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Good Nazi/Bad Nazi ( & the the Man who annoyed Hitler TV Show)
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20-08-2011 10:25am#1I am often fascinated with induvidual human behaviour as much as groups. And the BBC 2 have announced a show which neatly fits it.
Details of the show are below.
I also would like to know a bit about the unsung heroes -those who saved others. Like, I know who Anne Frank is but not the family who hid the Frank family.
So it isn't really about Nazi opponents and their politics but individuals and Nazis who used their power to settle personal scores.The Man Who Crossed Hitler, is broadcast at 21:00 on 21 August on BBC Two
The accompanying documentary, Hans Litten Vs Adolf Hitler: To Stop A Tyrant, goes out on BBC Two on 27 August at 20:00 BST
I think it may be on a Thursday Night so I will miss it.Hans Litten: The man who annoyed Adolf Hitler
By Jon Kelly BBC News Magazine
Continue reading the main story
A new drama tells the story of a Jewish lawyer who confronted Hitler 80 years ago - earning the dictator's life-long hatred. So who was Hans Litten?
In the Berlin courtroom, Adolf Hitler's face burned a deep, furious red.
The future dictator was not accustomed to this kind of scrutiny.
But here he was, being interrogated about the violence of his paramilitary thugs by a young man who represented everything he despised - a radical, principled, fiercely intelligent Jewish lawyer called Hans Litten.
The Nazi leader was floundering in the witness stand. And when Litten asked why his party published an incitement to overthrow the state, Hitler lost his composure altogether.
"That is a statement that can be proved by nothing!" he shouted.
Litten's demolition of Hitler's argument that the Nazis were a peaceful, democratic movement earned the lawyer years of brutal persecution.
Continue reading the main story “Start Quote
Even his closest friends said he wasn't good with people”Benjamin Carter Hett Litten's biographer
He was among the first of the fuehrer's political opponents to be rounded up after the Nazis assumed power. And even long afterwards, Hitler could not bear to hear his one-time tormentor's name spoken.
But although he was among the first to confront Hitler, Litten remains a little-known figure.
Now a drama and an accompanying documentary tell the story of a cantankerous, flawed but ultimately heroic man.
Litten was, long before he confronted the dictator, a staunch anti-Nazi. Although his father, a law professor, had converted from Judaism to Christianity and played down his background to further his career, the young Litten went in the opposite direction, joining a Jewish youth group and learning Hebrew out of a mixture of adolescent rebellion and sympathy for the dispossessed.
As a lawyer, he specialised in defending workers and rank-and-file members of the German Communist Party (KPD). However, he was no Stalinist, clashing with the KPD leadership for following Moscow's orders. "Two people are too many for my party," he would say.
Indeed, his hard-line adherence to his principles meant Litten was not always regarded as sympathetic character.
"He was a saint. But I have a feeling that, if I sat down to have a beer with him, I wouldn't like him," says Benjamin Carter Hett, author of Crossing Hitler: The Man Who Put the Nazis on the Witness Stand, a biography of Litten.
"He was in many ways a difficult man to deal with. He was doctrinaire in his politics. Even his closest friends said he wasn't good with people."
However, it was Litten's belligerence, as well as his forensic intelligence, that made his interrogation of Hitler so effective.
In 1931, Litten sought to have criminal charges brought against four members of the Nazi party's Sturmabteilung (SA) paramilitary group after they attacked a dance hall frequented by communists, killing three people.
Litten called Hitler as a witness, hoping to expose the Nazi party's deliberate strategy of overthrowing democracy by bringing terror to the streets. Hitler had previously assured middle-class voters that the SA was an organisation dedicated to "intellectual enlightenment".
Over three hours in May 1931, this claim was dismantled by Litten's precise, detailed questioning.
At first, Hitler insisted to Litten that he was committed to "100% legality". But his composure began to crack when Litten asked him why he had been accompanied by armed men. "That is complete lunacy," the Nazi leader barked.
