. Like Cass, Le Pen is not a man Londoners will readily identify with.

Many people have condemned the editors of the various newspapers that ran the BNP ad. Searchlight has discovered that in many cases the decision was imposed on the editors by the papers’ owner, Archant, which describes itself as “the UK’s largest independently-owned regional media business”. Its portfolio includes many London titles including the Hampstead and Highgate Express, the Hackney Gazette, the Barking and Dagenham Post and the Recorder group of papers in East London.

But Archant is unlikely to be to blame for the strange appearance of the BNP ad. The Cass family photo is strangely elongated, as if the designer was unclear how to resize a picture to fit the space. Now the BNP’s chief designer is one Mark Collett of Leeds, a man widely derided in the BNP as incompetent. We see what they mean.

The BNP are definitely not people like us.

Searchlight

The war children born to Nazi fathers in a sinister eugenics scheme speak out

They were the blue-eyed blonds born into a sinister SS scheme to further the Aryan race. But the defeat of the Nazis left Norway's 'Lebensborn' facing the vengeance of an entire nation. Here, five former war children talk for the first time about their ordeal – and their fight for compensation

They stare blankly into the lens, their lips tellingly pursed. All are the Norwegian subjects of a terrifying Nazi experiment. All were involved in one of the most shocking trials of eugenics the world has ever known. All are Lebensborn – the "spring of life". And all are here to tell their stories for the first time.

The Lebensborn Society was born on 12 December 1935, the brainchild of Heinrich Himmler, Hitler's right-hand man and head of the SS. He had designed a project to promote an "Aryan future" for the Third Reich and turn around a declining birth rate in Germany. People were given incentives to have more children in the Fatherland as well as in occupied countries, most importantly in Scandinavia, where the Nordic gene – and its blond-haired, blue-eyed progeny – was considered classically Aryan.

But after the conflict had ended, many of the Norwegians born into the programme suffered. In an attempt to distance itself from the occupying forces, the Norwegian government publicly vilified the children born by Norwegian mothers and Nazi fathers. Many of those children subsequently experienced intense bullying, and in some cases, extreme mental and physical abuse. In recent years, a Lebensborn group in Norway has been fighting what it sees as the Norwegian government's complicity in their horrific ordeal.

Now, these once-persecuted children, many of whom are in their sixties, have been brought together by British photographer Lucinda Marland, who travelled to Norway to interview them and take their portraits, with a 1940s 5x4 plate camera, reproduced exclusively here.

"The people I met described themselves as the lucky ones and maintain that hundreds of others were never able to come to terms with the prejudice and cruelty they ' suffered," says Marland. "They were incredibly humble and proud people still coming to terms with their demons; many of them would be welling up when they were talking to me."

The Lebensborn programme arrived in Norway in March 1941, six years after the scheme was started in Germany. The occupying soldiers were officially encouraged to father children with the local women. They were reassured that the Third Reich would take care of the child if they did not wish to marry the mother, or were already married. As well as paying all the costs for the birth, the Lebensborn association gave the mothers substantial child support, including money for clothes, as well as a pram or cot. It was noted at the time that only a small proportion of the German fathers wanted to marry the pregnant women and bring them back to the German Reich.

Hotels and villas were requisitioned and 10 Lebensborn homes were established from scratch. Here, more than 8,000 children were registered, and issued with a Lebensborn number and file containing their medical records.

For many of the young, impressionable Norwegian girls who had become pregnant at the hands of the invaders, it was a convenient place to give birth – well away from the disapproving eyes of their peers, with access to the best available care.

But towards the end of the war, the exiled Norwegian government – which had set up shop in London – started broadcasting ominous warnings to collaborators in Norway. One said: "We have previously issued a warning and we repeat it here of the price these women will pay for the rest of their lives: they will be held in contempt by all Norwegians for their lack of restraint."

Soon afterwards, the war ended, Himmler committed suicide and Norway's pre-war leaders returned. Norwegians cut off the hair of many of the "German whores" who had sired children with the Nazi soldiers, and they were paraded through the streets and spat at. Though the women hadn't broken any law, several thousand were arrested and many interned. A large number lost their jobs, for as little as having been seen talking to a German, and many were traumatised for life. "We will never be rid of the stigma, not until we are dead and buried," says one of the Lebensborn interviewed by Marland, Paul Hansen. "I don't want to be buried in a grave; I want my ashes to be scattered to the winds – at least then I won't be picked on any more."

