Tag: the Third Reich

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I have been watching 1970s Nazisploitation movies lately. This started when, on a whim, I thought it would be funny to write a review of Ilsa: She Wolf of the SS, which is one of those movies that everyone has heard of — because, credit where it’s due, it is one hell of a name — but which very few people have ever actually seen. Nonetheless, you still hear people drop the name as a punchline all the time. If some conservative bimbo offers a milquetoast take that is mildly critical of Black Lives Matter, someone will inevitably say, “Who does she think she is, Ilsa: She Wolf of the SS?” So I thought I’d watch it just to know where the joke came from. (more…)

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Part 2 of 2 (Part 1 here)

Harlan’s film, unlike Mendes’, was an enormous box office success,[1] and it is said that concentration camp guards and the SS were shown this film to remind them of their duties. It is fast-paced, and Harlan shows things: the oppression of Süß’s decrees, Theodora’s corpse, the angry mob, and the people fighting for their rights. Sturm’s calm, civil demeanor is contrasted with Süß’s slick manipulation and George’s overbearing yet sensual Karl. (more…)

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Part 1 of 2 (Part 2 here)

I’ve reviewed Munchhausen and Grosse Freiheit Nummer 7, films produced in the Third Reich that avoided discussing National Socialist philosophy regarding Jews. Which films from that era did? There was Der ewige Jude, Hitler’s favorite film on this subject given its depictions of Jews in caftans and beards, visually compared with rats scurrying down a drain. “That’s what I want to see,” Hitler said to Goebbels. “That’s what we need.” (more…)

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I have been wanting to write a review of Die große Liebe (The Great Love) for years. I read that it had the distinction of being the most popular movie in the Third Reich, and that got me curious. The only Nazi films that anyone has ever heard of are two that are discussed far out of proportion to their actual popularity at the time: the Hitler infomercial Triumph of the Will and Der ewige Jude, a helpful and informative public service announcement about the Jewish menace lurking in the shadows of Europe. As much as you hear about those two films, very few Germans actually saw either of them at the time. I wanted to see a Nazi movie that the average German actually watched and enjoyed. (more…)

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Daniel Kevles
In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985

It is young men like you, Bertie, who make the person with the future of the race at heart despair. Cursed with too much money, you fritter away in idle selfishness a life which might have been made useful, helpful and profitable. You do nothing but waste your time on frivolous pleasures. You are simply an anti-social animal, a drone. Bertie, it is imperative that you marry. — P. G. Wodehouse, The Inimitable Jeeves (1923) (more…)

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We might be at a critical point in history. It is possible that the Left’s vilification of all things they dislike has reached its zenith, and will soon begin its downward arc towards a more realistic understanding of history. What’s driving it is the rise of transgenderism and its odious step-sibling, transgender identity politics.

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When we think about Third Reich films, we always go to the usual: Triumph of the Will, Der Ewige Jude, Jud Süß, and Kolberg, Goebbels’ final, fist-shaking epic call to resistance as the Reich crumbled. Yet, German film a the time was quite varied, innovative, entertaining, and more than just propaganda films for the master race. Jewish writer Walter Laqueur observed that German film had a worldwide reputation in the 1920’s and ’30s, and even in the Nazi era films were made with a high level of competence and had considerable entertainment value. Unlike the other arts, movies under Hitler were given a great deal of latitude. (more…)

Luz Long

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Part 1 of 2 (Part 2 here)

In addition to our sporting mission, we Germans also have the major political mission to fulfill. — Luz Long[i]

Carl Ludwig “Luz” Hermann Long (1913-1943) was a world-class German athlete who competed in both high and broad jump competitions and is best known for winning the silver medal in the broad jump at the 1936 Olympics.

He was one of the most visible ambassadors of sports in the Third Reich, sometimes even acting as standard bearer at sports events, and Long really was the ideal Aryan poster boy: tall, blond, and blue-eyed, with both a competitive and chivalrous streak to boot. (more…)

General Andrei Vlasov, who commanded the German-backed Russian Liberation Army.

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The Third Reich was not profuse in mistakes; otherwise, it would not have been able to battle for almost six years against the major world powers, in numerical and material inferiority and with so few and counterproductive allies. However, it itself made a vital mistake which resulted in losing the war. (more…)

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Ernst Jünger
The Peace
Singapore: Rogue Scholar Press, 2022

Ernst Jünger is representative of the German twentieth century in many ways; his books and essays are often visceral, violent, brutal, and profound. The First World War shaped much of his writing. Jünger articulated the new heroics of soldiers dealing stoically with the frightful carnage wrought by technology and envisioned a totalitarian future characterized by obedience beyond question. (more…)

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I first saw Decision Before Dawn on TV in the mid-sixties on Saturday Night at the Movies, seemingly banal filler that offered a surprisingly good row of early fifties movies such as The Big Carnival (previously reviewed by me), The Desert Fox, and others that were gritty, blunt, and full of Cinéma vérité. This one always stuck with me, and I recently saw it again on YouTube.

What sticks? The realistic setting of this 1951 film in a battered Germany during the Second World War holding off the inevitable, and the strong performance of Oskar Werner as Corporal Mauer, a POW who is convinced by the Americans to go back into Germany on a mission that could supposedly end the war (don’t they all?). (more…)

A Yiddish election poster from Ukraine in 1917 which reads, in Yiddish, “Vote for the United Jewish Socialist Workers’ Party.”

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Introduction

When approaching the Jewish Question, a beginner should keep in mind that the ultimate goal of his investigation should be the normalization of the white and Jewish populations. Normalization, in this case, means a state of affairs in which one population does not take undue advantage of the other. A utopian goal, perhaps, but one that would most likely reap tangible rewards the closer both populations come to achieving it.

How are white-Jewish relations today not normalized? If you ask Jonathan Greenblatt or any other spokesmen of diaspora Jewish interests, they would tell you that relations today are normalized. (more…)