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The ultimate goal of a large-scale project known as “Wooffan SS” was for dogs to take over as SS officers, spies, and concentration camp guards. The Telegraph sifts through the sordid kennel of history:

The Germans viewed canines as being almost as intelligent as humans and attempted to build an army of fearsome ’speaking’ dogs, extraordinary new research shows. Hitler hoped the clever creatures would learn to communicate with their SS masters — and he even had a special dog school set up to teach them to talk. The incredible findings show Nazi officials recruited so-called educated dogs from all over Germany and trained them to speak and tap out signals using their paws.

The Germans hoped to use the animals for the war effort, such as getting them to work alongside the SS and guard concentration camps to free up officers. The bizarre ‘Wooffan SS’ experiment has come to light after years of painstaking research by academic Dr Jan Bondeson into unique and amazing dogs in history.

The school, based in Leutenburg near Hannover and led by headmistress Margarethe Schmitt, was set up in the 1930s and continued throughout the war years. It was reported to have had some success, with dogs tapping out words with their paws. Some of them were able to imitate the human voice and one, when asked who Adolf Hitler was, is said to have replied ‘Mein Fuhrer’.

 

Hitler’s propaganda stressed the importance of keeping fit and abstaining from drink and tobacco to keep the Aryan race strong and pure.

But in reality his soldiers were taking addictive and damaging chemicals to make them fight longer and more fiercely.

A study of medicines used by the Third Reich exposes how Nazi doctors and officers issued recruits with pills to help them fight longer and without rest.

The German army’s drug of choice as it overran Poland, Holland, Belgium and France was Pervitin – pills made from methamphetamine, commonly known today as crystal meth.

By the time the invasion of the Soviet Union was launched in 1941, hundreds of thousands of soldiers were doped up on it. Records of the Wehrmacht, the German army, show that some 200 million Pervitin pills were doled out to the troops between 1939 and 1945.

Research by the German Doctors’ Association also showed the Nazis developed a cocaine-based stimulant for its front-line fighters that was tested on concentration camp inmates.

‘It was Hitler’s last secret weapon to win a war he had already lost long ago,’ said criminologist Wolf Kemper, author of a German language book on the Third Reich’s use of drugs called Nazis On Speed.

The drug, codenamed D-IX, was tested at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp north of Berlin, where prisoners loaded with 45lb packs were reported to have marched 70 miles without rest.

The plan was to give all soldiers in the crumbling Reich the wonder drug – but the invasion of Normandy in June 1944, coupled with crippling Allied bombing, scotched the scheme.

‘The Blitzkrieg was fuelled by speed,’ said a pharmacologist. ‘The idea was to turn ordinary soldiers, sailors and airmen into automatons capable of superhuman performance.’

Medical authorities say the downside of the plan was that many soldiers became helplessly addicted to drugs and were of no use in any theatre of war.

Otto Ranke, a military doctor and director of the Institute for General and Defence Physiology at Berlin’s Academy of Military Medicine, was behind the Pervitin scheme.

He found that the drug gave users heightened self-confidence and self-awareness.

On the eastern front, where the fighting was the most savage of the war, soldiers used it in massive quantities against an enemy that showed no mercy.

In January 1942, one group of 500 troops surrounded by the Red Army were attempting to escape in temperatures of minus 30 Degrees C.

‘I decided to give them Pervitin as they began to lie down in the snow wanting to die,’ wrote the medical officer for the unit.

‘After half an hour the men began spontaneously reporting that they felt better.

‘They began marching in orderly fashion again, their spirits improved, and they became more alert.’

Concentration camp prisoners were also the victims of terrible experiments overseen by German doctors aimed at making the war less risky for their own troops.

At Dachau hundreds died in vats of ice water as physicians sought to find a way to better insulate the flying suits of Luftwaffe pilots brought down in the sea.

And at Mauthausen in Austria inmates suffered horrific chemical burns as the doctors sought cures for phosphorous shell injuries.

Physician’s group president Jörg-Dietrich Hoppe said: ‘I will be the last president of this group who lived through this time.

‘It is intolerable to think that so many physicians were silent or complicit in what was done in the name of medicine at this time.’