The condemnation escalated. The Norwegian government tried to deport the Lebensborn to Germany but the scheme was vetoed by the Allies. In July 1945, one newspaper expressed the fear that Lebensborn boys would "bear the germ of some of those typical masculine German characteristics of which the world has now seen more than enough". A leading psychiatrist advised that a large proportion of the 8,000 (officially registered) children must be carrying bad genes and therefore would be mentally retarded; "genetically bad", he said, they "belonged in special institutions". As a result, hundreds of children were forcibly incarcerated in mental institutions. Here they were often abused, raped and their skin scrubbed until it bled. A member of the Norwegian ministry of social affairs said of them in July 1945: "To believe these children will become decent citizens is to believe rats in the cellar will become house pets." '

Through legal action, many of the children have sought compensation from the Norwegian government for its discrimination against them. A few were offered limited financial recompense. But still officials refuse to take the blame. "The government has acknowledged that several war children have been subject to harassment in society," says government lawyer Thomas Naalsund. "But it is highly difficult to say now, 50 years later, that the government was responsible for these events."

Last year, 157 of the children appealed to the European Court of Human Rights but lost on the grounds that their problems happened too long ago. "There is a hypocrisy at the heart of Norway, home of the Nobel Peace Prize, a country that prides itself on resolving conflicts around the world but refuses to acknowledge its own victims of war," says the Lebensborns' lawyer, Randi Spydevold. "I'm disappointed and embarrassed on behalf of Norway. I thought Norway was a great country, the best country for human rights; I didn't disbelieve that for one moment until I took this case."

Now, what hope that still exists among the Lebensborn is in their desire that by sharing their stories, one day an international standard will be set that will prevent future war children from being discriminated against, and enduring the atrocities that they themselves have had to live through. Their chilling tales, some of which are reproduced here, are just one small step towards that potential resolution.

Ellen Voie: 'I was locked in a dark room'

I was born in 1942 in a Lebensborn home, where I stayed until I was adopted aged two. My adoptive parents were incredibly cruel: they beat me and locked me in a small, dark room for hours. To this day I'm still afraid of the dark and have nightmares.

We lived in a small community where everyone seemed to know I was a German child and told me how awful I was. I was very disruptive; I couldn't concentrate. When I was 16 the local priest refused to confirm me because I did not have a baptism certificate. I had to go to the local authority where I found out that my parents had changed my name.

Then I went to Denmark to study. While there I worked as a nursery nurse, and fell in love with a German, but my parents disapproved and I had to return to Norway to continue studying.

A year after I returned, a friend and I were walking to the cinema when a car pulled up with some boys in it. My friend said she knew them so we got in, but the car broke down. My friend went off with one of the boys to get spare parts and left me alone with the other boy, who raped and almost killed me. A taxi driver saved my life.

I later discovered I was pregnant from the attack. I was 19 years old. My parents threw me out of the house and put me in a home, where I stayed until my son was born. My parents then insisted I give up my baby; I was only allowed to hold him for a few minutes before they took him away. But I was determined that history would not repeat itself and with the help of a social worker I got my son back.

Despite all the hardships, I got an education and my work as a social worker has helped me deal with my past. I've dedicated my adult life to helping others, children in particular. It helps me to forget my own tormented past. I now live with my husband and dogs in Oslo.

Paul Hansen: 'They classed me as a retard'

I think my mother's family put pressure on her to give me up, so I was born in a Lebensborn home in 1942 and my mother left me there.

I later learnt that after the war a government delegation came to the home to decide what to do with the 20 war children, including me, who had been left there. We were lined up and the doctor said he would take us. It turned out that he was the head of a mental institution. There was no medical prognosis behind his decision; it was just that we were war children, and therefore must be "retarded" due to our parentage. They made no effort to trace any of our family members, they just locked us up with children so sick that some were incontinent and incapable of feeding themselves. I was four years old.

By the time I was released I had lost any chance of a proper education and for the next few years I went from one home to another.

I was eventually sent to a special school for children with learning disabilities and mental illness. This was the only formal education I received. War children were segregated from the rest of the school. We were not allowed any contact with the outside community. I was then moved to a boys' home and then another mental institution, where I was finally old enough to sign myself out. The people there helped me get a job in a factory. My colleagues used to taunt me mercilessly until one day I stood up and told them what had happened to me. They never taunted me again and I stayed there for 17 years.

In 1975 I got married but my wife had a nervous breakdown and we divorced in 1977. Then I lived with someone for nearly 20 years but she died of cancer.

