Eichmann’s List

ARTICLE BY Sarah Helm PUBLISHED ON A-FE

Another important “privileged” group were Jews in mixed marriages. Nazi hardliners argued that Jews married to non-Jews had “infected” the “Aryan” line & should be exterminated first, but Goebbels was still concerned about protests. These Jews were prosperous, & many had friends or relatives who were now senior Nazi figures. As Goebbels put it, the position of intermarried Jews was “sensitive” & their deportation was deferred.

Russian soldiers fighting their way through the rubble of Berlin in the last days of the war turned the corner of Iranische Strasse, in the district of Wedding, & came across an elegant building almost intact. Fanning out to search the structure, the Russians ransacked the place, room by room. Medical equipment & rows of beds showed that it had once been a hospital. Searching deep into the bowels of the building, the Russian liberators burst open cellar doors, & in the darkness made out hundreds of cowering figures – more than 800 people in all.

The soldiers swept through in an orgy of rape. Only when the Red Army commanders arrived was the question asked: “But who are you?”

“We are Jews.”

“You are Jews?” exclaimed the astonished Russians, whose path to Berlin had taken them through the smoldering remains of Nazi death camps. “Why aren’t you dead yet?”

The discovery that 800 Jews had survived Hitler’s Final Solution in the middle of Berlin staggered the city’s liberators. That they had survived in the full knowledge of the Nazi high command beggared all belief. The Russians had stumbled upon the last Jewish sanctuary in Germany – & upon an extraordinary story of survival. & yet over the years it has been a story that few have been able or willing to tell. Because how could this have happened? Who were these survivors? & what was Hitler’s sinister purpose in permitting them to live?

Among those 800 men & women were personal dramas of every kind. They were the bravest of the brave, the lucky & the cunning. They were collaborators & spies. There were also many “privileged” Jews – spouses of non-Jewish Germans. But most mysteriously, they were Jews whose lives had been protected by the highest-ranking Nazis. Little is known about them because their files were burnt by the Gestapo just days before the Russians arrived. [Read More]

The Red Orchestra

One of my favorite introductions to a novel.

From The Red Orchestra: The Soviet Spy Network Inside Nazi Europe by V.E. Tarrant

First, this is a story of a loosely connected group of Soviet spy apparats (networks) which operated in Nazi Germany, Nazi-occupied France, Belgium & Holland, & neutral Switzerland during the Second World War & which were collectively known as Die Rote Kapelle – The Red Orchestra.

The Red Orchestra was not only one of the strangest spy apparats in the history of espionage, it was also one of the most effective, playing a vital part in the eventual destruction of the vile scourge of Nazism. Its agents & informers included Russians, Polish Jews, Frenchmen, Belgians, Dutchmen, Hungarians, Swiss, Germans, & Englishmen. Although the Red Orchestra was a GRU (Glavno Razvedyvatelno Upravlenie, or Soviet Military Intelligence) apparat, its members included people from diverse political persuasions, ranging from committed Communists to right-wing conservatives, & from many different social classes, from aristocrats right across the spectrum to the proletariat. They included amongst their ranks professional GRU agents, businessmen, publishers, ordinary soldiers, a fortune teller & a group of high-ranking, strategically placed German officers who provided the Red agents with the day-to-day decisions & planning made by Hitler & the German High command relating to the course of the war on the Russian Front. This diverse collection of men & women, who in normal circumstances would have had very little in common, were united by a single common denominator – a hatred for Nazis.

The German counter-intelligence agencies became aware of the existence of the Red Orchestra shortly after Hitler launched his invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, & thus began a hunt for the Red agents by the Abwehr (Military Intelligence) & the Gestapo (Secret State Police) which lasted for over two years. During this time, by dint of slow, painstaking detective work, lucky breaks, the application of ‘intensified interrogation’ (the euphemism for torture) & betrayal, the German sleuths slowly prised open the Red Orchestra. But by the time the investigation had been brought to a successful conclusion the German forces on the Eastern Front had been defeated, thanks in the main to the information sent to Moscow by the Red Orchestra.