Source: DailyMail

It was an audacious double-cross that fooled the Nazis and shortened World War II. Now a document, here published for the first time, reveals the crucial role played by Britain’s code-breaking experts in the 1944 invasion of France.

All the ingredients of a gripping spy thriller are there – intrigue, espionage, lies and black propaganda.

An elaborate British wartime plot succeeded in convincing Hitler that the Allies were about to stage the bulk of the D-Day landings in Pas de Calais rather than on the Normandy coast – a diversion that proved crucial in guaranteeing the invasion’s success.

An intercepted memo – which has only now come to light – picked up by British agents and decoded by experts at Bletchley Park – the decryption centre depicted in the film Enigma – revealed that German intelligence had fallen for the ruse.

The crucial message was sent after the D-Day landings had started, but let the Allies know the Germans had bought into their deception and believed the main invasion would be near Calais.

It was an insight that saved countless Allied lives and arguably hastened the end of the war.

Now archivists at the site of the code-breaking centre hope that a new project to digitise and put online millions of documents, using equipment donated by electronics company Hewlett-Packard, will uncover further glimpses into its extraordinary past.

Behind the story of this crucial message and its global impact lies Juan Pujol Garcia, an unassuming-looking Spanish businessman who was, in fact, one of the war’s most effective double agents.

The Nazis believed Pujol, whom they code named Alaric Arabel, was one of their prize assets, running a network of spies in the UK and feeding crucial information to Berlin via his handler in Madrid.

In fact, the Spaniard was working for British intelligence, who referred to him as Garbo. Almost the entirety of his elaborate web of informants was fictitious and the reports he sent back to Germany were designed, ultimately, to mislead.

But agent Garbo was so completely trusted at the top level of the Nazi high command that he was honoured for his services to Germany, with the approval of Hitler himself, making him one of the few people to be given both the Iron Cross and the MBE for his WWII exploits.

“He was no James Bond – he was a balding, boring, unsmiling little man,” says Amyas Godfrey, an associate fellow at the Royal United Services Institute.

“But he had the Germans completely fooled. They thought the information he was sending was so accurate.”

To maintain his cover, much of what Garbo fed the Germans was absolutely genuine. But when it came to the looming Allied invasion of France, his “intelligence” was anything but.

Ahead of D-Day, the British launched Operation Fortitude, a plot to confound the Nazis about the location of the landings. Garbo was an integral part of the plan.

To establish his credibility, he sent advance warning ahead of the Normandy landings on 6 June 1944 – but too late for the Germans to act on it.

Then, in the days afterwards, he fed them entirely fictitious intelligence from his fake “agents” that the invasion had been a red herring and “critical attacks” would follow elsewhere – most likely down the coast in Pas de Calais. He also reported, again falsely, that 75 divisions had been massed in England before D-Day, meaning that many more were still to land in France.

It was an account the Nazis took extremely seriously. As can be seen in the document reproduced by the BBC, it was transmitted to their high command by Garbo’s German handler.

As a result, German troops were kept in the Calais area in case of an assault, preventing them from offering their fullest possible defence to Normandy.

But what truly gave the Allies the edge was the fact that they knew the Nazis had been duped.

Unknown to Berlin, the Germans’ seemingly foolproof Enigma code for secret messages had been cracked by Polish code breakers.

In Bletchley Park, Buckinghamshire, some 10,000 men and women were employed deciphering the messages. And when the document above was cracked, the Allies knew they could press forward in the confidence that thousands of German troops would be tied up vainly standing guard at Calais.

“The whole of the 20th Century might have been very different if it wasn’t for this,” says Kelsey Griffin, Bletchley Park’s director of museum operations.

“Churchill’s official biographer, Martin Gilbert, said it was difficult to imagine how the D-Day landings could have happened without Bletchley Park.

“We had an army of unarmed intellectuals here.”

The intercepted document – in its original, freshly-released, German language version – is all the more extraordinary for having been found by volunteers digging through Bletchley Park’s archives.

One of them, retired civil servant Peter Wescombe, 79, recalls the excitement of realising its significance for the first time.