“If you were going to come up with a person that Hitler would loathe, it would be him”Laurence Rees Historian
But the decisive blow came when Hitler was asked why the Nazi party had published a pamphlet by Joseph Goebbels, Hitler's chief propagandist, which promised the movement would "make revolution" and "chase parliament to the devil" using "German fists".
Asked by Litten how Goebbels's rise up the Nazi hierarchy could be squared with a commitment to legality, Hitler began to stammer and "search convulsively for an answer", according to one contemporary newspaper report of the trial.
According to World War II historian Laurence Rees, writer and director of the television series Nazis: A Warning from History, it was not Litten's focus on the Nazis' violent methods that enraged Hitler the most. By 1931, most Germans could not fail to have noticed that the SA were brutal streetfighters, he says. And Hitler himself was accustomed to - and indeed thrived on - the venomous abuse directed at him from opponents.
My uncle, Hans Litten
Actress Patricia Litten, 57, lives in Nuremberg, Germany
I grew up in Switzerland. My father was the only one of the three Litten sons who survived.
As a child I was aware of the absent family but my father didn't like to speak about it.
Today very, very few people know much about Hans Litten. But I think it's so important that we talk about him.
Even in this horrible system, the Third Reich, there were people who kept up the fight - Hans could have ran away, but he stayed because of his clients.
I don't know if I could have been so strong.
Out there in the world right now there are people who will do what he did - even if it will cost their lives.
But, he says, Litten's meticulous, carefully reasoned questioning was guaranteed to enrage him.
"What drove Hitler berserk is that here is someone taking him coolly and calmly through the evidence," says Rees.
"He hates that kind of intellectual argument - he prefers either haranguing or sulking. It's not just Litten's Jewishness. If you were going to come up with a person that Hitler would loathe, it would be him."
The trial was widely publicised and marked out Litten as a hate figure in the Nazi press, which called for him to be physically attacked.
As Hitler edged closer to power, friends urged Litten to flee Germany. But he refused. "The millions of workers can't get out," he said. "So I must stay here as well."
Soon the Nazis were in control. When the new regime used the Reichstag fire in February 1933 as an excuse to suspend civil liberties, Litten was among the first to be rounded up.
Over the next five years he was held in a succession of notorious concentration camps including Sonnenburg, Dachau and Buchenwald. He was singled out for especially brutal treatment at the hands of the guards, who knew full well of the fuehrer's personal antipathy towards him.
Nonetheless, throughout his incarceration he was admired by his fellow inmates for his kindness towards them and his insistence on keeping his dignity intact. When the guards ordered prisoners to stage a performance in celebration of a Nazi anniversary, Litten read out a poem called Thoughts Are Free.
By February 1938, he could endure no more. He took his own life by hanging himself. He was 34.
“There are still Hans Littens around the world today”
Mark Hayhurst Film-maker
After the Nazi regime was finally smashed, Litten's reputation as a staunch opponent of Hitler was revived. A plaque in Berlin was dedicated to him in 1951, the headquarters of the German bar association is at Hans Litten House and the lawyers' association of Berlin named itself itself the Hans Litten Bar Association after reunification.
Yet his name is not widely known. According to Mark Hayhurst, who wrote and directed the BBC drama and documentary about Litten, he was a victim of cold war politics - his left-wing sympathies meant he was overlooked in the West, and his attacks on the Stalinist hierarchy caused him to be neglected in the Soviet Bloc.
With these divisions now buried for a generation, Hayhurst hopes that Litten can be reclaimed as a figurehead for resisting tyranny.
"There are still Hans Littens around the world today," he says. "He's still an inspiration."
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-145725784
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The first time I heard of people like Hans Litten was Marlene Dietrich who was the first high profile anti-nazi campaignerOne cannot speak of Marlene Dietrich without thinking of personality. She had brains, beauty, and most of all, power - something most women of her era found hard to tackle. Born in Germany in 1901, she became a much beloved actress in Nazi-Germany, but never did she feel this a goal. Unlike most, she despised all that the Nazi Party stood for and refused to become the iconic entertainer for their regime.
