#Nuremberg Rally

[deutschland-im-krieg]

Hitler speaks to 700,000 attendees at the 6th Reichsparteitag rally, the Zeppelinfeld, Nürnberg, 1 September 1934

[carbone14]

Rassemblement annuel du parti nazi au congrès de Nuremberg – Nuremberg – Allemagne – 10 septembre 1938

Photographe : Scherl

©Bundesarchiv - Bild 183-H12148

[davidaugust]

It is not a fair representation.

[frary-us]

Diana and Tom at Nuremberg Rally

I didn’t know Tom was a fascist like Unity and Diana until quite recently. He doesn’t really get mentioned a lot, I had always just assumed he was apolitical. 

[navree]

the real october surprise all along was that donald trump, surprise, is racist in general but also really specifically against hispanics. this is apparently a surprise for a lot of them, i guess.

[tomorrowusa]

« Trump was like a blender going at full speed with the top off, goop splattering everywhere. »

— New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd describing Weird Donald Trump's bizarre news conference last week where (among other things) he claimed that his rallies have more attendees than Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech in 1963.

Just to clarify, this is what the National Park Service says about what was formally known as the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.

It was the largest gathering for civil rights of its time. An estimated 250,000 people attended the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom on August 28, 1963, arriving in Washington, D.C. by planes, trains, cars, and buses from all over the country. [ ... ] With that many people converging on the city, there were concerns about violence. The Washington, D.C. police force mobilized 5,900 officers for the march and the government mustered 6,000 soldiers and National Guardsmen as additional protection. President Kennedy thought that if there were any problems, the negative perceptions could undo the civil rights bill making its way through Congress. In the end, the crowds were calm and there were no incidents reported by police. While the March was a peaceful occasion, the words spoken that day at the Lincoln Memorial were not just uplifting and inspirational such as Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech, they were also penetrating and pointed.

The 1963 march was way bigger than Trump's 06 January 2021 mob of coup crazies. Unlike the 2021 Trump attempted coup, no law enforcement officers were killed or injured by the civil rights marchers.

[wifelinkmtg]

TUMBLR POST EDITOR WON'T LET ME TITLE THIS POST ANYMORE SO I GUESS THIS IS THE TITLE NOW. WEBBED SITE INNIT

So let's say you grew up in the nineties and that The Lion King was an important movie to you. Let's say that the character of Scar - snarling, ambitious, condescending, effeminate Scar - stirred feelings in you which you had no words for as a child. And then let's say, many years later, you're talking about it with a college friend, and you say something like, "oh man, I think Scar was some sort of gay awakening for me," and she fixes you with this level stare and says, "Scar was a fascist. What's the matter with you?"

The immediate feeling is not unlike missing a step: hang on, what's happening, what did I miss? You knew there were goose-stepping hyenas in "Be Prepared," but you didn't think it mattered that much. He's the bad guy, after all, and the movie's just pointing it out. Your friend says it's more than that: the visuals of the song are directly referencing the Nuremberg rallies. They're practically an homage to Riefenstahl. This was your sexual awakening? Is this why you're so into peaked caps and leather, then? Subliminal nazi kink, perhaps?

And then one of your other friends cuts in. "Hold up," he says, "let's think about what Scar actually did in the movie. He organized a group of racialized outcasts and led them against a predatory monarchy. Why are you so keen to defend their hereditary rule? Scar's the good guy here." The conversation immediately descends into a verbal slap fight about who the real bad guy is, whether Scar's regime was actually responsible for the ecological devastation of the Pride Lands, whether the hyenas actually count as "racialized" because James Earl Jones voiced Mufasa after all. Your Catholic friend starts saying some strange and frankly concerning shit about Natural Law. Someone brings The Lion King 2 into it. You leave the conversation feeling a little bit lost and a little bit anxious. What were we even talking about?

INTRODUCING: THE DITCH

There is a way of reading texts which I'm afraid is pervasive, which has as its most classical expression the smug obsession with trivia and minutiae you find in a certain vein of comic book fan. "Who was the first Green Lantern? What was his weakness? Do you even know the Green Lantern Oath?" It eschews the subjective in favor of definitively knowable fact. You can't argue with this guy that, say, Alan Scott shouldn't really count as the first Green Lantern because his whole deal is so radically different from the Hal Jordan/John Stewart/Guy Gardner Corps-era Lanterns, because this guy will simply say "but he's called Green Lantern. Says so right on the cover. Checkmate." This approach to reading a text is fundamentally 1) emotionally detached (there's a reason the joke goes, oh you like X band? name three of their songs - and not, which of their songs means the most to you? which of them came into your life at exactly the right moment to tell you exactly what you needed to hear just then?) and 2) defensive. It's a stance that is designed not to lose arguments. It says so right on the cover. Checkmate.