“It was like turning up a crock of gold,” he remembers. “It was absolutely wonderful.”

It is a find archivists at the site, run by the Bletchley Park Trust, hope will be repeated after HP donated scanners and experts to provide technical expertise to the digitisation project.

Many of the records at the centre have not been touched for years, and the charity hopes that by putting them online in a searchable format they can “crowdsource” the expertise of historians and amateurs alike.

And surely then many more real-life tales of deception, double-crosses and painstaking effort will emerge.

Source: BBC

Newly discovered documents have revealed a bizarre footnote to World War II: the Nazis’ dogged obsession with a Finnish mutt who gave not a howl, but a heil. And, just as absurdly, the totalitarian state that dominated most of Europe was unable to do much about the canine’s paw-raising parody of Germany’s Fuehrer.

In the months preceding Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union, Berlin’s Foreign Office commanded its diplomats in the Nazi-friendly country to gather evidence on the dog and its owner — and even plotted to destroy the owner’s pharmaceutical business.

Historians were unaware of the scheme until some 30 files containing correspondence and diplomatic cables were found by a researcher in the Foreign Office archives.

Klaus Hillenbrand, an expert on the Nazi period who examined the documents, called the episode “completely bizarre.”

“Just months before the Nazis launched their attack on the Soviet Union, they had nothing better to do than to obsess about this dog,” he told The Associated Press.

The Dalmatian mix named Jackie was owned by Tor Borg, a businessman from the Finnish city of Tampere. Borg’s wife Josefine, a German citizen known for her anti-Nazi sentiments, dubbed the dog “Hitler” because of the way it raised a paw high in the air, much like Germans greeting the Fuehrer with a cry of “Heil Hitler!”

In one photo, Borg, a jovial businessman known for his sense of humor, appears with Jackie by his side wearing a pair of round sunglasses.

On Jan. 29, 1941, the German vice consul in Helsinki, Willy Erkelenz, wrote that “a witness, who does not want to be named, said … he saw and heard how Borg’s dog reacted to the command ‘Hitler’ by raising its paw.”

Borg was ordered to the German Embassy in Helsinki and questioned about his dog’s unusual greeting habits.

The businessman denied ever calling the dog by the German dictator’s name, but acknowledged that his wife called the dog Hitler. He tried to play down the accusations, saying the paw-raising only happened a few times in 1933 — shortly after Hitler came to power.

Borg assured the Nazi diplomats that he never did anything “that could be seen as an insult against the German Reich,” according to the documents.

The zealous diplomats in Helsinki did not believe him and wrote back to Berlin that “Borg, even though he claims otherwise, is not telling the truth.”

The ministries involved — the Foreign Office, the Economy Ministry and even Hitler’s Chancellory — meticulously reported all their findings about the hound.

The Economy Ministry announced that the German chemical conglomerate IG Farben, which supplied Borg’s wholesale trade with pharmaceuticals, agreed to cut all ties, which would have destroyed his business.

Meanwhile, the Foreign Office was looking for ways to bring Borg to trial for insulting Hitler. But in the end, none of the witnesses were willing to repeat their accusations in front of a judge.

So, when on March 21, 1941, the Foreign Office asked the Chancellory whether to press charges against Borg, the reply came back: “Considering that the circumstances could not be solved completely, it is not necessary to press charges.”

There’s no evidence Hitler, who owned a German Shepherd named Blondi, was ever told of the case, even if it made it all the way to his Chancellory, Hillenbrand said.

Finland cooperated with Nazi Germany during WWII, and Helsinki was one of the few European capitals the Nazis never occupied.

As for Borg, he and his company survived the war unscathed. He died in 1959 at age 60; his wife Josefine passed away in 1971.

Borg’s company Tampereen Rohduskuppa Oy went on to become Tamro Group, the leading wholesale company for pharmaceuticals in the Nordic countries.

And Jackie, the Hitler-saluting canine, also died a natural death, according to Tamro spokeswoman Margit Nieminen.

She said the company was not aware of the dog’s place in history until the recent archive discovery.

Source: Yahoo News

Dr. Josef Mengele in 1956, left. Arthur Rudolph, center, in 1990, was a rocket scientist for Nazi Germany and NASA. John Demjanjuk in 2006.

