Introduction: Driven, in part, by the social dislocation caused by the global financial collapse, fascism in Europe is gaining momentum. Much of the broadcast explores fascism in Sweden, a country not generally noted for its reactionary politics. A driving force in Swedish fascism for decades was the late Per Engdahl, whose New Swedish Movement coalesced in the 1930’s alongside the other fascist movements of Europe.
Engdahl was instrumental in the preservation of overt, above-ground European fascism in the immediate post-World War II period. Shepherding an important meeting of fascist leaders at Malmo, Sweden in 1951, Engdahl has also been a contributor to an important fascist journal called Nation Europa.
Although Sweden is generally viewed as a quasi-socialist nation, contemporary fascist elements thrive in the corridors of power in that country. Many of that country’s most powerful industrialists and financiers enthusiastically backed Hitler. “Neo”-fascist and Nazi elements have links to the Swedish intelligence service, and Ikea founder and Sweden’s richest man Ingvar Kamprad has an overt Nazi heritage. (Kamprad is pictured at left.)
Among those brave enough to resist the encroachment of fascism in Sweden was the late author Stieg Larsson. 
(Larsson is pictured at right.) Dying on November 9th, a significant date for the Nazis, his death has been attributed to “natural causes.”
Author Christopher Hitchens opines that if Larsson’s heart attack was, in fact, an assassination that would mean 
“medical murder.” Given the links between Sapo (the Swedish intelligence service) and Swedish Nazi elements, that is not a possibility that can be dismissed.
Much of the second side of the program updates contemporary European rehabilitation of the Axis powers of World War II.
Program Highlights Include: Credible indications that Stieg Larsson’s novels were portrayals of real events; Larsson’s editorial supervision of an anti-fascist magazine; the German intelligence service’s refusal to release its file on Adolph Eichmann; the Ukraine’s rehabilitation of SS collaborator and war criminal Stephan Bandera; the resuscitation of fascist and Nazi sympathies in Bosnia; an endorsement by Austria’s largest daily of a Holocaust-denying presidential candidate; employment by Holocaust-denier David Irving of the half-brother of the new head of MI6–Britain’s foreign intelligence service. (The insignia of the Bosnian Pride movement is pictured above and at right. At the top of the page are pictures of SS chief Heinrich Himmler reviewing troops of the 14th Waffen SS division [heavily recruited from Stephen Bandera’s OUN/B] and young, nostalgic devotees of that division are pictured to the right.
1. A driving force in Swedish fascism for decades was the late Per Engdahl, whose New Swedish Movement coalesced in the 1930’s alongside the other fascist movements of Europe.
When, as often happened, he was labelled an old Nazi, Per Engdahl, leader from the early Thirties of the ‘New Swedish Movement’, angrily used to protest that the label was incorrect.
No Nazi he — but he certainly was a Fascist, a believer in corporatism, and a long-time admirer of Il Duce, Benito Mussolini, whose posthumous triumph in the latest Italian elections Engdahl must have savoured, before he died on 4 May (his death was only made public in Sweden two weeks later, after the funeral). . . .
. . . The Allied victory in 1945 left Engdahl and his minuscule Fascist movement high and dry in a country where there had been a considerable number of Nazi and Fascist sympathisers until the turning-point of the war with El Alamein and Stalingrad. He went on publishing the movement’s magazine, Vagen Framat (‘The Road Ahead’) and often managed to make friendly contact with younger politicians, who initially did not know who he was or what he represented. He liked to point out what he saw as corporativist traits in the prevalent Social Democrat ideology, and tried, with limited success, in his autobiography, Fribytare i folkhemmet (‘Freebooter in the People’s Home’ — ie the Swedish welfare state), to portray himself as a nice elderly statesman with ideas that might be somewhere off base but not necessarily out of date.
In later years, Engdahl became a passionate pro-European, in contrast to younger extreme right– wingers in Sweden, who tend to oppose Sweden’s entry into the European Union.
