Karl's Weird News

Neo-Nazis rally on Dresden bombing anniversary:

Thousands of protesters formed a human chain in Dresden on Saturday, determined to stop neo-Nazis from exploiting the German city’s painful history on the 65th anniversary of its deadly Allied bombing in World War II.

Heavy security including riot police was in place to prevent clashes between the two groups, and five police helicopters flew overhead to monitor the crowds.

Neo-Nazis have caused outrage in the past by comparing the 1945 bombing of Dresden to the Holocaust and far-right organizers of Saturday’s protest characterized it as a “mourning march.”

Some 5,000 far-right supporters poured into the city, according to police, who limited them to a rally rather than a march for security reasons.

Neo-Nazi bomb plot linked to Auschwitz sign theft 

It sounds like the plot of a Steig Larsson thriller: a band of eastern European criminals is contracted to steal an iconic piece of Nazi memorabilia, which is then sold to a mysterious collector to finance a neofascist bomb attack on the Swedish parliament.

But today it emerged that Swedish investigators are helping Polish detectives investigate the theft of the sign from Auschwitz, amid reports that the robbery was linked to a rightwing terror plot.

The wrought iron plaque reading Arbeit Macht Frei (work sets you free) which spanned the entrance at the former Nazi death camp was wrenched from the gate on 18 December, and recovered three days later, cut into three pieces, in a forest in northern Poland.

The robbery prompted Poland to declare a state of emergency, and provoked impassioned calls for the sign’s return from concentration camp survivors and the Israeli prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu.

The five men being held in police custody in Krakow in connection with the theft have been described by Polish prosecutors as common criminals who had apparently acted for financial gain.

But according to the Danish daily Aftonbladet, the men were contracted by a neo-Nazi group which planned to sell it on to a third party, a foreign rightwing extremist or collector of Nazi memorabilia, with the aim of using the funds to finance a string of attacks in Stockholm.

Poland Probes Swedish Link in Auschwitz Sign Theft

Poland will formally seek Sweden’s help in investigating the theft of the “Arbeit Macht Frei” sign from the Auschwitz memorial, confirming that Polish authorities suspect a Swedish link in the crime.

Boguslawa Marcinkowska, a spokeswoman for Krakow prosecutors, says her office will send a formal request for help Wednesday to the Swedish Justice Ministry in Stockholm.

Polish media have been reporting that the theft was commissioned by a collector living in Sweden, but investigators have not confirmed that.

German garden gnome gives Nazi salute, creator under investigation:

A 14-inch garden gnome is causing quite a stir in Germany.

The tiny statue meant for beautifying lawns is offending many and breaking German law by giving the straight-armed Hitler salute, the Daily Mail reports.

The Nazi salute is illegal in Germany and those who break the law can face up to three years in prison.

Seven hundred of the gnomes were created by German artist Ottmar Hoerl and have been displayed in Belguim and Italy, without controversy.

Neo-Nazis attack concentration camp survivors during memorial service for 345,000 dead

Survivors of a Nazi death camp were shot at and abused as they gathered to remember their liberation. Masked neo-Nazi thugs screamed ‘Heil Hitler!’ and ‘This way for the gas!’ at ten elderly Italian men and women, who returned to the site of the Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria.

The gang also fired air guns at a group of 15 French survivors, many dressed in the striped pyjama-style uniforms they wore as inmates. One suffered a head wound while another was injured by a shot in the neck.

The four thugs managed to escape. Jewish leaders in Austria were appalled by the weekend scenes that marred events marking the 64th anniversary of the camp’s liberation by American troops.

An estimated 320,000 people were murdered or worked to death at Mauthausen and its outlying slave labour installations. Jewish leaders condemned Saturday’s incidents, which marred events marking the 64th anniversary of the camp’s liberation by U.S. troops.

German teens drawn to neo-Nazi groups

Roughly one in twenty 15-year-old German males is a member of a neo-Nazi group, a higher proportion than are involved in mainstream politics, according to a study released on Tuesday.

Many politicians fear a resurgence of right-wing extremism as unemployment creeps higher in Germany, which is facing its deepest recession since World War Two.