1. Strange Bleeps In The Ether

At 3:15 in the morning of Sunday, June 22nd, 1941 a gigantic radical lightening flash, followed a split second later by a deep thunderous roar, rippled along the German-Russian frontier as thousands of heavy-calibre guns simultaneously belched forth fire & steel. This massive bombardment heralded an onslaught by more than three million German troops, who poured over the Bug & Niemen rivers to invade the Soviet Union. Four days later, at 3:58AM on Thursday, June 26th, while Hitler’s panzers were smashing through the forward Russian defenses, a German long-range radio monitoring station sited at Kranz on the Baltic coast of East Prussia intercepted a Morse code message being tapped out on the key of a clandestine short-wave radio transmitter. The operator who intercepted this message had tuned in to the frequency employed by partisans of the Norwegian Resistance, who made nightly contact with London, usually relaying a short message consisting of no more than ten to a dozen cipher groups. But the call-sign the operator intercepted on the morning of June 26th was entirely different from those used by the Norwegians: ‘KLK from PTX… KLK from PTX… KLK from PTX. 2606.03.3032 wds. No. 14 qbv.’ This strange call-sign was followed by a message composed of thirty-two five-figure cipher groups, ending with the Morse signature ‘AR 503.85. KLK from PTX.’

During the course of the next four nights the Kranz station intercepted further messages from the PTX pianist (as an enemy radio operator was termed in German counter-espionage parlance), & when the nature of these messages was reported to Lieutenant-Colonel Hans Kopp, commanding officer of the Funkabwehr (Signals Security), whose headquarters was situated on the Matthaikirchplatz in central Berlin, he ordered the radio monitoring stations in Germany & Nazi-occupied Europe to pay special attention to the PTX transmissions: “Essential discover PTX schedule. Night frequency 10,363 kilocycles. Day frequency unknown. Priority 1a’.

As the PTX transmitter had burst into life only a few days after the invasion of the Soviet Union, Kipp was apprehensive that the recipient of the PTX messages might well be housed in Moscow & that the enciphered messages were the result of information gleaned by a Soviet spy ring at work somewhere in the Reich or the occupied territories. During the course of the next two months the monitoring stations intercepted some 250 messages taped out on the key of the PTX transmitter, but attempts to discover the location of the clandestine set by taking cross-bearings on the source of the signals produced inconclusive results: all that the radio experts could suggest was that PTX was operating from somewhere in an area covering southern Holland, Belgium, & north-eastern France. As it was essential to locate the city or town in which the pianist was holed up before a hunt by German counter-espionage agents could be mounted, such an imprecise report was as good as useless: they may as well have suggested the North Pole!

In the meantime, however, a far more disturbing report landed on Kopp’s desk. Early in July the monitoring stations at kranz & Breslau, while searching the air waves for further PTX transmissions, intercepted messages from a second transmitter which was employing the same five-figure cipher as the PTX pianist. In addition, it was noted that the schedules & frequencies employed by this second pianist were closely related to the modus operandi of PTX, which strongly suggested that the two pianists belonged to the same espionage apparat. Moreover, attempts by the monitoring stations to pin-point the location of this second transmitter by cross-bearings had produced far more positive & alarming results: it was housed somewhere within a radius of less than five miles from the Funkabwehr headquarters in the very heart of Hitler’s capital! To make matters worse, the Funkabwehr codes & cipher evaluation analysts had come to the conclusion that the cipher employed by both pianists was of Russian origin, which presented Kopp with the unpalatable certainty that a Soviet spy ring was at work in Germany.