And then you get the guys who are like "well obviously Bruce Wayne could do far more as a billionaire to solve societal problems by using his tremendous wealth to address systemic issues instead of dressing up as a bat and punching mental patients in the head," and these guys have half a point but they're basically in the same ditch butting heads with the "well, actually" guys, and can we not simply extricate ourselves from the ditch entirely?

So, okay, let's return to our initial example. Scar is portrayed using Nazi iconography - the goose-stepping, the monumentality, the Nuremberg Lichtdom. He is also flamboyant and effete. He unifies and leads a group of downtrodden exiles to overthrow an absolute monarch. He's also a self-serving despot on whose rule Heaven Itself turns its back. You can't reconcile these things from within the ditch - or if you can, the attempt is likely to be ad-hoc supposition and duct tape.

Instead, let's ask ourselves what perspective The Lion King is coming from. What does it say is true about the world? What are its precepts, its axioms?

There is a natural hierarchical order to the world. This is just and righteous and the way of things, and attempts to overthrow this order will be punished severely by the world itself.

Fascism is what happens when evil men attempt to usurp this natural order with the aid of a group or groups of people who refuse to accept their place in the order.

There exists an alternative to defending and adhering to one's place in the natural order - it consists only of selfish spineless apathy.

Manliness is an essential quality of a just ruler. Unmanliness renders a person unfit for rule, and often resentful and dangerous as well.

And isn't that interesting, laid out like that? It renders the entire argument about the movie irrelevant (except for whatever your Catholic friend was on about, since his understanding of the world seems to line up with the above precepts weirdly well.) It's meaningless to argue about whether Scar was a secret hero or a fascist, when the movie doesn't understand fascism and has a damn-near alien view of what good and evil are.

There's always gonna be someone who, having read this far, wants to reply, "so, what? The Lion King is a bad movie and the people who made it were homophobes and also American monarchists, somehow? And anyone who likes it is also some sort of gay-bashing crypto-authoritarian?" To which I have to reply, man, c'mon, get out of the ditch. You're no good to anyone in there. Take my hand. I'm going to pull on three. One... two...

SO PHYREXIA [PAUSE FOR APPLAUSE, GROANS]

We're talking about everyone's favorite ichor-drooling surgery monsters again because there was a bit in my ~*~seminal~*~ essay Transformation, Horror, Eros, Phyrexia which seemed to give a number of readers quite a bit of trouble: namely, the idea that while Phyrexia is textually fascist, their aesthetic is incompatible with real-world fascism, and further, that this aesthetic incompatibility in some way outweighs the ways in which they act like a fascist nation in terms of how we think of them. I'll take responsibility here: I don't think that point is at all clear or well-argued in that essay. What I was trying to articulate was that the text of Magic: the Gathering very much wants Phyrexia to be supremely evil and dangerous fascists, because that makes for effective antagonists, but in the process of constructing that, it's accidentally encoded a whole bunch of fascinating presuppositions that end up working at cross-purposes with its apparent aim. That's... not that much clearer, is it? Hmm. Why don't I just show you what I mean?

Atraxa, Grand Unifier (art by Marta Nael)

In "Beneath Eyes Unblinking," one of the March of the Machine stories by K. Arsenault Rivera, there's a fascinating and I think revealing passage in which Atraxa (big-deal Phyrexianized angel and Elesh Norn's lieutenant) has a run-in with an art museum in New Capenna. The first thing I want to talk about is that, in this passage, Atraxa has no understanding of the concept of "beauty". A great deal of space in such a rushed storyline is devoted to her trying to puzzle out what beauty means and interrogating the minds of her recently-compleated Capennan aesthetes to try and understand it. In the end, she is unable to conceive of beauty except as "wrongness," as anathema.

