NEW YORK (JTA) — A New York state assemblyman said a Brooklyn Holocaust memorial should only be for Jews.

Dov Hikind, a Brooklyn Democrat, said the memorial should not recognize the other victims of the Nazis, the New York Post reported. The memorial in the Sheepshead Bay neighborhood was erected by the City of New York.

“These people are not in the same category as Jewish people with regards to the Holocaust,” said Hikind, an Orthodox Jew whose district includes the heavily Chasidic section Borough Park. “It is so vastly different. You cannot compare political prisoners with Jewish victims.”

Along with 6 million Jewish victims, millions of gays, disabled people and Roma also were persecuted by the Nazis — a fact that several city officials played up in their defense of a plan to recognize those groups at the memorial.

“It wasn’t only the Jews that were massacred,” said the city’s Jewish mayor, Michael Bloomberg.

“There’s no doubt that most of the atrocities at the Holocaust were done upon Jewish people,” said City Council Speaker Christine Quinn. “But it goes against history and their memory to not commemorate all groups that were persecuted by the Nazis.”

Hikind, who speaks out frequently on Jewish issues, made the comments at a news conference attended by his 89-year-old mother, Frieda, a survivor of Auschwitz.

My interview with Robert K. Wilcox regarding the assassination of General George S. Patton, Jr. after World War II is now on YouTube as a 10-part series for the full (nearly) 2 hour interview.

Count Franz Ludwig von Stauffenberg, the third son of Hitler’s would-be assassin Count Claus von Stauffenberg and brother to Gen. Berthold von Stauffenberg, recently spoke to the German magazine FOCUS about Germany’s ratification of the Lisbon Treaty. Stauffenberg, a father of four and grandfather of eight, has spent his life as an attorney and a politician for the Bavarian Christian Social Union party, serving in the Bundestag from 1976 to 1987 and as a Member of the European Parliament from 1984 to 1992.

FOCUS asked the Count about his participation in the German court challenge against the Lisbon Treaty.

“I see the way to [the Constitutional Court] as a last resort,” the Count said, “and had hoped that we could compel a re-think through an ordinary democratic manner, through argument, debate, and public pressure. This has totally failed. I’m not anti-European; I was long enough a CSU Member of the European Parliament. This Europe is no longer compatible with the basic structures of a democratic legal state.”

FOCUS: Has your case something to do with your experience as the son of the resistance fighter Count von Stauffenberg?

“No. My father expected that his children would … stand on their own as a man or woman. I didn’t go into politics from devout worship of my father, but because of the unsuccessful paths of my peers from the generation of 1968.”

FOCUS: Your action comes late. Why have you waited so long?

“In Brussels, there was no sudden seizure of power, but a systematic, persistent development, in which the Bundestag deputies, constantly obedient and even docile, incapacitated themselves. They see themselves as a reserve team for higher office rather than in their actual role as inspectors to reflect, as a counter force on equal footing.”

FOCUS: How can it be that so few see a risk in the Lisbon Treaty, and the rest should be so beaten with blindness?

“In Germany, almost no one wanted to hear concerns. We live in a society of lemmings.”

Link: Graf Stauffenberg: “Wir leben in einer Gesellschaft von Lemmingen” (In German)

Original article from Andrew Cusack blog.

From: The Telegraph (UK)

Patton as Lt. Gen (wikipedia)

George S. Patton, America’s greatest combat general of the Second World War, was assassinated after the conflict with the connivance of US leaders, according to a new book.

The newly unearthed diaries of a colourful assassin for the wartime Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the forerunner of the CIA, reveal that American spy chiefs wanted Patton dead because he was threatening to expose allied collusion with the Russians that cost American lives.

The death of General Patton in December 1945, is one of the enduring mysteries of the war era. Although he had suffered serious injuries in a car crash in Manheim, he was thought to be recovering and was on the verge of flying home.

But after a decade-long investigation, military historian Robert Wilcox claims that OSS head General “Wild Bill” Donovan ordered a highly decorated marksman called Douglas Bazata to silence Patton, who gloried in the nickname “Old Blood and Guts”.

His book, “Target Patton”, contains interviews with Mr Bazata, who died in 1999, and extracts from his diaries, detailing how he staged the car crash by getting a troop truck to plough into Patton’s Cadillac and then shot the general with a low-velocity projectile, which broke his neck while his fellow passengers escaped without a scratch.

Mr Bazata also suggested that when Patton began to recover from his injuries, US officials turned a blind eye as agents of the NKVD, the forerunner of the KGB, poisoned the general.

Mr Wilcox told The Sunday Telegraph that when he spoke to Mr Bazata: “He was struggling with himself, all these killings he had done. He confessed to me that he had caused the accident, that he was ordered to do so by Wild Bill Donovan.