Kopp reacted to this discovery as though he had received a violent electric shock, for on the eve of invasion of Russia the counter-espionage agencies in the Reich has assured Hitler that Germany had been swept clean of Communists & Soviet underground agents. Indeed, the campaign to smash the German Communist Party – in its day, the most powerful in Europe – along with the Communist espionage & informer organizations of the Comintern (Communist International) had commenced immediately after the Nazis sized power in January 1933. During the next eight years thousands of German Communists vanished behind the barbed wire of the concentration camps, while the Gestapo (Secret State Police), SD (SS Security Service) & Abwehr (Military Intelligence) methodically tracked down & liquidated the Comintern underground of saboteurs, informers & agents operating in the Nazi state.

This violent campaign to rid Germany of ‘reds’ had obviously not been thorough enough, as evidenced by the sudden appearance of the Berlin pianist. Goaded into action, Kopp dispatched three radio monitoring squads on to the streets of Berlin at the beginning of September to hunt down the enemy pianist, who had already relayed over 500 messages through the ether to Moscow. Theoretically, the location of a transmitter was a relatively easy matter. Three monitoring squads, each equipped with a direction-finder set (a receiver with a rotatable loop aerial) posted themselves at three different positions some miles from each other & each took a bearing on the clandestine transmitter when the pianist began tapping out his messages. The bearings were obtained by slowly turning the loop aerials until they reached a position where the enemy transmitter’s signal sounded loudest in the direction-finder receivers. The resulting data were then reported back to the squads’ commander, who drew the three reported lines of bearing across a street map commencing from the known positions of the three squads. The point at which the three lines intersected would then reveal the position of the transmitter on the street plan. That was the theory, but in practice the process of detection proved to be far more difficult.

When Kopp’s monitoring squads began their hunt, disguised in post office mechanics’ uniforms & employing post office maintenance vans & canvas street shelters to hide their bulky direction-finder sets, they found their task beset with problems. Unlike the PTX pianist who transmitted practically every night, the Berlin pianist functioned capriciously, alternating bouts of feverish activity with spells of silence which sometimes lasted for days at a time. To compound this difficulty the monitoring squads also had to cope with the pianist’s campaign of subterfuge. To throw the hounds off the scent he constantly changed his call-sign & transmitted on a variety of wavelengths. For example, on one particular night he put out his call-sign on 43 meters, received his acknowledgement from Moscow on 39 meters & then switched to 49 meters to transmit his message. He also introduced an additional stratagem by putting out a fresh call-sign when he switched from 43 to 49 meters, to give the impression that another transmitter had joined in.

To complicate matters still further, it soon became apparent from the bearings taken by three squads that the pianist was transmitting from three different places. Nevertheless, by October 21st, 1941 the detection squads had managed to narrow down the search to three approximate locations, each being less than two miles from Funkabwehr headquarters: one was near the Bayrische Platz to the south-west of Funkabwehr HQ, the second was to the eastward near the Moritzplatz & the third was due north in the area of Invalidenpark.

By this stage Kopp was confident that a few more days of short-range direction finding would pin-point the actual tenement blocks used by the pianist, & a raid launched when he was actually tapping out his messages would bag the elusive quarry. During the night of October 22nd the three squads searched the air waves in vain for the tap of the pianist’s key. Frustratingly, it seemed, the pianist had lapsed into one of his periodic bouts of silence. Night after night the three squads continued to search the air waves without success until, more than a week later, it dawned on Kopp that the pianist, by some ocular means, had discovered or been warned that the hounds were closing in for the kill.

Left with no alternative, Kopp withdrew his monitors & ordered the long-range stations to pay special attention to the Berlin area so that the Funkabwehr would be alerted should the wary pianist being transmitting again – if he ever did. In the meantime, Kopp had to admit defeat: the trail had gone cold.

Himmler’s Daughter Devotes Life to Hitler’s Henchmen

ARTICLE PUBLISHED ON CANADIAN CONTENT

Members of a charity group loyally devoted to helping their old friends met in secret last weekend.

They arrived in ones & twos at the nicely painted house with a well-tended lawn – ever on the look-out for any hidden observer who may have threatened their anonymity. In most countries, they would have passed for modest do-gooders anxious to conduct their benevolent work out of the public gaze.

