Relatives of Polish soldiers executed by Joseph Stalin's secret police in one of the Second World War's most infamous massacres are to take Russia to the European Court of Human Rights to try to make it disclose the full truth about the killings.

In the so-called Katyn atrocities, personally ordered by Stalin in 1940, the NKVD (forerunner of the KGB) killed 21,587 Polish Army reservists in cold blood on the grounds that they were "hardened and uncompromising enemies of Soviet authority".

Russia has refused to prosecute surviving suspects or reveal their names. It is keeping two-thirds of the files on the subject classified, and has classed the murders as an ordinary crime whose statute of limitations has expired.

Relatives of victims say that the killings amounted to genocide and that Russia has a moral obligation to open its archive on them. The killings took place at three locations but the massacre took its name from just one, the Katyn Forest in modern-day Belarus. The murders killed many of Poland's intelligentsia; among the dead were officers, chaplains, writers, professors, journalists, engineers, lawyers, aristocrats and teachers.

All were killed by a single shot to the back of the head. Some 15,000 bodies have been found and the rest are thought to be still buried in secret mass graves.

Illustration: Jesus, a German soldier and an Aryan family adorn the pulpit

A protestant parish is trying to raise money to restore the Martin Luther Memorial Church in Berlin -- and its National Socialist ornamentation -- as a memorial to the “victims of the Nazis.”

The imposing Martin Luther Memorial Church in Mariendorf, south Berlin, looks like many others built in the 20th century, with its brick and stone Bauhaus-style exterior. But the last surviving Nazi-era church in Germany is also a place where pastors preached from pulpits adorned with Aryans, and babies were baptized in a font featuring carvings of a Nazi storm trooper.

In fact, the National Socialist link is clear from the outset. In the lobby, an iron cross chandelier illuminates the busts of Martin Luther and Field Marshall Paul von Hindenburg, Germany's famous World War I commander. Church officials believe that there was initially a likeness of Adolf Hitler -- after whom the church was supposed to be named.

In the main part of the church, stained glass windows framed by a stone arch face pews for 800 worshipers and a giant organ. The organ was first used at National Socialist rallies in Nuremberg in 1935 -- the year the church was opened and two years after Hitler came to power.

On Wednesday of last week, Portuguese Jews marked the 500-year anniversary of the start of a massacre which saw thousands of Jews burned at the stake in the streets of Lisbon at the hands of zealous Roman Catholics.

City officials unveiled a small memorial at the site of one of the main stakes used during the three-day killing spree while Lisbon’s main Square, Rossio, was lit up with 4,000 candles in memory of the dead.

One of the organizers of the candlelight memorial, journalist Nuno Guerreiro Josue, said he hopes the event will help ensure that one of Portugal’s darkest, but still largely unknown, moments in history is not forgotten.

"It is important to remember the three days that 500 years ago filled the streets of Lisbon with blood," he said in a statement posted on his website. Historians estimate that between 2,000 and 4,000 "New Christians" -- Jews who were forced by the state to convert in 1496 -- were thrown into pyres set up across the city centre before authorities regained control of the Portuguese capital.

The violence erupted on April 19, 1506 after a man believed to be a "New Christian" suggested that a light emanating from a crucifix at a chapel was likely caused by natural causes instead of divine intervention as thought by many Christians.

Among the ruins of a 3,200-year-old palace near Athens, researchers are piecing together the story of legendary Greek warrior-king Ajax, hero of the Trojan War.

Archaeologist Yiannis Lolos found remains of the palace while hiking on the island of Salamis in 1999 and has led excavations there for the past six years.

Now he's confident he's found the site where Ajax ruled, which has also provided evidence to support a theory that residents of the Mycenean island kingdom fled to Cyprus after the king's death.

"This was Ajax's capital," excavation leader Lolos, professor of archaeology at Ioannina University, told The Associated Press on Wednesday.

"It was the seat of the maritime kingdom of Salamis — small compared to other Mycenaean kingdoms — that was involved in trade, warfare and piracy in the eastern Mediterranean."

