During World War II, the Nazis developed a secret weapon named the “Schweres Wasser” (Heavy Water) which was a isotope of water that was enriched in the hydrogen isotope deuterium. This heavy water was used in the production of nuclear weapons but the allies became aware of this and they launch an operation to sabotage […]
21 leading Nazis were given…
21 leading Nazis were given IQ tests at Nuremberg. The average score was 128. The smartest Nazi was Hjalmar Schacht, a key resistance fighter who was acquitted on all charges. He scored 143.
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The world’s richest woman…
The world’s richest woman, Françoise Bettencourt Meyers, owns a 33% stake in L’Oreal which was founded by her grandfather, Eugène Schueller, a known fascist and Nazi sympathizer. Françoise married and has raised her children Jewish.
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A Town in Austria Is so Sick of Nazis Visiting Hitler’s Birthplace That They’re Turning It into a Police Station
In a small town in Austria on the border of Germany sits a structure with a notorious past. It was here, in a nondescript building downtown called the Braunau am Inn, that Adolf Hitler was born on April 20, 1889.
The building has been used as a school and a library over the years, but it has also been a magnet for neo-Nazis who view it as a shrine to Hitler. People have been coming since all the way back in the 1940s just after World War II ended, when Austrian and German veterans would flock to the house on Hitler’s birthday.
In 1972, the interior ministry of Austria took over the main lease from the family that owned the building so that the government could eventually have the final say about what the building would be used for. In 1984, the Austrian government tried to acquire the building outright from Gerlinde Pommer, who had sole possession of the building, but she refused to sell. Pommer also refused to renovate the structure so the government could not find a good tenant for the property.
Finally, in 2017, the Austrian government seized the building from Pommer and the dispute ended. Authorities have decided to turn Hitler’s birthplace into a police station to hopefully deter neo-Nazis from visiting the site.
In 1989, a stone was put in place in front of the building that reads, “For peace, freedom and democracy. Never again fascism. Millions dead are a warning.”
There will be an international architectural competition to redesign the building for its future police tenants.
Wolfgang Peschorn, the interior minister of Austria, said, “The future use of the house by the police should send an unmistakable signal that the role of this building as a memorial to the Nazis been permanently revoked.”
And it’s about time.
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The Nazi Sieg Heil was…
The Nazi Sieg Heil was ridiculed by some people. Since “heil” is also the imperative of the German verb “heilen” (“to heal”), a common joke in Nazi Germany was to reply with “Is he sick?”, “Am I a doctor?”, or “You heal him!”
A German Town Came up with a Genius Plan to Deprive a Neo-Nazi Music Festival of Beer
This might be the best story of 2019… so far.
Recently, a neo-Nazi rock festival took place in the small town of Ostritz, Germany. Attendees descended on the small town of just over 2,000 people for the Sword and Shield (SS) music festival to do what neo-Nazis do: get drunk, listen to terrible music, and find like-minded boneheads to act like idiots with.
But the far-right folks were in for a surprise when they found out that a court had recently ruled that no alcohol was to be served or consumed at the event due to the fear of potential violence.
Police kept an eye on the festival to make sure that the ban was upheld.
But the best part?
Locals even chipped in and bought more than 100 crates of beer to really make sure that the far-right festival attendees wouldn’t have any brewskies for the weekend.
German residents buy up all of town's beer before white supremacists arrive for 'Shield and Sword Festival' of Nazi music driving the point home they are not welcome in Ostritz. https://t.co/ZBdwNHhUn4
— Official KAOS Radio Austin (@KAOSATXofficial) June 24, 2019
Hahahahahahahahaha!!!!!
How to protest a right-wing music festival: take away their beer! Last weekend, hundreds of neo-Nazis in the eastern German village #Ostritz were cut off at the source.
The residents joined forces to show extremists they weren't welcome. Locals bought over 100 crates of beer. pic.twitter.com/h6DijJOa6X— DW Politics (@dw_politics) June 25, 2019
A local activist named George Salditt said,
“The plan was devised a week in advance. We wanted to dry the Nazis out.
