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Atlas Shrugs: OBAMA TO APOLOGIZE TO GERMANY FOR WWII?

OBAMA TO APOLOGIZE TO GERMANY FOR WWII?

****TOP MEMORIAL DAY WEEKEND POST***SCROLL FOR UPDATES AND NEW POSTS***

The latest inconceivable Obamaction is yet another unbecoming apology in Europe, this time in Germany for WWII. John Rosenthal suggests, "As bizarre as it may seem, President Obama’s impending trip to Dresden suggests that German revisionists have a friend in the White House".

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Atlas Shrugs: OBAMA TO APOLOGIZE TO GERMANY FOR WWII?

Israel Matzav: Switzerland's immoral 'neutrality'

Switzerland's immoral 'neutrality'

If any of you were surprised by Sunday night's meeting between Swiss President Hans-Rudolf Merz and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, you should not have been. Merz claimed Switzerland's 'neutrality' as justification for him to meet with the man Israeli Knesset speaker Ruby Rivlin called the 'Persian-speaking Hitler.' Switzerland has a long history of making claims like that. For instance, look at its behavior during World War II.

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Israel Matzav: Switzerland's immoral 'neutrality'

WITOLD PILECKI

Double life of Witold Pilecki, the Auschwitz volunteer who uncovered Holocaust secrets

It was perhaps the bravest act of espionage of the Second World War. After voluntarily being imprisoned in the Auschwitz concentration camp for 2½ years, and smuggling out its darkest secrets to the Allies, Witold Pilecki overcame a guard and, with two comrades, escaped almost certain death.

Now new details have emerged of the extraordinary tale of the Polish officer who hatched a plot with the country's resistance to be rounded up by the occupying Germans in September 1940 and sent to the most notorious Nazi extermination centre.

At the time Auschwitz was predominantly a camp for captured resistance fighters, although Jews and anyone considered a threat to the Nazi regime were also being sent there.

Newly released documents from the Polish archives reveal how Mr Pilecki, going under the false name Tomasz Serafinski, went about setting up an underground resistance group in the camp, recruiting its members and organising it into a coherent movement.

“In order to assure greater security I have taken the view that each cell of five will not be aware of another cell,” he wrote in one of his reports smuggled out to the Resistance and which has now come to light.

“This is also why I have avoided people who are registered here under their real names. Some are involved in the most incompetent conspiracies and have their own plans for rebellion in the camp.”

Later he wrote: “The gigantic machinery of the camp spewing out dead bodies has claimed many of my friends ... We have sent messages to the outside world which were then transmitted back by foreign radio stations. Consequently the camp guards are very angry right now.”

Mr Pilecki's reports from the camp were channelled to the Allies via a courier system that the Polish Resistance operated throughout occupied Europe. By 1942 Mr Pilecki's organisation realised the existence of the gas chambers and he worked on several plans to liberate Auschwitz, including one in which the RAF would bomb the walls, or Free Polish paratroopers would fly in from Britain.

However, in 1943, realising that the Allies had no plans to liberate the camp, he and two others escaped. The new documents include a Gestapo manhunt alert after his escape.

Mr Pilecki ensured that a full report on the camp reached London, and the resistance group he started in Auschwitz continued to feed information to Britain and the United States, confirming that the Nazis were bent on the extermination of the Jews.

The archive material will again raise questions as to why the Allies, and in particular Winston Churchill, never did anything to stop the atrocities there. “We can only assume the British thought we were exaggerating,” said the Polish historian Jacek Pawlowicz. “I'm certain Poles shared their intelligence with MI6 and the highest levels of British Government, which, for some reason, remained silent.”

After his escape Mr Pilecki was captured fighting in the Warsaw Uprising in 1944 and spent the rest of the conflict in a prisoner-of-war camp. In July 1945 he joined Free Polish troops in Italy, from where he agreed to return to Poland and gather intelligence on the Soviet takeover of the country.

He was, however, caught by the Polish Communist regime. In a twist of fate, a Polish Jew administered the torture during his interrogation. Mr Pilecki's wife was invited to visit and he told her that his time in Auschwitz was child's play by comparison. After a show trial he was given three death sentences and shot.

The new material includes his charge sheet, which has 132 subsections, each listing a separate alleged crime. “From July 1945 to May 1947 the accused worked against the Polish state as a paid resident of an overseas intelligence agency,” one accusation reads. “The worst crime committed against the state was that he was acting in the interests of foreign imperialism, to which he has completely sold out through a prolonged period of work as a spy.” The implication is clear: Mr Pilecki was providing information on the Soviet-backed regime that was finding its way to MI6.

After his death Mr Pilecki was demonised by the Communists and his heroics re-emerged only after 1989.

