German or Nazis?

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Horst Wessel. A song about a dead pimp set to a fine German naval tune.

Who was a pimp? Not Wessel, whatever else he may have been. He was a musician but you are right that the melody is based on an older folk tune, like the naval tune you refer to, and the idea that Wessel wrote it was Nazi myth making.

Cheers

Steve
 
Horst was the son of a doctor and Lutheran Pastor and his mother came also from a long line of Lutheran Pastors. Horst's father wanted him to become a Pastor but Horst rebelled and enrolled in Law school. Intelligent but he had a very violent temper. Dropping out of Law school he joined the Black Reichswehr paramilitary forces which under Roehm soon comprised the SA, Sturmabteilung troops of the Nazi Party. He soon came to the attention of Goebbels who made him his protege. In 1929 at 22 he met Erna Janicke, an 18YO prostitute. He soon moved in with her at her apartment. The landlady, Elisabeth Salm, was the widow of a man who had been an active Communist in the KPD. When a violent argument erupted between Wessel and Salm over either unpaid or a rent increase, Salm went not to the Police (she feared the legal consequences of renting to a prostitute) but to the KPD for help. Seeing a chance to get rid of Wessel and avenge his attacks on them, two men, Ali Höhler, a tough with underworld connections, and Erwin Rückert, an active party member, went to Wessel's apartment. When he opened the door for them, Höhler shot him in the head.
Both Communists and Nazis jumped on the propaganda bandwagon. It was the Communists who portrayed Wessel as a pimp while the Nazis stated that Wessel had saved Janicke by introducing her to the Nazi Party and its values. Hohler was arrested and given 6 years in prison. Goebbels organized a martyr's funeral for Wessel which was attended by 30,000 people. Wessel had musical talent and had founded an "SA" band, which provided music during SA events. In early 1929, Wessel wrote the lyrics for a new Nazi fight song Kampflied , which was first published in Goebbels's newspaper as Der Unbekannte SA-Mann. The song later, after Wessel's death, became the "Horst-Wessel-Lied" (Lied, perhaps he did, but in this case, Lied is German for SONG). The Nazis made it a co-national anthem of Nazi Germany, along with the first stanza of the Deutschlandlied.
"Deutschlandlied" or "Das Lied der Deutschen" is the title of the song while the first stanza is "Deutschland, Deutschland über alles," Music by Joseph Haydn in 1797 and lyrics by August Hoffmann which he vacationed on Heligoland in 1841. Hoffmann intended the lyrics to be a call to the 35 German monarchical states and 4 free cities to give up their tiny states and become a unified Germany. In 1922 Deutschlandlied became the German national anthem. After reunification this was changed to just the 3rd stanza, which begins " Einigkeit und Recht und Freiheit " the official German motto.
When I first read Heligoland it sounded so familiar, then it clicked: Werner Heisenberg first formulated the equation underlying his picture of quantum mechanics while on Heligoland in the 1920s. While at Munich in the early 1920s, Heisenberg first met the Danish physicist Niels Bohr. He and Bohr went for long hikes in the mountains and discussed the failure of existing theories to account for the new experimental results on the quantum structure of matter. Heisenberg plunged into several months of intensive theoretical research, but met with continual frustration. Finally, suffering from a severe attack of hay fever, he retreated to the treeless (and pollenless) island of Heligoland in the summer of 1925. There he conceived the basis of the quantum theory.
 
A secret policeman of Stalins time commented that, when they picked up their victims off the street, none called out to passers by for help. "We had nothing to show that we had authority" he said. "If the passing public had sided with the suspects we would have had to go away. But they never did. They turned their eyes aside and walked on glad that it was not them and the victims followed us like sheep".

By the time "Stalins time" came to pass the communist regime had taken control of the levers of power held for years by an absolute monarchy.
 
By the time "Stalins time" came to pass the communist regime had taken control of the levers of power

You can see the same thing happen today in North Korea. For those of us who have grown up in democracies the way such states work and the malign effect such fear and control can have on their peoples are almost incomprehensible.
The Nazi state shared many things in common with other totalitarian regimes, not least the cult of a personality. See schoolgirls thunderstruck at the sight of Hitler, Stalin, Kim Jong-un or his father. Mussolini never quite carried it off :)

Orwell, ever perceptive, once wrote that an army will only goose step in a nation whose people are afraid to laugh at it.

Cheers

Steve
 
At May, 20th, 75 years ago, German Nazis brought to the newly built Auschwitz concentration camp a group of 728 Polish political prisoners from the prison in Tarnów. This date is considered to be the day when the camp began to operate.
It is estimated that around 75,000 Polish political prisoners were murdered in Auschwitz by the Germans. On the whole, during WW2, the Germans murdered around six million Polish citizens, half of which were Jewish and the other half were Catholic.
Today we are witnessing the rewriting of history, as the victims, namely the Polish people, are being blamed for the Nazi crimes which were perpetrated by the German people during WW2.
US president Barack Obama called the German built concentration camps on Polish soil "Polish death camps", while the head of the FBI Blamed Poles and other nationalities for the crimes of the Nazis.
In Europe the French President, François Hollande, called the German people "victims of the Nazis", and very recently the German parliament thanked the allies for "liberating" Germany from the Nazis.
Here's a reminder of just who exactly the Nazis were.