Government figures have shown anti-Semitic crimes rose at the end of last year.

“It is shocking that right-wing groups have more success recruiting male youths than the established political parties,” said Christian Pfeiffer, author of the report issued by Lower Saxony’s criminal research instute.

Hitler’s Grammy Drunk During Cop Stop, Says Mom

Little Adolf Hitler Campbell’s parents are already in the midst of a custody battle. And now they may have even more trouble on their hands, because grandma was sauced in the backseat of their car, according to Adolf’s mother.

Deborah Campbell, Adolf’s mom, claims the couple was mistreated by Raritan Township police during a traffic stop.

 With husband Heath at the wheel and her mother in the backseat, Deborah was headed to family court Jan. 13, when they were pulled over by police at around 10 a.m.

Deborah claimed police referred to him as “the Nazi guy” and quizzed him about his tattoos, one of which is a swastika, according to the Express-Times. She says they also made Heath take a sobriety test after allegedly smelling alcohol in the car.

15-Foot Swastika Etched Into Pond

Someone carved a 225-square foot swastika into a pond on a New York/New Jersey border – and police want to find out who did it.

People who live near the Suffern/Mahwah border found the 15-foot by 15-foot anti-Semitic symbol surrounded by two smaller ones carved into the ice at the Foxwood Pond Wednesday morning, according to the Journal News.

It looks like whoever did it used a snow shovel to engrave the hateful sketches into the ice at the pond where locals often come to ice skate. Aside from the swastikas, the carver also etched something that looked like male private parts into the ice, reported the Journal News.

German Medic’s Account Confirms Hitler Had Only One Testicle

An extraordinary account from a German army medic has finally confirmed what the world long suspected: Hitler only had one testicle.

War veteran Johan Jambor made the revelation to a priest in the 1960s, who wrote it down.

The priest?s document has now come to light ?- 23 years after Jambor?s death.

The war tyrant?s medical condition has been mocked for years in a British song.

The lyrics are: “Hitler has only got one ball, G�ring has two but very small, Himmler is somewhat sim’lar, But poor old Goebbels has no balls at all. Hitler has only got one ball, The other is on the kitchen wall, His mother, the dirty b??r, Chopped it off when he was small.”

UK police: man charged with having IEDs, Nazi book

British police charged a 43-year-old man Thursday with plotting an act of terrorism and having two improvised explosive devices, chemicals, timers, and a Nazi-themed handbook.

 Neil Christopher Lewington was first arrested last week after police discovered a suspected explosive device when they searched him at a railway station in Lowestoft, a coastal city in eastern England.

 He was originally charged with possessing an item to cause criminal damage and was released on bail Saturday. But he was immediately re-arrested by Scotland Yard.

 Scotland Yard said in a statement that Lewington carried two improvised explosive devices to Lowestoft from Reading, a city near London where he lives, on Oct. 30. It said Lewington was being charged with making or having an explosive substance intended to “to endanger life, or cause serious injury to property in the U.K.”

The police statement said Lewington had four containers of weed killer, seven timers, three tennis balls, fire lighters, and a book entitled: “Waffen SS U.K. Members Handbook.”

Far-right Austrian leader sacked for revealing gay affair with J�rg Haider

The successor of the Austrian far-right leader J�rg Haider was dismissed yesterday after he revealed a ?special? relationship ?far beyond? friendship with his former mentor.

In emotional interviews with the national broadcaster and a tabloid newspaper Stefan Petzner spoke openly about his affair with Haider, who died at the age of 58 in a high-speed car crash after heavy drinking session at a gay club this month. Haider?s party, the Alliance for the Future of Austria, captured 11 per cent of the vote in national elections last month .

?He was the man of my life. Our relationship went far beyond friendship,? Mr Petzner, 27, said after only a week in the job, adding that Haider?s wife, Claudia, 52, ?did not object? to their relationship.

?I only had him. Now I am all alone. I would spend nights with him and his family and that was important for me because I often was afraid to be alone in the dark,? he added.

