Russians call it lies?

[mataleo]

I argued with russian about history and Stalin etc.

he told me his side of story and showed this link

he called many things nazi propaganda, and cia lies

was he right or wrong

and what he belive in http://www.northstarcompass.org/nsc9912/lies.htm

how much is it true/false?

[hermod]

I argued with russian about history and Stalin etc.

he told me his side of story and showed this link

he called many things nazi propaganda, and cia lies

was he right or wrong

and what he belive in http://www.northstarcompass.org/nsc9912/lies.htm

how much is it true/false?

In 1933 political change took place in Germany that were to leave their mark on world history for decades to come. On 30 January Hitler became prime minister and a new form of government, involving violence and disregard of the law, began to take shape. In order to consolidate their grip on power the Nazis called fresh elections for the 5th of March, using all propaganda means within their grasp to secure victory. A week before the elections, on 27 February, the Nazis set fire to parliament and accused the communists of being responsible. In the elections that followed, the Nazis secured 17.3 million votes and 288 deputies, about 48% of the electorate (in November they had secured 11.7 million votes and 196 deputies).

Sefton Delmer (not a friend of the Nazis, to say the least), the British propagandists whose job was to coin and spread lies about the Third Reich, revealed the origin of that hoax: "Willy Münzenberg, the propaganda genius of the German Communist Party" - what didn't prevent Delmer from using it for propaganda purposes on numerous occasions.

Sefton Delmer: The Reichstag Fire

I saw the Reichstag fire not only from the outside, but the inside – in all senses of the word. And as a result I formed a view of its origin very different from the legend accepted by historians.

The news that the Reichstag was burning came to me from one of the many petrol station attendants to whom I had given my card with a request to ring me if anything noteworthy happened nearby. There were no taxis to be seen, and I had already put my car in the garage a quarter of a mile away. So I ran, ran and ran the whole mile and a half from my office to the Reichstag.

I got there at a quarter to ten – just forty minutes after the first alarm had been given. Already there were quite a few people standing around, watching the flames funnelling up through the great glass dome in a pillar of fire and smoke. Every minutes fresh trains of fire engines were arriving, their bells clanging as they raced through the streets.

[...]

Author in chief – of the 'Hitler, Göring and Goebbels did it' fiction – was Willy Münzenberg, the propaganda genius of the German Communist Party. He had managed to escape the German police roundup on February 28th and to flee to Paris. Willy, a dynamic little fellow full of charm and imagination, whom I was later to meet frequently in Paris, soon set up a workshop in the student quarter on the left bank. Then, with the help of a small team of collaborators he proceeded to fake up a number of stories all going to show that the Reichstag fire was a Nazi conspiracy. Every little bit of fact that came the way of the team was seized, twisted and embellished to make up the 'dossier' which was promptly published in two 'Brown Books'.

The recipe by which they worked was simple enough. For instance when Walter Gempp, the Berlin Fire chief who had personally directed the operations in the burning Reichstag, was dismissed because he had accepted extensive bribes from a fire extinguisher concern, Willy Münzenberg and his merry men immediately turned him into a brave anti-Nazi martyr. Gempp, they said, had been got rid of because he knew too much about the fire's Nazi origin, and because he had complained publicly that he had been hindered by the Nazis in his fire fighting. He had complained, they alleged, that when his firemen got into the Reichstag they found at least twenty Stormtroopers already there. A brilliant invention. I can vouch myself, that when I went round the burning building, we met only police officers, no Stormtroopers. But it was universally accepted as the truth.

On May 8th, 1933, Ernst Oberfohren, the deputy chief of the nationalist Party and a bitter opponent of his leader Hugenberg's alliance with Hitler, committed suicide out of chagrin over the way things were going in Germany. Münzenberg at once faked up a secret document which, he alleged, Oberfohren had left behind telling the inside history of the fire. It too proved wonderfully effective. My colleague of the Manchester Guardian fell for the fake and sent a long dispatch, citing it as proof of the Nazis' guilt.

My editor immediately wanted to know why I had not done the same. So I pointed out that apart from other improbabilities contained in the alleged Oberfohren document, I was particularly doubtful concerning the validity of one of the ten points it put forward as proof of the Nazi guilt. This 'point' was not in the Manchester Guardian version. But it was contained in the copy of the document I had seen.

"I think you will agree that it rather undermines the credibility of Herr Oberfohren's alleged revelations – if indeed he was their author. Listen to this!" And then I read him the passage.