Was Erwin Rommel a german or a Nazi?
 
Was Erwin Rommel a german or a Nazi?

He was a German and willing servant of the Nazi German state. He was a man who served a king and realised too late that he was the devil. Even then he was never a member of the clique who led the July plot. He did, like many, turn a deaf ear and blind eye to it. His disillusionment owed much to the fact that he knew the war was lost, rather than any political or moral differences with the government.

How do you define a Nazi? A member of the NSDAP? Rommel never joined. A supporter of the Nazi regime? Rommel was a Nazi under that definition.

Cheers

Steve
 
In Rommels defence I offer the following:-

The last Labour government in the UK was democratically elected and initially had a massive majority. They were elected on the promise of operating an "ethical foreign policy" (google it) within the term of the governments second parliament the same Labour government engaged in what is now widely regarded as an illegal war in Iraq despite massive public protests and opposition in parliament. Many people think Tony Blair should be in the dock for his part, that is politics which probably shouldnt be gone into to much. The point I am making is that I have never heard anyone say the British generals Air commodores and admirals should be brought to book, in a democracy a military leader must do as the government bids or resign/be removed. In a totalitarian regime a military leader must do what the despot demands or usually pay with his life. The German and Soviet regimes were much better at killing their own high commands than their enemies were. A British general who opposed Churchill would be removed, if he plotted to assassinate Churchill he would be hanged.
 
Only widely regarded as such by hipsters, hard-core liberals and unicorns that sh!t rainbows...

I supported the Gulf war after the invasion of Kuwait but Mr Blairs adventure there had no justification, even when he started it there was no way of ever saying what a victory meant.
Removing Saddam was supposedly not the aim but it was and no one had any clue as to what to do when he was removed. I am not a hard core liberal or hipster I just worked in the middle east for years, a leader ther has two qualities, he speaks and knows the word of god so disagreeing is heresy and has a lot of supporters who can recite a book but little else apart from carrying and using a kalashnikov.
 
The plan for post-Saddam Iraq was to install a democratic government that afforded the Iraqi people the ability to have a decent life without fear of ending up in a mass grave at the whim of their leader.

What the coalition planners did not count on, was the insurgents (most foreign) who jumped on the bandwagon at the request of local leaders who were nothing more than two-bit warlords hiding under the auspices of religion.

The war itself was not illegal, it was deliberated on and approved by, the UN and covered under several resolutions AND prior to the war, Saddam was given countless opportunities to comply with UN requests that would have alleviated this war from the onset.

The Iraqi war was not an act of "leibensraum" or an act of "protecting Russian speaking minorities". The goal was to go in, clean house and leave.
 
The problem in the west is in not understanding that democracy is an alien concept in Islam. If your religious leader speaks and knows the word of God why would he not be your political leader.

Is there a different version of this concept occurring in Russia?
 
The plan for post-Saddam Iraq was to install a democratic government that afforded the Iraqi people the ability to have a decent life without fear of ending up in a mass grave at the whim of their leader.

What the coalition planners did not count on, was the insurgents (most foreign) who jumped on the bandwagon at the request of local leaders who were nothing more than two-bit warlords hiding under the auspices of religion.

The war itself was not illegal, it was deliberated on and approved by, the UN and covered under several resolutions AND prior to the war, Saddam was given countless opportunities to comply with UN requests that would have alleviated this war from the onset.

The Iraqi war was not an act of "leibensraum" or an act of "protecting Russian speaking minorities". The goal was to go in, clean house and leave.

I would bot say mostly foreign. In 2004 when I was there the majority of the insurgents where Iraqi. Either Sadr's Army or Sunni's in Fallujah.
 
Is there a different version of this concept occurring in Russia?

I once read that in the time of the Tzars the best the Russians could hope for was a friendly Tzar. To me the communists took over the levers of power from the Tzars and the men behind the scenes have never let them go. If you say Magna Carta started England and the UK down the road of removing absolute monarchs then it has taken 800 years, if you try to do it in a few years then you just get a "king" with another name like Lord Protector Fuhrer or (like Napoleon) Emperor.
 
Several of my buddies (Army and Marines) said they were encountering a good number of Syrians, Jordinians and even some Chechens along with some ex-Iraqi army mixed in with locals

When you are dealing with people who are taught little more than reciting the Koran it is easy to convince them that the west is continuing its age old crusade. For Muslims the nationally recognised borders dont matter the land controlled by Shia and Sunny actions is what counts.
 

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