Almost totally blind, Engdahl nevertheless participated — in so far as he was given space in the newspapers, more often on the radio — in Swedish political debates. His new Swedish movement was, like himself, reaching a ripe old age, but possibly getting some new recruits among clean-shaven youths with boots, who usually express their political leanings through immigrant-bashing and denying the fact of the Holocaust. . . .
“Obituary: Per Engdahl” by Bjorn Kumm; The Independent [UK]; 5/24/1994.
2. Engdahl was instrumental in the preservation of overt, above-ground European fascism in the immediate post-World War II period. Shepherding an important meeting of fascist leaders at Malmo, Sweden in 1951, Engdahl has also been a contributor to an important fascist journal called Nation Europa.
, , , , Two Italian journalists, Del Boca and Giovana, surveying fascism throughout the world wrote in their book Fascism Today: “Nation Europa has for many years been considered to be the most authoritative organ of European neo-Fascism” (p.457).
Nation Europa was established shortly after the Second World War by a former Waffen-SS officer, Arthur Ehrhard. Associated with Nation Europa were many old Nazis attempting to reorganise Nazi activities throughout Europe. In 1951 a Fascist International conference was held in Malmo Sweden, attended by more than 30 fascist leaders. The purpose of the conference was to lay the basis for future fascist activities. The conference was organised by the Swedish fascist Per Engdahl. An observer of the fascist scene wrote at the time: “Dr Engdahl, the organiser of this movement, is conspicuously associated with a German journal which may be described as the brains trust of the Fascist International. Nation Europa, a well-produced monthly (published at Coburg) claims to be labouring in the service of European nationalism” (Wiener Library Bulletin, 1952 May/August, p.21).
Early contributors included many of the remains of the old Nazi ‘elite’: i.e. Hans Grimm, Karl Heinz Priester, Oswald Mosley, Julius Evola (the Italian racist, whose works are highly recommended in Nouvelle Ecole: see p.76, Autumn 1973) and Maurice Bardèche, the French fascist who started a book with the statement je suis un écrivain fasciste.(73) Adolf von Thadden, the ex-leader of the NPD, is a regular contributor and Richard Verrall of the National Front’s directorate,(74) and editor of the National Front’s paper Spearhead, is also a contributor (see his article Was will Englands ‘National Front’? in September 1977). . . .
3. Although Sweden is generally viewed as a quasi-socialist nation, contemporary fascist elements thrive in the corridors of power in that country. Many of that country’s most powerful industrialists and financiers enthusiastically backed Hitler. “Neo”-fascist and Nazi elements have links to the Swedish intelligence service, and Ikea founder and Sweden’s richest man Ingvar Kamprad has an overt Nazi heritage.
. . . . This week sees the film adaptation of the first book in Larsson’s trilogy, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, released in Britain. So far, more than 2.5 million Europeans have seen the movie, and No Country For Old Men producer Scott Rudin has just inked a deal to make the Hollywood version. By the time Rudin has finished, many millions more will have followed the story of investigative journalist Mikael Blomkvist and chaotic, freewheeling computer hacker Lisbeth Salander. What they find at the end of that story, however, may shock them.
Tattoo begins as a slow-moving, gently unfolding detective story but ends with scenes of horror beyond anything Hannibal Lecter could imagine. Throughout the book version, Larsson keeps dropping genuine figures relating to violent crimes against women in Sweden. The Swedish title for the book is Men Who Hate Women, and footnotes quote real-life incidents to explain how the fictional Salander – whose civil rights are removed at the whim of a judge – is based on real incidents.
Larsson, as with Betner and Mankell, spends much of the time pulling apart the stereotype of happy-ever-after, perfectly educated, socially democratic and joyfully tolerant Swedes enjoying wild sex lives and perfectly cooked meatballs. The Millennium Trilogy tracks Blomkvist and Salander’s attempts to uncover mysterious murders in neo-fascist billionaire families as well as state-sanctioned violent sexual abuse, paedophilia and rape. Larsson himself was a campaigning anti-Nazi journalist who set up his own version of the British anti-fascist magazine Searchlight, so you can see why he’d take this path. Mankell, however, was a well-established mainstream author before he created Wallander. He did so in order to investigate pedophile rings at the heart of Sweden”s security services and expose public and institutionalised racism.
