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Post by kaima on Sept 25, 2018 17:15:44 GMT -7
Freddie Oversteegen, Gritty Dutch Resistance Fighter, Dies at 92Freddie Oversteegen was only 14 when she became an assassin for the Dutch resistance. She engaged in drive-by shootings from a bicycle and luring German soldiers into the woods, where they were executed.CreditCreditvia National Hannie Schaft FoundationBy Sam Roberts Sept. 25, 2018 Freddie Oversteegen was only 14, petite with long braids, when she became an assassin and saboteur. It was 1940, Germany had invaded the Netherlands, and she and her sister, Truus, who was two years older, had been recruited by the local Dutch resistance commander, in the city of Haarlem. “Only later did he tell us what we’d actually have to do: Sabotage bridges and railway lines,” Truus Menger-Oversteegen recalled in a 2014 book, “Under Fire: Women and World War II.” “We told him we’d like to do that.” Then the commander added, “ ‘And learn to shoot — to shoot Nazis,’ ” she said. “I remember my sister saying, ‘Well, that’s something I’ve never done before!’ ” The sisters, along with a lapsed law student, Hannie Schaft, became a singular female underground squad, part of a cell of seven, that killed collaborators and occupying troops. The three staged drive-by shootings from their bicycles; seductively lured German soldiers from bars to nearby woods, where they would execute them; and sheltered fleeing Jews, political dissidents, gay people and others who were being hunted by the invaders. Freddie Dekker-Oversteegen, the last surviving member of the trio, died on Sept. 5, the day before her 93rd birthday, at a nursing home in Driehuis in the Netherlands, about five miles from where she was born. Her death was announced by Jeroen Pliester, the chairman of the National Hannie Schaft Foundation, which the Oversteegen sisters started in 1996. Ms. Schaft was captured, tortured and executed by the Nazis on April 17, 1945, 18 days before the liberation of the Netherlands. She was 24. After the war Ms. Schaft — the martyred “girl with the red hair,” as she had been called by the Nazis — was hailed as a national heroine. Truus Oversteegen, the leader of the three, went on to marry a fellow resistance fighter, become a painter and sculptor of works that were largely inspired by the war, write a memoir titled “Not Then, Not Now, Not Ever” and lecture about her experiences. She died in 2016. In 2014, Ms. Oversteegen, left, and her sister, Truus, were awarded the Mobilization War Cross by Mark Rutte, the Dutch prime minister.Creditvia National Hannie Schaft Foundation Freddie Oversteegen said she had felt sidelined after the war, in part because she had been a member of a Communist youth group; the Dutch government was soundly anti-Soviet.Of the three young women, she was the most reserved, even though she was the first of them to fatally shoot a German soldier. (He had been lured from a bar into the woods.) Asked in 2016 by the online magazine Vice Netherlands how she had later dealt with her participating in wartime brutality, she replied, “By getting married and having babies.” She also said that until she and Truus were profiled in a 2016 television documentary in the Netherlands titled “Two Sisters in the Resistance,” she had been envious of her sister. By then, Truus had become a well-known author. “I have always been a little jealous of her because she got so much attention after the war,” she said of Truus. “But then I’d just think, ‘I was in the resistance as well.’ ” In 2014, both sisters were awarded the Mobilization War Cross by Mark Rutte, the Dutch prime minister. Ms. Oversteegen married Jan Dekker, an engineer for the Dutch steel producer Koninklijke Hoogovens. She is survived by their three children, four grandchildren and a stepbrother from her mother’s second marriage. Freddie Nanda Oversteegen was born on Sept. 6, 1925, in Schoten, a village in the province of North Holland, to Jacob Oversteegen and Trijntje van der Molen. (Schoten is now part of Haarlem.) Her parents were members of International Red Aid, a social service group organized by the Communist International. Freddie and her sister joined the Dutch Youth Federation, another Communist affiliate, and made dolls for children caught up in the Spanish Civil War. After their parents divorced, amicably (Jacob sang a farewell serenade in French), the girls moved with their mother into a small North Holland apartment, where the sisters shared a bunk. As early as the mid-1930s, the family took in Jews fleeing from Germany. After the Germans invaded, Jews were hidden elsewhere because the Oversteegens feared that their Communist leanings might invite exposure. Many were discovered nevertheless. Ms. Oversteegen in 2013. When asked how she later dealt with her role in wartime brutality, she replied: “By getting married and having babies.”Creditvia National Hannie Schaft Foundation“They were all deported and murdered,” Ms. Oversteegen was quoted as telling the anthropologist Ellis Jonker in “Under Fire: Women and World War II.” “We never heard from them again. It still moves me dreadfully, whenever I talk about it.” The sisters worked as nurses in Enschede, on the German border in eastern Holland, where they could surreptitiously report on a German military airport. They also distributed leaflets and anti-Nazi posters. Their anti-Nazi activities brought them to the attention of Frans van der Wiel, the Dutch underground leader in Haarlem, who visited them and, with their mother’s blessing, persuaded them to join the Council of Resistance. Their mother gave them only one rule, Ms. Oversteegen said: “Always stay human.” Retaining their humanity became more challenging once the sisters joined the seven-member underground cell based in Haarlem (they and Ms. Schaft were the only women) and learned that their job would entail blowing up bridges and railway tracks — and murder. “Yes, I’ve shot a gun myself and I’ve seen them fall,” Freddie Oversteegen told a TV interviewer. “And what is inside us at such a moment? You want to help them get up.” Still, she justified killing collaborators, who had betrayed her neighbors, and foreign soldiers, who had invaded and occupied her country. “We had to do it,” she said. “It was a necessary evil.” Ms. Oversteegen also rebutted criticism that the resistance had provoked German retaliation against innocent civilians. “What about the six million Jews?” she said. “Weren’t they innocent people? Killing them was no act of reprisal. We were no terrorists. The real act of terror was the kidnapping and execution of innocent people after the resistance acted.” The three women drew the line once, though, according to Kathryn J. Atwood’s book “Women Heroes of World War II: 26 Stories of Espionage, Sabotage, Resistance, and Rescue” (2011). They had been ordered to kidnap the children of the politician and senior Nazi officer Arthur Seyss-Inquart, reichkommissar of the occupied Netherlands. The plan was to swap the children for imprisoned members of the Dutch underground. The three refused because the children could have been killed if the exchange went awry. “We are no Hitlerites,” Ms. Schaft was quoted as saying in the book. “Resistance fighters don’t murder children.”
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Post by pieter on Sept 26, 2018 9:53:54 GMT -7
Communist Party of the NetherlandsOn May 15, 1940, immediately after the German occupation, the Communist Party of the Netherlands (Dutch: Communistische Partij Nederland), decided to organize an underground movement. In July 1940 the Nazi occupation force banned the CPN. The party continued illegally. Together with the much smaller anti-Stalinist communist party RSAP the only pre-war organisation that already in 1940 protested against the anti-Semitic measures by the German occupiers. It founded a resistance movement called Raad van Verzet (nl) (Resistance Council). It published a resistance newspaper called De Waarheid (The Truth). Both took part in the February Strike in 1941, the largest act of resistance in the Netherlands. The party lost about 2000 lives during resistance; most victims fell because the pre-war Dutch intelligence services did not destroy their files about communists and continued their pre-war cooperation with the Gestapo and also continued their infiltration of the now underground party. Call to resistance, the Februari strike of 1941. The February Strike (Dutch: Februaristaking) was a general strike in the German-occupied Netherlands during World War II, organized by the then-outlawed Communist Party of the Netherlands (CPN) in defence of persecuted Dutch Jews and against the anti-Jewish measures and activities of the Nazis in general.
The direct causes were a series of arrests and pogroms held by the Germans in the Jewish neighbourhood of Amsterdam. It started on 25 February 1941 and lasted for two days; on 26 February, 300,000 people joined the strike. The strike was harshly suppressed by the Germans after three days.