“Donovan told him: ‘We’ve got a terrible situation with this great patriot, he’s out of control and we must save him from himself and from ruining everything the allies have done.’ I believe Douglas Bazata. He’s a sterling guy.”

Mr Bazata led an extraordinary life. He was a member of the Jedburghs, the elite unit who parachuted into France to help organise the Resistance in the run up to D-Day in 1944. He earned four purple hearts, a Distinguished Service Cross and the French Croix de Guerre three times over for his efforts.

After the war he became a celebrated artist who enjoyed the patronage of Princess Grace of Monaco and the Duke and Duchess of Windsor.

He was friends with Salvador Dali, who painted a portrait of Bazata as Don Quixote.

He ended his career as an aide to President Ronald Reagan’s Navy Secretary John Lehman, a member of the 9/11 Commission and adviser to John McCain’s presidential campaign.

Mr Wilcox also tracked down and interviewed Stephen Skubik, an officer in the Counter-Intelligence Corps of the US Army, who said he learnt that Patton was on Stalin’s death list. Skubik repeatedly alerted Donovan, who simply had him sent back to the US.

“You have two strong witnesses here,” Mr Wilcox said. “The evidence is that the Russians finished the job.”

The scenario sounds far fetched but Mr Wilcox has assembled a compelling case that US officials had something to hide. At least five documents relating to the car accident have been removed from US archives.

The driver of the truck was whisked away to London before he could be questioned and no autopsy was performed on Patton’s body.

With the help of a Cadillac expert from Detroit, Mr Wilcox has proved that the car on display in the Patton museum at Fort Knox is not the one Patton was driving.

“That is a cover-up,” Mr Wilcox said.

George Patton, a dynamic controversialist who wore ivory-handled revolvers on each hip and was the subject of an Oscar winning film starring George C. Scott, commanded the US 3rd Army, which cut a swathe through France after D-Day.

But his ambition to get to Berlin before Soviet forces was thwarted by supreme allied commander Dwight D. Eisenhower, who gave Patton’s petrol supplies to the more cautious British General Bernard Montgomery.

Patton, who distrusted the Russians, believed Eisenhower wrongly prevented him closing the so-called Falaise Gap in the autumn of 1944, allowing hundreds of thousands of German troops to escape to fight again,. This led to the deaths of thousands of Americans during their winter counter-offensive that became known as the Battle of the Bulge.

In order to placate Stalin, the 3rd Army was also ordered to a halt as it reached the German border and was prevented from seizing either Berlin or Prague, moves that could have prevented Soviet domination of Eastern Europe after the war.

Mr Wilcox told The Sunday Telegraph: “Patton was going to resign from the Army. He wanted to go to war with the Russians. The administration thought he was nuts.

“He also knew secrets of the war which would have ruined careers.

I don’t think Dwight Eisenhower would ever have been elected president if Patton had lived to say the things he wanted to say.” Mr Wilcox added: “I think there’s enough evidence here that if I were to go to a grand jury I could probably get an indictment, but perhaps not a conviction.”

Charles Province, President of the George S. Patton Historical Society, said he hopes the book will lead to definitive proof of the plot being uncovered. He said: “There were a lot of people who were pretty damn glad that Patton died. He was going to really open the door on a lot of things that they screwed up over there.”

To read Patton’s famous speech to the toops in 1944, along with good historical counts partaining to it, follow this link.  Note: the speech is heavy with “offensive” language.

by Eric Margolis (from LewRockwell.com)

METZ, France – President Barack Obama’s visit to Normandy to commemorate the 65th anniversary of D-Day makes us think about the entire course of World War II, and the lingering propaganda or myths that still becloud it.

As a former instructor of military history and lover of history, let me address four of these myths that are particularly annoying and misleading:

First, France’s army did not simply surrender or run away in 1940, as ignorant American Know-Nothing conservatives claim.

The German Blitz that smote France on May-June, 1940, scattering its armies like leaves before a storm, was a historical revolution in warfare. Blitzkrieg combined rapidly-moving armor and mobile infantry, precision dive bombing, flexible logistical support, and new high technologies in C3 – command, control and communications. In 1940, Germany led the world in technology: 75% of all technical books were then written in German.

France’s armies and generals, trained to re-fight World War I, were overwhelmed by lightening warfare. France was then still a largely agricultural society. Blitzkrieg – now adopted by all major modern armed forces – was designed to strike an enemy’s brain rather than body, paralyzing his ability to manage large forces or to fight. The Germans called it their “silver bullet.”

