Harald Jähner, Life in the Fallout of the Third Reich, 1945-1955

At Amazon, Harald Jähner, Aftermath: Life in the Fallout of the Third Reich, 1945-1955.

Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands

Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin.

Christopher Browning, Ordinary Men

Christopher Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland.

BONUS: Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust.

Volker Ullrich, Eight Days in May

At Amazon, Volker Ullrich, Eight Days in May: The Final Collapse of the Third Reich.

Michael Burleigh, The Third Reich

At Amazon, Michael Burleigh, The Third Reich: A New History.

Timothy Ryback, Takeover

A new and important history. 

At Amazon, Timothy Ryback, Takeover: Hitler's Final Rise to Power.

Heinz Höhne, The Order of the Death's Head

At Amazon, Heinz Höhne, "The Order of the Death's Head: The Story of Hitler's SS."

Julian Jackson, France on Trial

At Amazon, Julian Jackson, France on Trial: The Case of Marshal Pétain.

Alternative for Germany Party Gains Ground Ahead of Elections

Hmm.

At Der Spiegel, "Normalization on the Extreme Right":

The far-right Alternative for Germany party is polling better than it has in several years. With elections approaching next year in a trio of eastern German states, the AfD is seeking to find its way even closer to the political mainstream.

The world wars, says Tino Chrupalla, head of the far-right party Alternative for Germany (AfD), were "a catastrophe" for Germany and Europe. They "divided the continent and weakened it permanently."

Chrupalla speaks of Germany’s "defeats." He doesn’t, however, speak of the millions of dead, nor does he make mention of the Holocaust.

Instead, Chrupalla says that he finds it problematic "to always link remembrance with the question of guilt." Culpability issues should be "superseded by the question of the accomplishments of every civilization." That, he says, is a process the AfD would like to initiate. "Historical guilt should no longer determine the way we act."

Those who may still have been wondering where the AfD stands on the political spectrum and what to think of the party’s leader – who is fond of referring to himself as a mainstream conservative – such utterances should make it abundantly clear. The quotes come from an interview Chrupalla gave to the right-wing extremist blog "Sezession," which appeared two weeks ago – right around the time when the rest of Europe was observing Victory in Europe Day.

Chrupalla’s comments are reminiscent of the rather shocking claims of his predecessor Alexander Gauland, who is today honorary chairman of the AfD. In 2018, Gauland said that Germany had a "glorious history that is much longer than 12 years." And: "Dear friends, Hitler and the Nazis are but a spot of bird shit on German history."

Five years ago, Gauland’s statements triggered widespread indignation. Leading politicians from all of Germany’s democratic parties condemned his comments, the German government branded them as "shameful" and all major media outlets covered the story. There were even voices within the AfD itself demanding an apology, which Gauland then half-heartedly delivered. He regrets the impact they made, he said.

But following Chrupalla’s comments? Crickets. There were no objections worthy of note from his own party nor from other politicians – despite the fact that Chrupalla went even further than Gauland. Gauland at least mentioned the Nazis. Chrupalla, though, did not, nor did he say anything about their crimes.

Getting Used to the Party

The incident shows once again just how entrenched the AfD has become, how the party has become an accepted part of Germany’s political landscape. Ten years after its founding, so many have grown used to the party and its beliefs that not even historical revisionism is sufficient to trigger a debate. Instead, other parties have begun cooperating with the AfD time and again, particularly the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and the business-friendly Free Democratic Party (FDP), which is part of Germany’s current governing coalition.

Despite being monitored by the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, Germany’s domestic intelligence agency, on suspicions of right-wing extremism, the AfD doesn’t just have representatives in almost all of Germany’s state parliaments and in the Bundestag, the federal parliament in Berlin. It is also polling higher in public opinion surveys than it has in five years. A broad feeling of uneasiness with the current situation could be feeding the rise, as could the fact that the number of refugees arriving in Europe has once again ticked upwards. But are such explanations sufficient?

Keep reading. 

Harald Jähner, Aftermath

At Amazon, Harald Jähner, Aftermath: Life in the Fallout of the Third Reich, 1945-1955.

Ian Kershaw, The End

At Amazon, Ian Kershaw, The End: The Defiance and Destruction of Hitler's Germany, 1944-1945.

Where Online Hate Speech Can Bring the Police to Your Door

It's Germany, which obviously has good justification for suppressing online right-wing extremism.