The 1941 February Strike is considered to be the first public protest against the Nazis in occupied Europe, and the only mass protest against the deportation of Jews to be organized by non-Jews.This arrest of Amsterdam Jews on the Jonas Daniël Meijer square by the Nazis, February 1941 was the rootcause of the februari strike. Most of these man died in German Nazi concentrationcamps in occupied Poland.German soldiers at the Jonas Daniël Meijerplein during the raidsThe statue of the Dock worker on the Jonas Daniël Meijer square in Amsterdam is a symbol for the resistance against the Nazi occupiers during the Februari strike of 1941. It is also seen as an anti-fascist symbol.Source: Wikipedia
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Post by pieter on Sept 26, 2018 10:30:01 GMT -7
Freddie Oversteege alive. I can't translate the interview
Freddie Oversteegen's grave in the Netherlands
The guy in the video is her son and he can't understand that the muncipality she lived in before the death did nothing to honour her.
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Post by pieter on Sept 26, 2018 10:40:19 GMT -7
Resistance scene. Training of Hannie Schaft, the resistance fighter of Freddie Oversteegens singular female underground squad.
The resistance fighter who plays the German says when Hannie Schaft didn't dare to shoot: "She didn't dare, women, I knew it!"
Assassination of a Dutch Nazi collaborator by Hannie Schaft
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Post by pieter on Sept 26, 2018 11:59:06 GMT -7
Kai (Ron), I am glad that in 2014, Freddie Oversteegen and her sister Truus, were awarded the Mobilization War Cross by Mark Rutte, the Dutch prime minister. Freddie Oversteegen tells the truth when she had felt sidelined after the war, in part because she had been a member of a Communist youth group; the Dutch government was soundly anti-Soviet. After the war the Dutch communists were feared and loathed and seen as henchmen of the SovjetUnion. There was a fear for a Sovjet invasion and after the Hungarian uprising in 1956 and the oppression of that by Sovjet troops there was a strong anti-communist sentiment. Communist buildings in Amsterdam were attacked by furious anti-communist mobs. I admire the communist resistance in the Netherlands during the war, which started when Nazi Germany and the SovjetUnion still were allies ( 1939- 1941) and the the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact ( August 23, 1939) and the German-Soviet Commercial Agreement ( February 11, 1940) were stil respected and lived through by Nazi Germany and the SovjetUnion. In late 1939 and early 1940 Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, following their joint invasion of Poland in accordance with the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, staged the Gestapo–NKVD conferences, a series of security police meetings took place in Brześć (27 September 1939), Lwów (October 1939), Przemyśl (November 1939), Kraków (6–7 December 1939), Zakopane (8–9 December 1939) and again Kraków (March 1940). The conferences were held by the Gestapo and the NKVD officials in these Polish cities. In spite of their differences on other issues, both Heinrich Himmler, Reichsführer of the SS ( Schutzstaffel) and Lavrentiy Beria, chief of the Soviet security and secret police apparatus ( NKVD) under Joseph Stalin during World War II, had similar objectives as far as the fate of the prewar Poland was concerned. Both Gestapo and NKVD expected the emergence of Polish resistance and discussed ways of dealing with the clandestine activities of the Poles. According to some sources in the immediate aftermath of the meeting, the Soviet NKVD began the collection of data leading to the Katyn massacre committed in the spring of 1940. Soviet and German officials having a friendly conversation in the newly captured Polish city of Brest, September 1939.I don't connect the resistance activism, heroism and socialist ( Communist) idealism of Freddie Oversteegen, Truus Oversteegen and Hannie Schaft to that larger sinister, obscurantist, dark, evil and historic events in the East (the Occupation of Poland (1939–1945) by Nazi Germany and the SovjetUnion, the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, the Gestapo–NKVD conferences, Katyn and Stalinist Sovjet NKVD war crimes in Eastern-Poland against Polish civilians), because they didn't knew about it, and fact was that the ordinary (common) communist youth and communist workers were less informed than the party leadership, under whom were hard line Stalinists like Paul de Groot ( en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_de_Groot ). The Dutch communists like communists all over Europe had tough hard line Stalinist people like Paul de Groot in their ranks, but also anti-Stalinists ( Trotskyists) were active and were kicked out of the party in the twenties, thirties and forties. The young girls Freddie Oversteegen, Truus Oversteegen and Hannie Schaft weren't hard line Stalinist communists, but humanist young idealists who believed in Socialism and a better world and resisting the Nazi occupiers with their anti-semitic, racist and inhumane brutal methods. They saw it as their moral duty to act and do something against it. To join the resistance, sabotage the Nazi authorities and war machine and to help jews go into hiding and to help other opponents and victims of the German, Austrian and Dutch Nazi's in the Netherlands. One of their tasks was to eliminate Dutch Nazi collaborators. Often people who had a lot of blood on their hands and were responsible for several or dozens of lost lives of Dutch non-jewish and jewish compatriots. Freddie Oversteegen, Truus Oversteegen and Hannie Schaft were convinced that these Dutch Nazi's ( en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Socialist_Movement_in_the_Netherlands / en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weerbaarheidsafdeling ) caused great harm to the Netherlands and the jewish minority in the Netherlands. Amsterdam mobs storm the communist 'de Waarheid' newspaper building Felix Meritis due to the Sovjet occupation of Hungary during the Hungarian Uprising of 1956 and stone the buildingAnti communist mob in Amsterdam in 1956 after the Sovjet invasion of Hungary and attack on BudapestI repeat that many of these young people who joined the communist party in the late thirties and participated in the Communist resistance were not hard line Stalinists, but idealists, who believed in Marxist, Leninist and Socialist ideas. Many communists were former Social-Democrats and many Social-democrats were former communists. Unfortunately the rivalry between the two workers movements often went that far that inside the rivalry between the Social-Democrats and Communists could become ugly. Both were political prisoners in Nazi concentrationcamps like Durchgangslager Amersfoort, Durchgangslager Westerbork, and after that in Buchenwald-, Mauthausen- and NeuengammeNatzweiler concentration camps and some of the communists became Kapo's and in that new role with the power that went with it they could attack, physically abuse, beat to death or torture other political prisoners with a Social-democratic, liberal, Free Thinking Democratic, conservative or christian democratic background. Some people turned into beasts in the Nazi concentrationcamps. It was survival of the fittest. I am sorry that I have to say, both Non-Jews and Jews became Kapo's in the Nazi concentrationcamps. It was survival of the fittest, divide and rule, people were starved to death, worked to death, experienced incredibly sadistic German and Austrian SS-Totenkopfverbände (SS-TV) (Death's Head Units). An example of physical abuse, beating and murder of a fellow political prisoner by other political prisoners and compatriots is the case of the former Amsterdam alderman Monne de Miranda, a Social Democratic politician who died after severe physical abuse by the former resistance members of ' De Geuzen' resistance group (not communist by the way) Teun van Es and his comrades Joop Greeven and J an Goedknecht in the Dutch Nazi concentration camp Amersfoort. The German Nazi's had brought these toughened resistance fighters especially from the German concentration camp Buchenwald back to the Netherlands to the Polizeiliches Durchgangslager Amersfoort to introduce the same terror methods as they used in the German Nazi concentration camps. Rumours say that Dutch Communist prisoners were involved in the murder of De Miranda, but there was no evidence of that. ' Lagerälteste' ((camp leader or camp senior, another word for Kapo) Jan Hurkmans, a Duch communist was suspect of being involved in the physical abuse/murder of Dutch Social Democratic political prisoner Monne de Miranda. Dutch Social Democrat Monne de Miranda (1875 - 1942), murdered in 1942 in Polizeiliches Durchgangslager Amersfoort by former Dutch resistance fighters who acted like Nazi concentrationcamp Kapo's (allies of Nazi SS camp guards)Monne de Miranda carried away by fellow prisoner Elie Cohen after heavy physical abuse by Dutch capo's and fellow prisoners. He was stoned by bricks and sand in a large pit in the camp. Before that he was already beaten and heavily wounded.Political prisoners at Sachsenhausen were "enemies of the Nazi state"The Red triangle badge in Nazi concentrationcamps stood for political prisoners: social democrats, socialists, communists, and anarchists; rescuers of Jews; trade unionists; and FreemasonsIn many camps ruthless, toughened, hardline, Stalinist communists (who already had experienced tought battles within communist