Free Republic

<p>German lawmakers embarrass their envoy in S.F. Phillip Matier,Andrew Ross Sunday, August 24, 2008 They came. They shopped. And they embarrassed the hell out of us.</p> <p>That was the reaction of the German consul general in San Francisco, Rolf Schütte, to a group of lawmakers from his homeland who recently traipsed through the city, leaving a lot of bad feelings in their wake after using a racial slur and choosing sightseeing and shopping over meetings with their U.S. counterparts.</p>

The planned construction of over 180 mosques in Germany is mobilizing right-wing xenophobes but also an increasing number of leftist critics. They fear the Muslim places of worship will facilitate the establishment of a completely parallel society. ... the media reported "turmoil" and an "enraged" audience in a school auditorium in Ehrenfeld, a district of the German city of Cologne. The mood was almost comparable to that of the protest gatherings once held against nuclear missiles or reactors. Instead the outrage was directed at a huge mosque planned for the area. Still, the words used by the project's opponents called...

Three German tourists kidnapped in eastern Turkey Three German tourists were kidnapped in Turkey's eastern province of Agri, CNNTurk reported on Wednesday. They were kidnapped by terrorists, it added quoting the governor of Agri. (UPDATED) Three German climbers on Mount Ararat were kidnapped in Turkey's eastern province of Agri, CNNTurk reported on Wednesday. The three, who were party of a 13-member team, were kidnapped by terrorists, it added quoting the governor of Agri

A blog following the unearthing by Pistonhead.com member CY88 of the german bunker at the bottom of his garden _____________________ Monday, 2 June 2008 Background People visiting this blog from Pistonheads.com may recall that in the "Secret Room" thread in early 2008, I said that I thought I had a nazi bunker buried in my garden. Well, since then I decided to get off my backside and excavate it. Our house is in an old quarry, and when we bought it five or so years ago, the previous owner told us that there was a tunnel built by the germans...

The rate of infanticide in Germany varies widely between the regions of the former West Germany and East Germany. Der Spiegel reports that the issue has become a political hot potato, and that the suggestion by the governor of the formerly communist-run state Saxony-Anhalt that communism could be the cause has people demanding his resignation: Wolfgang Böhmer, governor of the eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt, faces opposition calls to resign after he said women in the east had "a more casual approach to new life" than in the west. Böhmer, who trained as a gynaecologist, was responding to research showing that...

One day after this report was submitted, however, German troops marched into the demilitarized zone of the Rhineland. In a spectacular move that fully exposed the weakness of the western democracies, Hitler could celebrate his greatest triumph in foreign policy to date. The domestic problems of previous months — shortage of foodstuffs, high prices, low wages and, in Catholic areas, much antagonism towards the regime over the struggle between the church and state were temporarily forgotten in the euphoria.

There's an old joke that says inside every German there's a Nazi yearning to get out. While a gross overstatement, there is, I'm unhappy to report, more than a little truth to that old chestnut.

Three people have been arrested in Germany on suspicion of planning terror attacks. Two of the suspects were Germans who had converted to Islam while the third held Turkish and German passports. The sources said the three all had links to Pakistan and that they had been experimenting with explosives and trying to build car bombs. They were arrested during a series of raids carried out overnight. A German radio station said the suspects had been planning to bomb Frankfurt airport and the US military base at Ramstein in western Germany.

Last Updated: Saturday, 21 July 2007, 10:37 GMT 11:37 UK Taleban 'kill captured Germans' Two Germans kidnapped near Kabul in Afghanistan this week have been killed, a spokesman for the Taleban has said. The spokesman, Qari Yousuf Ahmadi, said the Taleban's demand that Germany withdraw its 3,000 troops in Afghanistan had been ignored. Afghan and German officials say they have no confirmation of the killings and are seeking evidence. The Taleban has also threatened to kill at least 18 hostages from South Korea, captured separately on Thursday. Deadlines pass Local police said the Germans, whose identity has not been revealed,...