We thought, if an alcohol ban is coming, we’ll empty the shelves at the local supermarket.”
An estimated 2,000 people also gathered for anti-racist demonstrations in Ostritz during the weekend as well. An estimated 500-600 people attended the Sword and Shield festival and were outnumbered not only by protesters but also by police, who numbered roughly 1,400.
"Thick necks, bald heads and NO BEER"#Nazis gather in #Ostritz for the ‘Shield and Sword’ Nazi festival. pic.twitter.com/Iwqmzz2zzN
— Maggie Aitch (@FreeBesieged) June 26, 2019
The mayor of Ostritz, Marion Prange, said,
“There are people here in Ostritz who do not tolerate the event, who stand for different values and who try to be role models,” Prange said.
Now this is what I call teamwork, and this is what I call community.
Cheers!
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America’s Most Decorated Female Spy Finally Gets the Recognition She Deserves
There are many great heroes of WWII who have become household names by now, their exploits immortalized in movies, TV shows, and books. One name most people haven’t heard, however, is Virginia Hall.
Today, that changes, though Virginia herself might not be too happy about becoming a household name. As she liked to say, “Many of my friends were killed for talking too much.”
Since it’s been over 70 years since she worked as a wartime spy, and she’s no longer living, it’s probably safe – and high time – to talk about her contributions.
: “for extraordinary heroism in connection with military operations against an armed enemy while serving as an American Civilian Intelligence Officer in the employ of the Special Operations Branch, Office of Strategic Services, who entered voluntarily and served in enemy-occupied France from March to September 1944. Despite the fact that she was well known to the Gestapo because of previous activities, Miss Hall established and maintained radio communications with London headquarters, supplying valuable operational and intelligence information. With the help of a Jedburgh team, she organized, armed, and trained three battalions of French resistance forces in the Department of the Haute Loire. Working in a region infested with enemy troops and continually at the risk of capture, torture, and death, she directed the resistance forces with extraordinary success in acts of sabotage and guerrilla warfare against enemy troops, installations, and communications. Miss Hall displayed rare courage, perseverance, and ingenuity. Her efforts contributed materially to the successful operations of the resistance forces in support of the Allied Expeditionary Forces in the liberation of France.” Hall was born in 1906 to a wealthy Baltimore family who expected her to educate herself and then marry into more money. She had other ideas, wearing bracelets of (live) snakes to school, becoming an avid hunter, and taking pride in being “capricious and cantankerous.”
She was educated at Radcliffe and Barnard before traveling to Paris and falling in love with France, a love that would change the course of her life. Once she’d gone overseas, Hall became set on becoming a diplomat, said Sonia Purnell, the author of a forthcoming book on Hall.
“She wanted to be an ambassador. She got pushed back by the State Department. She applied several times.”
While working in a secretarial capacity at a U.S. consulate in Turkey, Hall had a hunting accident that cost her her left leg below the knee. She persevered through a long and painful recovery, and learned to maneuver on a wooden leg.
Another Hall biographer and ex-CIA officer, Craig Gralley, believes that losing her leg was a turning point in her life.
“She had been given a second chance at life and wasn’t going to waste it. And her injury, in fact, might have kind of bolstered her or reawakened her resilience so that she was in fact able to do great things.”
She was living in France when WWII broke out, and immediately jumped into the fray, volunteering to drive a French ambulance. As her beloved France was overrun, Hall fled to Britain and quickly fell in with British intelligence. After a bit of training, she found herself back on French soil and working as a British spy in 1941.
Hall posed as a reporter for The New York Post and saw many in her network arrested and even killed. The Gestapo had her number and knew they were in search of a woman with a limp, but Hall was a natural at the spy game – like many women who were an active part of the resistance, she exploited her female-ness and her “cripple-ness” to fly under the radar.
“Virginia Hall, to a certain extent, was invisible,” says Gralley. “She was able to play on the chauvinism of the Gestapo at the time. None of the Germans early in the war necessarily thought that a woman was capable of being a spy.”