But there is nothing humanitarian about this shadowy organization or the kindly looking old lady at the heart of its dark web. For the covert gathering was the quarterly meeting of Stille Hilfe – or Silent Aid – which has helped some of the Third Reich’s most evil fugitives from justice.

& one of its most revered and terrifying figures is the 81-year-old daughter of Heinrich Himmler, architect of the Holocaust. Mother-of-two Gudrun Himmler, known as the Princess of Stille Hilfe, joined other confederates of the Nazi aid group at a weekend summit in Munich.

During her childhood she worshipped her father, who organized the murder of six million Jews in the Second World War, & was worshipped in return.

As head of the Gestapo, he would have her flown to join him wherever he was on his mission to enslave the world. One of her visits was to Dachau, north of Munich, which served as the model for all of Nazi Germany’s other concentration camps. [Read More]

England Preps For Hitler

ARTICLE PUBLISHED ON A-FE

The book is mostly written in English suggesting it may have been intended to prepare future generations for rule in a Nazi government. It was published in 1942 – at the height of the German expansion across Europe.

The work portrays Adolf Hitler as a “great peacemaker” & even suggested Britain had sought an alliance with Germany. The book is decorated with a picture of Stratford-upon-Avon & attempts to give an insight into British cultural icons, including Shakespeare. Entitled ‘Hirts Englandkundliches Lesebuch fur die Oberstufe an Oberschulen’ [‘English Textbook theory for Colleges & High Schools’], the text lavishes praise on Hitler.

One section reads: “He made before the German people & the world several offers of peace, in words which were unequivocal, emotional & idealistic. He was called a liar in the world press. He offered France friendship saying that there was no further cause of quarrel between their two peoples. The French press spat on his outstretched hand & increased their military strength.” [Read More]

The Nazis Of Costa Del Sol

ARTICLE BY Olive Press PUBLISHED ON A-FE

In a verdant Elviria urbanization the smell of jasmine & honeysuckle hang heavy in the air & an anonymous two-bedroom bungalow sits below a towering cork oak tree.

A visitor could be forgiven for assuming that Las Cumbres was just another unremarkable costa suburb, but here, until the late 1990s, one of Hitler’s most loyal Nazi generals was able to live out a long & comfortable life.

Major general Otto Remer – who played a key role in quashing a major assassination plot against the Führer in 1940 – was able to spend his final years in the modest 220,000-euro house surrounded by Nazi memorabilia & his ‘glorious’ memories. Refusing to repent right up to his death in August 1997, he regularly received correspondence & visits from fellow Nazis around Spain, as well as his monthly subscription to the surprisingly legal fascist organ Halt.

Ultimately, the Nazi lived an enviable life on the sunshine coast, despite being a key member of Hitler’s Third Reich, which was responsible for the deaths of millions of innocent people around Europe during the Second World War. [Read More]

GM & The Nazis

ARTICLE BY EDWIN BLACK PUBLISHED ON A-FE

The Inside Story of How General Motors Secretly Mobilized the Third Reich To Conquer Europe (Part I)

James D. Mooney thrust his arm diagonally, watching its reflection in his hotel suite mirror. Not quite right. He tried once again. Still not right. Was it too stiff? Too slanted? Should his palm stretch perpendicular to the ceiling; should his arm bend at a severe angle? Or should the entire limb extend straight from shoulder to fingertips? Should his Sieg Heil project enthusiasm or declare obedience? Never mind, it was afternoon. Time to go see Hitler.

Just the day before, May 1, 1934, under a brilliant, cloudless sky, Mooney, president of the General Motors Overseas Corporation, climbed into his automobile & drove toward Tempelhof Field at the outskirts of Berlin to attend yet another hypnotic Nazi extravaganza. This one was the annual “May Day” festival.