COLOGNE, Germany — In a city with the greatest Gothic cathedral in Germany and no fewer than a dozen Romanesque churches, adding a pair of slender fluted minarets would scarcely alter the skyline. Yet plans for a new mosque are rattling this ancient city to its foundations. Cologne’s Muslim population, largely Turkish, is pushing for approval to build what would be one of Germany’s largest mosques, in a working-class district across town from the cathedral’s mighty spires. Predictably, an extreme-right local political party has waged a noisy, xenophobic protest campaign, drumming up support from its far-right allies in Austria and...

WASHINGTON (AP) - Seventeen-year-old Eberhard Fuhr was taken out of his high school classroom in Cincinnati during 1943, and arrested by FBI agents. He was sent off to an internment camp in Texas for so-called "enemy aliens" and spent the next four and a half years there with his family. Thousands of Germans experienced a similar fate. But they were detained in far fewer numbers in this country than Japanese. The stories of the Germans have gotten little attention so far. But the US Senate took a step toward changing that this week, voting to look into the treatment of...

WASHINGTON - In 1943, 17-year-old Eberhard Fuhr was taken out of his high school classroom in Cincinnati, arrested by FBI agents, and sent off to an internment camp for "enemy aliens" in Texas, where he spent the next 4 1/2 years with his family. Thousands of Germans experienced a similar fate. They were detained in far fewer numbers in this country than Japanese. The stories of the Germans have gotten little attention so far, but the Senate took a step toward changing that this week, voting to look into the treatment of Germans and other Europeans in the U.S. during...

ROME, MARCH 23, 2007 (Zenit.org).- For harboring Jews, the nine members of the Ulma family were executed by firing squad in 1944 in their German-occupied Polish village. Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, Vatican secretary of state, mentioned the Polish family in a speech given recently in Rome on the occasion of the publication of a book by British historian Martin Gilbert entitled "The Righteous: The Unsung Heroes of the Holocaust." The Ulmas' story was also told recently in an interview with the magazine Inside the Vatican and Mateusz Szpytma, a Polish historian and co-author of the book "The Sacrifice of the Just:...

A German legislator has moved to strip Adolf Hitler of his German citizenship, Der Spiegel reports. Isolde Saalmann, a deputy in the state legislature of Lower Saxony, plans to file a motion to investigate whether Hitler's citizenship can be revoked. Hitler, an Austrian, was granted German citizenship on Feb. 25, 1932 in the city of Braunschweig just months before he became Germany's chancellor, according to the report. Click here to read Der Spiegel's story. "If the state of Lower Saxony as the legal successor of the then free state of Braunschweig distances itself from it, it could be helpful," Saalmann...

Germans demand compensation from Poland over war losses A German group has filed claims against Poland with a European court over property lost in the aftermath of World War II, a member said today. The Prussian Claims Society, which represents some Germans who were expelled from Poland after the war ended, filed the complaint with the European Court of Human Rights, the society’s deputy leader Gerwald Stanko said. “Twenty-two individual complaints have gone to the European Court of Human Rights,” Stanko said. He said the aim was to secure either compensation or the return of property. The Prussian Claims Society...

NAZI REPRISAL POLICY IN SERBIA SHAMELESSLY EXPLOITED BY THE YUGOSLAV COMMUNISTS By Aleksandra Rebic On September 6, 1941, following the successful attacks by Mihailovich forces against the Germans in Western Serbia, Adolph Hitler issued the decree that for every German killed, 100 Serbian hostages would be shot. For every German wounded, 50 Serbs would be shot. This decree would be posted throughout Belgrade, Serbia on September 13, 1941. The Germans were not kidding. General Boehme, the German Commanding General of the occupation forces in Serbia from September 16 to December 2 of 1941, issued three orders to supplement Hitler’s decree....