A secret history of the United States government’s Nazi-hunting operation concludes that American intelligence officials created a “safe haven” in the United States for Nazis and their collaborators after World War II, and it details decades of clashes, often hidden, with other nations over war criminals here and abroad.

The 600-page report, which the Justice Department has tried to keep secret for four years, provides new evidence about more than two dozen of the most notorious Nazi cases of the last three decades.

It describes the government’s posthumous pursuit of Dr. Josef Mengele, the so-called Angel of Death at Auschwitz, part of whose scalp was kept in a Justice Department official’s drawer; the vigilante killing of a former Waffen SS soldier in New Jersey; and the government’s mistaken identification of the Treblinka concentration camp guard known as Ivan the Terrible.

The report catalogs both the successes and failures of the band of lawyers, historians and investigators at the Justice Department’s Office of Special Investigations, which was created in 1979 to deport Nazis.

Perhaps the report’s most damning disclosures come in assessing the Central Intelligence Agency’s involvement with Nazi émigrés. Scholars and previous government reports had acknowledged the C.I.A.’s use of Nazis for postwar intelligence purposes. But this report goes further in documenting the level of American complicity and deception in such operations.

The Justice Department report, describing what it calls “the government’s collaboration with persecutors,” says that O.S.I investigators learned that some of the Nazis “were indeed knowingly granted entry” to the United States, even though government officials were aware of their pasts. “America, which prided itself on being a safe haven for the persecuted, became — in some small measure — a safe haven for persecutors as well,” it said.

The report also documents divisions within the government over the effort and the legal pitfalls in relying on testimony from Holocaust survivors that was decades old. The report also concluded that the number of Nazis who made it into the United States was almost certainly much smaller than 10,000, the figure widely cited by government officials.

The Justice Department has resisted making the report public since 2006. Under the threat of a lawsuit, it turned over a heavily redacted version last month to a private research group, the National Security Archive, but even then many of the most legally and diplomatically sensitive portions were omitted. A complete version was obtained by The New York Times.

The Justice Department said the report, the product of six years of work, was never formally completed and did not represent its official findings. It cited “numerous factual errors and omissions,” but declined to say what they were.

More than 300 Nazi persecutors have been deported, stripped of citizenship or blocked from entering the United States since the creation of the O.S.I., which was merged with another unit this year.

In chronicling the cases of Nazis who were aided by American intelligence officials, the report cites help that C.I.A. officials provided in 1954 to Otto Von Bolschwing, an associate of Adolf Eichmann who had helped develop the initial plans “to purge Germany of the Jews” and who later worked for the C.I.A. in the United States. In a chain of memos, C.I.A. officials debated what to do if Von Bolschwing were confronted about his past — whether to deny any Nazi affiliation or “explain it away on the basis of extenuating circumstances,” the report said.

The Justice Department, after learning of Von Bolschwing’s Nazi ties, sought to deport him in 1981. He died that year at age 72.

The report also examines the case of Arthur L. Rudolph, a Nazi scientist who ran the Mittelwerk munitions factory. He was brought to the United States in 1945 for his rocket-making expertise under Operation Paperclip, an American program that recruited scientists who had worked in Nazi Germany. (Rudolph has been honored by NASA and is credited as the father of the Saturn V rocket.)

The report cites a 1949 memo from the Justice Department’s No. 2 official urgingimmigration officers to let Rudolph back in the country after a stay in Mexico, saying that a failure to do so “would be to the detriment of the national interest.”

Justice Department investigators later found evidence that Rudolph was much more actively involved in exploiting slave laborers at Mittelwerk than he or American intelligence officials had acknowledged, the report says.

Some intelligence officials objected when the Justice Department sought to deport him in 1983, but the O.S.I. considered the deportation of someone of Rudolph’s prominence as an affirmation of “the depth of the government’s commitment to the Nazi prosecution program,” according to internal memos.

The Justice Department itself sometimes concealed what American officials knew about Nazis in this country, the report found.