At the New York Times, "Battling far-right extremism, Germany has gone further than any other Western democracy to prosecute individuals for what they say online, testing the limits of free speech on the internet":

When the police pounded the door before dawn at a home in northwest Germany, a bleary-eyed young man in his boxer shorts answered. The officers asked for his father, who was at work.

They told him that his 51-year-old father was accused of violating laws against online hate speech, insults and misinformation. He had shared an image on Facebook with an inflammatory statement about immigration falsely attributed to a German politician. “Just because someone rapes, robs or is a serious criminal is not a reason for deportation,” the fake remark said.

The police then scoured the home for about 30 minutes, seizing a laptop and tablet as evidence, prosecutors said.

At that exact moment in March, a similar scene was playing out at about 100 other homes across Germany, part of a coordinated nationwide crackdown that continues to this day. After sharing images circulating on Facebook that carried a fake statement, the perpetrators had devices confiscated and some were fined.

“We are making it clear that anyone who posts hate messages must expect the police to be at the front door afterward,” Holger Münch, the head of the Federal Criminal Police Office, said after the March raids.

Hate speech, extremism, misogyny and misinformation are well-known byproducts of the internet. But the people behind the most toxic online behavior typically avoid any personal major real-world consequences. Most Western democracies like the United States have avoided policing the internet because of free speech rights, leaving a sea of slurs, targeted harassment and tweets telling public figures they’d be better off dead. At most, Facebook, YouTube or Twitter remove a post or suspend their account.

But over the past several years, Germany has forged another path, criminally prosecuting people for online hate speech.

German authorities have brought charges for insults, threats and harassment. The police have raided homes, confiscated electronics and brought people in for questioning. Judges have enforced fines worth thousands of dollars each and, in some cases, sent offenders to jail. The threat of prosecution, they believe, will not eradicate hate online, but push some of the worst behavior back into the shadows.

In doing so, they have flipped inside out what, to American ears, it means to protect free speech. The authorities in Germany argue that they are encouraging and defending free speech by providing a space where people can share opinions without fear of being attacked or abused.

“There has to be a line you cannot cross,” said Svenja Meininghaus, a state prosecutor who attended the raid of the father’s house. “There has to be consequences.”

But even in Germany, a country where the stain of Nazism drives a belief that free speech is not absolute, the crackdown is generating fierce debate:

How far is too far?

A Turning Point

Walter Lübcke was a well-liked if unassuming local politician in the central German state of Hesse. He was known among constituents more for his advocacy of wind turbines and a bigger airport than provocation. But as a supporter of then-Chancellor Angela Merkel’s immigration policies, he became a regular target of online abuse after a 2015 video of him had circulated in far-right circles. In the video, he suggested to a local audience that anyone who did not support taking in refugees could leave Germany themselves.

In June 2019, he was shot and killed by a neo-Nazi on the terrace of his house at close range, shocking the public to the depths of far-right extremism in the country and how online hate could lead to grave real-world violence.

Publicly displaying swastikas and other Nazi symbolism is illegal in Germany, as is denying or diminishing the significance of the Holocaust. Remarks considered to be inciting hatred are punishable with jail time. It is a crime to insult somebody in public.

But authorities struggled to translate the speech laws to the internet age, where the volume of toxicity is seemingly endless and often masked by anonymity.

At first, policymakers in Germany attempted to put more pressure on internet companies like Facebook to crack down. In 2017, the country passed a landmark law, the Network Enforcement Act, that forced Facebook and others to take down hate speech in as little as 24 hours of being notified or face fines.

Companies beefed up their content moderation efforts to comply, but many German policymakers said the law did not go far enough because it targeted companies rather than the individuals who were posting vile content. Hate speech and online abuse continued to spread after the law passed, as did the rise in far-right extremism.

The assassination of Mr. Lübcke represented a turning point, intensifying efforts to prosecute people who broke the speech laws online. And in the last year, the government adopted rules that made it easier to arrest those who target public figures online.

Daniel Holznagel, a former Justice Ministry official who helped draft the internet enforcement laws passed in 2017, compared the crackdown to going after copyright violators. He said people stopped illegally downloading music and movies as much after authorities began issuing fines and legal warnings.

“You can’t prosecute everyone, but it will have a big effect if you show that prosecution is possible,” said Mr. Holznagel, who is now a judge...

 

The First Wave Hits Omaha Beach

On Twitter:

Some units in the first wave that hit Omaha Beach on D-Day suffered a casualty rate north of 90%. We asked young men with their whole lives ahead of them to pay the ultimate price.