Israeli warplanes fired shots over an unarmed German vessel backing up the UN mission off the Lebanese coast, the German defence ministry has said. The incident, which Israel has so far denied, was one of two involving the Israeli military and German forces in the region this week, defence spokesman Thomas Raabe told reporters Friday. "There have been two incidents, one involving a helicopter and another the Alster" a German electronic surveillance and reconnaissance ship. Raabe said six Israeli F-16 fighter planes had fired shots into the air over the Alster on Tuesday while the ship was in international waters...

Germany’s Defense Ministry announced Wednesday that two Israeli Air Force jets fired at a German navy vessel off the coast of Lebanon. The IDF denies the claim. The report was initially printed by the German daily Der Tagesspiegel, which quoted a German official telling a parliamentary committee that two Israeli F-16s had flown low over a German ship and fired two shots past it. The official also said the F-16s used infra-red flares, part of their anti-missile systems, to protect the planes from being shot down. It is unclear whether the German ship may have fired at the planes first,...

WHEN the sun sets over Angeles City, the neon glow from a single street illuminates everything around it. Set away from the smoke-filled traffic jams of the city's main thoroughfares, Fields Avenue comes alive after dark. This dusty street, which stretches for a kilometre, is lined on both sides with bars and nightclubs, each attempting to out-do the other with gaudy lights and tasteless names. Outside each bar stand groups of up to 10 girls. Their job is a straightforward one: they must encourage passing tourists to come into their premises for a drink. Once inside, the tourist will encounter...

Ressam at times defiant in 2 days of questioning By Mike Carter Seattle Times staff reporter After more than a year of cooperating with federal prosecutors, Ahmed Ressam has become a sometimes difficult and defiant government witness. Ressam was at times surly and evasive during two days of closed-door questioning this week in Seattle by German lawyers who need his help prosecuting Mounir el-Motassadeq, a Moroccan accused of helping the Sept. 11, 2001, hijackers. Ressam, convicted of conspiracy to commit an act of international terrorism, might be endangering his deal with federal prosecutors to serve as few as 27 years...

GERMANY was poised yesterday to shatter its most enduring postwar taboo by sending troops into the cauldron of Lebanon, where they risk coming into direct conflict with Israelis. As troops from France, Italy, Spain, Turkey and other donor nations prepared to deploy in southern Lebanon, Germany’s late decision to participate ranked as its most delicate foreign policy move since it was held to account for the Holocaust in 1945. Since then, it has been unthinkable that Germany would put itself in a combat situation in which its soldiers could shoot at Jews. The decision to deploy troops to join the...

Yesterday I visited Buchenwald concentration camp, the largest such camp in Germany (the larger ones Germany put outside of Germany.) Since it is my 4th time in Germany I felt kind of an obligation to visit it...a duty to face the truth in this beautiful land. Most of the camp is gone, almost all of the prisoner's barracks are. Outside the fence, about half the SS barracks are there--nicely painted yellow, with red tile roofs, resembling ten thousand other German buildings in other places. I had heard that birds don't roost inside the camp , and I think it may...

SOEST, Germany – More and more Germans are converting to Islam. Last year approximately 4,000 persons became Muslims. According to the Central Islam-Institute in Soest, the numbers have been rising since the turn of the century. Up to the year 2000 the annual number of conversions stagnated at 300, but it has been rising ever since. The institute’s director, Salim Abdullah, has no plausible explanation for this trend, as he told the evangelical news agency "idea." In the past, converts were chiefly women, who married Muslims, or academics with an "affection for the Orient."

The sound of the blast was unearthly, and the tremor was felt 100 miles away in Philadelphia. The night sky over New York Harbor turned orange. From Bayonne to Brooklyn and beyond, people were jolted from bed as windows shattered within a radius of 25 miles. The Statue of Liberty, holding high its torch less than a mile from the epicenter, was damaged by a rain of red-hot shards of steel. On nearby Ellis Island, frightened immigrants were hastily evacuated to Manhattan. Ground zero itself -- a small island called Black Tom -- all but disappeared, "as if an atomic...