parties, street battles between communists on one side and Social-democrats on the other side and street battles between communists of the Rotfrontkämpferbund [Red Front Fighters' League] on one side and Nazi SA thugs on the other side, and clashes between the police and communists during the 1900-1910 years, after the First World War in the revolutionary 1918 year and during the early twenties, you had several short lived Sovjet republics outisde the sovjetunion called Räterepublik in German and Radenrepubliek in Dutch. The Spartacist uprising Spartacist fighters defending a barricade during the Spartacist Uprising in Berlin, 1919.The Spartacist uprising (German: Spartakusaufstand), also known as the January uprising (Januaraufstand), was a general strike (and the armed battles accompanying it) in Germany from 4 to 15 January 1919. Germany was in the middle of a post-war revolution, and two of the perceived paths forward were either social democracy or a council republic similar to the one which had been established by the Bolsheviks in Russia. The uprising was primarily a power struggle between the moderate Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) led by Friedrich Ebert, and the radical communists of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD), led by Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, who had previously founded and led the Spartacist League (Spartakusbund). This power struggle was the result of the abdication of Kaiser Wilhelm II and the resignation of Chancellor Max von Baden, who had passed power to Ebert, as the leader of the largest party in the German parliament.[1] Similar uprisings occurred and were suppressed in Bremen, the Ruhr, Rhineland, Saxony, Hamburg, Thuringia and Bavaria, and another round of even bloodier street battles occurred in Berlin in March, which led to popular disillusionment with the Weimar Government. Spartacist militia in BerlinIn the turmoil following World War I, the Russian example inspired the formation of Soviet republics in other areas of Europe including Hungary, Bavaria, Slovakia and Bremen. Bavarian Soviet RepublicThe Bavarian Soviet Republic (German: Bayerische Räterepublik) was the short-lived unrecognised socialist state in Bavaria during the German Revolution of 1918–19. It took the form of a workers' council republic. Its name is variously rendered in English as the Bavarian Council Republic or the Munich Soviet Republic (German: Münchner Räterepublik; the German name Räterepublik means a republic of councils or committees; council or committee is also the meaning of the Russian word soviet) after its capital, Munich. It was established in April 1919 after the demise of Kurt Eisner's People's State of Bavaria and sought independence from the also newly proclaimed Weimar Republic. It was overthrown less than a month later by elements of the German Army and the paramilitary Freikorps. Execution of a German Communist in Munich, 1919.I think about the Latvian Socialist Soviet Republic (1918–1920) The communists, in resistance against fascism and capitalWithin the leftwing movement there was a great deal of tension, rivalry and hatred between the Social Democratic workers movement on one side and the communist workers movement on the other side. They were electoral rivals, and competed during the elections. German Social Democratic election poster directed against Nazi's and communists. The same was the case in the Netherlands.Election poster CPN thirtiesAnother CPN election poster from the thirties against the colonial Dutch rule in Indonesia. "Indonesia free from the Netherlands, now! Vote communists!"1931, poster for a Dutch communist newspaper, the TribuneCommunist demonstration in the Netherlands during the Cold War years. The communists were disliked by the Social Democrats (Dutch Labour partt; PvdA), the Christian Democrats (CDA), rightwing conservative liberals (VVD) (the party of Dutch prime minister Mark Rutte who awarded Freddie and Truus the Mobilization War Cross), the conservative and nationalist and monarchist and Monarchist forces in society. The Communists were closely monitored by the Dutch Domestic Security Service (BVD) and people who were associated with or linked with the Communist party the CPN often had great difficulties to find a job, because as 'communist' individuals they were seen as enemies of the State and agents of Moscow. Some peoples lives were ruined, because they were seen reading 'De Waarheid', the Truth, or attended a communist meeting or demonstration. That went very far. The Dutch Social Democrats (PvdA) and the Social Democratic Union NVV even collaborated with the Americans (CIA). en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communist_Party_of_the_Netherlands
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Post by pieter on Sept 26, 2018 13:34:39 GMT -7
Kai (Ron), If you look at the circumstances of the first half of the 20th century, and then in the first three to four decades in that first half, you saw class societies, monarchies, reactionary rightwing authoritarian rulers (no Nazi's, no fascists, but just ultra-conservative, often aristocratic or nobility rulers, with roots in the class of Grand Burgher (Großbürger), connected to wealthy counts, dukes, earls, barons and Industrial families, merchants and large bankers). These rulers were Prussian Junkers in Germany (Paul von Hindenburg), bourgeois politicians in the Netherlands with a confessional backround, and Monarchist leanings and colonial interests. Fascism arrived in Italy in 1922 and stayed there until 1943. The Spanish civil war from 17 July 1936 until 1 April 1939 played a great role in leftist circles in Europe and even in the USA. Social-democrats ( Labour party supporters), anarchists, leftwing socialists and communists allied themselves with the Republicans in Spain and Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, the Spanish protectorate in Morocco, Portugal and foreign rightwing idealists from the USA, UK, Ireland, Scandinavia and Romania allied themselves with the Nationalist, Carlist (Monarchist), Catholic conservative ( en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CEDA ) forces of the Nationalist general Francisco Franco. Many leftist socialists, communists and anarchists fought in International Brigades next to the Republican leftist forces, socialists, communists and anarchists of Spain. Soon the totalitarian and dominant Stalinists also showed their policies in Spain. Killing not only Nationalists and Fascists and Carlists in the Civil War but also leftist people on the Republican side. The Soviet Union directed Communist parties around the world to organized and recruited the International Brigades. Another significant Soviet involvement was the activity of the People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs ( NKVD) inside the Republican rearguard. Communist figures including Vittorio Vidali (" Comandante Contreras"), Iosif Grigulevich, Mikhail Koltsov and, most prominently, Aleksandr Mikhailovich Orlov led operations that included the murders of Catalan anti-Stalinist Communist politician Andrés Nin, the socialist journalist Mark Rein, and the independent left-wing activist José Robles. Another NKVD-led operation was the shooting down (in December 1936) of the French aircraft in which the delegate of the International Committee of the Red Cross ( ICRC), Georges Henny, carried extensive documentation on the Paracuellos massacres ( en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paracuellos_massacres ) to France. In Europe it was clear what the Nazi's were doing in Nazi Germany since 1933, in Czechoslovakia since 1935 (the occupation and Germanisation of Sudetenland) and in Austria since 1938 ( the Anschluss) and Poland since september 1939. You had German and Austrian jewish refugees in the Netherlands and non-Jewish German and Austrian Social-democratic, communist, artist, intellectual and scientific and journalist refugees. In the Netherlands there was a lively German underground press, the German artists like Max Beckmann (February 12, 1884 – December 27, 1950) fled nazi Germany and lived and worked in the Netherlands. Some of Beckmann's strongest works were made in the Netherlands. Freddie Oversteegen, Truus Oversteegen and Hannie Schaft were children and teenagers of their time and were aware of what was going on in Europe and the Netherlands and they had to do something about that as young idealistic and brave women. They joined the Communist resistance and became resistance fighters. Jannetje Johanna ( Jo) Schaft ( 16 September 1920 – 17 April 1945) was a Dutch communist resistance fighter during World War II. She became known as the girl with the red hair (in Dutch Het meisje met het rode haar, also the title of a book and film about her). Her secret name in the resistance movement was Hannie. Hannie SchaftHannie SchaftPistol of Hannie SchaftGravestone with her school photo on it; honorary cemetry Bloemendaal (Netherlands, North-Holland)Hannie Schaft was born in Haarlem, the capital city of North Holland. Her mother was a Mennonite and her father was attached to the Social Democratic Workers' Party; the two were immensely protective of Schaft because of the death of her older sister. Hannie Schaft as a childFrom a young age, Schaft often discussed politics and social justice with her family, which encouraged her to pursue law and become a human rights lawyer. During her law studies at the Universiteit van Amsterdam she became friends with the Jewish students Philine Polak and Sonja Frenk. This made her feel strongly about actions against