The last recorded message to be intercepted from a German military communications network at the end of the Second World War has been revealed to the public for the first time.

It shows that Britain’s Bletchley Park code breakers carried on working in the dying days of the war to ensure there would be no final stand by the Nazis, according to GCHQ historian Tony Comer.

Mr Comer added the message, released to mark the 75th anniversary of VE Day, gives “a small insight into the real people behind the machinery of war”.

With the Allies closing in and the network having retreated to the German town of Cuxhaven, a messenger who is identified only as Lieutenant Kunkel sent out a statement.

The intercepted message, which was sent as he signed off on 7 May 1945 at 7.35am, said: “British troops entered Cuxhaven at 1400 on 6 May – from now on all radio traffic will cease – wishing you all the best. Lt Kunkel”.

This was immediately followed by: “Closing down for ever – all the best – goodbye”.

Bletchley Park code breakers were collecting communications from the German Brown network.

By 1944, the network’s outstations had spanned across Europe from western Germany to the Baltic coast and was sending reports about the development of German experimental weapons.

Mr Comer said: “These transcripts give us a small insight into the real people behind the machinery of war.

“While most of the UK was preparing to celebrate the war ending, and the last of the German military communicators surrendered, Bletchley staff – like today’s GCHQ workers – carried on working to help keep the country safe.”

It is among the release of a number of never-before-seen messages which give an insight into the final hours of a German communications network, according to GCHQ.

Germany’s leaders are struggling to work out how to counter a recent rise in right-wing hate, 75 years after the Nazis were driven from power.

Wednesday’s shooting rampage that began at a hookah bar in the Frankfurt suburb of Hanau was Germany’s third deadly far-right attack in a matter of months and came at a time when the Alternative for Germany, or AfD, has become the country’s first political party in decades to establish itself as a significant force on the extreme right.

In the wake of the latest spasm of violence, Chancellor Angela Merkel denounced the “poison” of racism and hatred in Germany, and other politicians similarly condemned the shootings.

The rampage followed October’s anti-Semitic attack on a synagogue in Halle and the killing in June of a regional politician who supported Mrs Merkel’s welcoming policy toward migrants.

But Germany’s top security official, interior minister Horst Seehofer, said the trend goes back further, noting a 2016 attack on a Munich mall against migrants and a years-long cross-country killing spree against foreigners by a group calling itself the National Socialist Underground.

“Since the NSU and the rampage in Munich through today, an extreme-right trail of blood has run through our country,” he said.

Extremism is no new phenomenon in modern-day Germany, where the Red Army Faction and other radical-left groups waged a campaign of kidnappings and killings from the 1970s through the 1990s, and where some of the key September 11 plotters lived and schemed before heading to the US to attend flight school ahead of the 2001 attacks.

Germany has strict laws prohibiting any glorification of the Nazis, with bans on symbols like the swastika and gestures like the stiff-armed salute, and denial of the Holocaust is illegal.

But security officials have frequently been accused of being “blind in the right eye”, for intentionally or inadvertently overlooking some far-right activity.

That was said to be the case with the NSU, which was able to kill 10 people, primarily immigrants, between 2000 and 2007 in attacks written off by investigators as organised crime.

It was only after two NSU members died in 2011 in a botched robbery that the group’s activities were uncovered.

Mehmet Gurcan Daimaguler, a lawyer who represented victims’ families at the trial of an NSU member, said German authorities need to give more than “lip service” to fighting racism.

“We haven’t really begun yet a real fight against neo-Nazis, and one of the reasons, for me, clearly is the victims,” he said.

“The victims of Nazis are not members of the German middle class, but Muslims, migrants, LGBT people, immigrants.

“As long as the victim pool, so to say, was limited to minorities, it was not considered a real threat for society.”

Mr Seehofer said that has changed, noting increased resources are being devoted to fighting far-right crime, including the addition of hundreds of new federal investigators and domestic intelligence agents.

In addition, stricter laws have been passed, and the Cabinet approved a bill just this week, before the Hanau attacks, to crack down on hate speech and online extremism.

Under the bill, which is awaiting passage in parliament, internet companies would have to report a wide range of hate speech to police, and retweeting such material to a wide audience, or explicitly condoning it publicly, could be subject to prosecution.

“We are not blind in any eye,” Mr Seehofer said.

Still, with national elections coming next year, politicians are grappling with strategies to confront AfD and blunt its appeal to disgruntled voters.

The AfD does not espouse violence, but many are accusing the party of producing a climate where right-wing extremism can flourish.

