Associated Press willingly cooperated with the Nazis, new report shows.

A German motorcycle rider talking with a Dutch peasant woman, at an unknown location in Holland, May 24, 1940. AP.

Associated Press willingly cooperated with the Nazis, new report shows. (ToI).

News agency and Third Reich said to have made mutually beneficial deal, with AP providing countless photos for Nazi propaganda; AP denies collaboration.

The Associated Press news agency willingly cooperated with Nazi Germany, submitting to the regime’s restrictive rulings on the freedom of the press and providing it with images from its photo archives to be used in its anti-Semitic and anti-Western propaganda machine, a new report reveals.

According to German historian Harriet Scharnberg, the world’s biggest news agency was only allowed to remain in Germany because it signed a deal with the regime.

The news agency lost control over its copy by submitting itself to the Schriftleitergesetz (editor’s law), agreeing not to print any material “calculated to weaken the strength of the Reich abroad or at home,” she wrote in an article published in the academic journal Studies in Contemporary History.

Scharnberg’s research was first reported by the UK-based Guardian newspaper.

The AP’s images appeared in many of the regime’s propaganda publications. Most of the images in a pamphlet called “Jews in the US” were provided by the AP. Hmmm......."Wir haben es nicht gewusst".  Read the full story here.

Video - Northern Ireland Catholic priest caught snorting coke amid Nazi artifacts.

Video - Northern Ireland Catholic priest caught snorting coke amid Nazi artifacts. (Jpost).

A Catholic priest was caught on video snorting what appears to be cocaine in a room with Nazi memorabilia.

The video of Father Stephen Crossan, 37, was taken at what was then his parish home in Northern Ireland after a “two-day bender” in July 2015, the Sun on Sunday reported.

Crossan told the newspaper that he is not a Nazi and he collected historical items from around the world. He confirmed that he was using drugs in the video but said, “It was just the one night and that was it. I do not have an issue with drugs.” Read the full story here.

U.S. supported Ukraine cancels social benefits for former NAZI concentration camps prisoners & Russian medal recipients.

U.S. supported Ukraine cancels social benefits for former concentration camps prisoners and Russian medal recipients. (Tass).

Ukraine has stopped paying out welfare payments for pensioners, World War Two veterans, people with disabilities, liquidators of the Chernobyl disaster beginning with Monday, since the law of December 28, 2014, on stabilizing the financial condition of the state has come into force.

It affects practically all social security beneficiaries, without defining the mechanisms for providing targeted assistance to low-income groups.

Kiev has eliminated transport, healthcare, utilities and financial benefits for former prisoners of Nazi concentration camps and recipients of some Soviet-era orders and titles. 

Compensations to families with children living in the areas contaminated by radiation from the Chernobyl accident will be no longer paid either.

Ukraine’s parliamentary opposition believes that the Prosecutor General’s Office should launch an investigation against Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk who actively promoted the law on the abolition of privileges.

Did Belgian interior Minister Condone Nazi Collaboration?

Belgium SS Leon Degrelle with Goebbles.

Did Belgian interior Minister Condone Nazi Collaboration? (Forward).

A representative of Flemish Jews asked a deputy prime minister of Belgium to clarify statements in which he appeared to condone the actions of Nazi collaborators.

Jan Jambon, who is also Belgium’s interior minister, made the statements during an interview which was published last week in the La Libre Belgique newspaper.

During the interview, Jambon, who is a member of the New Flemish Alliance party, was asked about his participation in 2001 at a rally organized by the far-right association Sint-Maartenfonds, whose mission statement is to support Flemish Belgians who fought on Nazi Germany’s side in World War II. 

Commenting about these veterans, he said: “The people who collaborated with the Germans, they had their reasons. I did not live in those times.”

After the Oct. 13 publication of the interview, Jambon rejected any interpretation of his words as condoning Nazism or collaboration with Nazi Germany and apologized to anyone who was offended by them.

But Raphael Werner of the Flemish Forum of Jewish Organizations told the Antwerp-based Joods Actueel newspaper that the forum wants to meet with Jambon and discuss the issue more thoroughly.

“Then we could hear for ourselves what are the positions of the minister, not only about collaboration but also about the sensitive questions connected to it,” he said, according to an article published on Oct. 14.

Some 66,000 Jews lived in Belgium when Germany invaded in 1940, according to Yad Vashem, Israel’s national Holocaust museum in Jerusalem. Of them, 34,801 were imprisoned and or deported. More than 80 percent of those deported died.

Belgium, a federal bi-national state, comprises three autonomous regions: The Dutch-speaking Flemish Region; the French-speaking Walloon Region; and the central Brussels region.Read the full story here.

Related: Belgian Senate recognizes authorities’ role during Holocaust

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Urges Ukraine To Examine Its History of Anti-Semitism.

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Urges Ukraine To Examine Its History of Anti-Semitism.HT: Forward. By Nathan Guttman.

As Ukraine grapples with political upheaval and threats to its territorial integrity, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum is confronting the country’s post-revolution government with another, no less difficult challenge: contending with its past treatment of Jews.

The museum has urged the new government in Kiev to set up an international commission to examine its troubled relations throughout the 20th century with the country’s Jewish community.

Aware of the country’s current turmoil, a delegation of museum officials visiting Kiev presented the proposal as an idea, not necessarily as an immediate priority to be implemented quickly. But according to museum director Sara Bloomfield, the initial response from Ukrainian officials was positive.