After winning the leading role of "Lola Lola" in Josef von Sternberg's Der Blaue Engel (The Blue Angel), her work in Germany ended by choice, and on the day of the film's premiere in 1930, she fled for the United States. Upon her arrival in America, Dietrich performed for Allied troops and was often heard referring to Hitler as "an idiot."
She was an anomaly for her time by defying all that the Nazis stood for. Life could have been made very easy for Marlene if she had followed orders and become the star that Hitler and Goebbels wished she would. Though she was famous in Germany before her departure, she became much more infamous for defying their ideals. Her beauty was quintessential of the aimed for Aryan features, but by sticking to her own beliefs and morals, she showed everyone that she was much more than "a pretty face" and did not simply stand by and watch Hitler destroy the world. Her strong opposition against the Nazi powers were rewarded in 1947 by receiving the U.S. War Department's 'Medal of Freedom' for entertaining troops throughout World War II and also for her strong stance against Nazism.
Thirty years after leaving her homeland, Dietrich paid a visit to Berlin and was received by an angry group of picketers urging her to "go home."
http://www.history.ucsb.edu/faculty/marcuse/classes/33d/projects/naziwomen/marlene.htmFilm goddess and tarnished angel
“The Germans and I no longer
speak the same language.”
— Marlene Dietrich in 1960 after a sometimes stormy reception
in her native Germany. (Quoted in Blue Angel by Donald Spoto.)
Part of the Berlin Marlene Dietrich Collection was on display in Hollywood a few years ago. PHOTO: Hyde Flippo
Starting with her breakthrough role as the sultry, unfaithful cabaret singer Lola Lola in The Blue Angel (Der blaue Engel) in 1930, Marlene Dietrich, the “Kraut” (as Ernest Hemingway called his pal), went on to make film history with her alluring looks in films such as Blonde Venus (1932), Destry Rides Again (1939), Witness for the Prosecution (1957), and Judgment at Nuremberg (1961). In a varied career of acting, singing, and dancing, Dietrich conquered Las Vegas and Broadway in the 1960s, and went on a world tour in the 1970s. Over a period of several decades Marlene Dietrich was the ultimate Hollywood woman of mystery and a symbol of erotic allure for several generations of moviegoers.
She was born December 27, 1901 in Schöneberg (now part of Berlin) as the second daughter of Louis Erich Otto Dietrich and Wilhelmina Elisabeth Josephine Felsing. (Most people never knew that Marlene had an older sister, Elisabeth, and they were unlikely to ever learn about it from Marlene.) Herr Dietrich was a police lieutenant, and his newest daughter was born in their modest apartment at Sedanstraße 53 (now Leberstraße 65). The future film star, who would later declare, “When you’re dead, you’re dead. That’s it,” was given the angelic name Maria Magdalene. Her family called her Lene (LAY-na) or Leni and this may have influenced her when at the age of only thirteen she cut out the center part of “Maria Magdalene” to form the unique name Marlene. She would later use this childhood creation to identify the budding film star who was to be known around the world as Marlene Dietrich.
Marlene’s father died when she was only five (in 1907). She and her sister were raised by her mother. (Wilhelmina was later married briefly to Eduard von Losch, giving rise to biographic confusion over Marlene’s surname, which was always Dietrich.)
The author pays his respects at Dietrich’s resting place in Berlin. The gravestone inscription says, “Here I stand at the marks of my days.”* Nearby lies her mother’s grave. Husband Rudi was buried in California in 1976 — without Marlene in attendance. PHOTO: Cheryl Flippo
Dietrich’s cemetery: 3. Städtischer Friedhof (Waldfriedhof in Friedenau), Stubenrauchstr. 43-45, 12161 Berlin.
From the beginning, Dietrich was a rebel, running counter to what people expected and social mores. Later she was a married woman (until husband Rudi Sieber’s death in 1976) who spent little time with her husband and had numerous affairs with both men and women throughout her film career. Thanks to her daughter Maria (Sieber) Riva (who gives Dietrich a low rating as a mother), Dietrich became a grandmother in 1948, with her still-alluring picture adorning the August 9th cover of Life magazine. She often dressed as a man and sang in films and on stage in a style that could be interpreted as lesbian or bisexual at a time when such things were just not done. (This was no doubt influenced by her life in the wild and woolly Berlin of the 1920s.) But Dietrich, even as a child, had a certain aura and strength of character that often made people overlook her flaws and excesses.