The seven-year-old party now has members in all 16 state parliaments and is the largest opposition party nationally, though with less than 13% of the vote in the last election.

“One cannot see this crime in isolation,” said Norbert Roettgen, one of several members of Mrs Merkel’s party hoping to succeed her as chancellor when her term ends next year.

“We need to fight the poison that is being dragged into our society by the AfD and others.”

Alexander Gauland, an AfD leader, accused Mr Roettgen and others of trying to exploit the Hanau violence for political advantage.

“Everything that we know is that it was a totally crazy person,” Mr Gauland said.

The gunman, 43-year-old Tobias Rathjen, posted rambling writings and videos online ahead of the attacks, advocating genocide and espousing theories about mind control.

Mr Gauland, who once got in trouble for downplaying the Nazi era as a speck of “bird poop” in German history, said Rathjen had probably never heard any of his speeches, and he rejected any connection between the bloodshed and his party’s anti-migrant platform, as did several other AfD leaders.

But Mr Seehofer said the power of words cannot be discounted.

“I can’t deny that a statement that Nazism is a speck of bird poop in history provides this fertile soil,” Mr Seehofer said.

“There are also many other remarks that, in my view, mess up heads, and something bad comes from messed-up heads far too often.”

Holger Muench, head of the BKA, Germany’s equivalent to the FBI, said the threat from mentally disturbed people has grown in recent years, as they latch on to ideas often found online and turn violent.

“The fact that there are mentally ill people in society, that is unchanged for the most part,” he said.

“But the fact that there are mentally ill people with a world view that makes them a risk to serious acts of violence, that is changing.”

No evidence has emerged to link Mr Rathjen to the AfD.

But people in Hanau were quick to suggest at least an indirect connection.

Dieter Hog watched as the police descended upon Rathjen’s house after the shootings and said he did not know his neighbour or what might have motivated him.

“But it might be the seed of Mr Hoecke,” he said, referring to Bjoern Hoecke, an AfD leader who called Berlin’s memorial to the victims of the Nazi Holocaust a “monument of shame”.

And Hatice Nazerzadeh, the woman who shouted at German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier during the candlelight vigil, said that with the party’s ascent, attacks are becoming common.

Parts of AfD are already under close scrutiny by Germany’s domestic intelligence agency, but she said more should be done.

“The core problem is the AfD,” said Ms Nazerzadeh, whose cousin was shot in the head by Rathjen and killed.

“As long as the AfD is legal, racism is legal.”

The death of a former Auschwitz guard days before his trial in Germany has dashed the hopes of two elderly Jewish survivors of Nazi rule who wanted to see justice for their parents, who perished while the guard was on duty at the death camp.

Israel Loewenstein, himself a 91-year-old Holocaust survivor, and Henry Foner, a 83-year-old chemist, talked to Reuters at their homes in Israel a day before news of the death of Ernst Tremmel, the former guard, emerged.

They had hoped Tremmel would face justice late in his life.

“But then again we don’t know if he would have even told the truth about Auschwitz – many of the accused don’t, after all,” Loewenstein told Reuters on Friday after learning of Tremmel’s death.

German courts are hearing two other Auschwitz cases. The trials of 95-year-old Hubert Zafke, a former Auschwitz paramedic, and of 94-year-old Reinhold Hanning, a former guard at the death camp, have already started. Both have remained silent on the accusations so far.

“It’s a good thing (Germany) is doing it, but it doesn’t touch my heart somehow,” Foner, who was evacuated from Germany to Britain with other Jewish children in 1939 as part of a Jewish initiative, said at his home in Jerusalem.

He had hoped to see justice done in the case of Tremmel, but said: “There can never be closure. Closure to me is meaningless – you can’t get back what has been taken.”

Tremmel was a member of the Nazi SS guard team at the death camp in occupied Poland from November 1942 to June 1943. His trial had been scheduled to start on April 13, but a court spokesman said on Thursday he had died at the age of 93.

Although Tremmel was not directly involved in the mass killings at Auschwitz, German prosecutors said he had helped in the murder of at least 1,075 people during his stint of some eight months at the death camp. They said he volunteered to join the SS and started working as an Auschwitz guard at the age of 19.

Tremmel’s platoon was regularly charged with overseeing the camp’s ‘selection process’, forming a human chain around the arriving deportation trains to prevent new arrivals from escaping before they were either selected for forced labour or sent off to be killed in the camp’s gas chambers.

Loewenstein, who survived the Holocaust in various forced labour camps, remembered the selection process when he arrived at the death camp in March 1943, at the age of 18.

