Nazi germany

Tuesday

Cockburn

Comparing Fauci to Josef Mengele seems ill-advised

Cockburn always thought Thanksgiving was the holiday designated for sharing madcap political views that one day you'll regret saying aloud. So kudos to Fox Nation's Lara Logan for extending the tradition into advent, by offering a comparison between Anthony Fauci and Nazi doctor Josef Mengele on Monday's edition of Fox News Primetime. Logan, a former war correspondent, was invited on to discuss the Omicron variant. Presumably the logic behind the booking was that the variant emerged from her home country, South Africa. Here's the expertise she chose to provide: On Dr. Fauci, this is what people say to me. He doesn't represent science to them, he represents Josef Mengele. Dr. Josef-the Nazi doctor who did experiments on Jews in the second world war and in the concentration camps.

lara logan

Friday

William Cook

Berlin has always been a Faustian metropolis

Each time I return to Berlin, the wonderful, awful city where I spent the best days of my misspent youth, I pay a sentimental visit to Grolmanstrasse, where my German grandparents used to live. There isn’t much left to look at. Their apartment block was destroyed in 1945 in the Battle of Berlin. The site where it stood is now occupied by a children’s playground. For me, that empty space seems to symbolize the way Berlin has changed — mainly for the better, but at enormous human cost. So much has vanished — not just the buildings, but also the people who inhabited them. For my children’s generation, Berlin is a party town. For me, it’s a city full of ghosts. It is these ghosts that keep bringing me back to Germany’s battered, bombastic capital.

berlin

Monday

Andy Pearce

Why teaching the Holocaust still matters

From our UK edition

Pretzsch is a normal small town on the River Elbe, 35 miles north east of Leipzig, with little or nothing to suggest its dark past. Eighty years ago, in the spring of 1941, it became a mustering point for a cadre of men who would perform ‘special tasks’ during the forthcoming Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union. Over the spring and early summer months, around 3,000 men arrived in Pretzsch. Quartered in SS accommodation, the men eventually learnt they would be part of four Einsatzgruppen — special task forces — who were to move behind the German front line. Their task was framed as maintaining security and eliminating resistance.

Thursday

Chris Mullin

One of the lucky ones: Hella Pick escapes Nazi Germany

From our UK edition

Hella Pick is one of that vanishing generation of Jewish refugees who arrived in Britain on the eve of the second world war, courtesy of the Kindertransport. An only child of separated parents, born and brought up in Vienna, she was luckier than most: her mother got out soon afterwards. Her grandmother, who remained, died in Theresienstadt. Early life in the UK was not easy for refugees from Nazism. Visas were only granted to those who had an offer of work, and just about the only work permitted to them was domestic service, which must have been particularly galling for people like Hella’s mother who had once been prosperous. Young Hella was relatively fortunate.

Thursday

Bart van Es

The ‘unremarkable’ life of SS officer Robert Griesinger

From our UK edition

In October 2011 Daniel Lee was at a dinner party at which a Dutch woman told a disturbing story. It concerned an armchair that her mother had recently taken for re-upholstering. The chair was something of a family treasure. As a child growing up in Amsterdam, the woman herself had always sat on it as she did her homework and it featured in countless family photographs. When her mother returned to pick up the chair, however, the upholsterer had addressed her in outrage. He did not work for Nazis, he said. The loved chair, it turned out, contained a hidden cache of SS documents, all stamped with swastikas. The woman at the party felt contaminated by what her mother had told her: throughout her childhood she had been in close proximity to these objects from the Fascist past.

Sunday

Steve Donoghue

Edward VIII: Unlucky in love, or a Nazi-loving cad?

‘After I am dead, the boy will ruin himself within 12 months,’ King George V groused in his last days about his oldest son and heir, David, Prince of Wales. Never a particularly cheery fellow, by 1935 George V was worn down by a lifetime of non-stop smoking. His gloom might have been understandable, but it wasn’t universal, since he had nothing but good things to say about his second son, the stuttering Bertie. In the prescience that kings sometimes display about their successors, George V suspected that he was about to pass the imperial crown into unsteady hands. When the old king died in January of 1936, David, Prince of Wales became King Edward VIII. As Prince of Wales, he had been phenomenally popular, the House of Windsor’s first full-blown celebrity.

edward viii