Germans hit road in search for jobs By Kate Connolly in Berlin (Filed: 08/07/2006) More Germans are emigrating than at any time since the war, driven from home by unemployment or the search for better job prospects. Around 145,000 mainly young people turned their backs on the country last year, more than at any time since 1945, and almost a three-fold increase since the 1980s, according to the Federal Office of Statistics. The favoured countries were America, followed by Switzerland, Poland, Austria, Britain and France. Doctors and academics constitute the largest groups of those leaving. Doctors in particular are choosing...

German stereotypes of Poles 29.06.2006 They are car thieving, backward and unemployed who can’t play football, apparently. Report by Slawek Szefs Although their image has been changing for the better, Poles are still negatively perceived by most Germans and are not fully accepted in the country of their Western neighbors. Those are the conclusions of a six-year study published in a report by the Institute of Public Affairs in Warsaw. In the eyes of an average German, Poles are mostly associated with car theft, cultural backwardness and unemployment. What's worse, they can't even play football! The latter opinion is fully...

Like most other local residents, Tricia Torrez didn't know that the Sahuarita area had a German prisoner of war camp during World War II. Until a couple of years ago, that is, when she overheard her grandfather, Joe Martinez, talking about it as they were driving along a stretch of Nogales Highway south of Sahuarita, near the community of Continental. "He said something to grandma like, 'Remember the POW camp here?' " Torrez said. "I couldn't believe it, because he wouldn't ever talk about it, his time in the military," she said.

EUROPE'S largest legal annual migration is under way with university professors joining roadsweepers and the jobless to pour into Germany from eastern Europe to pick asparagus.People come in their tens of thousands from Poland and the Czech Republic for two-months of plucking that which Germans love to see on their dinner tables, but of whose harvest they want no part. Once again the German government is throwing money at the nation's five million jobless, trying to persuade and cajole them into working for a change. But asparagus-picking is one job they refuse to do. The asparagus spring harvest is again...

Once I read that the number of Germans directly involved in the Holocaust — giving orders in Berlin, building the infrastructure of the death camps, rounding up victims, piloting trains, releasing the gas, hunting down escapees and so forth — was 100,000. In 1939 the population of the Reich was 80 million, so slightly more than one-tenth of 1 percent of the Germans were actually involved in murdering Jews. Yet, somehow, I never see anyone trying to clear the German volk of the guilt of the crimes of Hitler's "tiny extremist minority." No, the verdict of history is that all...

BERLIN (Reuters) - Germans are leaving their country in record numbers but unlike previous waves of migrants who fled 19th century poverty or 1930s Nazi terror, these modern day refugees are trying to escape a new scourge -- unemployment. Flocking to places as far away as the United States, Canada and Australia as well as Norway, the Netherlands and Austria more than 150,000 Germans packed their bags and left in 2004 -- the greatest exodus in any single year since the late 1940s. High unemployment that lingers at levels of more than 20 percent in some parts of Germany and...

Germans give chimney sweeps the brush-off By Kate Connolly in Berlin (Filed: 26/12/2005) In his top hat, white tie and brass-buttoned uniform, and dangling a brush on a chain over his shoulder, Erhard Feller might have walked off the set of a film about Victorian England. But the 51-year-old chimney sweep is a vibrant part of working life in modern Berlin and the uniform is standard for him and his 8,000 colleagues across Germany. Even though most German chimneys are too thin for Santa Claus to squeeze into, Christmas is still the busiest time of year for Mr Feller, who...

I'll reply to this with a chronology.

A German man has been arrested after a marriage guidance counsellor advised him to run around naked shouting at trees.Dieter Braun, 43, from Recklinghausen said the stress release technique had worked perfectly until he was arrested. He told police that venting his anger on the trees had stopped him shouting at his wife. "If I didn't go to the woods and scream at the trees then my marriage would probably be over," he said. He added taking his clothes off at the same time made him feel more relaxed. "For me it's a type of relaxation therapy. Feeling the breeze...