“Wallender was born in May 1989 out of a need to talk about xenophobia. So the story came first, then him,” says Mankell. “I was writing the first novel out of anger at what was happening in Sweden at the time – the rise of xenophobia. That was my ambition. And, since acts of xenophobia are a crime, I needed a police officer.
“Even after the second and third books, I really wasn’t thinking of a series. Then I realised I was creating a tool that could be used to tell stories about the situation in Sweden in the Nineties.”
Wallander and Blomkvist also wade through some of the extremely unpleasant undercurrents beneath Sweden’s tranquil social order. In Larsson and Mankel’s stories, both men encounter Neo-Nazis who collude with Sapo, the Swedish version of MI5 and MI6 combined. In their version of Sweden, racism is rife, violence against women is commonplace, while the trafficking of children for sex is facilitated by highly placed lawyers and doctors. . . .
. . . Little of this would come as a surprise to Larsson, Blomkvist or Salander, who encounter all of this and more while investigating the brutal murder of a child, apparently at the hands of her rich, Nazi-sympathising family. “Sweden has yet to come to terms with its Nazi past,” says Anna Blondell, who runs a Swedish restaurant in London. “We were neutral during the war, and our Nazi party still lives on. In fact, I think it will do well at the next election, under a different name. Many people in the older generation were very sympathetic to Nazi ideas like eugenics but, unlike Germany, we have not so open about this.”
Certainly the country practised forced sterilisation of women deemed unfit to be mothers until as recently as 1975. Branded low class, or mentally slow, they were kept in Institutes for Misled and Morally Neglected Children, where they were eventually “treated”. In 1997, the government admitted that 60,000 women had been sterilised.
Meanwhile, Ikea founder and Sweden’s richest man Ingvar Kamprad revealed his youthful Nazi sympathies in 1994, confessing to a nine-year friendship with Per Engdahl, the openly pro-Nazi leader of the Neo-Swedish movement. Kamprad claimed he couldn’t remember if he’d joined the Nordic Youth, Sweden’s equivalent of the Hitler Youth. . . .
“The Dark Side of Swedish Society” by Stephen Armstrong; Telegraph.co.uk; 3/13/2010.
4. The death of Stieg Larsson, author of the above-mentioned Girl with the Dragoon Tattoo, raises disturbing questions. Dying on November 9th, a significant date for the Nazis, his death has been attributed to “natural causes.”
Displaying the doubt that is requisite for a mainstream journalist, author Christopher Hitchens expresses his belief that Larsson died of natural causes, despite documented plots against his life from Swedish fascist elements. (In addition to his works of fiction, Larsson edited an anti-fascist journal similar to the British Searchlight.)
Hitchens opines that if Larsson’s heart attack was, in fact, an assassination that would mean “medical murder.” Given the links between Sapo (the Swedish intelligence service) and Swedish Nazi elements, that is not a possibility that can be dismissed.
Note, also, that one of Hitchens’ sources told him that everything Larsson wrote about actually happened.
I suppose it’s justifiable to describe “best-selling” in quasi-tsunami terms because when it happens it’s partly a wall and partly a tide: first you see a towering, glistening rampart of books in Costco and the nation’s airports and then you are hit by a series of succeeding waves that deposit individual copies in the hands of people sitting right next to you. I was slightly wondering what might come crashing in after Hurricane Khaled. I didn’t guess that the next great inundation would originate not in the exotic kite-running spaces at the roof of the world but from an epicenter made almost banal for us by Volvo, Absolut, Saab, and ikea.
