Free Republic

A shocking report out of Germany says that government agencies intentionally placed homeless children with a widespread and influential pedophile ring for decades. Starting in the 1970s psychology professor Helmut Kentler conducted his “experiment.” Homeless children in West Berlin were intentionally placed with pedophile men. These men would make especially loving foster parents, Kentler argued.A study conducted by the University of Hildesheim has found that authorities in Berlin condoned this practice for almost 30 years. The pedophile foster fathers even received a regular care allowance.Helmut Kentler (1928-2008) was in a leading position at Berlin’s center for educational research. He was...

For more than half a century, governments all over the world trusted a single company to keep the communications of their spies, soldiers and diplomats secret. The company, Crypto AG, got its first break with a contract to build code-making machines for U.S. troops during World War II. SNIP The Swiss firm made millions of dollars selling equipment to more than 120 countries well into the 21st century. Its clients included Iran, military juntas in Latin America, nuclear rivals India and Pakistan, and even the Vatican. But what none of its customers ever knew was that Crypto AG was secretly...

For two decades after the Second World War, over half of all employees of the West German interior ministry were ex-Nazis, a new study shows. The research, carried out by the Center for Contemporary Historical Studies with the blessing of the Interior Ministry, shows that the number of ex-Nazi party members in both the West and East German postwar administrations was much higher than previously thought. In exact figures, an average of 54 percent of civil servants in the West German interior ministry were former Nazis, although at its high point between 1966 and 1961, two-thirds of all employees at...

Germany’s foreign intelligence agency can keep secret some of its records on Adolf Eichmann, the man known as the architect of the Nazi Holocaust, a court ruled Thursday. The Federal Administrative Court ruled that the intelligence agency was within its rights to black out passages from the files sought by a journalist attempting to shed light on whether West German authorities knew in the 1950s where Eichmann had fled after World War II. Thursday’s ruling followed a decision last year in which the court said the Federal Intelligence Service had to release some files it had previously kept secret. Israeli...

Cold War: The White House has announced our absence at ceremonies marking the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Meanwhile, Russia has been practicing a nuclear invasion of an abandoned Poland. The Berlin Wall has been a famous backdrop for American presidents sounding the battle cry of liberty in the struggle against tyranny. It was there that John F. Kennedy expressed our solidarity with the encircled residents of that outpost of freedom with his famous "Ich bin ein Berliner." And it was there that Ronald Reagan, with a defiant "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall," voiced our...

Gelsenkirchen, Germany - German police said Thursday they are seeking a man, believed to be a neo-Nazi, who beat up a US national because he was speaking English in a McDonald's restaurant. The victim, 54, was taken to hospital with serious injuries after the incident on Saturday, which has not previously been reported. The victim had been talking to his female partner in English in the fast-food eatery in the industrial city of Gelsenkirchen when the stranger interrupted and demanded they speak in German. The girlfriend replied that her partner only knew a little German. The assailant, described as having...

“There can be no peace without honestly and maturely confronting the past.” --Joachim Gauck[1] It’s the middle of May, and I’m having breakfast at the Hotel Adlon in Berlin.[2]  I’m in Germany with other journalists on a visit sponsored by Atlantik-Brücke, a Berlin-based organization that promotes German-American friendship.   This morning I’m speaking with Dr. Helmut Holl, former state secretary for Lower Saxony in northwestern Germany.  Dr. Holl and I discuss the German Democratic (sic) Republic (sic) (GDR), which subjugated eastern Germany from 1949 to 1990 after National Socialist subjugation from 1933 to 1945.   A short walk from the Adlon is...

A SENIOR adviser to Gerhard Schröder, the German chancellor, has been accused of passing confidential documents to East Germany in the 1980s which revealed how the British Army and RAF would react to an attack by Soviet-led Warsaw Pact forces.The details were among more than 100 pages of material allegedly given to the East Germans by Karsten Voigt, 63, a former MP who now works for the German foreign ministry as co-ordinator of German-American relations. He spent yesterday at an international security conference attended by Donald Rumsfeld, the US defence secretary. The German magazine Focus claimed this weekend that in...

<p>ATLANTA, Georgia (CNN) -- Gregor Jordan set out to make a film that teasingly mocked the military.</p> <p>Little did he know he would come under a firestorm from media pundits, the military and those who uphold the memory of America's first all-black cavalry unit, which was nicknamed the Buffalo Soldiers -- also the title of his new movie.</p>

<p>When Allied troops liberated the concentration camps 58 years ago this spring, they were greeted by living skeletons -- human beings nearly dead from hunger, disease, and savage abuse.  The men and women behind the barbed wire were emaciated and traumatized, some so weak they couldn't move.  Many were the last remnant of a murdered family; all had witnessed horrors beyond words.</p>

Toogood Reports [Weekender, February 23, 2003; 12:01 a.m. EST]URL: http://ToogoodReports.com/ When I lived in then-West Germany from 1980-1985, my German girlfriend's father, Alois, was a (conservative) Christian Democrat and union man who had originally been a farmer in Bohemia. After centuries as a German province, after The War Bohemia (Boehmen) was awarded to Czechoslovakia, a nation which had itself been slapped together out of parts of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which the Allies dismantled after World War I. My girlfriend's mother, Ingrid, was a farm girl from Upper Silesia (Oberschlesien), which likewise after the war was awarded, after centuries as a...