"Hitler's constant companion and friend, the English journalist Delmer," it said, "telegraphed full details of the fire to his newspaper before it was discovered, and the name of [the young Dutch Communist Marinus] van der Lubbe as being the culprit."

The Editor agreed that perhaps we had not been scooped after all.

Münzenberg and his team freely seasoned their inventions with Nazi names to give them the stamp of authenticity. Heines, the Stormtroop leader, they said had led a posse of his men into the Reichstag, through the subterranean passage connecting it with Göring's palace. There they had then poured petrol over the benches in the assembly hall. The story was believed all the world over. The fact that Heines was four hundred miles away at Gleiwitz in Silesia, when this was supposed to be happening, did not detract from it at all.

The Münzenberg team declared that the protocol drawn up by Commissary Heisig and Commissary Zirpins during their interrogation of van der Lubbe and signed by him had been destroyed because in it van der Lubbe said that he had not laid the fire in the debating chamber. 'Someone else' he was alleged to have said, 'must have done that.' He had only set fires in the restaurant and the corridors. In fact the protocol was never destroyed. It still exists today and extracts from it were recently published. In it – as I have already stated – van der Lubbe states that he was responsible for all the fires in the building and had no helpers. And he continued to protest his sole responsibility for the fire at the trial – right up to the last.

When the Nazis tried to contradict the 'Brown Book's' accusations they were too late. The world, shocked by their appalling crimes against the Jews and horrified by the lawlessness of the Stormtroops, was only too ready to believe that the fire was their work.

The legend first sponsored by Münzenberg grew and grew. After the collapse of Hitler, it became standard practice for former Nazi highups to alibi themselves with some new piece of 'evidence' proving that the Nazis fired the Reichstag. But in almost all instances they merely elaborated some point in Willy Münzenberg's ingenious myth.

Even today, when the 'Hitler, Göring and Goebbels did it' legend has been thoroughly exploded as a result of the meticulous and painstaking historical investigation done by the German writer Fritz Tobias,* I fear it will still live on among the historical lumber filling the minds of most people.

But not, I hope, the minds of those who read this book.


* Der Reichstagsbrand, 1933. Fritz Tobias. Der Spiegel. Hamburg, 1959.

Sefton Delmer, Trail Sinister pp. 185-200, Martin Secker & Warburg, London 1961.


On the occasion of the Reichstag fire in 1933, Münzenburg issued a mendacious "Brown Book" portraying the "guilt of the National Socialists," organized the "Reichstag counter-trial against Hermann Göring," gave birth to a whole series of such "brown books" and a flood of similar pamphlets and emigré newspapers. The uninhibited mendacity of his activities was exposed by Fritz Tobias in Der Reichstagsbrand – Legende und Wirklichkeit ('The Reichstag Fire – Legend and Reality'), Rastatt/Baden 1962.

http://www.heretical.com/miscella/reichstg.html

William Hearst - Friend of Hitler

William Randolph Hearst is the name of a multi-millionaire who sought to help the Nazis in their psychological warfare against the Soviet Union. Hearst was a well-known US newspaper proprietor known as the 'father' of the so-called 'yellow press', i.e., the sensationalist press. William Hearst began his career as a newspaper editor in 1885 when his father, George Hearst, a millionaire mining industrialist, Senator and newspaper proprietor himself, put him in charge of the San Francisco Daily Examiner.

This was also the start of the Hearst newspaper empire, an empire which strongly influenced the lives and thinking of North Americans. After his father died, William Hearst sold all the mining industry shares he inherited and began to invest capital in the world of journalism. His first purchase was the New York Morning Journal, a traditional newspaper which Hearst completely transformed into a sensationalist rag. He bought his stories at any price, and when there were no atrocities or crimes to report, it behoved his journalists and photographers to 'arrange' matters. It is this which in fact characterises the 'yellow press': lies and 'arranged' atrocities served up as truth.

These lies of Hearst's made him a millionaire and a very important personage in the newspaper world. In 1935 he was one of the richest men in the world, with a fortune estimated at $200 million. After his purchase of the Morning Journal, Hearst went on to buy and establish daily and weekly newspapers throughout the US. In the 1940s, William Hearst owned 25 daily newspapers, 24 weekly newspapers, 12 radio stations, 2 world news services, one business providing news items for films, the Cosmopolitan film company, and a lot of others. In 1948 he bought one of the US's first TV stations, BWAL-TV in Baltimore. Hearst's newspapers sold 13 million copies a day and had close to 40 million readers. Almost a third of the adult population of the US were reading Hearst newspapers every day. Furthermore, many millions of people throughout the world received information from the Hearst press via his news services, films and a series of newspapers that were translated and published in large quantities all over the world. The figures quoted above demonstrate how the Hearst empire was able to influence American politics, and indeed world politics, over very many years - on issues which included opposition to the US entering the Second World War on the side of the Soviet Union and support for the McCarthyite anti-communist witch-hunts of the 1950s.