Far Right storms election as Austrians back anti-EU rhetoric

The Far Right has made a grand return in Austria, emerging from yesterday’s elections as the second biggest parliamentary block, according to preliminary results.

The two parties that campaigned on an anti-immigrant and anti-European Union ticket have captured about 29 per cent of the vote, pushing the country’s traditional conservative party into third place.

 Heinz-Christian Strache and his Freedom Party, who were accused of xenophobia and waging an anti-Muslim campaign, won 18 per cent – a rise of 7 per cent compared with the last elections. Mr Strache’s former mentor, J�rg Haider, won 11 per cent of the vote with his new party, the Alliance for the Future of Austria.

Israeli ex-agent: We allowed Nazi doc to escape

The team that kidnapped Nazi mastermind Adolph Eichmann in 1960 knowingly let another notorious war criminal ? Josef Mengele ? get away, according to a former Israeli Mossad agent. Rafi Eitan was a member of the Mossad team that seized Eichmann from Buenos Aires and brought him to trial in Israel. Eitan said the agents had also located Mengele but feared that trying to nab him would endanger the Eichmann operation.

Visitors can’t get enough of Hitler tours in Munich

Visiting tourists can’t get enough of Adolf Hitler tours in Munich, the southern German city where the dictator nurtured his Nazi Party and, 10 years before he was elected German chancellor, mounted the 1923 Beer Hall Putsch.

The guided walking tours take visitors to city sites with Adolf Hitler significance which most Munich natives today are no longer aware of, such as the fact that Hitler gave his first public speech upstairs at the world-famous Hofbraeuhaus beer hall in 1918.

Close by, in the Schwabing district, is a pub, the Schellingsalon, where Hitler liked to drink and often did not pay the bill.

Though he was born in Braunau, Austria, Hitler made Munich his home in 1913, before World War I. The trail follows him from his beginnings and his rise to Fuehrer of the Third Reich.

Eric Loerke, 57, a U.S. national and longtime Munich resident, conducts the walks in English for a local guides firm, Munichwalktours, with a maximum of 25 paying visitors on each Third Reich Tour.

‘Nazi’ Pope helped Jews flee Holocaust

Pius XII, the wartime pontiff often condemned as “Hitler’s Pope”, was actually considered an enemy by the Third Reich, according to newly discovered documents. Several letters and memos unearthed at a depot used by the Stasi, the East-German secret police, show that Nazi spies within the Vatican were concerned at Pius’s efforts to help displaced Poles and Jews. In one, the head of Berlin’s police force tells Joachim von Ribbentropp, the Third Reich’s foreign minister, that the Catholic Church was providing assistance to Jews “both in terms of people and financially”.

German neo-Nazi crime rate sets new high:

Crimes committed by neo-Nazis and other right-wing extremists in Germany reached their highest level last year since reunification in 1990, a newspaper reported on Monday.

The crime rate rose by 14 percent to more than 18,000 extremist offences, Tagesspiegel daily said, in an advance release of a story to run on Tuesday.

Of the 18,000 offences, 1,100 were acts of violence — an 8 percent rise from the previous year, it said, citing federal police figures.

Youths probed for daubing swastikas on sheep

German police said on Thursday they were investigating four youths for spraying sheep with swastikas, the cross-like symbol used by the Nazis. The youths, between the ages of 15 and 18, painted swastikas on several sheep out of a herd of around 30 near the northwestern town of Etzenborn, police said.

Exhibit considers Nazis’ deadly medicine

Adolf Hitler used the theory of eugenics in his quest to create a master race, legitimizing the murder of thousands deemed unfit for the German race and culminating in the genocide of 6 million Jews.

But the idea behind eugenics — improving a population’s health through genetics — was hardly unique to Germany, as shown by a traveling exhibit developed by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., and on display at The Andy Warhol Museum.

White Supremacist Gang Gaining Clout in Western U.S.

The white supremacist gang Public Enemy No. 1 began two decades ago as a group of teenage punk-rock fans from upper-middle class bedroom communities in Southern California.