Tempelhof Field was a sprawling, oblong-shaped airfield. But for May Day, the immense site was converted into parade grounds. Security was more than tense, it was paranoid. All cars entering the area were meticulously inspected for anti-Hitler pamphlets or other contraband. But not Mooney’s. The Fuhrer’s office had sent over a special windshield tag that granted the General Motors’ chief carte blanche to any area of Tempelhof. Mooney would be Hitler’s special guest.

As Mooney arrived at the airfield, about 3:30 in the afternoon, the spectacle dazzled him. Sweeping swastika banners stretching 33 feet wide & soaring 150 feet into the air fluttered from 43-ton steel towers. Each tower was anchored in 13 feet of concrete to resist the winds as steadfastly as the Third Reich resisted all efforts to moderate its program of rearmament & oppression. [Read More]

Corporate America & The Rise Of Hitler

ARTICLE BY BILL DOARES PUBLISHED ON A-FC

Between 1933 & 1945, Hitler’s Nazi regime conquered most of Europe & North Africa. It unleashed a war that took over 50 million lives. It forced tens of millions of people into slavery. & it carried out the biggest mass murder campaign of the 20th century. Six million Jewish people, half a million Romani’s, & millions of Slavic people were poisoned in gas chambers, shot, deliberately starved or tortured to death in fiendish scientific experiments. Hundreds of thousands of disabled people, gays, communists, socialists & other anti-Nazis–many of them German–were also murdered by Hitler. These crimes were carried out in the name of Nordic racial purity.

The nightmare came to an end on April 30, 1945. Hitler blew his brains out as victorious Soviet troops closed in on his underground bunker in Berlin. His closest ally, Italian Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini, had been executed by Italian Communist fighters a day earlier. On May 9 the Nazi armies surrendered. Clinton, Kohl & Yeltsin are sure to recount all this on the anniversary. They will say the horrors must never happen again. But it will all be hypocrisy. They will conceal the class character of World War II. They won’t say that Hitler & the Third Reich were creations of the capitalist profit system. They won’t say that the millions of Soviet soldiers who gave their lives to defeat the Nazi war machine were fighting under the red flag of socialism. & they won’t denounce the giant banks & corporations that financed fascism & profited from the Holocaust it unleashed. [Read More]

BMW & The Nazi Regime

ARTICLE BY GAIL EDMONDSON PUBLISHED ON A-FC

Automaker BMW is Germany’s most admired employer & a pioneer in profit sharing. So it came as a shock when an investigative television documentary exposed the Nazi-era misdeeds of BMW’s controlling shareholder family, the Quandts. The Silence of the Quandt Family highlighted how patriarch Günther Quandt, grandfather to the generation now controlling BMW (BMWG.DE), built a blood-stained wartime fortune on the back of slave labor & how he sidestepped postwar recrimination.

The reclusive Quandt family responded to the document, pledging to back a research project into the family’s Nazi past & its role under the Third Reich, opening family archives & documents to an independent historian. [Read More]

1. Initial Response To Aggression

In October 1937, America was a nation sharply divided between isolationists & interventionists. World War I had been a great disappointment. President Woodrow Wilson had promised in April 1917 that American entry into the war would bring about lasting world peace. Yet the onerous terms of the 1919 Treaty of Versailles, never ratified by the United States, made another European war more, rather than less, likely.

American disillusionment intensified during the mid-1930s, when Senator Gerald P. Nye of North Dakota sponsored a series of congressional hearings to investigate World War I munition sales. President Wilson had declared that the war was being fought to make the world “safe for democracy,” yet Nye showed that the war had also been fought, at least in part, to safeguard the US-backed international loans & enrich American war profiteers. Arms manufacturers were Nye’s favorite target because, as he revealed, these so-called merchants of death had made huge fortunes before 1917 selling exorbitantly priced munitions to both sides.