Ajax was one of the top fighters in the legendary Greek army that besieged Troy to win back Helen, the abducted queen of Sparta. Described in Homer's Iliad as a towering hero protected by a huge shield, Ajax killed himself after a quarrel with other Greek leaders.

Sixty years later, and Hitler still sells: Several offers in the region of $14 million have been received for a large eagle and swastika recovered from the Graf Spree, a warship scuttled by its crew in 1939 outside Montevideo in Uraguay.

Divers raised the 2m-high bronze eagle statue from the stern of the Graf Spee after  unbolting the 400kg bronze after its discovery on a routine survey dive.

The wreck lies in just 12m of water, its stern buried in mud up to deck level. This hid the mounting position of the eagle, which was thought to have been removed years ago.

The eagle design, complete with swastika emblem, was designed personally by Adolf Hitler. The 2.5m-wide wingspans of the bronze casts curved around the sterns of capital ships including the Graf Spee's sisters Deutschland and Admiral Scheer, as well as the Gneisenau and Scharnhhorst. But the Graf Spee's is thought to be the only one of the casts to have survived.

On the night of 13 February 1945, Allied bombers firebombed the German city of Dresden, killing an estimated 135,000 people, mostly civilians and refugees who were fleeing the advance of the Soviet Army. Dresden was no military target: it was pure terrorism, and killed more people in one night than both Atomic bombs dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima did together.

This horrific event was remembered this month in ceremonies in Sweden and Dresden itself, where over 6,000 Germans marched in the streets with black flags, banners and purple balloons.

The Dresden Bombing:

In 1941 Charles Portal of the British Air Staff advocated that entire cities and towns should be bombed. Portal claimed that this would quickly bring about the collapse of civilian morale in Germany. Air Marshall Arthur Harris agreed and when he became head of RAF Bomber Command in February 1942, he introduced a policy of area bombing (known in Germany as terror bombing) where entire cities and towns were targeted.

One tactic used by the Royal Air Force and the United States Army Air Force was the creation of firestorms. This was achieved by dropping incendiary bombs, filled with highly combustible chemicals such as magnesium, phosphorus or petroleum jelly (napalm), in clusters over a specific target. After the area caught fire, the air above the bombed area, become extremely hot and rose rapidly. Cold air then rushed in at ground level from the outside and people were sucked into the fire.

In 1945, Arthur Harris decided to create a firestorm in the medieval city of Dresden. He considered it a good target as it had not been attacked during the war and was virtually undefended by anti-aircraft guns. The population of the city was now far greater than the normal 650,000 due to the large numbers of refugees fleeing from the advancing Red Army.

Hungary's Reformed church has welcomed a decision by Russia to return a valuable Calvinist book collection, six decades after it was seized as war booty by the Soviet Red Army.

“We're very happy this collection is returning after so many years, and we hope all the books will be included," said Zoltan Tarr, general secretary of Hungary's Reformed church.

"It's an important symbolic act, which could help heal the war wounds which are still very real in the life of Europe." The 32-year-old pastor from Debrecen in eastern Hungary was reacting to news that Russian President Vladimir Putin planned to return the books in person to the Reformed college in the eastern town of Sarospatak during a visit to Hungary, set to start on 28 February.

More than 60 years ago, a group of Czech and Slovak exiles parachuted into their Nazi-occupied homeland and assassinated SS-Obergruppenfuehrer Reinhard Heydrich.

For the first time since the end of the World War Two, a German museum is offering a close look at "Operation Anthropoid", the codename for the only successful assassination of a member of Adolf Hitler's inner circle.

Michal Burian of the Military Institute of Prague, which presented the exhibition in the Czech capital before it moved to Berlin, says the assassination ranks among the most important moments of the last century and is far more than a footnote.

"The assassination is an ancient tragedy. You can find everything in this story -- bravery, love, betrayal, death. In my opinion, it is one of the most interesting stories of the 20th century," he said.