His son, Andrzej Pilecki, who was 16 when he learnt that his father had been executed, said: “There'd be no better memorial to my father than for the young to learn of his example. I was at school at the time, it was a terrible shock, but now after 60 years of waiting I am thrilled to see justice.”

The new archive releases also reveal touching details. In a smuggled letter dated October 18, 1943, to his ten-year-old daughter he wrote: “I am very happy to hear you are such a devoted housemaid and that you like to take care of the animals and our plants in the garden. I, too, like every kind of bug and beetle as well as the beans and the peas. I like everything that lives. I'm very glad to hear that inside my children there are the same thoughts that I have.”

The Chief Rabbi of Poland, Michael Schudrich, said that Mr Pilecki was “an example of inexplicable goodness at a time of inexplicable evil. There is ever-growing awareness of Poles helping Jews in the Holocaust, and how they paid with their lives, like Pilecki. We must honour these examples and follow them today in the parts of the world where there are horrors again.”
The historian Michael R.D.Foot said that the life and death of Mr Pilecki brought shame on the British and the Allies, who turned a blind eye to Stalin's European ambitions as well as the Holocaust. “The Foreign Office's betrayal of Poland is the darkest chapter in its history, even if that betrayal was a strategic necessity,” he said.

taken from TIMESONLINE (http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/europe/article5891132.ece)

Thanks to Israeligirl67 for sharing this

HOW CAPTURE OF A NAZI SPY CHANGED THE COURSE OF WWII

Exposed: How capture of a Nazi spy changed the course of WWII

By The Associated Press


Tags: Nazi, World War II


Newly released British intelligence files reveal how a Nazi spy was snatched from a boat on the high seas before he could warn Germany that an Allied convoy was steaming ahead to invade North Africa.


It was a little-known episode that changed the course of World War II.

Gastao de Freitas Ferraz, the radio operator on a Portuguese cod-fishing vessel, was secretly feeding Germany information about the movements of Allied ships in the North Atlantic.
The story of his capture, a week before the invasion by U.S. and British forces, is contained in previously secret documents from the MI5 security service released Tuesday by Britain's National Archives.

Cambridge University historian Christopher Andrew said "the file changes our understanding of British history and offers new information on Britain's intelligence battle against the Nazis."

On Nov. 8, 1942, British and American troops under Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower landed in Morocco and Algeria, which were occupied by the troops from Germany and the pro-Nazi Vichy French regime.

The French forces were quickly overcome, but German troops under Gen. Erwin Rommel resisted and pushed the Allies back. After fierce armored desert battles lasting into 1943, the Germans were defeated. It was a turning point in the war that helped lay the groundwork for the D-Day invasion of 1944.

But all that might have changed if Freitas Ferraz had not been captured.

Portugal was neutral during the war, but the files reveal that in 1942 British spies had become suspicious of unnatural behavior by Portuguese fishing boats, including ones with elaborate communications equipment.

Freitas Ferraz's boat, the Gil Eannes, was searched while in port at St. John's, Newfoundland, and MI5 decided the radio operator should be arrested.

But the documents show the detention was bungled in a series of errors. A frustrated MI5 officer named H.P. Milmo said he wasted valuable time trying to find out which government department was responsible for Newfoundland, then a British colony.

Officials then searched in vain for powers under which to detain Freitas Ferraz. But by the time the confusion cleared the Gil Eannes had sailed for Portugal, and officials made the risky decision to intercept it at sea.

Freitas Ferraz was arrested in a daring mid-Atlantic raid by HMS Duke of York on Nov. 1, 1942, and taken to Gibraltar and then Britain for interrogation. The MI5 file includes a detailed first-person biographical statement and confession. Freitas Ferraz was being paid 15,000 escudos a month to report to the Germans on the movements of Allied naval convoys and air units. The file notes that his job provided the perfect cover.

MI5 agent Milmo, later a prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials and a High Court judge, reported that the Gil Eannes was intercepted by the Royal Navy and de Freitas Ferraz was arrested when the vessel was about to sail into one of the large convoys carrying the British and American forces which occupied North Africa a week or so later.

Andrew, who is writing the official history of MI5, said the Germans had been completely hoodwinked by British deception before the invasion and believed the Allies would land in France or Norway.

"This would not have worked if Gastao de Freitas Ferraz had not been captured because he was on the tail of [Gen. George] Patton's troops, and would have told the Germans where they were really going," Andrew said.

"[That] could have affected the outcome of the whole war," he added.

Freitas Ferraz was deported to Portugal in 1945. In 1953, his name was included on a list of deportees who no longer needed to be banned from Britain for security reasons. In 1955, his file was marked closed.