Jews. With the German occupation of the Netherlands in World War II, in 1943, university students were required to sign a declaration of allegiance to the occupation authorities. When Schaft refused to sign the petition in support of the occupation forces, like 80 percent of the other students, she could not continue her studies and moved in with her parents again. Hannie Schaft in the middle with fellow students. One of these student must be the jewish student Sonja FrenkResistance workTruus Oversteegen and Hannie Schaft prepare themselves for another assignment.Schaft's resistance work started with small acts. First, she would steal ID cards for Jewish residents (including her friends). Upon leaving university, she joined the Raad van Verzet (nl) or "Council of Resistance," a resistance movement that had close ties to the Communist Party of the Netherlands. Rather than act as a courier, Schaft wanted to work with weapons. She was responsible for sabotaging and assassinating various targets. She carried out various attacks on Germans, Dutch Nazis, collaborators and traitors. She learned to speak German fluently and got involved with German soldiers. Schaft did not, however, accept every job. For instance, when asked to kidnap the children of a Nazi official she refused. If the plan failed, the children would have to be killed, and Schaft felt that was too similar to the Nazis' acts of terror. When seen at the location of a particular assassination, Schaft was identified as "the girl with the red hair." Her involvement led "the girl with the red hair" to be placed on the Nazis' most wanted list. Truus and Freddie Oversteegen during the war (Photo: Resistance Museum AmsterdamWhen one of Schaft's friends and fellow Resistance workers was injured in an attempted assassination effort, he mistakenly gave her name to Dutch Nazi nurses disguised as Resistance workers. To force Schaftto confess, German authorities arrested her parents and sent them to the Vught concentration camp. The distress of this situation forced Schaft to cease resistance work temporarily; her parents were eventually released. Upon recovery, Schaft dyed her hair black to hide her identity and returned to Resistance work. She once again contributed to assassinations and sabotage, as well as courier work, and the transportation of illegal weapons and the dissemination of illegal newspapers. As a 15 year old girl Freddie Oversteegen seduced nazi-collaborators, whom she executedDeathThe latest existing image of Hannie Schaft in Prison before the executionHannie Schaft was eventually arrested at a military checkpoint in Haarlem on 21 March 1945, while distributing the illegal communist newspaper de Waarheid, which was a cover story. She was transporting secret documentation for the Resistance. She worked closely with Anna A.C. Wijnhoff. After much interrogation, torture, and solitary confinement, Schaft was identified by the roots of her red hair by her former colleague Anna Wijnhoff. Schaft was assassinated by Dutch Nazi officials on April 17, 1945. Although at the end of the war there was an agreement between the occupier and the Binnenlandse Strijdkrachten (Dutch resistance) to stop executions, she was shot dead three weeks before the end of the war in the dunes of Bloemendaal. Two men took her there and one shot her at close range, only wounding her. She supposedly said to her executioners: "I shoot better than you," after which the other man delivered the final shot. On November 27, 1945, Schaft was reburied in a state funeral. Queen Whilhelmina called Schaft "the symbol of the Resistance." However, when communism fell out of favor in the Netherlands, commemorations for Schaft were banned. A beautiful image of Hannie Schaft during the war
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Post by pieter on Sept 26, 2018 13:58:46 GMT -7
Freddie OversteegenOversteegen in 1943, when her innocent appearance made her an invaluable resistance fighter.Freddie Nanda Dekker-Oversteegen (6 September 1925 – 5 September 2018) was a Dutch communist resistance member during the occupation of the Netherlands in World War II. Early lifeFreddie Oversteegen was born 6 September 1925 in the village of Schoten, Netherlands. She had an older sister, Truus Menger-Oversteegen. She and her family lived on a barge. Before the war, the Oversteegen family harbored people from Lithuania in the hold of their ship, hidden. After the divorce of her parents, Oversteegen was raised by her mother, who taught her communist principles. She moved from the barge to a small apartment. Oversteegen's mother would later remarry and give birth to her half-brother. The family lived in poverty. World War IITruus Oversteegen on the right and Freddie Oversteegen in the middle, 1941, The NetherlandsDuring the war, the Oversteegen family hid a Jewish couple in their home. Freddie Oversteegen and her older sister Truus began handing out anti-Nazi pamphlets, which attracted the notice of Haarlem Council of Resistance commander Frans van der Wiel. With their mother's permission, the girls joined the Council of Resistance, which brought them into a coordinated effort. Freddie was fourteen years old at the time. Oversteegen, her sister, and friend Hannie Schaft worked to sabotage the Nazi military presence in the Netherlands. They used dynamite to disable bridges and railroad tracks. Additionally, they aided Jewish children by smuggling them out of the country or helping them escape concentration camps. The Oversteegens and Schaft also killed German soldiers, with Freddie the first of the girls to kill a soldier. They would shoot soldiers while riding their bicycles. Most famously, they would lure soldiers to the woods under pretense of a romantic overture and then kill them. Oversteegen would approach the soldiers in taverns and bars and ask them to " go for a stroll" in the forest. Freddie Oversteegen in 1945Post-warFreddie Oversteegen, left, and her sister, Truus, were awarded the Mobilisation War Cross in 2014 EVERT-JAN DANIELSOversteegen served as a board member on the National Hannie Schaft Foundation, which was established by her sister, Truus. In 2014, Freddie and Truus were awarded the Mobilisation War Cross ( Mobilisatie-Oorlogskruis) by Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte for their acts of resistance during the war. There is also a street named after her in Haarlem. Oversteegen experienced a series of heart attacks towards the end of her life. She died on 5 September 2018 in a nursing home in Driehuis, one day before her ninety-third birthday. Personal lifeFreddie Oversteegen married Jan Dekker. They had three children. Source: Wikpedia, images Washington Post, Verzetsmuseum, All thats interesting, the Times
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Post by Jaga on Sept 26, 2018 21:35:53 GMT -7
Kai, Pieter
Freddie and her sister had good and full of purpose lives. It is a pity that Hannie Schaft lost her life so early and after being tortured. I like looking at the pictures of women from WW II. I really liked the way women did their hair and the fashion- it was simple but feminine and not that overblown like in 50s when women went back home to be housewives only.
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Post by pieter on Sept 27, 2018 10:36:16 GMT -7
I couldn't agree with you more. Since I have and artist, history and journalist background I have a profound interest in the first half of the 20th century and to me the fashion and women of the twenties, thirties and forties looked more attractive and natural than the women in the fifties.
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Post by pieter on Sept 27, 2018 11:09:29 GMT -7
Thirties and Forties look:The Rotterdam Dixon girls in 1930 on a roof in RotterdamWomen style 1940 ladies vintage watches clothes1947. Rita Hayworth during a visit to Amsterdam. Photo Ben van MeerendonkA German Jewish girl, one of several hundred who have arrived in Britain as part of a ‘Kindertransport’ (1938)Dutch collaborator Aldegonda Elisabeth Zeguers-Boere is transported from jail to the courthouse in Maastricht following her arrest after the city was liberated by Allied forces. Zeguers-Boere was an active informant for the German Sicherheitspolizei (Security Police) and Sicherheitsdienst (Security Service) and was responsible for the betrayal of between 50 and 60 members of the Dutch Resistance, several of whom were executed by the Germans. Zeguers-Boere was sentenced to death in 1945, however her sentence was later commuted to a term in prison and she died a free woman in 2005. Maastricht, Limburg, Netherlands. October 1944. Anna Zakrzewska (24 December 1925 — 11 August 1944) served with the Polish underground army as a courier and a medical orderly. ( en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna_Zakrzewska ) Female soldier of the Polish resistance "Home Army" (Armia Krajowa) 2WW The Armia Krajowa, or Home Army, was the dominant Polish resistance movement in World War II German-occupied Poland. The AK's primary resistance operations were the sabotage of German activities, including transports headed for the Eastern Front in the Soviet Union. The AK also fought several full-scale battles against the Germans, particularly in 1943 and 1944Janina Nowak was a Polish woman born on August 19, 1917, in Będów near Łódź. She was deported to the German Nazi Auschwitz camp on June 12, 1942, and received the prisoner number 7615 during registration. Janina was the first female prisoner who escaped from Auschwitz.Model presents a fashionable dress for autumn, Warsaw, September 1946.