“We came to Auschwitz in the middle of the night after four days on a train without food,” he recalled, speaking German at his home in Yad Hana, a former kibbutz in northern Israel.

“Suddenly, the doors were torn open, headlights were blazing, German shepherds were barking and we only heard the guards yell ‘Get out! Get out!'”

From the group of 100 people Loewenstein arrived with in Auschwitz, only 17 survived.

Loewenstein’s parents, Paula and Walter, as well as Max Lichtwitz, the father of Foner, arrived on the same deportation train from Berlin on Dec. 9, 1942. All three were selected to be killed and died in the death camp’s gas chambers the next day.

 (Editing by Richard Balmforth – by Tina Bellon) – Reuters News

For the first time since the end of World War II, a new annotated edition of Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf will go on limited sale in Germany.

This edition from the The Institute of Contemporary History (IfZ) offers 3,500 scholarly annotations. It seeks to challenge the ‘irresponsible’ earlier editions found in second-hand bookstores. Jewish groups are not with their concerns.

German justice ministers, however, have pledged to limit public access to stem neo-Nazi sentiment. Growing anxieties over the refugee crisis have provided extra succour to the populist far-right. Some expressed their far-right views to an actor dressed as Hitler. Neo-Nazis monopolise arson attacks against proposed refugee centres across Germany. At a Pegia rally in October, a guest speaker joked about putting Muslims in concentration camps. Germany recorded 1,596 antisemitic hate crimes last year. A vast majority of perpetrators expressed ‘right-wing’ views.

Hitler dictated Mein Kampf (My Struggle) to Rudolf Hess in Lansburg prison, where both resided after the failed beer-hall putsch of 1923. Hitler’s chauffeur, Emil Maurice, had started the ghostwriting process, but his writing skills proved as poor as Hitler’s.

Mein Kampf outlined his racist worldview and political outlook. Autobiographical elements contained many inaccuracies to help create a positive image of himself.

Hitler proved an avid reader of Henry Ford’s antisemitic book ‘The International Jew‘. He had kept a life-size portrait of Ford above his desk before becoming German Chancellor in 1933. In December 1931, Hitler responded “I regard Henry Ford as my inspiration“.

Henry Ford would later renounce his antisemitic writings, yet continued to admire the Nazi state. Shortly after after the annexation of Austria in 1938, Ford received the Grand Cross of the German Eagle, Nazi Germany’s highest award for foreigners.

Hitler’s unfettered antisemitism is not the sole product of Ford’s writing. He also admired his assembly line modernisation of car production. Both men had also admired the notorious antisemitic text The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Alfred Rosenberg had introduced Hitler to it in the early 1920s. Extracts of the text had appeared in Ford’s Dearborn Independent newspaper in 1920.

It became a powerful propaganda tool for the Nazi party. Between 1919 and 1939, they had published at least 23 editions of the text. The Times newspaper first exposed it as an antisemitic plagiarism in 1921. In spite of renewed debunking, its poisonous legacy endures.

Both men were products of an era of American and European history that normalised antisemitism. As Sylvia Steinberg Professor of American Jewish History at New York University noted:

“Anti-Semitism came from the top down from elite sources, and from the bottom up from populist sources. It came from the right, and the left. Small towns were no more hotbeds of anti-Semitism than large cities. It could be pretty much anyplace.”

After the defeat of Nazi Germany in 1945, Allied forces handed the copyright of Mein Kampf over to the state of Bavaria. Unlike the swastika and other Nazi iconography, the book was never banned.

Under German law, copyright lasts for 70 years. From January next year publishers will have free access to the text. It will cost 59 euros and contains 1,948 pages.

The post Why is Germany republishing Hitler’s Mein Kampf? appeared first on Religious Reader.

We have printed the Role of Righteous Muslims, Muslims who saved Jews in the Holocaust, in German. The booklet has now been printed in Arabic, German and English and we have circulated over 8,000 booklets electronically and in hard copy form within the UK. We hope that the Role of Righteous Muslims booklet serves as an educational tool for schools that work with German speaking students.

The booklet is an educational tool which highlights stories of Muslims, in different Muslim majority countries, who stood for their neighbours, their friends and in some cases, people from neighbouring villages, against the genocidal activities of the Nazis. We also hope that if you download the booklet, you may inform us of how you have used the educational tool and the kinds of activities that you used the booklet within. Your feedback will be helpful and we hope that it adds to Holocaust education. (The booklet can be downloaded below).

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