The resulting public outrage moved Congress to pass a series of four increasingly restrictive neutrality acts that shackled US foreign policy during the years leading up to World War II. The first of these laws, passed in August 1935, forbade all arms sales to belligerent nations once the president had determined that a state of war existed among them. Because the law made no distinction victim & aggressor, there was little the president or his interventionist cabinet could do to counter the expansionism then being practiced by Germany, Italy, & Japan. In fact, in July 1937, when Japan instigated a war with China, the president chose not to acknowledge the conflict formally because doing so would have forced him to bar all weapons sales to our Chinese allies.

Instead, Roosevelt made another sort of public statement. Motivated by Japan’s aggression in China (as well as German & Italian adventurism in Spain & elsewhere), the president decided to take on the isolationists directly in his famous “quarantine” speech. It’s often forgotten that, when immediate public reaction proved somewhat negative, Roosevelt quickly backed off the strong words he spoke that day in October 1937. Yet the Quarantine Speech nevertheless proved prophetic, expressing thoughts & attitudes that would only grow stronger in Roosevelt’s mind as the international situation worsened & war drew near.

The Truth About Pius & The Nazi Ratlines

POPE PIUS XII

For the past few years, Catholic revisionists have been busily pumping out historically inaccurate articles denying any Church role in the Holocaust whatsoever. These seemingly sober, knowledgable “scholars” often emphasize anecdotal evidence that individual Catholics, including Pope Pius XII, aided Jewish victims of the Hitler regime, & downplay Vatican ties to mass murder, or “conspiracy theories.” The following story was published in two Catholic publications. While attempting to distance Pius from the genocide, it at least acknowledges that prominent Catholics did collaborate with the Nazis, & makes a valid point: Officers of the CIA were the ultimate postwar Nazi collaborators, & they went to great lengths to protect Nazi recruits from exposure.

The author makes no mention of Naumovic v. SNB C-00-3636 BZ – a lawsuit filed on behalf of Russian & Yugoslavian Holocaust victims who exposed the trail of gold looted by the Waffen SS & laundered by the Reichsbank, Swiss Banks, Bank for International Settlements & the Vatican Bank during WWII – etc., & claims there is “no evidence” of collusion between Pius, Vatican officials & the Nazis. For a direct & documented refutation, see Blowback, by Christopher Simpson, Vladimer Dedijer’s The Yugoslav Auschwitz & The Vatican, & numerous others. Furthermore, of the ratlines actually ran through the Vatican itself, & escaping Nazis were disguised as priests to faciliate their relocation to South America, the United States & elsewhere around the globe.

The Catholic priests who [helped] the Nazis, did so in a big way. They turned more than a blind eye to the criminal pasts of those they helped, & it is fair to say that without the assistance of such priests, the Nazis could never have fled Europe in such vast numbers.

The two most vital priestly cogs in the system of machinery that enabled the Nazis to escape through Austria & Italy were the Croatian Roman Catholic priest Krunoslav Draganovic & the Austrian Bishop Alois Hudal. A keen supporter of Pavelic & his barbaric Ustashi, Draganovic served as a chaplain at Jasenovac concentration camps, where thousands were slaughtered in the most bestial fashion. Draganovic also played a key role in the “Bureau of Colonisation” which forced Serbs to convert to Catholicism, as well as stealing their property & giving it to Croatians. In the words of one US intelligence officer, Draganovic thought that “the ideas espoused by this arch-nationalist organisation – half-logical, half-lunatic – are basically sound concepts”.

After the war, Draganovic travelled around internment camps in northern Italy & Austria checking on the fate of the Ustashi members who had been captured. However, Draganovic’s “relief work” also involved sheltering his comrades at San Girolamo, the Croatian monastery in Rome, there, on the mezzanine floor, Draganovic founded the Committee of Croatian Refugees in Rome, which was nothing less than a front for his people-smuggling activity.

The Americans & the British managed to infiltrate a spy into the monastery, who discovered that the Ustashi were being ferried around in cars bearing Vatican diplomatic plates.