William Hearst's outlook was ultra-conservative, nationalist and anti-communist. His politics were the politics of the extreme right. In 1934 he travelled to Germany, where he was received by Hitler as a guest and friend. After this trip, Hearst's newspapers became even more reactionary, always carrying articles against socialism, against the Soviet Union and especially against Stalin. Hearst also tried to use his newspapers for overt Nazi propaganda purposes, publishing a series of articles by Goering, Hitler's right-hand man. The protests of many readers, however, forced him to stop publishing such items and to withdraw them from circulation.

After his visit to Hitler, Hearst's sensationalist newspapers were filled with 'revelations' about the terrible happenings in the Soviet Union - murders, genocide, slavery, luxury for the rulers and starvation for the people, all these were the big news items almost every day. The material was provided to Hearst by the Gestapo, Nazi Germany's political police. On the front pages of the newspapers there often appeared caricatures and falsified pictures of the Soviet Union, with Stalin portrayed as a murderer holding a dagger in his hand. We should not forget that these articles were read each day by 40 million people in the US and millions of others worldwide!

I would have appreciated to see a few examples of pro-Nazi articles published by Hearst at that time. The proofs of the alleged Hitler-Hearst connection seems nonexistent. It seems to come from the imagination of the anti-fascist journalist George Seldes. My own experience with old British and American newspapers tends to show that U.S. and British newspapers of that time depicted Stalin's Soviet Union in a positive way and Hitler's Third Reich in a very negative way. But maybe I haven't seen the right newspapers - i.e. Hearst's alleged pro-Nazi newspapers. That's why I'd like to see some before believing in that.

I'm not familiar with the Soviet documents dealing with the holodomor and the Gulags. So I don't know if the holodomor and the Gulag death toll have been vastly inflated by the West, as that communist author claims. But if that's true, one must concede that Western newspapers could have done the same thing as easily with Hitler's "Holocaust".

[Brycesdaddy1105]

From what I've read, Stalin deliberately caused the mass starvation in The Ukraine and other places in the former Soviet Union in order to force peasants onto collective farms. Norman Davies mentions it in his book "Europe." Timothy Snyder devoted the beginning of his book, "Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin," to the Holdomor. Snyder did not use the term "Holdomor."

[Roms47159]

I argued with russian about history and Stalin etc.

he told me his side of story and showed this link

he called many things nazi propaganda, and cia lies

was he right or wrong

and what he belive in http://www.northstarcompass.org/nsc9912/lies.htm

how much is it true/false?

In 1933 political change took place in Germany that were to leave their mark on world history for decades to come. On 30 January Hitler became prime minister and a new form of government, involving violence and disregard of the law, began to take shape. In order to consolidate their grip on power the Nazis called fresh elections for the 5th of March, using all propaganda means within their grasp to secure victory. A week before the elections, on 27 February, the Nazis set fire to parliament and accused the communists of being responsible. In the elections that followed, the Nazis secured 17.3 million votes and 288 deputies, about 48% of the electorate (in November they had secured 11.7 million votes and 196 deputies).

Sefton Delmer (not a friend of the Nazis, to say the least), the British propagandists whose job was to coin and spread lies about the Third Reich, revealed the origin of that hoax: "Willy Münzenberg, the propaganda genius of the German Communist Party" - what didn't prevent Delmer from using it for propaganda purposes on numerous occasions.

Sefton Delmer: The Reichstag Fire

I saw the Reichstag fire not only from the outside, but the inside – in all senses of the word. And as a result I formed a view of its origin very different from the legend accepted by historians.

The news that the Reichstag was burning came to me from one of the many petrol station attendants to whom I had given my card with a request to ring me if anything noteworthy happened nearby. There were no taxis to be seen, and I had already put my car in the garage a quarter of a mile away. So I ran, ran and ran the whole mile and a half from my office to the Reichstag.

I got there at a quarter to ten – just forty minutes after the first alarm had been given. Already there were quite a few people standing around, watching the flames funnelling up through the great glass dome in a pillar of fire and smoke. Every minutes fresh trains of fire engines were arriving, their bells clanging as they raced through the streets.

[...]

