JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 1019
For the next little bit I am going to try to have one word or phrase per post be unique to a Google search–today’s is “Nazi Capes”. (Yesterday was “Atomurbia”, created over coffee.) Frankly I’m a little surprised that it doesn’t come up–thank goodness for small favors of not having stores selling Nazi capes or some porn site featuring nazi-caped “dancers”, and so on.
The Allied advanced towards Berlin in 1944/45 liberated Nazi-occupied towns and cities and countries. The populations of course reacted immediately to those among them who facilitated the Nazi control of their communities. The collaborators were traitors, and were treated accordingly.
Fernand de Brinon, Marshall Petain, Karl Linnas, William Joyce (Lord
Haw=Haw), Ezra Pound,
the Ustaise (a Croatian fascist anti-Yugoslavian movement doubly doomed
post-war) are a sample of some of the major names in the history of Nazi sympathizers/collaborators who would be judged and adjudicated. There were many
others who survived this legal (and extra-legal) process--like Charles
Lindbergh and Henry Ford and Errol Flynn and (the IOC’s) Avery
Brundage–without much damage to themselves. (To be a little more
accurate, Charles Lindbergh was an America Firster with fascist
sympathies and unquiet anti-Semitic opinions–he did renounce his
admirations for Nazi Germany once America had been attacked on 7
December 1941. Country first in times of war for Lindbergh, though his
sympathies remained relatively intact for the 750 days of WWII being
fought in Europe without the United States.) There is also a large
population of Nazis (like Wernher von Braun, whose rockets killed
thousands on the ground in England and thousands more of the slaves who
worked for him at “home”) whose expertise was deemed necessary to
national security and who were settled in the U.S. to help form the new
fight against the Soviet Union. But that’s another story entirely.
There were many thousands of collaborators at society’s entry-level who
were dealt with locally–some were brought into the justice system,
though many didn’t make it quite that far. In many cases, people well
known to have added and assisted the Nazis in their occupation were
immediately found and dealt with upon liberation.
This photo-from the archives of the PM Magazine reporter and European
bureau chief Alexander Uhl, shows the arrest of Luxembourgian
collaborators, each made to wear a Nazi flag like a cape, the swastika
no doubt searing its way into the backs of each of these people. I
don’t know where they were being marched to or whether that march lasted
very long. Perhaps it ended in a field at the end of the street;
perhaps not. In any event, they were on their way to justice, whether
or not justice found them in a courtroom or a ditch is lost to history.
(The vast majority of collaborators arrested and brought into the
justice system in Luxembourg were sentenced to prison terms–of the 2000
arrested, nine were executed.) In any event I’ve never seen a picture
like this before, and am passing it along.
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