[But] the ultimate protectors of Pavelic were not members of the Vatican, but the Allies themselves. In mid-July 1947, an operation mooted by the Americans & the British to arrest Pavelic was suddenly cancelled with the simple order “Hands off”, for reasons that are still opaque. It is fashionable to suggest that an arrest would reveal the complicity of the Vatican in assisting Pavelic, but it is just as likely that the Allies did not wish for the former dictator to be arrested because to have done so would have alienated a vast number of Croatians who were being used as informers in the nascent Cold War against the Soviet Union.

Whether Pavelic ended up being of any use to the Allies is doubtful, but we do know that Draganovc was more than helpful. It was Draganovic who ran the “ratline” down which the Gestapo officer-turned-American agent Klaus Barbie & his family would scuttle in March 1951. Draganovic would spend many years in & out of contact with the CIA, & he was eventually dropped on the grounds of his utter untrustworthiness.

No less a controversial character is that of Alois Hudal, who was the rector of the Austro-German church & seminary, the Santa Maria dell’Anima on the Via della Pace. It is this Austrian bishop who, more than any other figure, did so much to give the Catholic Church its reputation as a Nazi conduit. Although not an out-&-out Nazi, Hudal was broadly sympathetic to much of the fascist creed, but he disliked the idea that a man – in the form of Hitler – could replace God. Nevertheless, his hatred for Communism & his intense nationalism made him sympathetic to many fleeing Nazis, & under the auspices of his Assistenza Austriaca, Hudal enabled hundreds of criminals to flee to Argentina & the Middle East.

Perhaps the most murderous was Franz Stangl, the commandant of Treblinka, who is estimated to have overseen the slaughter of some 780,000 Jews. When Stangl arrived in Rome in August 1948, his first port of call was Hudal, & today the archives of the seminary still contain the handwritten CV that Stangl presented to the bishop upon his arrival. Although the document omits Stangl’s service at Treblinka, it does reveal that he had been an SS captain. Had Hudal wanted to find out more, he could have done so, but Hudal was not the type of man who would have asked such questions. Instead, he secured Stangl a passage to Syria & a job at a textile mill.

Although it is impossible to ascertain precisely the extent and size of Hudal’s network, there can be no doubt that he worked in cahoots with all sorts of nefarious figures, from Argentinian secret agents to people-smugglers motivated by cash. Hudal’s motivation might have had its roots in charity & converting more souls to Catholicism, but in doing so, he helped some of the worst murderers of the 20th century to escape.

From The Truth about Pius and the Nazi Ratlines, John L. Jr. Allen

The Ratlines

FROM THE MAY 2010 Trumpet PRINT EDITION PUBLISHED ON A-FE

Adolf Eichmann, “the architect of the Holocaust,” escaped from Europe after World War II & remained hidden for 15 years before being captured. Germany holds a cache of sealed files detailing this history & is fighting to keep it secret despite critics’ objections. Some observers believe the documents would shed embarrassing additional light on German-Vatican collusion on the “ratlines,” an already proven postwar operation to protect Nazi leaders. [Read More]

Volkswagen & The Nazis

ARTICLE BY DIANNA BULLOCK PUBLISHED ON A-FE

Years after the Beetle became associated with peace, the world learned the true extent of the company’s Nazi-related history.

In 1937, the Nazi Party, allied with auto engineer & Beetle designer Ferdinand Porsche, formed the state-owned Volkswagen company. A year later, Hitler presided over the tightly controlled, propaganda-heavy groundbreaking ceremony for the new Volkswagen plant before a crowd of 70,000 ‘Heil!’-chanting faithful. Ferdinand Porsche was a willing, ‘morally indifferent’ participant in Hitler’s regime. Volkswagen hired some 20,000 forced laborers, prisoners of war, & concentration camp inmates from Auschwitz, Dachau, & Bergen-Belsen. Kept behind barbed wire in horrible living conditions, they worked for Volkswagen to manufacture grenades, land mines, military vehicles, warplanes, & V-1 flying bombs. They were subjected to malnutrition & savagely beaten for trying to feed themselves from food scraps off the floor. [Read More]

IBM & Auschwitz

ARTICLE BY EDWIN BLACK PUBLISHED ON A-FE

The infamous Auschwitz tattoo began as an IBM number.