So my first question is, why doesn't Atraxa have any idea of beauty? This is nonsense, right? We could point to a previous story, "A Garden of Flesh," by Lora Gray, in which Elesh Norn explicitly thinks in terms of beauty, but that's a little bit ditchbound, isn't it? The better argument is to simply look at Phyrexian bodies, at the Phyrexian landscape, all of which looks the way it does on purpose, all of which has been shaped in accordance with the very real aesthetic preferences of Phyrexians. How you could look at the Fair Basilica and not understand that Phyrexians most definitely have an idea of beauty, even if you personally disagree with it, is baffling. This is a lot like the canonical assertion that Phyrexians lack souls, which is both contradicted elsewhere in canon and essentially meaningless, given Magic's unwillingness or inability to articulate what a soul is in its setting, and as with this, it seems the goal is simply to dehumanize Phyrexians, to render them alien, even at the cost of incoherence or internal contradiction.

Atraxa's progress through the museum is fascinating. It evokes the 1937 Nazi exhibit on "degenerate art" in Munich, but not at all cleanly. The first exhibit, which is of representational art, she angrily destroys for being too individualistic (a point of dissonance with the European fascist movements of the 20th century, which formed in direct antagonism to communism.) The second exhibit, filled with abstract paintings and sculptures, she destroys even more angrily for having no conceivable use (this is much more in line with the Nazi idea of "degenerate art", so well done there.) The third exhibit is filled with war trophies and reconstructions from a failed Phyrexian invasion of Capenna many years prior, which she is angriest of all with (and fair enough, I suppose.) But then, after she's done completely trashing the place, she spots a number of angel statues on the cathedral across the plaza, and she goes apeshit. In a fugue of white-hot rage, she pulverizes the angel heads, and here is where I have to ask my second question:

Why angels? If you are trying to invoke fascist attitudes toward art, big statues of angels are precisely the wrong thing for your fascist analogues to hate. Fascists love monumental, heroic representations of superhuman perfection. It's practically their whole aesthetic deal. I understand that we're foreshadowing the imminent defeat of Phyrexia at the hands of legions of angels and a multiversal proliferation of angel juice, but that just leads to the exact same question: why angels? To the best of my knowledge, the Phyrexian weakness to New Capennan angel juice is something invented for this storyline. They have, after all, been happily compleating angels since 1997. We could talk about the in-universe justification for why Halo specifically is so potent, but I don't remember what that justification is, and also don't care. Let's not jump back in the ditch, please. The point is, someone decided that this time, Phyrexia would be defeated by an angelic host, and what does that mean? What is the text trying to say? What are its precepts and axioms?

Let me ask you a question: how many physically disabled angels are there in Magic: the Gathering? How about transsexual angels? How many angels are there, on all of the cards that have ever been printed for Magic: the Gathering, that are even just a bit ugly? Do you get it yet? Or do you need me to spell it out for you?

SPELLING IT OUT FOR YOU

There is a kind of body which is bad. It is bad because it has been significantly altered from its natural state, and it is bad because it is repellent to our aesthetic sensibilities.

The bad kind of body is contagious. It spreads through contact. Sometimes people we love are infected, and then they become the bad kind of body too.

There is a kind of body which is good. It is good because it is pleasing to our aesthetic sensibilities, and it is good because it is unaltered from its (super)natural state.

A happy ending is when all the good bodies destroy or drive into hiding all of the bad bodies. A happy ending is when the bad bodies of the people we love are forcibly returned to being the good kind of body.

Do you get it now?

ENDNOTES

It's worth noting that the ditch is very similar to the white American Evangelical hermeneutics of "the Bible says it. I believe it. That settles it," the defensive chapter-and-verse-or-it-didn't-happen approach to reading a text, what Fred Clark of slacktivist calls "concordance-ism". I don't think that's accidental. We stand underneath centuries of people reading the Bible very poorly - how could that not affect how we read things today? We are participants in history whether we like it or not.

I sincerely hope I haven't come across as condescending in this essay. Close reading is legitimately difficult! They teach college courses on this stuff! And while it is frustrating to have my close readings interrogated by people who... aren't doing that, like. I do get it. I find myself back in the ditch all the time. This stuff is hard. It is also, sorry, crucial if you intend to say something about a text that's worth saying.

I also hope I've communicated clearly here. Magic story is sufficiently incoherent that trying to develop a thesis about it often feels like trying to nail jello to the wall. If anyone has questions, please ask them! And thank you for reading. Next time, we'll probably do the new Eldraine set.

[dlyarchitecture]

[zvaigzdelasas]

[NYTimes is Private US Media]

On Saturday, Bidzina Ivanishvili, the founder of the governing Georgian Dream party, who built his fortune in banking, metals and real estate in Russia, said that the people of South Ossetia, which broke away from Georgia in the 1990s and expanded with Russian support in 2008, should receive an apology for the war that eventually broke out.