Yet it is from this society, of reassuring brand names and womb-to-tomb national health care, that Stieg Larsson conjured a detective double act so incongruous that it makes Holmes and Watson seem like siblings. I say “conjured” because Mr. Larsson also drew upon the bloody, haunted old Sweden of trolls and elves and ogres, and I put it in the past tense because, just as the first book in his “Millennium” trilogy, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, was about to make his fortune, he very suddenly became a dead person. In the Larsson universe the nasty trolls and hulking ogres are bent Swedish capitalists, cold-faced Baltic sex traffickers, blue-eyed Viking Aryan Nazis, and other Nordic riffraff who might have had their reasons to whack him. But if he now dwells in that Valhalla of the hack writer who posthumously beat all the odds, it’s surely because of his elf. Picture a feral waif. All right, picture a four-foot-eleven-inch “doll” with Asperger’s syndrome and generous breast implants. This is not Pippi Longstocking (to whom a few gestures are made in the narrative). This is Miss Goth, intermittently disguised as la gamine.
Forget Miss Smilla’s sense of the snow and check out Lisbeth Salander’s taste in pussy rings, tattoos, girls, boys, motorcycles, and, above all, computer keyboards. (Once you accept that George MacDonald Fraser’s Flashman can pick up any known language in a few days, you have suspended enough disbelief to settle down and enjoy his adventures.) Miss Salander is so well accoutred with special features that she’s almost over-equipped. She is awarded a photographic memory, a chess mind to rival Bobby Fischer’s, a mathematical capacity that toys with Fermat’s last theorem as a cat bats a mouse, and the ability to “hack”—I apologize for the repetition of that word—into the deep intestinal computers of all banks and police departments. At the end of The Girl Who Played with Fire, she is for good measure granted the ability to return from the grave.
With all these superheroine advantages, one wonders why she and her on-and-off sidekick, the lumbering but unstoppable reporter Mikael Blomkvist, don’t defeat the forces of Swedish Fascism and imperialism more effortlessly. But the other reason that Lisbeth Salander is such a source of fascination is this: the pint-size minxoid with the dragon tattoo is also a traumatized victim and doesn’t work or play well with others. She has been raped and tortured and otherwise abused ever since she could think, and her private phrase for her coming-of-age is “All the Evil”: words that go unelucidated until near the end of The Girl Who Played with Fire. The actress Noomi Rapace has already played Salander in a Swedish film of the first novel, which enjoyed a worldwide release. (When Hollywood gets to the casting stage, I suppose Philip Seymour Hoffman will be offered the ursine Blomkvist role, and though the coloring is wrong I keep thinking of Winona Ryder for Lisbeth.) According to Larsson’s father, the sympathy with which “the girl” is evoked is derived partly from the author’s own beloved niece, Therese, who is tattooed and has suffered from anorexia and dyslexia but can fix your computer problems.
In life, Stieg Larsson described himself as, among other things, “a feminist,” and his character surrogate, Mikael Blomkvist, takes an ostentatiously severe line against the male domination of society and indeed of his own profession. (The original grim and Swedish title of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is Men Who Hate Women, while the trilogy’s third book bore the more fairy-tale-like name The Castle in the Air That Blew Up: the clever rebranding of the series with the word “girl” on every cover was obviously critical.) Blomkvist’s moral righteousness comes in very useful for the action of the novels, because it allows the depiction of a great deal of cruelty to women, smuggled through customs under the disguise of a strong disapproval. Sweden used to be notorious, in the late 1960s, as the homeland of the film I Am Curious (Yellow), which went all the way to the Supreme Court when distributed in the United States and gave Sweden a world reputation as a place of smiling nudity and guilt-free sex. What a world of nursery innocence that was, compared with the child slavery and exploitation that are evoked with perhaps slightly too much relish by the crusading Blomkvist.
His best excuse for his own prurience is that these serial killers and torture fanciers are practicing a form of capitalism and that their racket is protected by a pornographic alliance with a form of Fascism, its lower ranks made up of hideous bikers and meth runners. This is not just sex or crime—it’s politics! Most of the time, Larsson hauls himself along with writing such as this:
The murder investigation was like a broken mosaic in which he could make out some pieces while others were simply missing. Somewhere there was a pattern. He could sense it, but he could not figure it out. Too many pieces were missing.