I now work as a cleaner and janitor at the University of Oslo and have a long-term girlfriend. As much as it hurts to talk about my past, I do so because it's important that people know what happened to us. I spent the first 20 years of my life in mental institutions just because my father was a German.

Kikki Skjermo: 'I was raped when I was 10'

I was born in 1945 near Trondheim. My mother was away a lot, finding work. It was my grandparents who brought me up and told me about my father. They provided for me, but never showed me any warmth. I felt like I lived behind a wall of silence; life was very empty and confusing.

At 10 years old I was raped by a local man, who had a deep hatred of the Germans. I didn't know him but he knew I was a German child. He told me people like me were born to be used. I didn't dare tell anyone; I stayed in bed for a week pretending I had a stomach upset.

At 15 I was granted special permission to marry my husband. It took me a couple of years to tell him about my history but he has always been a huge support and we've been married for 47 years.

Both he and my children encouraged me to trace my father, who I met for the first time when I was 42. We have a wonderful relationship and, when my daughter got married, she asked if my father could walk her down the aisle to show the world that the spell was broken.

It's taken me a long time to be able to say, it's OK, I'm a German child. It's important to speak out to help other war children who aren't as fortunate as me.

Bjorn Drivdal: 'They beat me up at school'

Growing up in Oslo, I was told my father was sent to the Eastern Front, where he died in action. But my mother would never tell me anything more about him.

I later learnt that when my mother discovered she was pregnant she tried to get an abortion, but the German authorities wouldn't let her.

I endured school until I was 15; I was always being beaten and couldn't understand why. I then went to sea, working mainly on cargo ships. On shore leave, I'd often find myself on the shadier side of town – I found it easier to be around people with something to hide.

I've been married twice and have five children. Both marriages ended in divorce; I wasn't easy to live with.

When I turned 57 I took early retirement because I couldn't concentrate and was having nightmares, and it was then that I confronted my past. I started seeing a psychologist and learnt to explore who I was.

I decided to go to Germany. I knew where my father had lived, so I went to the local newspaper, which helped me with my research. I found my father's grave and discovered he had actually died in 1974 in a car crash, not in the war as I had been led to believe. It was a devastating blow. But my trip to Germany wasn't all bad; I met my two half-sisters, who had no idea I existed, and this summer my nephew and his children are coming to visit me.

Gerd Fleischer: 'I was called a whore'

My mother and father planned to marry, but to marry an SS officer you had to prove three generations of Aryan blood. My mother's Lapp heritage meant she was not pure enough.

I was born in 1942. My father returned to Germany while my mother fell into poverty, not qualifying for any support from the state, my father or even the Lebensborn programme.

We lived a relatively untroubled life in Lapland until I went to school. One day a fellow pupil called me a "German whore"; I didn't know what this meant so I ran home and asked my mother. She told me that not everyone is open-minded.

My mother then married a former resistance fighter, who hated anything German, particularly me. Abuse and beatings soon became a regular part of my home life. At 13, I ran away.

Somehow I survived, putting myself through school. I remember being lonely, hungry and cold. The authorities knew about me but did nothing to help.

When I was 18, I left Norway and didn't return for 18 years. I worked as an au pair in England, and worked and studied in Germany. I managed to trace my father, who initially denied all knowledge of me. But when we met it was physically obvious I was his daughter. I was furious at him – even more so when he spoke ill of my mother. I successfully took him to court for the maintenance he had never paid to me.

Before returning to Norway I spent several years in Mexico, where I fostered two street children. I brought them home with me, but soon realised that Norway hadn't progressed in its attitude towards ethnic minorities. So I founded the organisation Seif [Self Help for Immigrants and Refugees] to fight for justice for all.

Independent

Family memoirs with a Nazi past

Berliner Katrin Himmler was shocked at SS ties and grandmother's connections

As a young girl, Katrin Himmler asked her grandmother about the man in a black suit in a photograph hanging on her living-room wall. Her grandmother didn't say much, but she cried.

The man in the picture was Ms. Himmler's grandfather Ernst, a brother of Nazi SS chief Heinrich Himmler. The little that Katrin's family did tell her about her grandfather, who disappeared during fierce fighting in Berlin in 1945, was that he was apolitical.

Decades later, Ms. Himmler discovered that her family's story was untrue. Her father, long suspicious, encouraged her in 1997 to go dig in wartime archives that the U.S. had recently returned to Germany. Ernst Himmler, she learned, joined Hitler's National Socialist German Workers' party as early as 1931. Two years later, he joined the SS guard, the special unit responsible for carrying out many of the Nazi regime's worst atrocities.