In 1980, prosecutors filed a motion that “misstated the facts” in asserting that checks of C.I.A. and F.B.I. records revealed no information on the Nazi past of Tscherim Soobzokov, a former Waffen SS soldier. In fact, the report said, the Justice Department “knew that Soobzokov had advised the C.I.A. of his SS connection after he arrived in the United States.”

Source: NY Times

by Edwin Black

The infamous Auschwitz tattoo began as an IBM number. And now it’s been revealed that IBM machines were actually based at the infamous concentration-camp complex.

IBM’s extensive technological support for Hitler’s conquest of Europe and genocide against the Jews was extensively documented in my book IBM and the Holocaust, published in February 2001. Last March, theVoice broke exclusive new details of a special wartime subsidiary set up in Poland by IBM’s New York headquarters, shortly after Hitler’s 1939 invasion, to help Germany automate the rape of Poland.

The new revelation of IBM technology in the Auschwitz area constitutes a final link in the chain of documentation surrounding Big Blue’s vast enterprise in Nazi-occupied Poland, supervised at first directly from its New York headquarters, and later through its Geneva office.

“This latest disclosure removes any pretext of deniability and completes the puzzle that has been put together about IBM in Poland,” says Malcolm Hoenlein, executive vice chairman of the New York–based Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations. “The picture that emerges is most disturbing.”

IBM spokesman Carol Makovich didn’t respond to repeated telephone calls. In the past, when asked about IBM’s Polish subsidiary’s involvement with the Nazis, Makovich has said, “IBM does not have much information about this period.” When a Reuters reporter asked about Poland, Makovich said, “We are a technology company, we are not historians.”

But these latest revelations about IBM come during an unprecedented confession by officials of the German media conglomerate Bertelsmann (which owns Random House, among other properties) that its previous official company history was incorrect and that it actually collaborated with Hitler’s regime and used Jewish slave labor.

Bertelsmann just released an 800-page report saying that company patriarch Heinrich Mohn belonged to a circle of supporters who donated money to a group called the “SS Sponsors Circle,” which provided financing to Hitler’s elite troops. As an October 8 report by The Wall Street Journal noted, Bertelsmann’s new history stands in stark contrast to the previous official company record, which had portrayed Mohn as a devout Christian and strong opponent of Hitler.

The current chairman of Bertelsmann, Gunter Thielen, was quoted as saying the company, which is still controlled by the Mohn family, accepted the conclusions of the report. Thielen added, “I would like to express our sincere regret for the inaccuracies . . . in our previous corporate history of the World War II era, as well as for the wartime activities that have been brought to light.”

Jewish leaders and others have pressed IBM to discuss its wartime activities, as companies such as Bertelsmann and Ford have done. “IBM must confront this matter honestly if there is to be any closure,” said Hoenlein. And scholars have urged the company to open its New York archives to researchers.

“The news that IBM machines were at Auschwitz is just the latest smoking gun,” said Robert Urekew, a University of Louisville professor of business ethics who has studied IBM’s Hitler-era activities. “For IBM to continue to stonewall and hinder access to its New York archives flies in the face of the focus on accountability in business ethics today. Since the United States was not technically at war with Nazi Germany in 1939, it may have been legal for IBM to do business with the Third Reich and its camps in Poland. But was it moral?” Read more »

Der Fuehrer’s Face is a 1943 animated cartoon by the Walt Disney Studios, starring Donald Duck. It was directed by Jack Kinney and released on January 1, 1943 as an anti-Nazi propaganda movie for the American war effort. The film won the 1943 Academy Award for Animated Short Film, and was the only Donald Duck cartoon to win an Oscar. In 1994, it was voted #22 of “the 50 Greatest Cartoons” of all time by members of the animation field.

Due to the propagandistic nature of the short, and the depiction of Donald Duck as a Nazi (albeit a reluctant one), Disney kept it out of general circulation after its original release. Der Fuehrer’s Face finally received an official U.S. video release in 2004, when it was included in the Walt Disney Treasures limited edition DVD set Walt Disney: On the Front Lines. It also appeared on another Walt Disney Treasures set:The Chronological Donald Volume Two, released in December 2005

Watch Der Fuehrer’s Face