Jonesing
May 21, 2009
Where To Place The Guantanamo Detainees
May 21, 2009
Persistence
May 21, 2009
Graduations
May 21, 2009
Obama In The Lead
May 21, 2009
Michael Vick House Arrest
May 21, 2009
If There Were Real Justice…
May 21, 2009
Nancy Waterboards
May 21, 2009
Meet The New Guy
May 21, 2009
Nancy’s Slip
May 21, 2009
Nancy’s Turn
May 21, 2009
The Germans are responsible for the industrial-scale mass murder of 6 million Jews. But the collusion of other European countries in the Holocaust has received surprisingly little attention until recently. The trial of John Demjanjuk is set to throw a spotlight on Hitler’s foreign helpers.
He’s been here before, in this country of perpetrators. He saw this country collapse. He was 25 at the time and his Christian name was Ivan, not John; not yet.
Ivan Demjanjuk served as a guard in Flossenbürg concentration camp until shortly before the end of World War II. He had been transferred there from the SS death camp in Sobibor in present-day Poland. He was Ukrainian, and he was a Travniki, one of the 5,000 men who helped Germany’s Nazi regime commit the crime of the millennium — the murder of all the Jews in Europe, the “Final Solution.”
….But it’s already clear that this last big Nazi trial in Germany will be a deeply extraordinary one because it will for the first time put the foreign perpetrators in the spotlight of world publicity. They are men who have until now received surprisingly little attention — Ukrainian gendarmes and Latvian auxiliary police, Romanian soldiers or Hungarian railway workers. Polish farmers, Dutch land registry officials, French mayors, Norwegian ministers, Italian soldiers — they all took part in Germany’s Holocaust.
Experts such as Dieter Pohl of the German Institute for Contemporary History estimate that more than 200,000 non-Germans — about as many as Germans and Austrians — “prepared, carried out and assisted in acts of murder.” And often they were every bit as cold-blooded as Hitler’s henchmen…
In the killing fields of Eastern Europe, there were up to 10 local helpers for every German policeman. The ratio is similar in the extermination camps. Not in Auschwitz, which was run almost entirely by Germans, but in Belzec (600,000 killed), Treblinka (900,000 deaths) or in Demjanjuk’s Sobibor…
Was the Holocaust a European Project?
Such a stupefying number of victims raises disturbing questions, and Berlin historian Götz Aly already started asking them a few years ago: was the so-called Final Solution in fact a “European project that cannot be explained solely by the special circumstances of German history”?
Moonbat Mother’s Day
May 21, 2009
Future Press Conference
May 21, 2009
‘Dramatic’ resurgence in rape and murder
May 21, 2009
There has been a huge increase in rapes and killings in eastern DR Congo by armed groups – including Congolese government troops – since Kinshasa announced imminent operations against rebels, a UN spokesperson said.
Elisabeth Byrs, spokesperson for the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), told FRANCE 24 in a telephone interview that there had been a “dramatic” resurgence in rapes and attacks in Sud-Kivu province, with civilians burned alive in their homes, and added that both government and rebel groups were responsible.
Sud-Kivu and particularly Nord-Kivu provinces, on the country’s eastern border, remain volatile after five years of a regional war fought across the country (1998-2003), followed by a civil war in the east.
Apart from internal conflict, hundreds of thousands of civilians have been displaced in the east and northeast of the DR Congo by the activities of rebels from neighbouring Rwanda and Uganda.
“Any man in a military uniform in the area is a threat to the safety of these vulnerable villagers,” Byrs said. “Since April there has been a huge increase in extortion, rape, and murder,” she added.
Byrs said the violence was directly linked to increased militarization in the region following the announcement of impending operations against rebel groups, including Hutu rebels group FDLR and Mai-Mai militia.
“They are taking advantage of a period of limbo between the announcement of operations and actual deployment to create havoc and chaos in the region,” said Byrs.
“There is a clear link between militarization and rape.
“Rape has always been used as a weapon of war, and without this situation becoming public knowledge, it could go on and on with total impunity. Enough is enough,” she added.
Burned alive
Some 1,128 homes were burned down in three villages during attacks in which 77 people were killed with machetes and knives then burned alive in one attack by the FDLR, according to the UN.
“There is terrible violence currently in Sud-Kivu, especially in the region of Kakeli,” Byrs explained.
During the first three months of the year, 463 rape cases were recorded in most of the province, equivalent to more than half of the total cases registered there last year.
FRANCE 24 correspondent Arnaud Zaijtman, who is based in the DRC, says the report proves that a current lull in fighting between Government troops and rebel militias has hidden the reality of increasing violence.
According to Zajtman: “Combatants who were previously supported by Rwanda have joined the DRC national army – but they have kept many of their weapons and money to keep up their illegal attacks.”
“There is a definite feeling that fighting will erupt again. And the rebels are taking advantage of the lull to get more funds and more weapons to fight,” our correspondent adds.
The Wrong Toolbox
May 21, 2009