Now 40 years old and married to an Israeli Jew, Ms. Himmler says she was shocked when she found out that Ernst was in the SS. "It might sound strange, but I never considered this possibility," she says.

Ms. Himmler investigated further. She unearthed records of Heinrich's elder brother, Gebhard, and coaxed his children into sharing memories and letters. She wrote a book, "The Himmler Brothers," about her family's history -- and the trauma involved in uncovering it.

Ms. Himmler's book, published in German in 2005 and in English this past summer, is one of several recent memoirs by the children and grandchildren of old Nazis that aim to reflect on how the party affiliation affected their families. Another book, published this past summer in German, "Kind L 364," tells the story of Heilwig Weger, a girl reared in one of the Lebensborn settlements the SS built for orphans and other so-called Aryan children. Ms. Weger was later adopted by Oswald Pohl, a Nazi officer hanged in 1951 for war crimes. The book conveys the pain she felt at losing him, the only father she knew, while being ostracized by other children because of his actions. Later, she hid her background from her own children.

The documentary "2 or 3 Things I Know About Him," released two years ago in Germany and this year in the U.S., shows how the filmmaker Malte Ludin and his siblings wrestled with the conflict of loving their father, a prominent Nazi executed after the war, while reviling what he had done.

At first, Ms. Himmler's relatives supported her determination to explore the family's history. But when she uncovered painful details, they balked, calling her a Nestbeschmutzer, someone who fouls her own nest. Ms. Himmler, for instance, found out that the grandmother she adored had made use of her husband's Nazi connections, and stayed in touch with ex-Nazi officials after the war.

In the postwar period, memoirs of Nazis or their families were long taboo. Ms. Himmler has vivid memories of those years. In high school one day, a classmate asked during a history lesson whether she was related to the Himmler. When she said yes, a tense silence gripped the room, Ms. Himmler recalls, after which the teacher continued her lesson as if nothing had happened.

"I think she lost an opportunity," says Ms. Himmler. "She could have used what happened to discuss the link that our generation bears to the past."

Ms. Himmler, an introverted but friendly woman, who pedals around today's liberal Berlin on a bicycle, met her future husband while studying political science at the Free University in Berlin. His family fled Poland and the Nazis in the 1930s. In the early days of their courtship, Ms. Himmler says, they raked over the past obsessively. They visited Nazi landmarks in Berlin, such as the stadium where the 1936 Olympic Games were held. They went to Krakow, in southern Poland, to see the Jewish quarter where his grandparents once lived.

Through Ms. Himmler, her husband refused requests for an interview; she declined to identify his name out of concern for protecting his privacy. She says her husband never held her family's past against her, even as he struggled with anger over his family's persecution by the Germans. His parents, who live in Israel, knew postwar Germany well from their own travels there and didn't object to their son's relationship with her.

Ms. Himmler spent several years burrowing through microfilmed wartime records and phone logs the U.S. returned to the German Federal Archive in Berlin in 1994. As she dug deeper, she uncovered painful truths about family members, including the grandmother she had loved until the old woman died in 1985.

As newlyweds, her grandparents acquired a home in a well-kept Berlin suburb. To make room for the couple, the Nazis "freed" the house of its former occupants: a union administrator, a painter and a civil engineer. Ms. Himmler never found out what became of them.

Ms. Himmler also found records of phone calls her grandmother made to Heinrich Himmler in 1944, as the Allies intensified their bombing of Berlin. Responding to her pleas to relocate the family somewhere safer, the SS chief hid them in a village in Poland.

After the war, Ms. Himmler's grandmother again made use of her Nazi connections, as she sought to secure an income and jobs for her children. At age 15, Ms. Himmler's aunt got work as a secretary in a factory owned by former Nazis.

Ernst vanished in Berlin in the spring of 1945, as the Allies pushed into the city. The government later informed the family that he was believed dead.

Ernst's elder brother, Gebhard Himmler, in a written account of his life, described himself as a civil servant, barely referring to the Nazi party, and never once mentioning Hitler. During her research, Ms. Himmler discovered her great uncle had been a party member, too. In charge of licensing engineers to work in Germany, he based his decisions on the devotion candidates showed to the Führer.

Today, Katrin Himmler and her husband live with their 8-year-old son in an apartment not far from the Reichstag, the seat of the German Parliament. They talk a lot with the boy about the past. Ms. Himmler says she isn't sure whether he has yet put it together that his mother's side of the family once tried to exterminate his father's.