No doubt they were, or there would be no book. (The plot of the first story is so heavily convoluted that it requires a page reproducing the Vanger dynasty’s family tree—the first time I can remember encountering such a dramatis personae since I read War and Peace.) But when he comes to the villain of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, a many-tentacled tycoon named Wennerström, Larsson’s prose is suddenly much more spirited. Wennerström had consecrated himself to “fraud that was so extensive it was no longer merely criminal—it was business.” That’s actually one of the best-turned lines in the whole thousand pages. If it sounds a bit like Bertolt Brecht on an average day, it’s because Larsson’s own views were old-shoe Communist.
His background involved the unique bonding that comes from tough Red families and solid class loyalties. The hard-labor and factory and mining sector of Sweden is in the far and arduous North—this is also the home territory of most of the country’s storytellers—and Grandpa was a proletarian Communist up toward the Arctic. This during the Second World War, when quite a few Swedes were volunteering to serve Hitler’s New Order and join the SS. In a note the 23-year-old Larsson wrote before setting out for Africa, he bequeathed everything to the Communist party of his hometown, Umeå. The ownership of the immense later fortune that he never saw went by law to his father and brother, leaving his partner of 30 years, Eva Gabrielsson, with no legal claim, only a moral one that asserts she alone is fit to manage Larsson’s very lucrative legacy. And this is not the only murk that hangs around his death, at the age of 50, in 2004.
To be exact, Stieg Larsson died on November 9, 2004, which I can’t help noticing was the anniversary of Kristallnacht. Is it plausible that Sweden’s most public anti-Nazi just chanced to expire from natural causes on such a date? Larsson’s magazine, Expo, which has a fairly clear fictional cousinhood with “Millennium,” was an unceasing annoyance to the extreme right. He himself was the public figure most identified with the unmasking of white-supremacist and neo-Nazi organizations, many of them with a hard-earned reputation for homicidal violence. The Swedes are not the pacific herbivores that many people imagine: in the footnotes to his second novel Larsson reminds us that Prime Minister Olof Palme was gunned down in the street in 1986 and that the foreign minister Anna Lindh was stabbed to death (in a Stockholm department store) in 2003. The first crime is still unsolved, and the verdict in the second case has by no means satisfied everybody.
A report in the mainstream newspaper Aftonbladet describes the findings of another anti-Nazi researcher, named Bosse Schön, who unraveled a plot to murder Stieg Larsson that included a Swedish SS veteran. Another scheme misfired because on the night in question, 20 years ago, he saw skinheads with bats waiting outside his office and left by the rear exit. Web sites are devoted to further speculation: one blog is preoccupied with the theory that Prime Minister Palme’s uncaught assassin was behind the death of Larsson too. Larsson’s name and other details were found when the Swedish police searched the apartment of a Fascist arrested for a political murder. Larsson’s address, telephone number, and photograph, along with threats to people identified as “enemies of the white race,” were published in a neo-Nazi magazine: the authorities took it seriously enough to prosecute the editor.
But Larsson died of an apparent coronary thrombosis, not from any mayhem. So he would have had to be poisoned, say, or somehow medically murdered. Such a hypothesis would point to some involvement “high up,” and anyone who has read the novels will know that in Larsson’s world the forces of law and order in Sweden are fetidly complicit with organized crime. So did he wind up, in effect, a character in one of his own tales? The people who might have the most interest in keeping the speculation alive—his publishers and publicists—choose not to believe it. “Sixty cigarettes a day, plus tremendous amounts of junk food and coffee and an enormous workload,” said Christopher MacLehose, Larsson’s literary discoverer in English and by a nice coincidence a publisher of Flashman, “would be the culprit. I gather he’d even had a warning heart murmur. Still, I have attended demonstrations by these Swedish right-wing thugs, and they are truly frightening. I also know someone with excellent contacts in the Swedish police and security world who assures me that everything described in the ‘Millennium’ novels actually took place. And, apparently, Larsson planned to write as many as 10 in all. So you can see how people could think that he might not have died but been ‘stopped.’”