*Dietrich’s gravestone quotation is adapted from... “Abschied vom Leben” (“Farewell to Life”)
by Carl Theodor Körner (1791-1813)
A sonnet written during the night of June 17-18, 1813 as
the poet lay wounded in war and expecting to die.
First verse in German and English:
Die Wunde brennt, die bleichen Lippen beben,
Ich fühl’s an meines Herzens mattem Schlage,
Ich stehe an den Marken meiner Tage!
Gott, wie Du willst! Dir hab ich mich ergeben.
My deep wound burns; my pale lips quake in death
I feel my fainting heart resign its strife,
And reaching now the limit of my life,
Lord, to thy will I yield my parting breath!
After her arrival in Hollywood with Blue Angel director Josef von Sternberg, the two made a series of successful films together. Dietrich starred in such notable films as Morocco (1930), Shanghai Express (1932), Blonde Venus (1932), and The Devil is a Woman (1935). (See Dietrich’s full filmography.) After the two went their separate ways, Dietrich had a rough patch before regaining her footing once again as “Frenchy” in Destry Rides Again (1939) opposite Jimmy Stewart.
Marlene Dietrich autographs the cast on the leg of Tech 4 Earl E. McFarland at an American hospital in Belgium, where she was entertaining the troops in 1944. PHOTO: National Archives
As a USO entertainer in World War II, often in uniform and near the front, Marlene displayed her devotion to her adopted country. (Dietrich became a US citizen in 1939.) She seemed to thrive on entertaining the troops and cavorting about in uniform. But this patriotic act was perceived by many in her native land as treason (ignoring the fact that Dietrich was anti-Nazi, not anti-German). In 1947 Marlene Dietrich received the US Medal of Freedom for her war efforts.
In 1960, for the first time since leaving Germany 30 years before, she performed on stage in her hometown of Berlin. She drew a mixed reaction of adulation and “Marlene Go Home!” As a result, she firmly refused to return to Germany until after her death. (“The Germans and I no longer speak the same language.”)
The Marlene-Dietrich-Platz street sign in Berlin. Photo © H. Flippo
All this colored several attempts to honor the exiled actress by naming a Berlin street for her in the late 1990s. Even her home district of Schöneberg refused to rename a street for her! That only became possible with the construction of the new Potsdamer Platz complex, where a small square (rather than a street) was officially dubbed Marlene-Dietrich-Platz in February 1998. (See photo.) On the occasion of Dietrich’s 100th birthday in 2001, the Berlin government officially apologized for its past snubs, but amazingly there were still protests when the Berlin-born star was postumously made an honorary citizen of Berlin on May 16, 2002. In her seventies, problems with those famous Dietrich legs, other health concerns, and obsessive vanity led her to withdraw from public view. Her last stage appearance was in Sydney, Australia (where she fell and broke her left leg) in September 1975. Dietrich made her last film appearance in Just a Gigolo (1979) at the age of 77 — lured back into a studio by $250,000 for two half-days work. Thirteen years later, a sad recluse, alcoholic, and a prisoner of her own legend, Marlene Dietrich died in Paris at her Avenue Montaigne apartment in 1992. She is buried in her native Berlin. Her vast memorabilia collection was acquired by the city-state of Berlin in 1993 for 8 million marks ($5 million). Many objects from the collection are now housed in a special exhibit at the Film Museum (Deutsche Kinemathek) in the Sony Center at Potsdamer Platz in the German capital city.
http://www.german-way.com/cinema/bio-marlene-dietrich.html
What the fuss was about
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Gert Frobe- a familiar face to many Bond fans but his membership of the Nazi party led to Goldfinger being banned from the state of Israel until a Jewish man came forward and revealed that Gert had helped hide him and his mother during the War.