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Post by Jaga on Sept 28, 2018 10:04:07 GMT -7
Pieter, beautiful photos, it is just sad that the stories of many people from this time period are so sad. I have pictures of my aunts, especially aunt Elizabeth. She was a beauty and she was a seamstress and she made her own dresses and her sisters dresses and her husband (they got married secretly when he was in prison for conspiracy against Germans) - he died in German labor camp ruing one of the allied forces bombardments, too bad
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Post by Jaga on Sept 28, 2018 10:05:54 GMT -7
This is my autn Elizabeth with her friends. She is on the left:
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Post by pieter on Sept 29, 2018 12:20:21 GMT -7
Dear Jaga, Yes, beautiful photos I found after researching the internet via google search for women and girls from the thirties and forties. With you I have empathy with these people who had such a hard time in these dreadful war years. My parents as children and teenagers for instance had not such secure lives we had when we grew up. My father witnessed the grim thirties, the crisis years. He saw the class differences in his Rotterdam as a sensitive upper middle class bourgeoisie boy. He saw already the bitter poverty in these thirties of the unemployed workers and the working class families with the low wages. He told me that in his primary school children already discussed what was going on in Nazi Germany and they noticed that foreign refugees came in who escaped from Nazi Germany and Nazi Austria. My father and his parents and sister lived in the Mecklenburglaan 26 in Rotterdam, the middle and upper class area of the neighbourhood Kralingen where there was also a working class Kralingen area. In the thrities they got new German neigbours, the elderly couple Levens, German jews from Frankfurt, I think they were coming from. Decent, gentle, kind neigbours, my father was fond of as a child and my grandparents had good neighbours contact with. During the bombardment of Rotterdam on May 14, 1940 the working class area of Kralingen was bombed and through a miracle the upperclass section with my grandparents house in the Mecklenburglaan was spared. Ofcourse the German neighbours were rounded up, brought to a highschool which was confiscated by the German and Austrian nazi authorities, where the Rotterdam Dutch and German/Austrian jews were gathered, from there they were transported to Westerbork, and from Westerbork these old neighbours of my dad were transported to the German Nazi Konzentrationslager Theresienstadt in the Czech Terezín, a former military fortress composed of citadel and adjacent walled garrison town of Litoměřice District, in the Ústí nad Labem Region of back then Nazi occupied Czechoslovakia. Sir Levens as a decorated First World veteran (German officer) was falsly promissed that they would go to the Ehre Judenheim Theresienstadt. It was a big Nazi propaganda lie, just like they lied that the jews would be resettled to the East to work. After Konzentrationslager Theresienstadt the old Levens couple (pensioned husband and wife) were transported to Nazi occupied Poland where they immediately after their arrival in Konzentrationslager Auschwitz-Birkenau also called the larges German Vernichtungslager (Extermination camp) were gassed with Zyklon B in the gass chamber. Innocent, decent former German citizens and Dutch citizens in the last years of their lives. Respected by their neighbours with whom they had friendly relations. They were well to do people, else they wouldn't have lived in the Mecklenburglaan in the upperclass section of the Kralingen neighbourhood in Rotterdam. Their achievements in Germany, their contributions to Germany, his service to the country in the First World War didn't count, because some stupid hysterical corporal from Austria ruled their former civilzed and respected nation of high culture, commerce, science and philosophy. The disappearance and murder of these nice neighbours in Rotterdam, nice, decent, humble, sophisticated old people made a great impression on my young father who was 12 when they disappeared. During the early war years he said that there were also 2 jewish boys in his class. One smart one and one clumsy and chubby boy. On one day they were gone, my father never heard of them again, didn't know where they were and why they left. Ofcourse these boys like my fathers neighbours were taken to Westerbork and after that to Buchenwald, Dachau, Neuengamme, Auschwitz, Bergen Belsen, Sobibór. If you arrived in Sobibór you had no chance of surival, your destiny was death. Postcard Seebach Ottenhoefen Schwarzwald Feldpost Hotel Kurhaus Ruhestein Kat Ottenhoefen im SchwarzwaldPeople had lived great lives in Pre-war Rotterdam, Warsaw (my grandparents, my mother and her sister), Kraków (proabbly your family Jaga), Poznań (my Polish grandmothers family, the Pantoflinsky's), Prague (my Polish grandfathers brother Jan Kotowicz sutdied there, and Franz Kafka, Max Brod, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Jaroslav Hašek, the author of The Good Soldier Švejk ), Bratislava, Copenhagen, Brussels, Antwerp, Berlin (The Roaring Twenties, UFA film studio's, Metropolis [1927 film], Nosferatu was filmed in 1921 in Wismar and Rostock in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern and in the North Frisian island Sylt in northern Germany and in Lübeck in Schleswig-Holstein, in Northern Germany, by Prana Film, a short-lived silent-era German film studio. I add this to the German cinema culture of Berlin of the roaring twenties), Frankfurt (the life of the Levens family in the Interbellum years before the Nazi's took power), and Vienna (Wien) with it's rich Interbellum (1919-1938) culture, fine art, literature, political developements (the captital of the country of Austromarxism and Austrofascism. From the late 19th century to 1938, the Vienna (Wien) remained a centre of high culture and modernism. A world capital of music, the city played host to composers such as Brahms, Bruckner, Mahler and Richard Strauss. The city's cultural contributions in the first half of the 20th century included, among many, the Vienna Secession movement, psychoanalysis, the Second Viennese School, the architecture of Adolf Loos and the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle. In 1913, Adolf Hitler, Leon Trotsky, Joseph Tito, Sigmund Freud and Joseph Stalin all lived within a few miles of each other in central Vienna, some of them being regulars at the same coffeehouses. Viennese Lebenskunst (“art of living”) has survived changing rulers and times. It is still possible to live in Vienna at almost the same pace and in much the same style as it was a century ago. The same music is played in the same rebuilt concert halls, and a theatrical or operatic success still stimulates lively conversation. One can drink the same sourish local wines in the taverns on the outskirts of town, consume the same mountains of whipped cream at Sacher’s and Demel’s, and sample the same infinite varieties of coffee in countless cafés. German innovative and progressive film studio in Berlin in the Interbellum eraBefore World War II the Viennese Jewish minority, which numbered more than 160,000, played a prominent role in the city, culturally and economically. It is estimated that two-thirds of all Jews emigrated to escape the Nazi occupation. Notable Jewish Austrian figures were Austrian writer, journalist, satirist, essayist, aphorist, playwright and poet Karl Kraus, Gustav Mahler, Franz Werfel, Elias Canetti, Austro-Hungarian economic historian, economic anthropologist, economic sociologist, political economist, historical sociologist and social philosopher Karl Polanyi (who was married with the the Polish-Hungarian communist revolutionary Ilona Duczyńska), the influential Austrian Social Democrat Otto Bauer (5 September 1881 – 4 July 1938), who is considered one of the leading thinkers of the left-socialist Austro-Marxist grouping. Bauer was also an early inspiration for both the New Left movement and Eurocommunism in their attempt to find a "Third way" to democratic socialism, and Austrian jurist, politician and social philosopher Max Adler (15 January 1873 – 28 June 1937) ; whom theories were of central importance to Austromarxism. Austromarxism had a great ideological influence on the General Jewish Labour Bund in Poland (Ogólno-Żydowski Związek Robotniczy "Bund" w Polsce). The Austro-Marxist principle of national personal autonomy was later adopted by various parties, among them the Bund (General Jewish Labour Union), left-wing Zionists (Hashomer Hatzair) in favour of a binational solution in Palestine, the Jewish Folkspartei between the two world wars and the Democratic Union of Hungarians in Romania after 1989. Austro-Marxism was also the first movement in Europe to mount an armed resistance to a fascist government, although eventually defeated in 1934. Of course the most famous