He left behind him enough manuscript pages for three books, the last of which—due out in the U.S. next summer—is entitled The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest, and the outlines and initial scribblings of a fourth. The market and appetite for them seems to be unappeasable, as does the demand for Henning Mankell’s “Detective Wallander” thrillers, the work of Peter (Smilla’s Sense of Snow) Høeg, and the stories of Arnaldur Indridason. These writers come from countries as diverse as Denmark and Iceland, but in Germany the genre already has a name: Schwedenkrimi, or “Swedish crime writing.” Christopher MacLehose told me that he knows of bookstores that now have special sections for the Scandinavian phenomenon. “When Roger Straus and I first published Peter Høeg,” he said, “we thought we were doing something of a favor for Danish literature, and then ‘Miss Smilla’ abruptly sold a million copies in both England and America. Look, in almost everyone there is a memory of the sagas and the Norse myths. A lot of our storytelling got started in those long, cold, dark nights.”
Perhaps. But Larsson is very much of our own time, setting himself to confront questions such as immigration, “gender,” white-collar crime, and, above all, the Internet. The plot of his first volume does involve a sort of excursion into antiquity—into the book of Leviticus, to be exact—but this is only for the purpose of encrypting a “Bible code.” And he is quite deliberately unromantic, giving us shopping lists, street directions, menus, and other details—often with their Swedish names—in full. The villains are evil, all right, but very stupid and self-thwartingly prone to spend more time (this always irritates me) telling their victims what they will do to them than actually doing it. There is much sex but absolutely no love, a great deal of violence but zero heroism. Reciprocal gestures are generally indicated by cliché: if a Larsson character wants to show assent he or she will “nod”; if he or she wants to manifest distress, then it will usually be by biting the lower lip. The passionate world of the sagas and the myths is a very long way away. Bleakness is all. That could even be the secret—the emotionless efficiency of Swedish technology, paradoxically combined with the wicked allure of the pitiless elfin avenger, plus a dash of paranoia surrounding the author’s demise. If Larsson had died as a brave martyr to a cause, it would have been strangely out of keeping; it’s actually more satisfying that he succumbed to the natural causes that are symptoms of modern life. . . .
“The Author Who Played with Fire” by Christopher Hitchens; Vanity Fair; 12/2009.
5. The German intelligence service (BND) chose–initially–to keep its files on Eichmann secret. Why would this be necessary? Among the possibilities is the political sensitivity deriving from past employment of Eichmann and many of his subordinates–and superiors–by elements of Western intelligence, including U.S. and German intelligence services.
The opening of these files would also shed light on the Underground Reich and its derivative, profound economic and political relationships with governmental, religious and commercial centers of power around the world.
NB: In response to journalists’ lawsuits, the BND reversed course and decided to release the files. One can but wonder what will be sanitized from those files.
Fifty years have passed since Adolf Eichmann’s arrest, but the German foreign intelligence agency, the BND, is still hoping to prevent the release of files detailing his post-war movements. A Federal Administrative Court in Leipzig is currently examining almost 4,500 pages of secret documents on Eichmann, a leading architect of Hitler’s plans to murder Europe’s Jews. The court is soon expected to rule whether the BND’s justifications for concealing the files are still applicable and in line with the country’s freedom of information laws. . . .
. . . Uki Goñi, a prominent Argentine journalist and expert on the post-war Nazi fugitives, has taken a special interest in the BND files and thinks that references to a foreign intelligence service are a smokescreen. “They could easily redact the name of the intelligence service and the name of the informants,” he told SPIEGEL ONLINE. “The files would not be embarrassing to any other secret service but to Germany itself.” Goñi believes the files would reveal hitherto unknown levels of collusion between the German government and Nazis who fled overseas to escape prosecution.