Now, the violent gang that deals in drugs, guns and identity theft is gaining clout across the West after forging an alliance with the notorious Aryan Brotherhood, authorities say.
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Law enforcement officials trace the gang’s rise to shifts in the power structure inside prisons.

The Aryan Brotherhood has long been the dominant white supremacist gang behind bars, with the Nazi Low Riders acting as its foot soldiers on the outside for drug dealing and identity theft.

In 2000, officials reclassified the Low Riders as a prison-based gang and began sending its members to solitary confinement as soon as they were imprisoned.

Neo Nazis Attack Berlin Chabad Kindergarten

Berlin police are trying to track down neo-Nazis who hurled a smoke bomb into a Jewish kindergarten over the weekend and covered the building with Nazi graffiti. The attack took place at a time when no one was in the building. The smoke bomb failed to ignite and a police spokesman said the attack did not cause serious damage or endanger children or staff at the school.

Nazi symbols and anti-Semitic phrases including “Auschwitz,” “Juden Raus” [Jews, Out!] “Sieg Heil” [Hail Victory – the common Nazi salute to Hitler], and “Weg hier” [Get away from here] were spray painted on the building’s outer walls, as well as on toys that had been lying around in the school’s playground.

French wartime collaborator dead:

French Nazi collaborator Maurice Papon, convicted of sending French Jews to Nazi camps in World War II, has died, aged 96.
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Papon was the second-highest official in France’s south-west Bordeaux region during the German wartime occupation.In 1998, he was jailed for 10 years for helping to send about 1,500 French Jews to Nazi-run death camps during WWII.

Papon never expressed remorse for his wartime actions but was freed in 2002 because of his age, after serving only three years of his sentence, a move which angered Holocaust survivors.

His view: “To resign would have been easier perhaps but, in the culture that I received from my parents, my philosophy teachers, it meant deserting.”

Himmler’s secret quest to locate the Aryan Holy Grail

Heinrich Himmler, the head of the Nazi SS, made a secret wartime mission to an abbey in Spain in search of what he believed was the Aryan Holy Grail, a new book claims.

Himmler visited the famous Montserrat Abbey near Barcelona where he thought he would find the Grail which Jesus Christ was said to have used to consecrate the Last Supper.

According to The Desecrated Abbey, by Montserrat Rico Góngora, the Reichsführer-SS thought if he could lay claim to the Holy Grail it would help Germany win the war and give him supernatural powers.

For sale: Berlin country estate, one Nazi owner

The hideaway villa used by Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi propaganda chief, to entertain his lovers is to be put up for sale in an attempt to bail out the cash-strapped city of Berlin. The rundown, empty Wald-hof estate, set in woodland 40 kilometres (25 miles) north of the city, has become a financial burden for the Berlin council, which has been contemplating the closure of opera houses and other desperate measures to avert bankruptcy.

Italian court convicts 10 ex-SS members, acquits 7 for ‘44 massacre

A military tribunal on Saturday convicted 10 former members of the Nazi SS in the 1944 slaughter of more than 700 people near Bologna – the worst civilian massacre in Italy during the Second World War, a news report said.

The 10 received life sentences for murder, while seven others were acquitted, the Italian news agency ANSA said.

But none of the men was in custody. They were tried in absentia, and all were believed to be living in Germany.

Descendants of Nazi doctor lose fight over compensation for looted art

Relatives of a gynaecologist who was committed to Hitler’s Master Race have been refused compensation for valuable artworks confiscated by Soviet soldiers after the war. The ruling, by a top administrative court in Leipzig, deals a blow to the offspring of thousands of Nazis who believe the time has come to reclaim some of the property taken by the Soviets. It has raised the question: what rights are enjoyed by the children of Nazis?

Their secret having been exposed, Nazi Gingerbread Men flee:

An artist who was forced to remove his Nazi gingerbread men from the window of a hardware store has set up the display in an empty storefront in another town. “The Secret Lives of Gingerbread Men” depicts a small gathering at a Nazi rally. Keith McGuckin set up the display in this northeastern Ohio city Thursday night, a day before the Jewish holiday of Hanukkah begins at sundown.