“In this country — you can’t really separate communism, Nazism and anti-Semitism,” Bloomfield said in a June 8 phone interview from Kiev.

She noted that discussing anti-Semitism and teaching about it in Ukraine should span from the early twentieth century, including the infamous 1913 blood libel trial of Menachem Mendel Beilis through the Stalinist persecution of Jews and the collaboration of some Ukrainian nationalists with the Nazis during the Third Reich’s occupation of the country.

Bloomfield visited Ukraine during the first week of June to meet with representatives of the newly-elected government and with scholars and members of the Jewish community. Her talks focused on practical issues, including gaining full access to Communist-era archives. But Bloomfield also sought to begin a process of dialogue aimed at getting Ukraine to reckon with its own history.Read the full story here.

Interview with French Marine Le Pen: 'I Don't Want this European Soviet Union'

Interview with French Marine Le Pen: 'I Don't Want this European Soviet Union'. HT: Spiegel.

In a SPIEGEL interview, French right-wing populist Marine Le Pen discusses the European election victory by her Front National, German dominance in the EU and her admiration for Russian President Vladimir Putin.Read the full story here.

Belgian Senate recognizes authorities’ role during Holocaust.

Belgium SS Leon Degrelle with Goebbles.

Belgian Senate recognizes authorities’ role during Holocaust.(TOI).A Belgian Senate committee adopted a resolution acknowledging the country’s complicity in the murder of Jews during the Holocaust.
The Senate’s committee on institutional affairs voted in favor of the resolution on Jan. 9, according to Belga, a local news agency.
“Some Belgian authorities practiced collaboration unfitting of a democracy,” the resolution read, “with tragic consequences for the Jewish population.”
The resolution also encourages the Belgian government to “examine the possibility of giving a statute” to Jews and Roma who were “deported for racist reasons” and to orphans of the Holocaust. It does not specify what that statute should be.
As the factual basis for the statement, the resolution referenced a 1,100-page report entitled “Obedient Belgium,” completed in 2007 by the Center for Historical Research and Documentation on War and Contemporary Society. The Senate tasked the federal research body with compiling the report in 2002.
An article in the newspaper La Libre Belgique cited political instability as the main reason for a six-year delay in the adoption of the report.
To come into effect, the resolution needs to pass in the Belgian Chamber of Representatives, where it is expected to receive the support of a large majority.
Last year, the mayors of Antwerp and Brussels for the first time apologized for their municipalities’ role in the deportation of Jews from Belgium in 1942.
Some 66,000 Jews lived in Belgium when Germany invaded in 1940, according to Yad Vashem. Of them, 34,801 were imprisoned or deported. More than 80 percent of those deported died.Hmmmm......"Never Again".Read the full story here.

Obama Praises Nazi Supporter in Jewish Heritage Month Proclamation

Obama Praises Nazi supporter in Jewish Heritage Month Proclamation.(Breitbart).President Barack Obama issued a proclamation yesterday in celebration of Jewish Heritage Month that lauded Nazi supporter Gertrude Stein, the Algemeiner reports.
Stein, who was Jewish, supported the puppet Vichy regime in France in the Second World War through her friend, historian and Nazi collaborator Bernard Fay. The Metropolitan Museum of Art recently agreed to update an exhibition of Stein's work with a reference to her Nazi connections.
The White House claimed that the inclusion of Stein had been a mistake, the result of an earlier draft of the proclamation released in error. However, Algemeiner preserved a screen shot of the original proclamation, which remained on the White House website after the new press release had been drafted.
Writing in Algemeiner on May 1, addressing the museum controversy, Harvard Law School professor Alan Dershowitz summarized Stein's efforts for the Nazis:

Stein, a “racial” Jew according to Nazi ideology, managed to survive the Holocaust, while the vast majority of her co-religionists were deported and slaughtered. The exhibit says “remarkably, the two women [Stein and her companion Alice Toklas] survived the war with their possessions intact.” It adds that “Bernard Fay, a close friend…and influential Vichy collaborator is thought to have protected them.” That is an incomplete and distorted account of what actually happened. Stein and Toklas survived the Holocaust for one simple reason: Gertrude Stein was herself a major collaborator with the Vichy regime and a supporter of its pro-Nazi leadership.
According to a new book entitled Unlikely Collaboration: Gertrude Stein, Bernard Fay and the Vichy Dilemma, by Barbara Will, Stein publicly proclaimed her admiration for Hitler during the 1930s, proposing him for a Nobel Peace Prize. In the worst days of the Vichy regime, she volunteered to write an introduction to the speeches of General Phillipe Petain, the Nazi puppet leader who deported thousands of Jews, but who she regarded as a great French hero. She wanted his speeches translated into English, with her introduction, so that Americans would see the virtues of the Vichy regime. In that respect she was like other modernist writers, such as Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot who proudly proclaimed their pro-Fascist ideology, but Stein’s support for Fascism was more bizarre because she was Jewish.
Stein’s closest friend, and a man who greatly influenced her turn toward fascism was Bernard Fay, who the Vichy government put in charge of hunting down Masons, Jews and other perceived enemies of the State. Fay was more than a mere collaborator as suggested by the Met exhibit. He was a full blown Nazi operative, responsible for the deaths of many people. After the war, when the horrendous results were known to all, Gertrude wrote in support of Fay when he was placed on trial for his Nazi war crimes.

No apology from the White House has yet been reported.Read the full story here.