In his book, “The Real Odessa,” which describes how the Peron regime systematically aided Nazi war criminals, Goñi documents how Nazi war criminals lived free and easy in Buenos Aires. German Foreign Service members and Nazis visited the same establishments and drank in the same beer hall. The Nazis didn’t hide their allegiances either: “The Nazis would come in, click their heels and throw up their traditional salute,” Goñi told SPIEGEL ONLINE. Eichmann didn’t feel the need to keep a low profile in that community. The German embassy in Buenos Aires gave his wife and children passports in their own name, just as they had given infamous Nazi doctor Josef Mengele a passport.
Attorney Reiner Geulen thinks that the most explosive information enclosed in the files pertains to Eichmann’s flight from Germany. “He was very chatty in Jerusalem — he knew he was going to die anyway,” Geulen said. According to Geulen, Eichmann explained in great detail who helped him flee Germany and then Europe — information the Israelis were very interested in. “There is good reason to believe that he received help from German, Italian and Vatican officials,” he said. . . .
6. The naming of Nazi and SS Collaborator Stephan Bandera as a “Hero” of the Ukraine should outrage everyone, not just Jews, although it shouldn’t surprise anyone. Deeply involved with war crimes committed by Nazi and SS units during World War II, Bandera’s OUN/B organization then jumped to Western intelligence after the war. (The 14th Waffens SS “Galician” Division–pictured at right– was drawn largely from the OUN/B.)
Elements associated with Bandera’s group disseminated disinformation attempting to link Bandera’s death with the KGB and Lee Harvey Oswald. This helped cover up President Kennedy’s assassination by convincing some that a Third World War would result from a proper investigation.
Evolving into a key element of the Nazi wing of the GOP, the OUN/B realized its goal of an “independent” Ukraine during the Reagan/George H.W. Bush regimes. Ykaterina Chumachenko–the top operational leader of the OUN/B– became the head of Presidential Liaison under Ronald Reagan.
Eventually, she married Mr. Yuschenko, and Ykaterina became the first lady of the Ukraine! Her husband has now named Bandera a hero!
The largest Jewish human rights organization in the US, the Simon Wiesenthal Center, joined the chorus of those who condemn the declaration of controversial nationalist leader Stepan Bandera as a Hero of Ukraine.
Mark Weitzman, head of government affairs at Wiesenthal Center wrote to Ukraine’s Ambassador in the US, noting that “it is surely a travesty when such an honor is granted right at the period when the world pauses to remember the victims of the Holocaust on January 27.”
Expressing his “deepest revulsion”, Weitzman also reminded that the late Simon Wiesenthal, who founded their organization, was born in Ukraine himself.
Earlier, Russian Jews similarly called Yushchenko’s move “a provocation promoting the rehabilitation of Nazi crimes” and “a challenge to the civilized world.”
Outgoing President Yushchenko, who lost the presidential elections on January 17, signed a decree conferring Bandera, the head of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) in 1941–1959, the status of a national hero.
Bandera’s supporters – mainly in Western Ukraine – claim he fought for Ukraine’s independence against both Soviet and German soldiers. However, many others in his country and Russia believe he was a war criminal who collaborated with the Nazis during WWII and killed innocent people.
The Federation of Russia’s Jewish Communities, or FEOR, in a statement issued Monday, said Yushchenko’s move “insults the memory of the victims” of Nazi crimes.
“The decree says Bandera was awarded ‘for his spiritual invincibility, fight for national ideology, heroism and self-sacrifice in a struggle for the independence of Ukrainian state’,” the document published on the organization’s website (www.feor.ru) reads. “Apparently, this way Yushchenko equates heroism and self-sacrifice to the mass murdering of the Jews and Poles that Bandera and his associates were widely practicing.”
The document authors believe “such a political gesture is a challenge to the civilized world, to everyone who fought against Nazism” during the Second World War. . . .
Jews Worldwide Outraged byYuschenko’s Praising of Nationalists; Russia Times; 1/30/2010.