Next time you want to complain about how tough you have it, read a history book. #MemorialDay pic.twitter.com/2O5oNPNtZo

— David Hookstead (@dhookstead) May 30, 2022

Israel Lives

 Emily Schrader, on Twitter.

עם ישראל חי. @Vouch4Eachother pic.twitter.com/rL4RahZyqT

— Emily Schrader - אמילי שריידר (@emilykschrader) April 27, 2022

Richard J. Evans, The Hitler Conspiracies

At Amazon, Richard J. Evans, The Hitler Conspiracies: The Protocols - The Stab in the Back - The Reichstag Fire - Rudolf Hess - The Escape from the Bunker.

Geoffrey P. Megargee, War of Annihilation

At Amazon, Geoffrey P. Megargee, War of Annihilation: Combat and Genocide on the Eastern Front, 1941.  

David Glantz, When Titans Clashed

At Amazon, David Glantz, When Titans Clashed: How the Red Army Stopped Hitler.

Frank McDonough, The Hitler Years

At Amazon, Frank McDonough, The Hitler Years: Triumph, 1933-1939.

Frank McDonough, The Hitler Years

At Amazon, Frank McDonough, The Hitler Years: Disaster, 1940-1945.

REPORT: Russia Has Empowered Neo-Nazi Factions in Zelensky's Army

There's some debate over this here, and I'm sure lots more on Twitter and elsewhere.

Nazis in the Ukraine army? This is way beyond my knowledge. I'll keep my eyes peeled for more on this. 

At UnHerd, "The truth about Ukraine’s far-Right militias":

Like any war, but perhaps more than most, the war in Ukraine has seen a bewildering barrage of claims and counter-claims made by the online supporters of each side. Truth, partial truths and outright lies compete for dominance in the media narrative. Vladimir Putin’s claim that Russia invaded Ukraine to “de-Nazify” the country is surely one of the clearest examples. The Russian claim that the Maidan revolution of 2014 was a “fascist coup” and that Ukraine is a Nazi state has been used for years by Putin and his supporters to justify his occupation of Crimea and support for Russian-speaking separatists in the country’s east, winning many online adherents.

But the Russian claim is false: Ukraine is a genuine liberal-democratic state, though an imperfect one, with free elections that produce significant changes of power, including the election, in 2019, of the liberal-populist reformer, Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Ukraine is, unequivocally, not a Nazi state: the Russian casus belli is a lie. And yet, there is a danger that the understandable desire by Ukrainian and Western commentators not to provide ammunition for Russian propaganda has led to an over-correction — and one that may not ultimately serve Ukraine’s best interests.

During one recent news bulletin on BBC Radio 4, the correspondent referred to “Putin’s baseless claim that the Ukrainian state supports Nazis”. This is, itself, disinformation: it is an observable fact, which the BBC itself has previously reported on accurately and well, that the Ukrainian state has, since 2014, provided funding, weapons and other forms of support to extreme Right-wing militias, including neo-Nazi ones. This is not a new or controversial observation. Back in 2019, I spent time in Ukraine interviewing senior figures in the constellation of state-backed extreme Right-wing groups for Harper’s magazine; they were all quite open about their ideology and plans for the future.

Indeed, some of the best coverage of Ukraine’s extreme Right-wing groups has come from the open-source intelligence outlet Bellingcat, which is not known for a favourable attitude towards Russian propaganda. Bellingcat’s excellent reporting of this under-discussed topic over the past few years has largely focused on the Azov movement, Ukraine’s most powerful extreme Right-wing group, and the one most favoured by the state’s largesse.

Over the past few years, Bellingcat researchers have explored Azov’s outreach effort to American white nationalists and its funding by the Ukrainian state to teach “patriotic education” and to support demobilised veterans; it has looked into Azov’s hosting of neo-Nazi black metal music festivals, and its support of the exiled, anti-Putin Russian neo-Nazi group Wotanjugend — practitioners of a very marginal form of esoteric Nazism, who share space with Azov in their Kyiv headquarters, fight alongside them in the front line, and have also played a role translating and disseminating a Russian-language version of the Christchurch shooter’s manifesto. Unfortunately, Bellingcat’s invaluable coverage of Ukraine’s extreme-Right ecosystem has not been updated since the current hostilities began, despite the war with Russia providing these groups with something of a renaissance...

Keep reading.