The Heydrich assassination took place on May 27, 1942 on a quiet street in the Prague suburb of Kobylisy. Two young men -- a Czech and a Slovak -- ambushed Heydrich's black Mercedes-Benz convertible as he was on his way to Prague's Hradcany Castle.

The Italian city of Turin is to play host to the unveiling of the world's oldest surviving map as part of the rich program of cultural events accompanying February's Winter Olympics .
The 1st-century-BC Papyrus of Artemidorus, which contains the map, will go on display for the first time ever at the city's Palazzo Bricherasio from February 8 to May 7.

The racial significance of the map is of course the fact that Whites had this sort of technical ability 1,900 years before Negroes in Africa even saw writing for the first time – when European explorers demonstrated it to them.

Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon has suffered a stroke and is mortally ill. This eye witness report of the 1982 Sabra and Shatila massacre in Lebanon, shows why few around the world will be shedding tears at Sharon’s exit from the world stage.

By Dr. Ben Alofs

I am a Dutch doctor, currently living in North-Wales. In the summer of 1982 I was working as a nurse in West-Beirut, which at the time was being besieged by the Israeli army.

The American negotiator Philip Habib had mediated an agreement, according to which the Israeli army would refrain from occupying West-Beirut, after the Palestinian fedayeen had left. A second fundamental aspect of the agreement was that the US would guarantee the security of the remaining Palestinian civilian population. The evacuation, supervised by an international peacekeeping force, went smoothly, and was completed on September 1st. Much earlier than September 26th, the date that had been agreed on, the international peacekeeping force left between September 10th and 13th. On September 3rd the first violation of the Habib-agreement took place, when Israeli forces occupied Bir Hassan, in the southern suburbs of Beirut. Before that, Sharon had stated he wanted the peacekeeping forces out of Beirut.

The absurdity of Jewish allegations that the Nazis were trying to kill European Jewry is nowhere better illustrated than in the fact that militant Zionists, who were trying to expel the British from Palestine, offered twice to enter World War II on the side of Nazi Germany in exchange for German support for the proposed state of Israel.

The remarkable offer was made in writing by a representative of the Lehi (the Hebrew acronym for Lohamei Herut Israel, "Fighters for the Freedom of Israel"), better known as the Stern Gang, a group of Zionists who violently fought against the British mandate holders in Palestine.

In 1940 and 1941, Lehi proposed intervening in the Second World War on the side of Nazi Germany to attain their help in expelling Britain from Mandate Palestine and to offer their assistance in evacuating the Jews of Europe arguing that "common interests could exist between the establishment of a new order in Europe in conformity with the German concept, and the true national aspirations of the Jewish people as they are embodied by the NMO (Lehi)."

Late in 1940, Lehi representative Naftali Lubenchik was sent to Beirut where he met the German official Werner Otto von Hentig and delivered a letter from Lehi offering to "actively take part in the war on Germany's side" in return for German support for "the establishment of the historic Jewish state on a national and totalitarian basis, bound by a treaty with the German Reich". Von Hentig forwarded the letter to the German embassy in Ankara, but there is no record of any official response. Lehi tried to establish contact with the Germans again in December 1941, also apparently without success.

So much for the “Holocaust” – one wonders how the Zionists could have offered to actively help Germany when the ‘evil Nazis’ were supposedly gassing the Jews…

(Illustration: German covering letter attached to Stern's January 1941 offer of an alliance with Nazi Germany)

Media Link

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stern_Gang

A secret synagogue in the Portuguese town of Porto, discovered during renovations of a building has thrown new light on the activities of Jews in 16th-century Iberia: of how they secretly continued to practice their religion in secret after being forced to publicly convert to Catholicism.

The synagogue was hidden behind a false wall in a four-story house that Father Agostinho Jardim Moreira, a Roman Catholic priest, was converting into a home for his old-age parishioners.

A scholar of Porto's Jewish history, he says that as soon as the workers told him of the wall, "I knew there had to be some kind of Jewish symbol behind it." His hunch was confirmed when the wall came down to reveal a carved granite repository, about five feet tall, arched at the top and facing east toward Jerusalem. It was the ark where the medieval Jews kept their Torah scrolls. Pieces of decorative green tiles in the ark further confirmed the age of the ark when experts dated their glazing to a method used in the 16th century.