Author in chief – of the 'Hitler, Göring and Goebbels did it' fiction – was Willy Münzenberg, the propaganda genius of the German Communist Party. He had managed to escape the German police roundup on February 28th and to flee to Paris. Willy, a dynamic little fellow full of charm and imagination, whom I was later to meet frequently in Paris, soon set up a workshop in the student quarter on the left bank. Then, with the help of a small team of collaborators he proceeded to fake up a number of stories all going to show that the Reichstag fire was a Nazi conspiracy. Every little bit of fact that came the way of the team was seized, twisted and embellished to make up the 'dossier' which was promptly published in two 'Brown Books'.

The recipe by which they worked was simple enough. For instance when Walter Gempp, the Berlin Fire chief who had personally directed the operations in the burning Reichstag, was dismissed because he had accepted extensive bribes from a fire extinguisher concern, Willy Münzenberg and his merry men immediately turned him into a brave anti-Nazi martyr. Gempp, they said, had been got rid of because he knew too much about the fire's Nazi origin, and because he had complained publicly that he had been hindered by the Nazis in his fire fighting. He had complained, they alleged, that when his firemen got into the Reichstag they found at least twenty Stormtroopers already there. A brilliant invention. I can vouch myself, that when I went round the burning building, we met only police officers, no Stormtroopers. But it was universally accepted as the truth.

On May 8th, 1933, Ernst Oberfohren, the deputy chief of the nationalist Party and a bitter opponent of his leader Hugenberg's alliance with Hitler, committed suicide out of chagrin over the way things were going in Germany. Münzenberg at once faked up a secret document which, he alleged, Oberfohren had left behind telling the inside history of the fire. It too proved wonderfully effective. My colleague of the Manchester Guardian fell for the fake and sent a long dispatch, citing it as proof of the Nazis' guilt.

My editor immediately wanted to know why I had not done the same. So I pointed out that apart from other improbabilities contained in the alleged Oberfohren document, I was particularly doubtful concerning the validity of one of the ten points it put forward as proof of the Nazi guilt. This 'point' was not in the Manchester Guardian version. But it was contained in the copy of the document I had seen.

"I think you will agree that it rather undermines the credibility of Herr Oberfohren's alleged revelations – if indeed he was their author. Listen to this!" And then I read him the passage.

"Hitler's constant companion and friend, the English journalist Delmer," it said, "telegraphed full details of the fire to his newspaper before it was discovered, and the name of [the young Dutch Communist Marinus] van der Lubbe as being the culprit."

The Editor agreed that perhaps we had not been scooped after all.

Münzenberg and his team freely seasoned their inventions with Nazi names to give them the stamp of authenticity. Heines, the Stormtroop leader, they said had led a posse of his men into the Reichstag, through the subterranean passage connecting it with Göring's palace. There they had then poured petrol over the benches in the assembly hall. The story was believed all the world over. The fact that Heines was four hundred miles away at Gleiwitz in Silesia, when this was supposed to be happening, did not detract from it at all.

The Münzenberg team declared that the protocol drawn up by Commissary Heisig and Commissary Zirpins during their interrogation of van der Lubbe and signed by him had been destroyed because in it van der Lubbe said that he had not laid the fire in the debating chamber. 'Someone else' he was alleged to have said, 'must have done that.' He had only set fires in the restaurant and the corridors. In fact the protocol was never destroyed. It still exists today and extracts from it were recently published. In it – as I have already stated – van der Lubbe states that he was responsible for all the fires in the building and had no helpers. And he continued to protest his sole responsibility for the fire at the trial – right up to the last.

When the Nazis tried to contradict the 'Brown Book's' accusations they were too late. The world, shocked by their appalling crimes against the Jews and horrified by the lawlessness of the Stormtroops, was only too ready to believe that the fire was their work.

The legend first sponsored by Münzenberg grew and grew. After the collapse of Hitler, it became standard practice for former Nazi highups to alibi themselves with some new piece of 'evidence' proving that the Nazis fired the Reichstag. But in almost all instances they merely elaborated some point in Willy Münzenberg's ingenious myth.

Even today, when the 'Hitler, Göring and Goebbels did it' legend has been thoroughly exploded as a result of the meticulous and painstaking historical investigation done by the German writer Fritz Tobias,* I fear it will still live on among the historical lumber filling the minds of most people.

But not, I hope, the minds of those who read this book.


* Der Reichstagsbrand, 1933. Fritz Tobias. Der Spiegel. Hamburg, 1959.

Sefton Delmer, Trail Sinister pp. 185-200, Martin Secker & Warburg, London 1961.