His comments at a rally in Gori, a town that was briefly occupied by Russian forces in 2008, were quickly condemned by pro-Western activists and the opposition. They also highlighted how Georgia’s relationship with the West has deteriorated over the past months.

On Monday, the United States announced that it had imposed sanctions against two Georgian officials and two activists associated with a pro-Russian political group that it said were involved in violent suppression of protests this year.[...]

In a statement, Mikheil Saakashvili, who was Georgia’s president at the time of the 2008 war [and Governor of the Odesa Oblast in Ukraine from May 2015 until November 2016, before being stripped of Ukrainian Citizenship], called Mr. Ivanishvili’s statement “an unprecedented betrayal” and “an insult to the memory of the heroes who sacrificed for our country.”

“He asked Georgians to apologize for the invader,” said Mr. Saakashvili, who is serving a six-year sentence in Georgia on charges related to abuse of power that he says were politically motivated.[...]

In 2009, an independent fact-finding mission set up by the European Union found that the war was initiated by “a sustained Georgian artillery attack” that was not “justifiable under international law” but that “much of the Russian military action went far beyond the reasonable limits of defense.” The report also accused all sides, including separatist formations, of violating international humanitarian law.[...]

Mr. Ivanishvili, who entered Georgian politics in the early 2010s, promised a “Nuremberg trial” against members of the United National Movement, a pro-Western party that was in power during the 2008 war, after parliamentary elections next month.

After the elections, he said, “all the perpetrators of the destruction of the Georgian-Ossetian brotherhood and coexistence will receive the strictest legal response.” He called the opposition “criminals” and “traitors” who “in 2008 burned our Ossetian sisters and brothers in flames.”

“We will definitely find strength in ourselves to apologize,” said Mr. Ivanishvili, who is officially an honorary chairman of the governing party, but who is widely believed to be its shadow leader.[...]

In May, defying large-scale protests, the Georgian government passed a law that aims to limit the influence of pro-Western nongovernmental groups and media outlets in the country.

16 Sep 24

[verbotenlove33]

Adi at a Rally

These are 3 photographs from an NSDAP rally in 1929, but I don’t believe it’s the Nuremberg Party Pally. Note how he’s wearing a black suit coat over his uniform with a black tie - this appears to be a style combo he was playing around with before his uniform became much more consistent and standardized in 1930/31…

Martin Bormann, Albert Bormann, K. H. Frank, Heinrich Himmler, Adolf Hitler…

Top notch hair style too 😋😋😋

[deutschland-im-krieg]

[1969] Great little book from a great series

[carbone14]

Premier congrès du parti nazi à Nuremberg – Congrès de Nuremberg – Allemagne – 1927

©Bundesarchiv - Bild 146-1969-054-53A

Derrière Hitler on distingue Heinrich Himmler, Rudolf Hess, Gregor Strasser, Franz Pfeffer von Salomon.

[whencyclopedia]

Nuremberg Rally

The Nuremberg Rally, or the Reich Party Congress, was an annual event held from 1927 to 1938 in Nürnberg, Germany. Organised on a massive scale by the National Socialist Party (Nazi), these operations in pomp, ceremony, and propaganda were attended by hundreds of thousands of party members. The climax was always a speech by the Nazi leader Adolf Hitler (1889-1945).

The Power of Propaganda

The National Socialist Party rallies were first held in Nuremberg in Bavaria in 1927 and continued until the outbreak of the Second World War (1939-45). Previously, Nazi rallies had been held in Munich and Weimar, but Nuremberg allowed the Nazis to play on its rich history, since in medieval times, the city had been the diet of the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation. The Nazis even began to call Nuremberg "the most German of German cities" (Range, 115). The city also had the advantage of a large open space for mass gatherings, the Luitpoldhain park.

These annual events, held each September and attended by Nazi party members, spanned several days. Unlike other gatherings of other political parties, Nuremberg was designed from the start as a place for show and spectacle, not the usual motions and debates on the intricacies of party policy. Hitler wanted unity and decreed that the rallies were to be a "clear and understandable demonstration of the will and the youthful strength" of the National Socialist Party (Range, 149). This was, however, still a period when the Nazi party was battling for electoral recognition, and it was not until 1933, when the Nazis took power, that the Nuremberg rallies became truly grandiose affairs.