New York Times 1988Gert Frobe, the German actor who starred as Goldfinger in the James Bond film of that name, died of a heart attack today in a Munich hospital. He was 75 years old.
Mr. Frobe appeared in nearly 100 movies, but was best known for his role as the greedy villain in the 1964 Bond film. He also appeared in the 1965 Hollywood movie ''Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines'' and in Rene Clement's ''Is Paris Burning?'' in 1966. In Nazi Party, but Hid 2 Jews
Mr. Frobe's agent, Pal Berkovicsa, said the actor had suffered a heart attack about a week ago at a spa at Starnberger Lake near Munich
In 1965, Mr. Frobe made headlines when he was quoted by the British newspaper The Daily Mail as saying: ''Naturally I was a Nazi.''
Mr. Frobe denied making the comment. ''What I told an English reporter during an interview,'' he said, ''was that during the Third Reich I had the luck to be able to help two Jewish people, although I was a member of the Nazi party.''
Israel banned Mr. Frobe's films for several months until a Jew, Mario Blumenau, informed the Israeli Embassy in Vienna that his life and his mother's had probably been saved when Mr. Frobe hid them from the Nazis.
Mr. Frobe, whose given name was Karl-Gerhard, was born on Feb. 25, 1913, in the town of Planitz in what is now East Germany. He studied theater during the early years of the Third Reich. After theaters were closed by the Nazis in 1944, he was drafted into the German Army, in which he served until the end of World War II.0 -
And there was Albert Himmler , Heinrichs brother , who was very much a Schindler type characterChildren of Light and Darkness: Goering’s Brother Saved Jews
Albert Goering, the brother of Nazi mastermind Hermann who planned the murder of millions of Jews, risked his life to save Jews in the Holocaust.
by Tzvi Ben Gedalyahu Published: 11/04/10, 9:28 AM / Last Update: 11/04/10, 9:48 AM
Israel news photo
While Nazi mastermind Hermann Goering was planning the deaths of millions of Jews, his brother Albert used his family name to save Jews from the evil regime, a new book called ”Thirty-Four” reveals.
The story of Albert Goering was little known until the appearance of the book by William Hastings Burke, who relates several details of Albert’s heroic deeds for the first time. His story had been shoved into obscurity, despite documents in British archives.
The Nazis' “Final Solution” disgusted Albert, who opposed the Nazi regime from its early days, even braving the daring act of refusing to return the Nazi salute when he worked in the Exports Department during the German occupation of Czechoslovakia. After death camps were built, he drove to a camp, where he acted heroically in loading hundreds of Jews into a truck and freeing them in forests.
Albert served time in prison after the war because his last name was enough for investigators to refuse to accept his story as true. He eventually was freed after a further probe unearthed personal testimony from Jews whom he saved. Jews who remembered or heard of his life-saving deeds helped him to survive after his release from jail until he died in Munich in 1966.
In his book, Burke relates that Albert reputedly was fathered by a wealthy Jewish Austrian doctor who had an affair with Goering’s mother. Hermann, who eventually directed the Luftwaffe and suggested himself as a replacement for Hitler towards the end of the Nazi regime, was the opposite of Albert’s quiet and sensitive personality.
While Hermann (pictured) was a national celebrity after he won aerial battles in World War I and commanded the Gestapo police in 1933, Albert fled to Austria to escape the regime. Burke relates that in Vienna, Albert saw Nazis forcing old Jewish women to scrub floors. He took the place of one of the women and also scrubbed. The incident was glossed over when SS forces intervened and saw his papers with his last name, which he used several times to escape certain death for helping and saving Jews.
Albert and Hermann “were political and ideological rivals on the streets, but in their private world, they remained devoted brothers,” Burke wrote in “Thirty-Four,” which is the number on Albert’s list of Jews whom he saved.