Austrian Viennese Jew was the Austrian neurologist and the founder of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, Austrian psychoanalyst, writer, and teacher Otto Rank (1884 – 1939), In May 1926, Rank moved to Paris where he became a psychotherapist for artists such as Henry Miller and Anaïs Nin and lectured at the Sorbonne (Lieberman, 1985). Another Viennese Austrian jew was Hanns Sachs ( 1881, Vienna – 1947, Boston) one of the earliest psychoanalysts, and a close personal friend of Sigmund Freud. Austrian culture has largely been influenced by its past and present neighbours: Italy, Poland, Germany, Hungary, and Bohemia ( Czechoslovakia). In the silent movie era, Austria was one of the leading producers of movies. Many of the Austrian directors, actors, authors and cinematographers also worked in Berlin. The most famous was Fritz Lang, the director of Metropolis. Following the Anschluss, the German annexation of Austria in 1938, many Austrian directors emigrated to the United States, including Erich von Stroheim, Otto Preminger, Billy Wilder, Hedy Lamarr, Mia May, Richard Oswald and Josef von Sternberg. From the 1950s to the 1970s, Franz Antel was a prolific director of popular comedies. New, younger directors emerged from the 1970s to the 1990s, among them Axel Corti, Michael Haneke, Ulrich Seidl, Michael Glawogger, Barbara Albert, and Götz Spielmann. As part of its historic cultural heritage of being a multinational state for centuries (Habsburg Monarchy, Austrian Empire, later Austria-Hungary), modern Austria is not entirely homogenously German-speaking, but has within its borders, albeit small, autochthonous minorities of different native tongue: Hungarian is the most widely spoken of the recognized minority languages spoken in Austria. Next to that Slovenian and Croatian is spoken in Austria as minority languages. That was ofcourse already the case in these Interbellum years (1919-1939) we are speaking of here. Notable Austrian Nazi's had a non Germanic-Austrian background for instance. Arthur Seyss-Inquart had a Czech father Emíl Zajtich who Germanised his name to Emil Seyß. Odilo Globočnik was born on 21 April 1904, into a Germanised Slovene family from Tržič (Neumarktl), in the Imperial Free City of Trieste, then the capital of the Austrian Littoral administrative region of the Austro-Hungarian Empire (now in Italy). Odilo Globočnik (21 April 1904 – 31 May 1945) was an Austrian war criminal. He was a Nazi and later an SS leader. As associate of Adolf Eichmann, he had a leading role in Operation Reinhard, which saw the murder of over one million mostly Polish Jews during the Holocaust in Nazi extermination camps Majdanek, Treblinka, Sobibór and Bełżec. Historian Michael Allen described him as "the vilest individual in the vilest organization ever known". SS Gruppenführer Odilo Globočnik en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austrian_Civil_WarBefore and during World War II a number of Vienna’s citizens, most notably more than 100,000 Jews, emigrated to the West in order to escape the Nazis. Following the war, Vienna’s population decreased when part of Greater Vienna was reintegrated with the province of Lower Austria. There were also moves in population from eastern to western Austria connected with the German annexation of Austria from 1938 to 1945 and the presence of Soviet troops from 1945 to 1955. Jaga, despite the tension and danger on the streets in the 20's with it's streetbattles between far right and extreme-left, Freikorps paramilitary bands, and authoritarian regimes in Central Europe (Sanacja in Poland, Miklós Horthy in Hungary, Ion Antonescu in Romania) and the crisis years of the thrirties and the terror of Nazism and Stalinism and war in the forties, people went on living with their lives. People continued to go to school, study, fall in love, start families, have their jobs and professions, even under extremely difficult circumstances. Freddie Oversteegen, Truus Oversteegen and Hannie Schaft were brave young women in the Dutch resistance Underground movement, but the situation in Poland was worse for the Population. Persecution, abuse and murder of the Polish elite and intelligentsia, prohibition of education, ethnic cleansing of ethnic Polish Roman-Catholic rural communities in parts of Poland, the terror of the Sovjets in Eastern Poland against Polish civilians between 1939 and 1941. And the terror of the brutal Ukrainian Insurgent Army (Ukrayins'ka Povstans'ka Armiya, UPA) with their Ethnic cleansing of Poles in Volhynia and Galicia. Despite the Second World War my Polish and Dutch families had had good lives inbetween 1919 and 1939 in these Interbellum years. My father went on Holiday with his parents to Belgium to the coastal village De Haan (French: Le Coq; West Flemish: D'n Oane) located in the Belgian province of West Flanders which maintained a low skyline so its many buildings in Belle Époque style were and are still prominently visible. The village for some reason was spared the large destruction in West Flanders during the First World War. And may grandparents went to Domburg in Zeeland, a wonderful sophisticated sea side (North sea) coast town for luxery tourism. And they went to Nazi Germany in 1935 for the first and last time, because my grandfather could only spend some of his bonds in natura in Germany. So they went to the state Baden-Württemberg to Hotel Kurhaus Ruhestein in the town Ottenhöfen im Schwarzwald in Germany. Large Nazi Swastica flags hang in front of the hotel. One jewish lady guest noticed my civilised, decent and humble and naive grandmother reading a terrible Nazi propaganda newspaper Der Völkische Beobachter (VB). The cautious, observant and nervous German jewish lady asked my grandmother why she was reading that terrible newspaper. She must have noticed in my grandmothers behaviour and attitude and accent that she wasn't a German nor a Nazi. My mother pardoned herself, feeling a little bit awkward and silly and replied. I don't know the newspaper and I bought it out of curiousity. When she read it she didn't agreed with the content, because it was vicious, poisonous with mean stories in it. My grandmother was certainly not an anti-semite, NSDAP nazi party supporter, but she must have been curious. (In comparison in France I bought a copy of the communist newspaper L'Humanité in 1990 in Montpellier out of curiosity, without being a communist) It was in the early stages of the Nazi regime, and it was strange to see a Jewish woman in a Nazi hotel which was clearly Nazi territory, but her silent, reserved, alert, over-conscious action towards my grandmother meant that she was not in a relaxed position and that it was not a nice political climate and country for her to say it mildly. This German jewish woman probably didn't survive the war, and maybe that time my grandparents, father and aunt was probably the last time she stayed in a hotel. Driving through Nazi Germany by train my father remembered passing a concentration camp. And he remembers that a drunken mineworker made jokes about Adolf Hitler in the train which was extremely dangerous. It was once for my back then 5 year old father, aunt and grandparents, but it was an experience they didn't forgot. A strange country Nazi Germany was with a strange atmosphere, bu the Schwarzwald was beautiful, and the hotel was fine. In Southern-Germany you had conservative Roman-Catholic reistance and aversion against Nazi's of some Baden, Württemberg, Bavaria (Bayern) people of farm or middle class town background. And you had some Social-democrats and communists too, but Zentrum ( en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centre_Party_(Germany) ) and political parties like Bayerische Volkspartei ( Bavarian People's Party ), which was a predecessor of the present day CSU in Bavaria. WarsawThe Warsaw Population reached 756,000 by 1903, and urban services underwent extensive modification. Despite revolutionary activity between 1905 and 1907, censorship was alleviated, Polish schools and other cultural institutions were established, and Warsaw experienced a cultural renaissance. After World War I the city regained its status as the national capital. The grandest of tsarist monuments, the colossal Orthodox Cathedral (1911), was demolished by the Polish government in the 1920s, but its symbolic role in the city has been assumed by the massive Palace of Culture and Science (1949), built by the Soviets south of the Old Town. The population of Warsaw passed the 1,000,000 mark in 1925. The period between the world wars was marked by further advances despite a period of inflation, depressions and slumps in trade, and political instability. Automobile and aircraft manufacture were introduced; city services underwent further expansion; and Warsaw’s emergence as a European cultural centre was symbolized by the beginning of such international competitions as the International Chopin Competition for Pianists (1927) and the Henryk Wieniawski International Violin Competition (1935). Education in Warsaw benefited from the presence of the headquarters of the Polish Academy of Sciences, which coordinated and coordinates research in both physical and social sciences through a number of institutes and industrial establishments. The Technical University of Warsaw, the Warsaw School of Economics and the University of Warsaw were and are notable institutions. Major libraries included and include the library (established in 1817) of the University of Warsaw and the National Library (1919); there were and are also a number of specialist libraries. Warsaw was a modern and cosmopolitan large central European city before the war with poverty and rich merchants, a business class and a very pluriform political climate despite the Sanacja regime. Next to Sanacja supporters you had oppositional Polish Socialists, Polish communists, Polish Nationalists, Polish Catholics and Polish people of the Centrolew and the Nationalist parties like the Endecja and the The Falanga National Radical Camp (Polish: Ruch Narodowo Radykalny-Falanga, RNR-Falanga, colloquially ONR-Falanga). The Sanacja regime put Nationalist, socialist, communist and democratic opposition activists in prisons and camps. But in the same time the Sanacja regime had a large support from the Sanacja party, the Bezpartyjny Blok Współpracy z Rządem ("Nonpartisan Bloc for Cooperation with the Government"), a pro-government grouping that denied being a political party. Warsaw was a place where the Polish-speaking Roman Catholic majority lived alongside Jews, Germans, and Russians. Early in the 20th century the largely Yiddish-speaking Jewish community accounted for almost 50 percent of the population, although it declined somewhat after 1918. The old German community, originally connected with trade and commerce, was being assimilated, however, and the Russian community, influential in the 19th century, had dwindled. Watch from 1:23 . This story of a great son of WarsawWhen I see these old images of pre war warsaw than I think that was my mothers Warsaw. And that Warsaw Ghetto and the Warsaw Uprising and the łapanka's (round ups) of Polish people between 1939 September 1939 and 1944/1945 that was the same Warsaw, and also the same Warsaw of the Stalinist terror of Mokotow Prison from 1945 until 1956. Warsaw was full of life, Polish Tango, Jazz, Polish classical music, art, science, academic education, diplomacy, love, hatred between political opponents ( Sanacja supporters vs dissidents, Endecja vs the Socialist PPS [ Polska Partia Socjalistyczna] and Bund, Bund/ PPS vs Polish Communists, Bund vs Polish Zionists, PSL [ Polish Peoples Party] vs Sanacja [as part of Centrolew] and etc.), car and tram traffic, people who enjoyed parks, theatre, cinema, sport activities, family life, social life and achievements in their studies and work. The same was ofcourse the case in Kraków, Poznań, Lwów (Lviv), Wilno (Vilnius), Lublin, and other Polish cities and towns. The lives of the people that lived there had purpose, meaning, direction and necessity. The First World War and the Second World War can't erase that important cutural, political and social era of the Interbellum (1919-1939). In the Interbellum a lot of cultural exchange took place in Central Europe. A lot of scientific, cultural and human achievements were made in that time in Central Europe. People travelled between countries, and you had some sort of Central-European intelligentsia in Warsaw, Bukarest, Budapest, Prague, Vienna (Wien), Berlin and Paris. That Central-European social-cultural, political and journalistic international border crossing intelligentsia consisted of Poles (Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz, Bruno Schulz and Henryk Stażewski, a foremost representative of the Constructivist movement, as well as the co-creator of the Geometric Abstract art movement, and a member of the Cercle et Carré group of abstract painters based in Paris), Czechs (Franz Cižek, Czech modernist avant-garde artist, writer, critic and one of the most important figures of the 1920s and 1930s movement, Karel Teige, a member of the association of Czech avant-garde artists Devětsil), Hungarians (László Moholy-Nagy), Romanians (Tristan Tzara of Dada), Dutch people(like Theo van Doesburg of De Stijl, who influenced Bauhaus people like Ludwig Mies van der Rohe), Russians who lived outside Russia (Wassily Kandinsky, El Lissitzky, Igor Stravinsky and others) and Ukrainians like the Ukrainian painter and composer Yefim Golyshev (one of the founding members of the Dadaist November Group). If I look at all the innovation in cinema, photography, graphical art, fine art, sculpture, literature, poetry, fashion, car designs, product designs, radio development, psychology, psycho-analysis, psychiatry, political theory in the sense of Western democratic thought, ideology (Social Democratic, Christian democratic, conservative, Democratic, Republican, also in the development of counter totalitarian ideas and foundations. Ofcourse they came to late, but they were developped in that time. Fascism, Nazism and Sovjet Communism came to fast to be countered, but there was a rich and deep, and progressive counter culture going on in these Interbellum years against reaction, against backwardness, against fascism and Stalinism, also the anti-Stalinist left from leftwing Socialists/Social-democrats to Marxist Trotskyists). So, Jaga, much of these stories of these people in the twenties, thirties and forties weren't that sad, they had sad and dangerous moments during the late thirties and forties. For the 'good' Germans who weren't Nazi the sadness started with the start of the Third Reich in 1933, when progressive ideas were halted, creativity was not wanted, different thought was punished. In another version the Russians and Ukrainains suffered under the same sort of limitations in the SovjetUnion, but in a different form and different system. Cheers, Pieter
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Post by pieter on Sept 29, 2018 18:51:09 GMT -7
Pieter, beautiful photos, it is just sad that the stories of many people from this time period are so sad. I have pictures of my aunts, especially aunt Elizabeth. She was a beauty and she was a seamstress and she made her own dresses and her sisters dresses and her husband (they got married secretly when he was in prison for conspiracy against Germans) - he died in German labor camp ruing one of the allied forces bombardments, too bad Jaga, I wrote a long text with images and video's because your reply triggered something in me. I have often thought about the early 20th century and had some irritation, frustration and sadness of the useless loss of human lives, the terror of these totalitarian and authoritarian regimes and systems and the fact that moderate, reasonable, decent and democratic forces didn't manage to conquer in a peaceful and humanistic way over the dark, obscurantist and sinister powers of war, civil war, genocide and total oppression. I wished that Alexander Kerensky, leader of the moderate-socialist Trudoviks faction of the Socialist Revolutionary Party, vice-chairman of the powerful Petrograd Soviet and leader of the Februari revolution in 1917 did manage to form a democratic coalition of moderate Social Democrats, reform oriented liberal aristocrats and the core of the rightwing forces in the Czarist army to defeat the Bolsjewists and form a Social Democratic regime, which would have been moderate and Democratic Socialist and liberal. Fact was that Kerensky was to lenient towards the Bolsjewists and Bolsjewists used his tolerance towards the radical left ( Bolsjewists, Socialists-Revolutionaries (the SRs)) while he failed to side with or strenghen the more Social Democratic Mensheviks and moderate Socialists and liberal Cadets. In the Radicalised Germany of the Weimarer Republik ( 1919-1933) we saw also that the moderate democrats failed to defeat the extreme right and far left on the long term. The Social-Democratic SPD failed in forming an alliance with the Conservative Roman-Catholic Zentrum Party, the Protestant Lutheran political forces, the German liberals of the German Democratic Party (German: Deutsche Demokratische Partei, DDP) and conservative Prussian powers in the Reichswhehr (the German army of the Weimar republic). Alexander KerenskyEven a lefrwing Popular Front of SPD-KPD (Social-Democrats and communists) which could have stopped the Nazi's from gaining power wasn't tried. In the Second World War the British and Americans cooperated with the 'devil' Stalin to defeat Adolf Hitler. The same should have taken place in Germany in 1932 and 1933. Extreme, radical, authoritarian, totalitarian, Pro-dictatorship ideas were strong in that time, because due to the effects of the First World War and later Black Tuesday (October 29, 1929) and the aftermath of that people were fed up by in their eyes weak democratic Weimar politicians, the poverty, hunger, Recession, unemployment extreme inflation and misery as a effect of