The Nazis understood the power of presentation and the positive effects of well-orchestrated pomp and ceremony on a populace that perhaps had yet to be fully convinced of Nazi policies and their wild ambitions for Germany. Hitler had devoted two chapters of his book Mein Kampf (published in 1925) to the subject of propaganda, in particular, the power of imagery and slogans on the masses. Hitler and his master of propaganda Joseph Goebbels (1897-1945), who took on this role in 1928, were constantly on the lookout for opportunities where the people could be impressed by sights, sounds, and words. As Hugh Greene, a British journalist based in Berlin in the late 1930s noted:

Showmanship was very important to the Nazis. I think that Hitler quite consciously wanted to keep the German people, or the mass of them, in a state of constant intoxication. The annual event at Nuremberg was of particular importance. (Holmes, 38)

Hitler, Nuremberg Rally of 1935

H.Hoffmann - Imperial War Museums (CC BY-NC-SA)

People came to Nuremberg on special trains and stayed in military barracks, empty warehouses, tents, and railway carriages. Special guests were invited for their prestige, such as Prince August Wilhelm (1887-1949), the son of Kaiser Wilhelm II (r. 1888-1918), and Winifred Wagner (1897-1990), daughter-in-law of the composer Richard Wagner (1813-1883) and organiser of the important Bayreuth music festival. Sympathetic foreigners, particularly diplomats and journalists, were also invited to the rallies so that they could report back home favourably on Hitler and Nazi Germany.

Continue reading...

[letsboldlygomotherfuckers]

please drop the cherik fic you mentioned on the wounded character post <3 <3 (and like... any other cherik recs on your mind lol please and thank you)

I'm so glad you asked lol

Rumor Has It by blueink3

Words: 166,073 Chapters: 47/47

Summary

"Did I hear the doorbell earlier?" "Yeah, but I'd steer clear if I were you. It seemed a little tense. I don't know what's going on, but there's a kid out there who looks freakily like the prof." Nearly six months after Cuba, Charles' life is turned upside down for the second time. Though he's slowly learning to adapt to the first, he's not sure he can handle the second. Luckily for him, there are a few people out there more than willing to help.

this fic is an absolute beast but god the domesticity, I'm not normally one for kidfics but this fic has me by the throat honestly, absolutely wonderful injured erik AND hurt charles. they take it in turns to get fucked up <3

The Last Love Song & Testament of Charles F. Xavier by midrashic

Words: 20,139 Chapters: 1/1

Summary

When Erik is accused of domestic terrorism, Charles has no choice but to marry him to keep him out of jail.

activist charles and erik!au, Erik gets arrested for "domestic terrorism" for protecting charles at a rally turned riot, charles will have to testify against him and decides marrying him is the only way out of that. the yearning in this is actually off the charts it's so insane they're both so fucking stupid

Idiot Control Now by cygnaut for QueenZenobia

Words: 3,941 Chapters: 1/1

Summary

Hank screws something up in the lab and everyone's powers increase tenfold. Not knowing how to control them like this, they all try to cope and not kill each other by mistake while Hank tries to find a way to reverse the effects. Charles has a particularly hard time of it.

this one is so soft, I love Charles completely out of his mind with his telepathy going haywire reaching for Erik's comfort

Five Nights In Nuremberg by FuryRed

Words: 26,138 Chapters: 5/5

Summary

When Charles escapes from the mutant prison he has been held in for the last two years he knows that he’s going to need help to avoid being recaptured. What he doesn’t expect is that help will come in the form of a mysterious German man who rescues Charles and takes him to his home; a handsome stranger who, frustratingly, doesn’t speak a single word of English…

this one is so gentle!!!!! erik looking after charles and charles learning to trust him despite temporarily not having his telepathy is so soft, and it's a really interesting character study with basically no dialogue used/dialogue where you and they can only understand half of it (unless you're a german speaker in which case I am jealous of you <3)

Blessed is the Match Consumed by cygnaut

Words: 19,705 Chapters: 1/1

Summary

"This isn't a concentration camp," Delta says, calm, like he's been rehearsing it. Erik looks at the gun on his hip, the guards behind him in the corridor, the bars between them. He smiles with a lot of teeth. "I think I'd know that better than you."