Ireland's president during World War II offered condolences to Nazi Germany's representative in Dublin over the death of Adolf Hitler, newly declassified government records show.

At the winter solstice on December 21, Germany officially reopened a replica of a great wooden circle that is believed to be a temple of the sun built by a lost culture 6,800 years ago.  The circle of posts, in a flat river plain at Goseck south of Berlin, has mystified scientists since its discovery in 1991 by an archaeologist studying the landscape from the air. An excavation found post holes and what may be the remains of ritual fires.

Goseck has been dubbed the German Stonehenge, though it is twice as old as the Stonehenge megalithic circle in southern England and has no stones. The original wood rotted away long ago, but new palisades, or wooden walls, were constructed at Goseck this year.

In a public works scheme, 2,300 oaken poles were erected in a circle on the same site over a seven-month period, with gateways opening to the points of the compass where the sun rises and sets on December 21. There are now two concentric wooden palisades, each 2.5 metres high, as well as a ditch and an earthen wall.

A winter solstice festival with flaming torches and laser lights and an audience of thousands atteneded the opening ceremony as the sun set over the southwest gate of the 75-metre-diameter circle.

In the 1930s, Swing Music was the vogue, and the National Socialist government of Germany, never one to miss an opportunity, personally followed Minister Joseph Goebbel’s instructions to use this music form as propaganda in the English speaking world.

Now, thanks to the White Man’s wonder of the Internet, it is now possible to hear these original tracks, as broadcast by Goebbel’s handpicked swing band,  “Charlie and His Orchestra”. This band was led by Karl Schwendler, an English speaking German who broadcast Nazi-themed swing and big-band hits every night on the medium-wave and short-wave bands throughout the 1930s to Canada, the US and Britain.

With titles such as “The Man With The Big Cigar” (whose “greatest friend is the USSR”), and “Who'll Buy My Bublitchky” (‘Bolshevist’), Charlie and His Orchestra reveal much about Nazi propaganda techniques and their willingness to use popular music to spread their message.

Download it while you can:

http://blog.wfmu.org/freeform/2005/12/still_more_nazi.html

Some 30,000 tourists packed the site of the Battle of Slavkov (Austerlitz) in which French Emperor Napoleon's soldiers defeated the units of the emperors of Austria and Russia, Franz I and Alexander I, 200 years ago, in Tvarozna, Czech Republic, over the weekend.

Military history fans staged the ever largest reconstruction of the battle, using 4,000 extras from 23 countries as far away as New Zealand. The units included infantry cavalry and artillery.

A village consisting of twenty wooden buildings burnt down at the battlefield.

Liberals have long argued that race “is a social construct” with no basis in biology. The science of genetics has however utterly exposed this lie: it is even possible to determine who in Britain is of Viking ancestry, and who has ‘half-Jewish’ ancestry, according to a researchers on the Wellcome Trust - Genetic History Project in Oxford, England.

Interviewed on the Science Show on the Australian Broadcasting Radio National, Sir Walter Bodmer, principal of Hertford College at Oxford University, explained how he was involved in taking samples from all over Britain to track down the extent of “Vikings, Vikings, Saxons and Angles” in the modern British population.

Of course, “if race didn’t exist”, as the lying liberals like to claim, such an undertaking would be impossible.

Dramatic evidence of the age and extent of White civilization has been uncovered with the announcement that archaeologists have discovered what they believe is the earliest evidence yet of long distance seafaring in the eastern Mediterranean, undermining beliefs that ancient mariners never ventured into open seas.

Fragments of stone implements believed to be up to 12,000 years old have been found at two sites of Cyprus, suggesting roving mariners used the areas as temporary camp sites after forays from what is today Syria and Turkey.

The contrast with Africa – which did not have the wheel only 100 years ago – cannot be more vivid.