On the occasion of the Reichstag fire in 1933, Münzenburg issued a mendacious "Brown Book" portraying the "guilt of the National Socialists," organized the "Reichstag counter-trial against Hermann Göring," gave birth to a whole series of such "brown books" and a flood of similar pamphlets and emigré newspapers. The uninhibited mendacity of his activities was exposed by Fritz Tobias in Der Reichstagsbrand – Legende und Wirklichkeit ('The Reichstag Fire – Legend and Reality'), Rastatt/Baden 1962.

http://www.heretical.com/miscella/reichstg.html

William Hearst - Friend of Hitler

William Randolph Hearst is the name of a multi-millionaire who sought to help the Nazis in their psychological warfare against the Soviet Union. Hearst was a well-known US newspaper proprietor known as the 'father' of the so-called 'yellow press', i.e., the sensationalist press. William Hearst began his career as a newspaper editor in 1885 when his father, George Hearst, a millionaire mining industrialist, Senator and newspaper proprietor himself, put him in charge of the San Francisco Daily Examiner.

This was also the start of the Hearst newspaper empire, an empire which strongly influenced the lives and thinking of North Americans. After his father died, William Hearst sold all the mining industry shares he inherited and began to invest capital in the world of journalism. His first purchase was the New York Morning Journal, a traditional newspaper which Hearst completely transformed into a sensationalist rag. He bought his stories at any price, and when there were no atrocities or crimes to report, it behoved his journalists and photographers to 'arrange' matters. It is this which in fact characterises the 'yellow press': lies and 'arranged' atrocities served up as truth.

These lies of Hearst's made him a millionaire and a very important personage in the newspaper world. In 1935 he was one of the richest men in the world, with a fortune estimated at $200 million. After his purchase of the Morning Journal, Hearst went on to buy and establish daily and weekly newspapers throughout the US. In the 1940s, William Hearst owned 25 daily newspapers, 24 weekly newspapers, 12 radio stations, 2 world news services, one business providing news items for films, the Cosmopolitan film company, and a lot of others. In 1948 he bought one of the US's first TV stations, BWAL-TV in Baltimore. Hearst's newspapers sold 13 million copies a day and had close to 40 million readers. Almost a third of the adult population of the US were reading Hearst newspapers every day. Furthermore, many millions of people throughout the world received information from the Hearst press via his news services, films and a series of newspapers that were translated and published in large quantities all over the world. The figures quoted above demonstrate how the Hearst empire was able to influence American politics, and indeed world politics, over very many years - on issues which included opposition to the US entering the Second World War on the side of the Soviet Union and support for the McCarthyite anti-communist witch-hunts of the 1950s.

William Hearst's outlook was ultra-conservative, nationalist and anti-communist. His politics were the politics of the extreme right. In 1934 he travelled to Germany, where he was received by Hitler as a guest and friend. After this trip, Hearst's newspapers became even more reactionary, always carrying articles against socialism, against the Soviet Union and especially against Stalin. Hearst also tried to use his newspapers for overt Nazi propaganda purposes, publishing a series of articles by Goering, Hitler's right-hand man. The protests of many readers, however, forced him to stop publishing such items and to withdraw them from circulation.

After his visit to Hitler, Hearst's sensationalist newspapers were filled with 'revelations' about the terrible happenings in the Soviet Union - murders, genocide, slavery, luxury for the rulers and starvation for the people, all these were the big news items almost every day. The material was provided to Hearst by the Gestapo, Nazi Germany's political police. On the front pages of the newspapers there often appeared caricatures and falsified pictures of the Soviet Union, with Stalin portrayed as a murderer holding a dagger in his hand. We should not forget that these articles were read each day by 40 million people in the US and millions of others worldwide!

I would have appreciated to see a few examples of pro-Nazi articles published by Hearst at that time. The proofs of the alleged Hitler-Hearst connection seems nonexistent. It seems to come from the imagination of the anti-fascist journalist George Seldes. My own experience with old British and American newspapers tends to show that U.S. and British newspapers of that time depicted Stalin's Soviet Union in a positive way and Hitler's Third Reich in a very negative way. But maybe I haven't seen the right newspapers - i.e. Hearst's alleged pro-Nazi newspapers. That's why I'd like to see some before believing in that.

I'm not familiar with the Soviet documents dealing with the holodomor and the Gulags. So I don't know if the holodomor and the Gulag death toll have been vastly inflated by the West, as that communist author claims. But if that's true, one must concede that Western newspapers could have done the same thing as easily with Hitler's "Holocaust".