7. In past broadcasts, we have looked at the re-emergence of Nazi influence in the Muslim population of “independent” Bosnia. Salient among those developments was the re-creation of the Handjar Division–named and modeled after the Third Reich’s 13th Waffen SS Division.
Nazi recrudescence in Bosnia appears to be gaining momentum.
Bosnian neo-nazi organization was birthed today that insists that Bosnia belongs to the Bosniaks, an invented nationality with which Bosnian Muslims identify in order to avoid their religious background when talking to the Western press.
The new Nazi Bosnian Pride Movement (Bosanski pokret nacionalnog ponosa) believes that Serbs and Croats have no right to the state and that the state belongs exclusively to Bosnian Muslims, aka Bosniaks. . . .
The Nazi Bosnian Pride Movement has expanded its enemy list from their WWII predecessors, the Handzar Division and the Young Muslims.
As their enemies, Nazi Bosnian Pride Movement includes the usual ones they were exterminating in WWII – Jews, Gypsies and Serbs – but have expanded the list to include Chetniks, Tito, communists, homosexuals, blacks and Croatian separatists.
The group plans to spread nazi leaflets very soon in the cities of Sarajevo, Zenica, Bihac, Tuzla and Mostar, all cities with substantial Muslim and Croat population that will find the message appealing.
The group’s notoriously slow to load their web site, bosnacenter.com. It serves up a blank page but with little googling, their moderated chat room appears with postings on Zionism, Serb Republic, Truth and 5 questions for prospective members. . . .
“Nazi Bosnian Pride Movement Formed”; serbianna.com; 2/19/2009.
8. Holocaust revisionism continues to advance on the European and world stages. In Austria’s recent elections, a Holocaust revisionist received the endorsement of Austria’s largest paper. Happily, she was trounced in the election.
A woman who has criticized anti-Nazi law and is married to an extreme rightist is running for president in Austria, and critics contend her candidacy could tarnish the reputation of a country still marred by its connection to the Holocaust.
Barbara Rosenkranz, 51, is not expected to win the April 25 election, despite her endorsement from the owner of Austria’s most widely read newspaper, the Kronen Zeitung. [Italics mine–D.E.]
But she is likely to lead a campaign against popular President Heinz Fischer laced with the anti-foreigner and anti-European Union rhetoric her far-right Freedom Party generates.
She is most widely known for her belief that Austria’s law banning the glorification of the Nazis is a hindrance to freedom of expression and violates the country’s constitution. In the same vein, she also has defended doubts over Nazi gas chambers.
Her husband, Horst Jakob Rosenkranz, was part of a far-right political party that was banned for being too radical. . . .
“Austrian Far-Right Icon Eyes Presidency” by Veronika Oleksyn [AP]; google.com; 3/3/2010.
9. Boding VERY poorly for the future, the half brother of the new MI6 chief is a researcher for Holocaust denier David Irving. (MI6 is the British foreign intelligence service.) Irving recently completed a prison term in Austria for Holocaust denial.
“. . . Among those featured in family photographs on the website is Lady Sawers’ half-brother Hugo Haig-Thomas, a former diplomat.
Lady Sawers met her husband after visiting her brother when he was posted to Yemen in the late Seventies. She liked the country and decided to stay, landing a secretarial job at the Embassy, where Sir John later succeeded Mr Haig-Thomas.
Mr Haig-Thomas is an associate and researcher for revisionist historian David Irving, who was jailed for three years in Austria in 2006 for ‘glorifying the Nazi Party’ because he questioned whether the Holocaust took place.
The historian describes Haig-Thomas as ‘a researcher who has done fine work for me’. His work includes examining the papers relating to the capture of Heinrich Himmler, the man behind Hitler’s plan to exterminate the European Jews.
A recent post by Mr Haig-Thomas on Irving’s website includes a translation of the testimony of a German officer who claimed to have built fake gas chambers at Sachsenhausen concentration camp on Soviet orders. [Italics are mine–D.E.]
But Mr Haig-Thomas said he had never considered his views controversial, nor did he regret his connection with Irving. . . .”
Banking with Bin Laden
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