that. Germans and Austrians were so poor and hungry that some people died in these after First World War years due to the effect of the in my point of view criminal and humiliating World War I reparations, the German and Austrian requirement to pay reparations to Great-Britain, France and the USA. This drawing, done in 1924 by Käthe Kollwitz, is titled "Germany's Children Are Starving".The Treaty of Versailles (signed in 1919) and the 1921 London Schedule of Payments required Germany to pay 132 billion gold marks (US$33 billion) in reparations to cover civilian damage caused during the war. This figure was divided into three categories of bonds: A, B, and C. Of these, Germany was required to pay towards 'A' and 'B' bonds totaling 50 billion marks (US$12.5 billion) unconditionally. The payment of the remaining 'C' bonds was interest free and contingent on the Weimar Republic's ability to pay, as was to be assessed by an Allied committee. A long line of unemployed Germans trying to get work in the climate of vast unemploymentThis World War I reparations caused great human tragedies in Germany and Austria, because it lead to extreme poverty and hunger under the German and Austrian populations, and that lead to the growth and popularity of the extreme left communist and far right reactionairy monarchist Freikorps forces, German Nationalist groups and the Nazi party NSDAP and it's storm troopers the SA (Sturmabteilung) who terrorised streets, alley's, boulevards, squares, public places of gathering and meetings of other democratic parties and opponents. The humiliating Versaille treaty and repair payments to the Western alliesThe Spartacist uprising (German: Spartakusaufstand), also known as the January uprising (Januaraufstand), was a general strike (and the armed battles accompanying it) in Germany from 4 to 15 January 1919. Germany was in the middle of a post-war revolution, and two of the perceived paths forward were either social democracy or a council republic similar to the one which had been established by the Bolsheviks in Russia. The uprising was primarily a power struggle between the moderate Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) led by Friedrich Ebert, and the radical communists of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD), led by Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, who had previously founded and led the Spartacist League (Spartakusbund). This power struggle was the result of the abdication of Kaiser Wilhelm II and the resignation of Chancellor Max von Baden, who had passed power to Ebert, as the leader of the largest party in the German parliament.[1] Similar uprisings occurred and were suppressed in Bremen, the Ruhr, Rhineland, Saxony, Hamburg, Thuringia and Bavaria, and another round of even bloodier street battles occurred in Berlin in March, which led to popular disillusionment with the Weimar Government. The May Coup (Przewrót majowy or zamach majowy) from 12 May until 14 May 1926 in Poland was a tragic conflict in which 215 Polish and soldiers were killed on both sides and 164 Civilians were killed and 920 Military personel and civilians were wounded. It divided Poland and made some good Poles to go into exile, and also put Poles in prisons and prison camps in the period of 1926-1939 where some of them died. The Polish military commander, diplomat, politician and general Count Tadeusz Jordan-Rozwadowski (19 May 1866 – 18 October 1928) was imprisoned after Piłsudski's coup, because during the May Coup d'État of 1926 he was the commander of the forces loyal to the legal government and assumed the role of the military governor of Warsaw. After the victory of Józef Piłsudski Rozwadowski was arrested in Warsaw on May 15, 1926 and transferred with four other detained generals to a military prison on Antokol in Wilno (Vilnius), where he was jailed in very strict conditions, in an unheated cell, for more than a year, until May 18, 1927. (For more info about general Count Tadeusz Jordan-Rozwadowski read this link: general Count Tadeusz Jordan-Rozwadowski ) General Count Tadeusz Jordan-Rozwadowski Tadeusz Jordan-Rozwadowski with other high ranking officers of the Polish army in better days when he had a leading role in the Polish armySoon after his release and retirement general Rozwadowski died under mysterious circumstances in a hospital in Warsaw. He was buried, amid rumors of poisoning, with military honours at the Łyczaków Cemetery in Lwów ( Lviv), among his fallen soldiers of the 1918–1919 Polish–Ukrainian War. Tadeusz Jordan-Rozwadowski's son Jozef Jordan-Rozwadowski, was an artillery officer in the Polish Army and was also awarded the Virtuti Militari. In the 1930s, he was forced to resign his commission and emigrate to the United States due to his continued support for the pro-democratic and anti-Piłsudski forces in Poland. He emigrated to t he United States and worked as an engineer and designed the elevators in the Empire State Building. He also contributed to the design of the Polish Pavilion in the 1939 New York World's Fair and the 1964 World's Fair. Józef Jordan Rozwadowski emigrated to the United States due to his continued support for the pro-democratic and anti-Piłsudski forces in PolandOther link on the subject: www.quora.com/Was-Poland-under-Pi%C5%82sudski-a-socialist-or-social-democratic-countryIn Germany after the Spartacist uprising you had the Bayerische Räterepublik ( Bavarian extreme-left Sovjet Republic of workers and soldiers councils) from 6 April 1919 until 3 May 1919, the extreme rightwing Kapp Putsch from 13 March 1920 until 17 March 1920 and from 8 until 9 November 1923 the Hitlerputsch (Hitler-Ludendorff-Putsch, Bürgerbräu-Putsch, Marsch auf die Feldherrnhalle genannt) took place. An abortive attempt by Adolf Hitler and Erich Ludendorff to start an insurrection in Germany against the Weimar Republic on November. In the late twenties Hitlers Sturm Abteilung ( SA) would often clash with the Roter Frontkämpferbund (("Alliance of Red Front-Fighters") a paramilitary organization under the leadership of the Communist Party of Germany ((German: Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands, KPD) during the Weimar Republic. In May 1926, during a flag parade, Red Front activists used it as a sign of rallying to the movement and as an oath to defend the USSR ( the SovjetUnion). Putschists in Berlin. The banner warns: "Stop! Whoever proceeds will be shot"Members of the Marinebrigade Ehrhardt, with swastikas on their helmets, distributing leaflets on 13 March 1920Kapp putschists at the Potsdamer Platz in BerlinThe defiant defendant, Adolf Hitler, with fellow defendants in the Putsch trial, including Gen. Ludendorff (left) and Ernst Röhm (right front) who will soon loom large in the Nazi movement.Alliance of Red Front-Fighters videoToday we see again sinister, obscurantist, radical, extreme forces in Europe. Slightly different than in the twenties and thirties. The workers of today are largely migrants with a Muslim background and the extremism, fanatism today comes from slightly different movements and directions. But we can learn from the past with these Islamist Jihadist Terrorist groups with their terror cells. The acts of violence perpetrated by proponents of insurrectionary anarchism in the late 19th and early 20th century, including bombings and assassinations aimed at the ruling class bare some resemblance with the Islamist terorism of today. And the rightwing extremism and the leftwing extremism of the Nazi's, Stalinists and post war extreme left and far right terrorists might also inspire today's lunatics, fanatics, extremists and terrorists. But the dynamics of today are different than that in the late 19th century and the 20th century. In MY point of view again the moderate, democratic and centrist forces have to watch out and don't let the extremes and radicals take over the momentum. Cheers, Pieter
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Post by pieter on Sept 29, 2018 19:27:20 GMT -7
Pieter, beautiful photos, it is just sad that the stories of many people from this time period are so sad. I have pictures of my aunts, especially aunt Elizabeth. She was a beauty and she was a seamstress and she made her own dresses and her sisters dresses and her husband (they got married secretly when he was in prison for conspiracy against Germans) - he died in German labor camp ruing one of the allied forces bombardments, too bad Dear Jaga, Your aunt Elizabeth looks very relaxed and confident in that photo with her friends. That fur looks good on her jacket. It is really a typical forties image, or is it early fifties? She loos more slim and well built than her friends. She has some Ingrid Bergman, Marlene Dietrich and Jeanne Moreau elements in her face and figure. Jeanne MoreauIngrid BergmanMarlene Dietrich (on the left) and Leni Riefenstahl ( on the right, with Anna Mae Wong, in 1930. (Courtesy Harvard Art Museums and Busch-Reisinger Museum)Cheers, Pieter
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