Hall operated largely in Lyon, which put her in the path of Klaus Barbie, otherwise known as “the Butcher of Lyon,” but thankfully she was never counted among the thousands tortured and killed by his forces. He was aware of her, however, posting signs around the city that featured a drawing of her and the words “The Enemy’s Most Dangerous Spy – We Must Find And Destroy Her!”
While there, she recruited everyone she could, from nuns at the convent where she was staying to a local brothel owner who helped by passing along information the prostitutes gathered from German troops. She organized the resistance in Lyon, providing safe houses and intelligence that altered the course of the war on French soil.
Even though she constantly changed her appearance, the Nazis got close enough in 1942 to send her into hiding in Spain. To get there, she walked 50 miles a day for 3 days in heavy snow, over the Pyrenees Mountains.
With a wooden leg. Remember?
Gralley, who considers himself in good shape, tried making the trek and found it exhausting.
“I could only imagine the kind of will and the kind of perseverance that Virginia Hall had by making this trek. Not on a beautiful day, but in the dead of winter and with a prosthetic leg she had to drag behind her.”
A snafu with her passport had her wasting 6 weeks in a Spanish jail before being released back to Britain. All Virginia wanted to do was to return to her work in France but the British refused her request, fearing her life.
The American OSS, however, had no such qualms – though Purnell points out that Hall did take precautions before returning to occupied soil.
“She got some makeup artist to teach her how to draw wrinkles on her face. She also got a fierce, a rather sort of scary London dentist to grind down her lovely, white American teeth so that she looked like a French milkmaid.”
Back in France, she worked with resistance fighters to blow up bridges, sabotage trains, and reclaim villages ahead of advancing Allied troops.
The war ended and Virginia Hall, like all of the fighters abroad, returned home. She brought with her a French-American soldier (now her husband) and a penchant for keeping her mouth shut.
Her niece, Lorna Catling, recalled meeting her aunt after the war in a conversation with NPR.
“She came home when I was 16, and she was pale and had white hair and crappy clothes.”
And as for the war?
“She never talked about it.”
Both the British and the French recognize Hall’s contributions, though only in private. She declined public accolades in the States, too, claiming she’d rather remain undercover.
William Donovan, the OSS chief, bestowed the Distinguished Service Cross on Hall – the only civilian to receive such an honor during WWII – and only her mother witnessed the ceremony.
She joined the CIA and worked there for 15 years, though she did not thrive and wasn’t happy being stuck behind a desk, CIA historian Randy Burkett tells NPR.
“As you get higher in rank, now it’s all about money and personnel and plans and policy and that sort of bureaucratic stuff. …Was she treated properly? Well, by today’s standards, absolutely not.”
She retired in 1966 without ever having spoken publicly about her experiences as a WWII spy, and died in 1982 without the public realizing who she was or what she had contributed to the successful war effort.
A Woman of No Importance. 
. . 
#powerfulwomenrepresent . . #awomanofnoimportance #soniapurnell #virginiahall #bookreview #bookrecommendation #readingwanderwoman #readingww2019 #readingwanderreviews #badasswomen #womeninhistory #sundayselfieshelfieRecently, her public moment has arrived: three books have been published and two movies are in the works, so Americans are finally going to know Virginia Hall in the way she deserves (if not the way she would have wanted).
As Sonia Purnell muses, “Through a lot of her life, the early life, she was constantly rejected and belittled. She was constantly just being dismissed as someone not very important of of no importance.”
Just one more example of “a woman of no importance” putting her head down and managing to change the world for the better, anyway.
Nevertheless, she persisted.
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The Auschwitz Memorial Actually Had to Ask Visitors to Stop Taking “Playful” Selfies
File this under “I don’t want to live on this planet anymore.”
You’d think that when visiting a place that will be indelibly associated with the absolute depth of human suffering and cruelty, people would take it seriously. And yet, I guess we can’t be too surprised by how insensitive people are.
The Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland is a site where over 1 million people were murdered during the Holocaust. I had the opportunity to visit it as a young lad with my parents, and the feeling you get there is indescribably sad. Indeed, the very air around the place is still thick with the misery of all those lost souls, to the point that even decades after my visit I still start to choke every time I think of it.
Unfortunately, due to the fact that visitors have been posting inappropriate photos from Auschwitz to social media, the memorial site had to put a tweet out admonishing that kind of ridiculous behavior.
When you come to @AuschwitzMuseum remember you are at the site where over 1 million people were killed. Respect their memory. There are better places to learn how to walk on a balance beam than the site which symbolizes deportation of hundreds of thousands to their deaths. pic.twitter.com/TxJk9FgxWl
— Auschwitz Memorial (@AuschwitzMuseum) March 20, 2019
The infamous train tracks of Auschwitz carried untold numbers of people to their deaths, and to see people acting this way has upset many. People on Twitter were taken aback by the trend and weighed in with their own opinions.
This is a very necessary post, our picture-taking habits are completely out of control. I may be visting in the summer, I will make sure I am aware of your photography policy. Thank you for all the essential work you continue to do. Without our historical memory we are nothing.
— Francesca
(@Just__Fran) March 20, 2019
I don’t understand why people use Auschwitz as a photo op or how they take cheerful selfies in front of a site that saw the murder of thousands of innocent people. I just can’t wrap my head around that one.
— Morgan Blythe (@tippotate) March 20, 2019
Amazing. How anyone could crack a smile within miles of that place is beyond me.
— Take a stand (@dailypaint) March 20, 2019
We visited on Monday, but couldn’t believe how many individuals took it as an attraction rather than a memorial. This is a site of mass extermination of many people. It’s a completely harrowing experience. pic.twitter.com/8QSFIuT1Vg
— Martin (@mdjcrimmins) March 20, 2019
There are simply no words for this kind of disrespect
— Ricky Edwards (@spongelover90) March 20, 2019
The Auschwitz Memorial later added these tweets.
It's simple: be respectful. https://t.co/qqb5rbwZur
— Auschwitz Memorial (@AuschwitzMuseum) March 23, 2019
Smiling is human. There are also human stories from #Auschwitz that can make people smile. You do not have to be solemn and stern all the time. Yet, there are some things which are simply disrespectful.
— Auschwitz Memorial (@AuschwitzMuseum) March 20, 2019
If you’re visiting a place where unfathomable atrocities took place, have some respect and be aware enough not to take cute selfies. Thank you.
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Here’s How 3 U.S. Soldiers Fooled 15,000 Nazis into Surrendering During WWII
There were some truly awesome war stories that came out of World War II, but the story of a U.S. soldier named Moffatt Burriss might be one of the absolute best.
In April 1945, Burriss was in Berlin as the war was winding down. He received orders from none other than General Dwight D. Eisenhower himself that he needed to stand down and let Russian troops take control of the city.
Photo Credit: Public Domain
By this point, Burriss had seen heavy combat in the Battle of the Bulge and in battles in Italy and the Netherlands, and he didn’t want to let the Russians take all the credit in Berlin.
Burriss recalled, “I said: ‘I can’t stand this any longer.’ I got in my Jeep with the lieutenant and sergeant and said, ‘Let’s go across the river and see what we can see, see if there are some [krauts] still over there…’”
That’s just the beginning of the tale. Watch the video of Burriss telling the rest of the amazing story in the video below.
After World War II, Burriss went on to become a successful businessman and a politician. He served in the South Carolina House of Representatives from 1977 to 1992. Burriss died in January 2019 at the age of 99.
A true American hero!
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In 1935 the Nazis held…
In 1935 the Nazis held a competition in which baby pictures were sent in and the “most beautiful Aryan baby” was chosen by Joseph Goebbels. The baby they picked, and used in propaganda for years, was actually Jewish; the photo had been sent in to make the Nazi party look ridiculous. 00