I am dismayed so far by the Republican response to Durbin's statements comparing our treatment of the Gitmo detainees to that given by the Nazi's, Soviets and Pol Pot. I heard Mitch McConnell and some other Senator on the Michael Savage Show debating and questioning Durbin in an entirely too civil manner. It is my opinion that Durbin's statements--and Hillary's and every Democrat who is suggesting that we are mistreating or torturing Gitmo detainees should, in turn, be responded to with nothing less than derision. It seems to me that by failing to do so, the Republicans are treating Durbin's...

I'll reply to this with details.

The final item in the Sept. 30, 1944 "Activity Report of Virginia Hall," American intelligence agent, was No. XV: "Were you decorated in the Field?" "No," she had typed, "nor any reason to be." The answer was typical of her matter-of-fact sense of duty. But William J. Donovan, known to a generation of spies as "Wild Bill," begged to differ. On May 12, 1945, Maj. Gen. Donovan, director of the U.S. Office of Strategic Services, informed President Harry Truman that Hall was, for her extraordinary heroism, to receive the Distinguished Service Cross -- second only to the Medal of Honor....

Sudeten German days open with decoration of Czech bishop AUGSBURG- The traditional Sudeten German days in Augsburg, Bavaria, opened today with the presentation of the Sudeten German Landsmannschaft's highest prize, the European Karl IV Award, to Czech bishop Josef Koukl. Koukl, 79, who became the first Czech on whom the Sudeten Germans bestowed their award, was decorated for his long-lasting effort at Czech-German reconciliation. "Today is the holiday of sending the Holy Spirit when all nations spoke one language although they did not lose their identity. It is important to talk together and understand each other," Koukl told journalists. He...

ONE of Hitler’s top intelligence officers, who ordered the murders of more than 100 British secret agents in concentration camps, was spared execution as a war criminal and selected to work for MI6. Newly opened papers contain startling evidence that in the postwar scramble to secure information about Russian communists, British Intelligence “turned” Horst Kopkow, faked his death and used him to fight the Cold War. Nazi SS documents Evidence emerged in the 1980s that Britain had become a refuge for suspected war criminals, but few would have believed that the Government had gone even further and put a man...

Sixty Years Later By Andrzej Jonas 11 May 2005 Two, maybe three, generations have passed since the end of World War II. For an individual this is almost a lifetime, but, in the historical sense, it is only a fleeting moment. A horrible event such as this stays in the memory of people and shapes the policies and worldview of societies and nations. But for how long? Sixty years after the war, everything seems different. Poles seem to be a different people and society. Poland is a different country and European alliances are much different now than in May 1945....

BERLIN _ Germany opened a Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin on Tuesday, marking the 60th anniversary of the Nazi regime's capitulation, as many young people here ponder over whether they should be continually apologetic for crimes they did not commit. Journalists visit the underground exhibition below Germany's national Holocaust memorial during a media preview in Berlin on May 6. In background are pictures of jews who were murdered by the Nazis. AP-Yonhap Even though German politicians, such as Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, do not hesitate using terms like ``shame'' for its past and even asking for ``forgiveness''...

IT was 60 years ago today that Adolf Hitler slunk for the last time into the private quarters of his Berlin bunker. With Soviet artillery shells shaking the earth above him and the last remnants of his empire crumbling, Hitler took with him a pistol for himself and a poison capsule for his mistress Eva Braun. The world was about to be rid for good of one of the most evil tyrants it has ever known.

WEIMAR, Germany - Elderly survivors of the Buchenwald concentration camp laid flowers and observed a moment of silence for victims of the Nazis, 60 years after U.S. troops liberated the camp. Flags from some 30 nations hung in the cold drizzle on Sunday, representing the nations from which the camp's 240,000 prisoners came between 1937 and 1945. About 56,000 died - either worked to death, shot or killed in medical experiments. Ukrainian concentration camp survivor Petro Mischtschuk, 78, holds a white flag at former Nazi death camp Buchenwald in Germany, Sunday. (AP) German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder and U.S. veterans...