AU in which the beach divorce didn't happen and Erik decides to stay and help Charles start his school. But despite their clean break, the government isn't ready to let the mutants disappear into hiding.

this one isn't cherik but it is an absolutely wonderful Erik character study, dadneto vibes, the scene where he gets put in the same position his mother was in was insane

through your eyes I see by boldlytothestars

Words: 5,490 Chapters: 1/?

Summary

“He was connected to Shaw when he died,” Raven snarls, shoving at Erik's shoulder harshly. It’s not enough to break his concentration, but it wasn’t meant to be. “It’s blown his shields wide open, what do you think this will do to him? He’s inside the head of every last man in those ships. Fuck them, I don’t care whether they live or die, but do you really think he’ll survive that?” She gestures back to Charles’ broken form on the floor, a thousand men screaming in terror in his head. “Been an honour- oh god I didn’t say- I want to go home- oh fuck, oh fuck- they can’t- will it hurt- no, no, no- please god- let it be quick-” Charles has stopped shouting but his broken, terrified pleading is almost worse. And, oh god, it’s not an option at all. The missiles explode midair.

what if it was erik's choice to stop the missiles to protect charles rather than an accident distracting him? charles got real fucked up by being in shaws brain as he died, shameless self plug xo

[lego-man-speer]

Nuremberg Defendants: Part 5, Wilhelm Frick - Reich Minister of the Interior

This is the next part of my Nuremberg Defendants series. Click the names below to see previous parts + the post I already made on Rudolf Hess

Rudolf Hess

Alfred Rosenberg

Joachim von Ribbentrop

Baldur von Schirach

Julius Streicher

-Wilhelm Frick was born on the 12th of March in 1877. He was the youngest of four children of Wilhelm Frick Snr, who was a Protestant teacher. He was born in Alsenz.

-He graduated from the Kaiserslautern Gymnasium in 1896, and went on to study Philology at the University of Munich. Early on he would change his studies to Law and transferred to the University of Berlin. In 1901 he received his doctorate in law and from 1903 he started working as an attorney at the Munich Police Department.

-Frick married his first wife, Elisabetha Emilie Nagel in 1910. Their marriage produced two sons and a daughter before ending in an ugly divorce in 1934. He remarried a few weeks later to Margarete Schutze Naumberg (the former wife of a Reichstag MP). Their marriage produced a son and a daughter and lasted until Frick's death.

-Frick did not serve in WW1 because he was deemed unfit. After the war he was put in charge of the political police as a district officer. In his role he had sympathies for the far-right extremists. On one occasion, Frick helped a Freikorps member, who had committed murder, to escape by issuing him a false passport.

-Frick was introduced to Hitler in 1919 by the Chief of Police, Ernst Pöhner. He willingly helped Hitler obtain permission to hold rallies and demonstrations.

-In 1923 he became a senior officer and head of the security service of the Munich Criminal Investigation Department. Frick later participated in the 1923 Munich Putsch. Had the Putsch succeeded, Frick was to become the new police chief. During the Putsch he remained in the police headquarters and ensured that the state police and the representative of the police president were not alerted immediately. After the Putsch, Frick was arrested and tried for aiding and abetting high treason. After several months in police custody, Frick was given a suspended sentence of 15 months imprisonment and was dismissed from his police job. During the disciplinary proceedings the dismissal was revoked after being declared unfair on the basis that his treasonous intent had not been proven.

-Frick was elected as a member of the Reichstag in 1924. He had been nominated by the National Socialist Freedom Movement. His speeches in the Reichstag were characterised by his radical anti-semitism and racism, as well as abuse and insults at his political opponents. He officially joined the NSDAP in 1925 after the ban on the party was lifted.

-In 1929 the NSDAP joined in a coalition government for the state of Thüringia. The party received the state ministries of the interior and education. In January 1930 Frick was appointed to these ministries - becoming the first Nazi to hold a ministerial post at any level in Germany. Frick used his position to dismiss communist and social democratic officials and replace them with NSDAP members. As minister he also used his power to make Hitler a German citizen (or else he could not stand for Reich Presidency in Germany). He also used his power to appoint Nazi race theoretician, Dr Günther, as professor at the University of Jena as well as the compulsory introduction of Nazi prayers in schools. Due to the character of these prayers, three out of the five introduced were declared unconstitutional by the German Constitutional Court in July 1930. Frick was removed from his office in April 1931 after a motion of no confidence by the SPD.