Indeed it was. France still relied on couriers to deliver vital information. Germany was the world’s leader in mobile radio communications. Amazingly, the French commander in chief, Gen. Gamelin, did not even have a telephone in his HQ outside Paris.

Britain’s well-trained expeditionary force in France was beaten just as quickly and thoroughly as the French, and saved itself only by abandoning its French allies and fleeing across the Channel.

No army in the world at that time could have withstood Germany’s blitzkrieg, planned by the brilliant Erich von Manstein, and led by the audacious Heinz Guderian, and Erwin Rommel –three of modern history’s greatest generals.

They were also incredibly lucky. Just one bomb on a German bridge over the Meuse, or one impassable traffic jam in the Ardennes forest could have meant the difference between victory and defeat. The French had temporarily moved some of their weakest reserve units just into the sector the Germans struck. It was, as Wellington said after Waterloo, a damned close run thing.

Germany’s new, fluid tactics shattered France’s armies. They were unable to reform their lines in spite of often fierce resistance. The fast-moving German panzers were constantly behind them. Retreat under fire is the most difficult and perilous of all military operations. After six weeks, and a stab in the back by Mussolini’s Italy, France’s armies had disintegrated.

France lost 217,000 dead and 400,000 wounded. Compare that to America’s loss of 416,000 dead during four years of war in the Pacific and Europe. At least France did not suffer the 2 million dead it lost in World War I. Germany losses: 46,000 killed in action, 121,000 wounded, and 1,000 aircraft. By comparison, the US, British and Canadians lost some 10,000 dead and wounded at D-Day.

Second, the forts of France’s Maginot Line were not tactically outflanked, as myth has it. The Germans struck NW of the Line’s end, through the Belgian/French Ardennes Forest, a route anticipated by the French Army which held war games there in 1939. The immobile French field army failed, not the Maginot Line. It may have been too costly, tied down too many men, and came to symbolize France’s defensive attitude, but the Great Wall of France fulfilled its designated mission.

The Line was intended to only defend the coal and steel industries of Alsace and Lorraine, which it did.

The Germans concluded an attack on the Line would be too costly, and opted for a different route – through Belgium.

But the high water table of Flanders and France’s aversion to building forts behind its Belgian ally left the Franco-Belgian border with only scanty fixed defenses.

Ironically, after the German breakthrough at Sedan on the Meuse, a French corps held in reserve to cover this vital sector moved east to the Stenay Gap to protect the Maginot Line’s left flank, opening the way for Guderian’s panzers to fan out to the NW behind French lines.

The second largest amphibious operation in Western Europe during WWII was the totally forgotten German crossing under fire of the Rhine in June,1940.

The crews of the unconquered Maginot forts held out until the armistice. Those who mock France for building forts that were supposedly “outflanked” should know the “impregnable” modern US fortifications at Manila, and Britain’s Fortress Singapore, were both taken from the rear by the Imperial Japanese Army. Germany’s much vaunted “Westwall” and coastal defenses fared no better.

Third – Germany’s Wehrmacht and Luftwaffe were crushed well before D-Day. In commemorating the war, we must remember to salute the courage and valor of Russia’s dauntless soldiers and pilots who, like German soldiers, fought magnificently albeit for criminal regimes. World War II in Europe was not won just at D-Day, as popular myth has it. Germany’s army and air force were broken on the Eastern Front’s titanic battles.

The numbers speak for themselves. The Soviets destroyed 75–80% of all German divisions – 4 million soldiers – and most of the Luftwaffe. Russia lost at least 14 million soldiers and a similar number of civilians. The Red Army destroyed 507 Axis divisions. On the Western Front after D-Day, the Allies destroyed 176 badly under-strength German divisions.

When the Allies landed in Normandy, they met battered German forces with no air cover, crippled by lack of fuel and supplies, unable to move in daytime. Even so, the Germans fought like tigers. Had the invading US, British and Canadians encountered the 1940’s Wehrmacht and Luftwaffe, the outcome may well have been different.

Fourth – World War II was not a good and evil struggle between “western democracies” and “totalitarian powers,” as we are still wrongly taught.

Eric Margolis (click for website)

In 1939, the only major powers without colonies – that were not imperial powers – were Germany(who lost her few colonies in World War I) and China. Once the war ended, Britain and Holland, who complained mightily about the evils of Nazi occupation, scrambled to reoccupy their former colonies, some of which had declared independence.

One can hardly call this a crusade for freedom. Liberation for the white people of German-occupied Europe, certainly. But not for the peoples of Africa and Asia. However, in the end, the war did set in motion forces that would eventually spell the end of colonialism. The collapse of the British Empire, which Winston Churchill had vowed to defend at all costs, opened the way to worldwide decolonization.

We should not forget all this.