POTSDAM - German researchers have located a gene that makes some people loathe cabbage and spinach in all their forms, and discovered that the same gene often protects people from obesity. The German Institute for Food Research in Potsdam near Berlin said the gene makes some people extraordinarily sensitive to the bitter substances phenylthiocarbamid (PTC) and propylthiouracil (PROP). Most people swallow those substances with a smile. The scientists, led by Wolfgang Meyerhof, investigated how the gene affects human taste receptor hTAS2R38. People who cannot taste PTC and PROP tended to eat fattier foods and become overweight, so a single gene...

A former German Nazi soldier turned Chilean sect leader was arrested on charges of pedophilia and suspicion of committing torture during the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, police said. Paul Schaefer, 83, was arrested in a small property some 120 kilometers (75 miles) from Buenos Aires with six people described as his security team, Argentine police investigator Gustavo Toledo told AFP. Schaefer led an insular German sect in southern Chile called Colonia Dignidad, and had been hiding since a warrant for his arrest on multiple counts of pedophilia was issued in August 1996. Schaefer was convicted of the charges in November...

March 7, 2005: Alarmed at the growing number of Islamic radical groups in Germany, several hundred German military intelligence analysts are being transferred to a civilian counter-terrorist organizations. Many of the troops will retain their military status, but will work in civilian clothes. Since September 11, 2001, German police have been looking more closely at the activities of Islamic radical groups in Germany. They found a lot more than they expected. German law makes it difficult to make arrests unless there is a lot of proof that a crime has been committed, or is well along in its planning. Given...

German police have arrested two suspected al-Qaida terrorists – one who was allegedly trying to buy enriched uranium for a nuclear bomb and other planning a suicide attack in Iraq. According to a German prosecutor, the arrests, which occurred early Sunday, came after months of investigation, Knight-Ridder reported. The suspects were nabbed after early morning police raids in Mainz and Bonn. President Bush is scheduled to visit Mainz next month, which heightens the security concerns in the city. It was determined today there was enough evidence to keep the pair in custody pending possible charges. Authorities described one suspect, Ibrahim...

BERLIN (AP) - Celebrating a native son who had to flee the Nazis, Germany opened festivities Wednesday marking the 100th anniversary of Albert Einstein's theory of relativity and the 50th anniversary of his death. The so-called "Einstein Year" of 2005 is being marked with tours, a scientific conference and a major exhibition about Einstein, whose theories about space, time and relativity revolutionized science and also helped make him a pop icon. German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder began the celebration at the German Historical Museum in Berlin, calling on his fellow Germans and scientists to embrace innovation and political debate as Einstein...

Prince Harry, the younger son of the Prince of Wales and the late Princess Diana and third in line to the British throne dressed up as a Nazi at a costume party last week. You may have seen something in the press about it. In Britain the media has been full of the business for days. Actually, Harry is a bit of a mixed up kid (he's now 20). The uniform was supposed to be that of a soldier of Rommel's Afrika Korps, and yet he also wore a swastika armband, which no such soldier would have done. Also, the...

BAYREUTH - Baffled authorities in southern Germany have issued an alert concerning unknown persons who have been sticking small US flags into piles of dog droppings in public parks in Bayreuth. "This has been going on for about a year now, and there must be 2,000 to 3,000 piles of excrement that have been thusly 'adorned' during that time," said Bayreuth parks administrator Josef Oettl. The sporadic series of incidents originally was thought to be some sort of protest against the US-led invasion of Iraq. And when it continued it was thought to be a protest against President George W....

Forget Steve McQueen breaking out of the German prison camp astride that motorcycle in "The Great Escape." Never happened. "It was fabricated by Hollywood," says Davy Jones. He should know. Jones, 91, helped dig three tunnels intended as escape routes for Allied airmen held at Stalag Luft III, a remote, top-security camp built in German-occupied Poland. On the night of March 24-25, 1944, 76 prisoners - none American - escaped. Only three made it to freedom: a Dutchman and two Norwegians. Most of the escapees were recaptured. Fifty were shot "We felt despair," says Jones, who became one of the...