-In 1933 Frick was made Minister of the Interior, shortly after Hitler's appointment as Chancellor. Along with Göring, Frick was one of the two Nazi ministers in the original Hitler cabinet and the only one to serve with a portfolio (Göring originally served without one). In October that same year he was appointed a Reichsleiter (the second highest political rank in the party). In 1934 he replaced Göring as Prussian Minister of the Interior thus giving him control of the police in Prussia.

-As a result of the Reichstag Fire Decree 1933 and the Enabling Act 1933, Frick's power increased tremendously. These acts would pave the way for dictatorship by abolishing numerous constitutional protections (including the right to free speech and freedom of the press).

-Frick was responsible for drafting up numerous laws to consolidate the Nazi regime. For example the 14th July 1933 Law Against the Formation of Parties - making the NSDAP the only legal party in Germany. Frick was also responsible for drawing up anti-semitic laws such as the law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service. The law forbade Jews, political opponents and non-Aryans from holding positions as teachers, judges or government positions. He also drafted the Reich Citizenship Law and the Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honour. (These became known as the Nuremberg Laws).

-In July 1933 Frick implemented the Law for the Prevention of Hereditary Diseased Offspring, which included forced sterilisations. This would later lead to the T4 exterminations. During the Second World War Frick was made aware that mentally disabled, sick and aged people (which the Nazis deemed as “the useless eaters”) were being put to death, but did nothing to intervene. An estimated 200,000+ (under Frick's jurisdiction) were systematically murdered.

-Frick took an active role in Germany's rearmament, in opposition to the terms of the Treaty of Versailles. He drafted laws introducing military conscription and extending the Wehrmacht service law to the annexed Austria (after the Anschluss in 1938) and to the Sudetenland. He introduced German law, the Nuremberg laws and the military service law to Austria. He further established the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia.

-Frick's power began to decline around the late 1930s during a power struggle with Himmler, who wanted control of the German police force. In one example of the struggle for power, Frick tried to restrict the widespread use of protective custody laws in 1933, only to be convinced not to by Himmler. In 1936 Hitler named Himmler the chief of German police which effectively united the police with Himmler's SS. In August 1943 Himmler replaced Frick as Minister of the Interior. Frick however remained in Hitler's cabinet as a minister without portfolio.

-After being replaced as Minister of the Interior, Frick was appointed the Reich Protector of Bohemia and Moravia, making him Hitler's representative in the Czech lands. This role was merely a representative one and Frick had no real power. Instead the power lay with his superior Karl Hermann Frank. However, Frick did take a general responsibility of the oppression in Bohemia and Moravia, for example terrorism of the population; slave labour and the deportation of Jews to concentration camps. Of the 82,309 Jews deported from the protectorate, around 71,000 were killed in the Holocaust. The occupation authorities and their collaborators killed another 7,000.

-Frick was indicted at the Nuremberg Trials on all four counts. Frick was the only other defendant besides Rudolf Hess who refused to testify on his own behalf. Frick was absolutely certain that he would be sentenced to death, therefore he chose not to bother, however he did state “Hitler didn't want to do things my way. I wanted things to be dine legally. After all, I am a lawyer.” He was found to have an IQ of 124 (just about below average of the other defendants). As a prisoner, a former guard described him as someone who was always willing to talk.

-At Nuremberg he was described as one of the architects of the Holocaust. From 1933 onwards he used his power to fulfil the threats he made to his opponents in the Reichstag in 1932: “Don't worry, when we are in power we shall put all of you guys in concentration camps.” Frick's ministry was the highest controlling authority of the concentration camps and Frick personally inspected them. Frick also took an interest into the experimentation on prisoners inside the camps, such as forcing malaria onto heathy prisoners and the air pressure and freezing experiments.

-Frick was unrepentant in his final statement and was found innocent on count 1 of the indictment, but was found guilty on the other three charges brought against him. He was sentenced to death by hanging.

-Frick was executed on the 16th of October 1946, aged 69. It is believed that the executions were deliberately botched so that the convicted Nazis suffered ling and agonising deaths. One of these botchings included the size of the gallows trap door, which was too small, thus leading to some defendants (including Frick) to hit their heads as they dropped, making them suffer head injuries (and this is quite evident in Frick's post-execution photo, which can be found on wikipedia). On his way to the gallows he seemed the least steady of any of the condemned and stumbled on the gallows steps. His last words were “Long live eternal Germany.” He died 12 minutes after the initial drop.

