Found this today

"Books cannot be killed by fire. People die, but books never die. No man and no force can put thought in a concentration camp forever. No man and no force can take from the world the books that embody man's eternal fight against tyranny. In this war, we know, books are weapons."--attributed to Franklin D. Roosevelt in a World War II-era poster by Steve Broder. Office of War Information Poster No. 7, US Government Printing Office: 1942-O-487131.

The American Library Association shared a post on vintage posters on their Facebook page, and one of the posters had this quote.

Glenn Beck annoyed me greatly

Which probably isn't surprising. What an ass. You don't have to be Jewish to recognise how wrong this is, posing Michael Bloomberg (who is Jewish) in an armband giving a Nazi salute in a graphic before the NRA national convention.

Jewish groups furious after Glenn Beck depicts Bloomberg doing Nazi salute

Abraham Foxman, a Holocaust survivor and national director of the Anti-Defamation League said that Mr Beck's implication that Mr Bloomberg is turning New York into a Nazi-like state was 'outrageous, insensitive and deeply offensive on so many levels.'

'Glenn Beck should know better,' he added. 'He has drawn similar inappropriate analogies to the Holocaust before. We wish he would stop trivializing the history of the Holocaust to score partisan political points.'

and then there was this...

Sharpton And Guests Take On ‘Stunning, Offensive’ ‘Zombie’ Obama Target From NRA Convention

MSNBC’s Al Sharpton went off on Zombie Industries Monday evening for displaying a life-size target that bears a striking resemblance to President Obama at this past weekend’s NRA convention in Houston, Texas. The NRA did eventually ask the company to remove the figure, nicknamed “Rocky,” from its booth, but it is still for sale, for $89.95, on their website.

I don't agree with Al Sharpton a lot, but he was dead right on this--these are racist and offensive target models that look like a sitting president, where people are encouraged to shoot at the target, which spills 'blood' when hit. Would we have a zombie George W Bush, or Abraham Lincoln, for example? No, of course not. Part of the patriotism that I was taught as a child includes respecting the President of the United States (even if you don't agree with the current holder of office). It's not about selling people targets that look like the president in preparation for that armed rebellion that many people on the right seem to think they're going to be part of soon. It scares me that people holding such extremist views happen to also often have guns, and makes me feel less safe as a citizen. It scares me just how many whackadoos are out there who still think Obama is a Muslim, that armed rebellion will be necessary to 'take back the country', etc., etc. Yet everyday the President still manages to actually carry on despite being reviled by these people.

Chronicling the true scope of the Nazi machine

The Holocaust Just Got More Shocking

When the research began in 2000, Dr. Megargee said he expected to find perhaps 7,000 Nazi camps and ghettos, based on postwar estimates. But the numbers kept climbing — first to 11,500, then 20,000, then 30,000, and now 42,500.

The numbers astound: 30,000 slave labor camps; 1,150 Jewish ghettos; 980 concentration camps; 1,000 prisoner-of-war camps; 500 brothels filled with sex slaves; and thousands of other camps used for euthanizing the elderly and infirm, performing forced abortions, “Germanizing” prisoners or transporting victims to killing centers.

In Berlin alone, researchers have documented some 3,000 camps and so-called Jew houses, while Hamburg held 1,300 sites.

Dr. Dean, a co-researcher, said the findings left no doubt in his mind that many German citizens, despite the frequent claims of ignorance after the war, must have known about the widespread existence of the Nazi camps at the time.

“You literally could not go anywhere in Germany without running into forced labor camps, P.O.W. camps, concentration camps,” he said. “They were everywhere.”

Excellent article; I want to read the book

The 'Iranian Schindler' who saved Jews from the Nazis

Thousands of Iranian Jews and their descendants owe their lives to a Muslim diplomat in wartime Paris, according to a new book. In The Lion's Shadow tells how Abdol-Hossein Sardari risked everything to help fellow Iranians escape the Nazis.

Fariborz Mokhtari's book is available on Kindle right now, and in print in April 2012.

An interesting look at the persistence of anti-Semitism in Germany from the Middle Ages to the Nazi era

The Persistence of Hate: German communities that murdered Jews in the Middle Ages were more likely to support the Nazis 600 years later

Another story out of Germany of a woman doing what she can to confront the past

Nazi family history put to good use by Inge Franken

Inge Franken is a sprightly 70-year-old who lives in an apartment on two floors in Berlin. She has a task, a mission. She tours schools educating children about her - and their - country's dark history.

She shows the class a photograph of two young boys - they can barely be 10 - who pose in Nazi regalia, and she seeks reaction. One has his chest puffed out in pride, the other seems reluctant and shame-faced. It is for today's children to decide which they would rather be.