During a family holiday, when Albert heard the news of the Nazi occupation of Austria that included shipping an elderly archduke of the Austrian royal family to the Dachau death camp, his brother Hermann offered him one wish. Albert wrote, 'I wished for the immediate release of the old Archduke.” Hermann freed the royal family member the following day, and Albert wrote him down as number 12 on his list.
Hermann’s fondness for Albert resulted in the cancellation of an order for his arrest. However, after Albert used a large truck to rescue Jews from a death camp, the Nazi regime issued an order to kill him. Albert fled to a safe house. After the war, he presented himself to American authorities.
Hermann committed suicide, and Albert eventually rejoined his family until he died of cancer
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/136933#.Tk_SGGFBWuo
Some detail
Later - as part of his job as export director of the Czech arms factory Skoda - Albert Goering was able to save many employees, among them the director Jan Moravek and his family. He protected several members of the Czech resistance and covered resistance actions.
Christina Vella and Radomir Luza tell in the gripping autobiography The Hitler Kiss A Memoir Of The Czech Resistance how Albert was wont to make jokes about Nazis and spill a few drops of information. In 1940 he even confided the date of the German invasion of France, which was promptly reported to the British.
Karel Sobota, for several years assistant to Albert Goering, worked in the Exports Department of Skoda and endangered himself by taking actively part in the Czech Resistance movement against Nazism. Karel Sobota later recalled how Albert Goering refused to return the Nazi salute when Nazi officers visited Skoda. At that time, this refusal was sufficient for one man to be imprisoned or worse.
Albert GoeringAlbert Goering insisted that all people, no matter the rank or position, be announced to him before entering his room. Karel Sobota later told how a high ranking SS officer one day arrived in Skoda and quickly entered directly in Albert Goering's room with Sobota unsuccessfully trying to block him. In a rage, Goering expelled the Nazi from his room and ordered him to wait outside. Then Goering begged Karel Sobota to come in and sit down by him, he calmly talked about the weather, his family and they both examined some of Albert's picture albums. This took about thirty or forty minutes.
Said Albert Goering: - 'Well, Herr Sobota, now it is time to let that Nachtwachter talk to me. Please allow him to come in ..' (night watcher, in german, reference to the black SS uniform).
The employees were very grateful to Albert Goering due to the human treatment he always gave to all Czechs and people of other nationalities. At that time passive resistance was the order of the day. Any work in the lines of production or in the administrative area always took much more days to be done than was initially expected.
Karel Sobota recalled how Albert Goering looked the other way as the Czech employees made wrong translations of catalogs, 'forgot' to do tasks assigned to them, left work unfinished in their desks or 'lost' important documents. The employees risked their lives - had they been caught red-handed by the Gestapo or the SS, they had been executed on the spot.0 -
Here is another really brave guyAlbert Battel (21 January 1891 – 1952) was a German Wehrmacht army lieutenant and lawyer recognized for his resistance during World War II to the Nazi plans for the 1942 liquidation of the Przemyśl Jewish ghetto.
Biography
Battel was born in Klein-Pramsen, Prussian Silesia. After serving in World War I, he studied economics and jurisprudence in Munich and Breslau (Wrocław).
As a fifty-one-year-old reserve officer, Battel was stationed in Przemyśl in southern Poland as the adjutant to the local military commander, Major Max Liedtke. When the SS prepared to launch their first large-scale “resettlement” (liquidation) action against the Jews of Przemyśl on July 26, 1942, Battel, in consort with his superior, ordered the bridge over the River San, the only access into the Jewish ghetto, to be blocked. As the SS commando attempted to cross to the other side, the sergeant-major in charge of the bridge threatened to open fire unless they withdrew. All this happened in broad daylight, to the amazement of the local inhabitants. Still later that same afternoon, an army detachment under the command of Oberleutnant Battel broke into the cordoned-off area of the ghetto and used army trucks to evacuate up to 100 Jews and their families to the barracks of the local military command. These Jews were placed under the protection of the Wehrmacht and were thus sheltered from deportation to the Belzec extermination camp. The remaining ghetto inmates, including the head of the Judenrat, Dr. Duldig, underwent “resettlement” in the following days.