Examining her grandparents' lives has led Ms. Himmler to question whether she would have acted any differently. "I'm not sure I would have," she says. When asked later how her husband felt about this, she replied in an email: "My husband thinks exactly as I and many other people: that ordinary people are in certain circumstances able to act in a horrible way -- and to tolerate horrible crimes. And most of us can't be sure how we would have behaved in that time (at least if we are honest and not moralistic)."

Some critics in Germany say that recent memoirs seek to profit from deplorable family histories and run the risk of apologizing for the Nazis, by offering humanizing portrayals of them as loving parents and grandparents.

"I'm definitely not apologizing for them," says Ms. Himmler. "It's hard to look at these people as ordinary men and women, but we really have to do this," she says. "They were doing monstrous things, but they were not monsters."

Wall Street Journal

Secret tapes of top Nazis

Richard Overy reviews Tapping Hitler's Generals: Transcripts of Secret Conversations, 1942-45 ed by Sönke Neitzel

From 1942 onwards the British kept a number of captured German staff officers, most of them from the army, at Trent Park house in the north London suburb of Cockfosters. Here they lived a boring but relatively free-and-easy existence, chatting, exercising, enjoying an occasional ramble.

What they did not know, though several seem to have guessed at it, was that a dozen of the rooms were bugged so that their private conversations (there was nothing strictly 'secret' about them) could be overheard by British Intelligence officers and, if useful, employed for Allied operations.

The conversations were, as it turned out, of very limited help to the conduct of the war, though they did supply a wealth of evidence on the nature of the National Socialist system which seems to have been largely ignored or poorly exploited when it later came to putting German generals on trial for war crimes.

Sönke Neitzel, a professor at the University of Mainz, has edited a volume of key extracts from the tape-recorded discussions and there is no doubt that they are of much more service to the historian than they ever were to British Intelligence.

After a brief introduction, where Neitzel explains with great clarity and detachment why the conversations matter, the book deals first with the officers' views of German politics and strategy, then their discussions of war crimes and atrocities and finally a shorter section on their reaction to the July Plot, the failed attempt in 1944 by a small coterie of army officers to assassinate Hitler.

Not surprisingly there is no clear unity on any of these issues. Some of the officers were inclined to dismiss atrocity stories as Allied propaganda until confronted by a fellow-general whose detailed description of some of the terrible horrors he had witnessed made the stark truth all too clear ('18,000 Jews killed in one morning', one Eastern Front commander told a doubter).

Some thought the July Plot a trick of Hitler's, to secure popular support for a last-ditch war effort. On politics the group remained divided: some unambiguously blamed the German people and their blind loyalty to the dictator, others thought Hitler a good thing, but badly advised. All detested Heinrich Himmler and the SS, and in that repugnance lay the root of the post-war myth that atrocities were the work of the black-shirted security corps and not of the army.

The 167 extracts, though well supported with extensive notes and a helpful 'who's who', will be hard going for anyone not already familiar with the territory. For the wider public the most revealing and accessible of the documents concern the issue of war crimes.

Although some of the officers found it hard to imagine that regular soldiers had committed crimes, there are simply too many instances exchanged between them for the idea of a 'clean' war to hold up. Over the three years during which the recordings were made, the whole panoply of crimes (the mass murder of Jews, the shooting of hostages, burning down churches filled with victims, and so on) is acknowledged and described.

Some of the nastier generals clearly disliked the Jews, although few would admit that murdering them en masse was a good thing. But at least one thought that killing 100 hostages for the death of a single German was quite justified - 'that's military law'.

At one point one of the prisoners remarks to a confidant that when it came to crime, the Allies had no idea of 'what really happened'. Little did he know that the British knew exactly, because they listened in to every confession. The question that remains is why so few of the officers were ever tried afterwards - despite the things to which they privately admitted - or why, on reading accounts from as early as 1942 and 1943, the British did not expose more fully the horror of what was going on on the Eastern Front.

To their credit a number of the prisoners were simply aghast at what they heard, and thought German defeat a punishment from God. But others hoped for German victory, or at the least the idea that even in defeat the German armed forces had fought a 'war with honour'. After 1945 it was this view that prevailed. By the 1960s the idea of the 'clean war' undermined by party fanatics was dominant.

These extracts exert a grim fascination. They represent a unique and unmediated window into the minds of a military elite, brutalised by the First World War, embittered by what they saw as Germany's unjust treatment, and finally ensnared in the seductive coils of Hitler's radical nationalism. The strange blend revealed here of resentment, racism, political innocence and professional arrogance is a cocktail that leaves a nasty aftertaste.

Telegraph