In August 1943, a timber merchant from Bendzin, Poland, arrived at Auschwitz. He was among a group of 400 inmates, mostly Jews. First, a doctor examined him briefly to determine his fitness for work. His physical information was noted on a medical record. Second, his full prisoner registration was completed with all personal details. Third, his name was checked against the indices of the Political Section to see if he would be subjected to special punishment. Finally, he was registered in the Labor Assignment Office and assigned a characteristic five-digit IBM Hollerith number, 44673.

The five-digit Hollerith number was part of a custom punch card system devised by IBM to track prisoners in Nazi concentration camps, including the slave labor at Auschwitz. [Read More]

The Pope, Eichmann & the Nazi ‘Ratlines’

ARTICLE BY JULIAN KOSSOFF PUBLISHED ON A-FE

Germany is fighting to keep sealed the Adolf Eichmann files detailing the years the Holocaust chief logistical organiser spent on the run before he was captured by Mossad agents.

Those hoping to have a 50-year secrecy order overturned believe the government is embarrassed by details within that may prove German & Vatican officials colluded in his escape and freedom. [Read More]

Code-Breaking

In the case of the Enigma, the first solutions were made by hand by mathematicians relying on German operators’ errors.

Harry Hinsley, assistant at Bletchley Park

The Allies’ ability to break German & Japanese codes during World War II was of critical importance – so much so that operations & lives were sacrificed rather than alert the enemy to the fact that their codes had been broken. Thousands of people worked on code-breaking, most notably at Bletchley Park in Buckinghamshire, England.

At the end of World War I the Germans had developed a cipher machine called Enigma that they thought could produce an unbreakable code. However, in the 1930s, Polish cryptologists cracked the code &, in 1939, passed their expertise onto the British who set up a top-secret code-breaking group under the gifted mathematician Alan Turing at the country house of Bletchley Park, 50 miles north of London. At the height of the war, thousands of radio intercepts a day were passing through Bletchley Park, including messages from Hitler himself. The resulting intelligence, known as Ultra, was circulated to only a restricted circle of Allied commanders. Later in the war, other German codes had to be broken. To do that the first programmable computer, called Colossus, was developed at Bletchley Park. The British won the Battle of Britain & the Battle of the Atlantic largely because they managed to read Luftwaffe & U-boat signals. Reading Hitler’s messages to his commanders also led to the destruction of German forces during Operation Overlord following the D-Day landings. Code-breaking also allowed the British to arrest German spies as well as send false intelligence & judge its effect.

OPERATION DOUBLECROSS

We read all the Enigma signals of the German Abwehr [Military Intelligence] which meant that we captured every spy that arrived in the United Kingdom by having advanced knowledge of his arrival. Which meant that we could turn such as we needed & use them to send messages we wanted the Abwehr to receive, & monitor the reception & the reaction of the Abwehr. All that signal intelligence underlay the effective use of what was called the Doublecross Operation for the purposes both of stopping German reception of intelligence – other than false intelligence – & also of creating deception by sending them false intelligence.

PURPLE

The Germans supplied Enigma machines to the Japanese, who developed their own code called Purple. The British broke this too & handed over the “Magic” decoders to the US in time for American code-breakers to decipher the diplomatic traffic between the Japanese Embassy in Washington & Tokyo before Pearl Harbor (December 7th, 1941). Although this failed to alert the US to the attack, decrypting Japanese messages played a significant part in US naval victories in the Coral Sea & at Midway in 1941-42. It also allowed American pilots to shoot down the plane carrying Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, the architect of the Pearl Harbor attack, on April 18th, 1943.