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No WW2...no Hells Angels...without the Hells Angels to do security at Altamont for Rolling Stones Merideth Hunter may have been able to enjoy the show and lived a full life. Thanks war. Then again, perhaps without that situation the Stones wouldn't have changed musical directions in the 1970s. Roger Waters would have had different writing and not much to say about isolation possibly had his father not been killed. No "The Wall"? No "Animals"? Things that make you say hmmm.

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Turns out the architect of the Dutch national WW2 monument was on the wrong side during the war...

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Last Monday I got to visit a WW2 bunker on the island of Schiermonnikoog, a small and absolutely gorgeous island north of The Netherlands. A large bunker was installed to house a 40 m high radio antenna as part of the Atlantik wall, and a railroad was built to get the materials there - by the time the bunker was complete, the antenna was outdated, instead they used a smaller dish.

When the province of Groningen was liberated in April 1945, a group of 120 SS-soldiers fled to Schiermonnikoog, where there was still a German base. Eventually the Canadian army managed to usher them away.


The island of Schiermonnikoog, originally a monastery, was sold by the province of Friesland and as such it was a private island between 1638 and 1945. By 1945 it was owned by a German nobleman, Bechtold Eugen von Bernstoff, and as such it was confiscated by the Dutch state as part of recovery payments. Bernstoff tried for years to get his island back, but that failed, and he finally got financial compensation from the German state in 1983.

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Here's the story of Julius Kuhl, a Polish ambassador who set up a passport scheme to save Polish Jews. Unfortunately, because most of the passports were from small Latin-American countries and the Nazis smelled a rat. Even so he saved possibly thousands of lives.

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/wo ... e35896768/

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The wreckage of the USS Indianapolis has finally been found, almost 70 years after it was sunk by the Japanese navy.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/201 ... en-decades

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That's an interesting one. Whenever I see the many remnants of the Atlantic Wall, I'm always reminded of how labor intensive and, at the same time, how pointless the whole exercise was. Kind of like Germany's Maginot line, really.

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"I have learned from my mistakes, and I am sure I can repeat them exactly."

Holocaust survivor Eliahu Pietruzska (102) escaped Poland at the start of WW2 and believed for a long time that his entire family had perished. Two weeks ago he found out that his younger brother survived, and his 66-year-old nephew wasted no time whatsoever to fly over to Israel to meet him.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/video ... mily-video

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A new 9 hour documentary on Hitler has come out. Looks quite interesting...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=id7pbLyGLE0

The DVD, presumably with English subtitles, is apparently out in Spring.

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"I have learned from my mistakes, and I am sure I can repeat them exactly."

Dealing with AfD politicians:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/ ... tician-afd

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Who says the Germans don't have a sense of humour! Excellent!

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"I have learned from my mistakes, and I am sure I can repeat them exactly."

There is currently a debate on whether or not to keep the wall that Dutch national-socialist leader Mussert used as decor for a speech.
https://www.volkskrant.nl/wetenschap/wa ... ~a4199596/

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Interesting; I found this in English on it, for those whose Dutch is even worse than mine.
https://www.dutchnews.nl/news/archives/ ... preserved/
Every heard of any good biographies in English or German on Mussert? I've only read Nolte's fairly suspect "Faschismus" chapter on him.

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"I have learned from my mistakes, and I am sure I can repeat them exactly."

As far as I know there aren't many Dutch ones either, apparently the best is by Jan Meyers.

What they never taught me in school is that the Nazis didn't like Mussert either, he was not a proficient German speaker and he was married to his own aunt, who was 18 years his senior. He also had an extra-marital relationship with a far cousin. This was mocked by the Nazi haters. The joke related in the 1946 book I referred to earlier in this topic goes:
"Wie zijn ras rein wil houen
moet zijn eigen tante trouwen"
which rhymes: if you want to keep your own breed pure, you must marry your aunt."

Here's the Dutch Wiki at least:
https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anton_Mussert
Note the school report card, with his 4/10 in German.

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75 years ago today, on Sunday, 6 December 1942, the RAF bombed the Philips factories in Eindhoven.

December 6th is St Nicholas, our primal children's celebration and where Santa Clause originates from. The Philips factories were closed on Sunday, but since the church was packed and the factories were located in the centre of town, there were around 150 casualties. Apart from which, a hospital, a school and the church were also bombed. Because the bombers were flying low, the defending nazis shot low, causing many casualties among the children who were playing outside with their newly gotten presents.

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I don't feel so good...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_ ... e_war_dead

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These photos are from a freshly published book by Gerard Groeneveld, entitled Nach Holland. Groeneveld has collected photoalbums by German soldiers for years. Nach Holland is an anthology of the early battles of Holland. You know, 10th to 15th of May 1940.

https://verhalen.volkskrant.nl/nach-holland#14766

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The wall has been promoted to national monument, so at least it won't be demolished to have bungalows there!

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New footage of WW2-aged Rotterdam:
https://www.ed.nl/video/unieke-oorlogsb ... en~vp33719

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Apparently Hans Asperger was a Nazi aide...
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/ ... study-says

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Two previously illegible pages of Anne Frank's diary have now been made legible. The two pages contain bawdy jokes and a text on sex.

https://www.volkskrant.nl/nieuws-achter ... ~b5abc4f1/

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The story of Jan Zwartendijk and Chiune Sugihara, who worked together to move over 2000 Jews out of Lithuania:
http://remember.org/witness/righteous

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On the 4th of October 1944, a resistance radio station was betrayed by the Germans. The station was located below the park ranger's hut. On this day, 19 resistance members were in the basement, as the ranger's son (18) and his friend (19) were in the hut keeping an eye out. Around 100 German soldiers surrounded the shack. An officer and the man who betrayed the resistance stepped in, and tried to force the kids to tell them where the radio was. At that point the ranger and a resistance fighter walked in and shot the officer and betrayer.

A fight broke out - people who fled the hut were shot. The basement was bombarded with grenades, the hut caught fire. People that were found in the hut were imprisoned and executed.

https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Post_in_de_Vloeiweide

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Lessons from a Warsaw ghetto survivor:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfr ... ism-europe

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Georges Loinger (108) passed away last Friday. He was French, a Jewish resistance hero who helped smuggle children across the border with Switzerland:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/ ... es-loinger

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WW2 colour photos:
https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesig ... r-pictures

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