After this incident, the SS authorities began a secret investigation into the conduct of the army officer who had dared defy them under such embarrassing circumstances. It turned out that Battel, though himself a member of the Nazi Party since May 1933, had already attracted notice in the past by his friendly behaviour toward the Jews. Before the war, he had been indicted before a party tribunal for having extended a loan to a Jewish colleague. Later, in the course of his service in Przemyśl, he was officially reprimanded for cordially shaking the hand of the chairman of the Jewish Council, Duldig. The entire affair reached the attention of the highest level of the Nazi hierarchy. No less a figure than Heinrich Himmler, the Reichsführer-SS, took an interest in the results of the investigation and sent a copy of the incriminating documentation to Martin Bormann, chief of the Party Chancellery and Adolf Hitler's right-hand man. In the accompanying letter, Himmler vowed to have the lawyer arrested immediately after the war.
All this remained unknown to Battel. In 1944, he was discharged from military service because of heart disease. He returned to his hometown Breslau, only to be drafted into the Volkssturm and fall into Soviet captivity. After his release, he settled in West Germany but was prevented from returning to practice law by a denazification court. Battel died in 1952.
Recognition
Battel’s stand against the SS came to be recognised only a long time after his death; most notably, through the tenacious efforts of the Israeli researcher and lawyer Dr. Zeev Goshen.
On January 22, 1981, almost 30 years after his death, Yad Vashem recognised Albert Battel as Righteous among the Nations.
http://www.enotes.com/topic/Albert_Battel0 -
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Advertisement
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Here is a surprise.Eva Peron ‘kept Nazi treasure taken from Jews’
Eva Peron, the former Argentine first lady, is believed to have kept Nazi treasures taken from wealthy Jewish families killed in concentration camps, according to a new book.
Eva Peron Photo: EPA
By Robin Yapp, Sao Paulo
4:52PM BST 01 Sep 2011
330 Comments
‘The Politically Incorrect Guide to Latin America’ aims to highlight a series of little known controversies about leading leftist figures in the history of the continent.
It claims that Simon Bolivar, the hero of Latin America’s independence wars, was scared that blacks and indigenous Indians would seize power and that Salvador Allende, the Marxist Chilean president of the 1970s, considered a Nazi-inspired policy of sterilisation.
Its authors, the Brazilian journalists Leandro Narloch and Duda Teixeira, said the book is intended to generate discussion about issues airbrushed from history books.
Eva Peron, known as Evita, was the second wife of President Juan Peron, and remains a national heroine almost 60 years after she died from cancer.
Hospitals, schools and orphanages were built in poor areas through a foundation she established and she was crucial to her husband’s popularity with the masses.
Related Articles- Italian police recover stolen Eva Peron jewels
23 Jun 2011
However, Mr Peron helped many Nazis fleeing Europe after the Second World War to find a safe haven in Argentina, including Adolf Eichmann and Josef Mengele.
According to the new book: “It is still suspected that among her [Eva Peron’s] possessions, there were pieces of Nazi treasure, that came from rich Jewish families killed in concentration camps.
“Peron himself even spoke of goods of ‘German and Japanese origin’ that the Argentine government had appropriated.” Looking further back in history, the authors write of Bolivar: “His greatest fear was that blacks, Indians and those of mixed race would take power and install a government.” Allende, who killed himself in 1973 during a coup which saw General Augusto Pinochet depose him, is accused of having “stifled the media”.
The book adds that he started “a project of socialist doctrination in schools and almost installed a law of sterilisation, inspired by a Nazi law” aimed at reducing genetic illnesses.
The book has triggered a wave of controversy, winning praise from some historians for stimulating debate but attracting strong criticism from others for a lack of historical context.
“It is not a historical guide. It is politically incorrect. We only show the unpleasant side of history’s heroes,” said Narloch, who is now planning a follow-up work about global historical figures.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/southamerica/argentina/8735411/Eva-Peron-kept-Nazi-treasure-taken-from-Jews.html0 - Italian police recover stolen Eva Peron jewels
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MO0lUXnAs-U
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