OBLIGATORY MENTION: This post is purely educational and is in no way supportive of any right-wing ideologies

[mads-nixon]

100th Bomber Boys: Major Robert 'Rosie' Rosenthal: Pt. 1

Ahead of the show's release, I bought Donald Miller's book and am reading it! Here is a little bit about Major Robert 'Rosie' Rosenthal (played by Nate Mann) from the prologue of Masters of the Air (pg. 13-14)!

Lt. Robert "Rosie" Rosenthal had not trained with the Hundredth's original crews. He and his crew had been assigned to the group that August from a replacement pool in England, to fill in for men lost on the Regens-burg raid. "When I arrived, the group was not well organized," Rosenthal recalled. "They were a rowdy outfit, filled with characters. Chick Harding was a wonderful guy, but he didn't enforce tight discipline on the ground orin the air." Rosenthal didn't fly a mission for thirty days. "No one came around to check me out and approve me for combat duty. Finally, my squadron commander, John Egan, had me fly a practice formation. I flew to the right of his plane. I had done a lot of formation flying in training and I was frustrated; I desperately wanted to get into the war. I put the wing of my plane right up against Egan's, and wherever he went, I went. When we landed, Egan told me he wanted me to be his wing man." Rosenthal had gone to Brooklyn College, not far from his Flatbush home. An outstanding athlete, he had been captain of the football and baseball teams, and later was inducted into the college's athletic hall of fame. After graduating summa cum laude from Brooklyn Law School, he went to work for a leading Manhattan law firm. He was just getting started in his new job when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. The next morning he joined the Army Air Corps. He was twenty-six years old, with broad shoulders, sharply cut features, and dark curly hair. A big-city boy who loved hot jazz, he walked, incongruously, with the shambling gait of a farmer, his toes turned inward and there wasn't an ounce of New York cynicism in him. He was shy and easily embarrassed, but he burned with determination. "I had read Mein Kampf in college and had seen the newsreels of the big Nazi rallies in Nuremberg, with Hitler riding in an open car and the crowds cheering wildly. It was the faces in the crowd that struck me, the looks of adoration. It wasn't just Hitler. The entire nation had gone mad; it had to be stopped. "I'm a Jew, but it wasn't just that. Hitler was a menace to decent people everywhere. I was also tremendously proud of the English. They stood alone against the Nazis during the Battle of Britain and the Blitz. I read the papers avidly for war news and listened to Edward R. Murrow's live radio broadcasts of the bombing of London. I couldn't wait to get over there. "When I finally arrived, I thought I was at the center of the world, the place where the democracies were gathering to defeat the Nazis. I was right where I wanted to be." Rosie Rosenthal didn't share these thoughts with his crewmates, simple guys who distrusted what they called deep thinking. They never learned what was inside him, what made him fly and fight with blazing resolve. Later in the war, when he became one of the most decorated and famous fliers in the Eighth, word spread around Thorpe Abbotts that his family was in a German concentration camp. But when someone asked him directly, he said "that was a lot of hooey." His family-mother, sister, brother-in-law, and niece (his father had recently died) were all back in Brooklyn. "I have no personal reasons. Everything I've done or hope to do is strictly because I hate persecution... A human being has to look out for other human beings or else there's no civilization."

Rosie was part of the 'Bloody 100th' Bombardment Group of the 13th Combat Wing, of the 'Mighty Eighth' Air Force with John 'Bucky' Egan and Gale 'Buck' Cleven (played by Callum Turner and Austin Butler) His plane was called Rosie's Riveters, and him and his crew were an integral part of the bombardment group.

On October 8th, 1943, the 100th went on a bombing run to Bremen, Germany, and Buck Cleven was shot down. Two days later, Egan and the rest of the 100th went on a supposedly "easy" mission to Münster, accompanied by P-47 Thunderbolts almost all the way to the target. Rosenthal and his crew were not flying their beloved Rosie's Riveters due to damage from their two previous missions in Bremen and Marienburg. Instead, they flew Royal Flush.

Rosie's crew was worried about flying a brand new plane, and became incredibly nervous. Bringing them together under one of the wings, he calmed the boys down and lifted their spirits. This mission proved disastrous, and Royal Flush was the only one in the 100th to make it back to Thorpe Abbotts (the 100th's air-base in East Anglia).

Needless to say, I love Rosie already!! I've read up to chapter 6, and I feel like my brain is going to explode with all the information I've taken in :3

lmk if y'all want more posts like this one or would like to be tagged in them!!