If the school visit goes well, she says, a child will say that he or she is going home to ask the parents and grandparents what happened in the war in their family. It makes Inge feel that she has set people thinking and asking.

She was spurred to this mission by her own past, a past hidden in a suitcase - and her mother's mind.

Inge Franken, having made a painful discovery about her own father, has confronted the silence many of her generation and those after have had from their parents and grandparents about the war. By doing so, she not only helps bring the truth to light, but also teaches the young how ordinary people got caught up in the Nazi war machine. It can be very painful to discover someone in your family participated in horrific things. On the other hand, it causes people to really think and may prevent something similar from happening again. If only she could send her message worldwide, one on one.

"Freedom of speech ends where hatred and racism begin"

German woman devoted to removing Nazi graffiti

Irmela Mensah-Schramm stopped abruptly at the crudely sprayed swastika on the wall of a pedestrian underpass. Whipping out a can of spray paint from her cotton tote bag, she quickly made short work of it, turning the neo-Nazi symbol into a nondescript black splotch.

For the 65-year-old retiree, it's all in a day's work.

"I scratched off the first sticker in 1986, at a bus stop in front of my house," Mensah-Schramm said as she ambled through the streets armed with her spray paint and metal scraper. It demanded "Freedom for Rudolf Hess" — Adolf Hitler's deputy, who at the time was still alive and in prison in Berlin.

I agree with her statement in the title of this post. I can understand that some property owners might be upset because in covering Nazi symbols, she is defacing property, but her heart is definitely in the right place. Good luck to her.

Of course young people in America should be able to see this vital documentary

Mystery surrounding documentary film set inside Warsaw Ghetto

Almost seventy years ago a Nazi propaganda film was shot inside the Warsaw Ghetto. It depicted the lives of Jews, most of whom went on to perish in a German concentration camp. Much of the film has been shrouded in mystery. The Nazis never completed it and it is not clear why they made it.

One Israeli filmmaker was determined to explore the origins of the film and this week her documentary investigation is being released in American cinemas.

Restrictions have been placed on the film in the United States for disturbing images, including emaciated corpses, hindering it as a tool of education of the Nazi treatment of the Jews and how film can be used as propaganda. I hope this is reconsidered.

The original footage was unfinished, its purpose not completely understood. The Israeli documentary director has put together not only the film, as well as outtakes later discovered, but the testimony of Germans involved in filming and Warsaw Ghetto survivors' reactions to the film. It sounds like a very powerful combination. The Nazis apparently wanted to show the disparate worlds between the Jewish rich and poor of Warsaw, and to perhaps to record this for posterity of a people only known of in Europe in the past, should their annihilation programme succeed.

Skeletons, indeed

A Nazi Past Casts a Pall on Name of a Disease

As someone who has to look up syndromes and disorders fairly often for patrons, I dislike the confusion that happens when names of discovering doctors are given to the disease--or possibly more than one disease, names that vary from country to country and change over time. It's not really precise or scientific, after all.

But what do you do when you discover the disease is the namesake of someone with a previously unknown sordid past? Medicine has grappled with the legacy of Nazism for decades now--whether to accept research that may have merit even though it was done in the most appalling matter, whether to accept publications such as anatomy atlases created through 'Nazi medicine', etc. This article looks at the issue of disease names and a Nazi past and what happens when they meet.

A couple of other interesting historical stories from the Times

The thriving Roman town that slipped into oblivion

I find it interesting that they know the structures of the town, right at the heart of Boadicea's Inceni tribe--'by using a high-resolution geophysical survey and a caesium vapour magnetometer, which measures the changes caused by human activity in the magnetic field of the Earth, they can see beneath the soil without having to excavate.' That's astounding.

Then there's this:

Did Unity Mitford have Adolf Hitler’s love child?

It's mostly a retelling of some rumours that would be difficult to prove, since most everyone who could verify it is dead at this point. But it is an intriguing thought. What would you do if you'd let a quiet life and when you were elderly discovered you were Hitler's son or daughter? It would be stunning. And of course, there's no reason to believe that a child of Hitler's would be evil incarnate, although it would be interesting to see what genetic proclivities might be seen.

The Mitfords themselves were varied in their tastes. Two (including Unity) were connected to fascism. One was a proponent of communism who married Winston Churchill's nephew. One married a man who later became a duke. Another was related to John F Kennedy by marriage. They definitely come across as having strong intellectual passions. Unity Mitford was so overwrought by word of her homeland declaring war on Hitler that she shot herself in the head (she survived as an invalid).