Nazis to the core / druk 1


Book Description

Wim Sassen haalde vanwege zijn relatie met Adolf Eichmann regelmatig het nieuws. Zijn broer Alfons daarentegen was altijd de man op de achtergrond. Niettemin speelden beiden een belangrijke rol in de naoorlogse schemerwereld waarin oorlogsmisdadigers op diverse manieren werden ingezet om Duitse weerwolfnetwerken en communistische cellen bloot te leggen. Toen de geallieerde opsporingsdiensten halverwege 1945 de vervolging van oorlogsmisdadigers aan de Nederlandse opsporingsdiensten overlieten, raakten de jongens verzeild in een wereld van internationale spionagediensten, ondergrondse organisaties die oorlogsmisdadigers uit Nederland en België hielpen te ontsnappen en particuliere opsporingsdiensten. 00Wanneer strafvervolging dreigt, wijken de mannen uit naar Latijns Amerika. Daar kwamen ze terecht in een warm nest van uitgeweken nazi’s die door de voorloper van de Noord Amerikaanse CIA “veilig” waren gesteld. In deze buitengewone periode rekenden ze tot hun vrienden Luftwaffe Ace Hans Ulrich Rudel, Adolf Eichmann, Josef Mengele en Klaus Barbie. Via deze groep werden de jongens opnieuw geïntroduceerd in een schimmige wereld waarin ex-SS’ers een voorname rol speelden in de internationale wapenhandel en hun diensten leverden aan militaire regimes in de strijd tegen het communisme. In dit boek zullen eveneens een aantal mythes0ontkracht worden zoals Wim Sassens beroemde ontsnapping uit Fort Blauwkapel op Kerstavond 1945, of dat de jonge Alfons al op 17 jarige leeftijd ‘Abwehr’-specialist zou zijn.




Nazis to the Core


Book Description

Wim Sassen's name has always been linked to the Eichmann case. Little is known about his personal life. Even less is known about the other Sassen family members who, like him, fled to Latin America after WWII. While two sisters abandoned their Nazi ideology and kept a low profile in Ecuador, Wim and his brother Alfons continued their Nazi allegiance. They joined forces with fugitives like Josef Mengele, Walter Rauff and Klaus Barbie under the protection of the German Secret Service. This book reveals new information on Wim and Alfons Sassen. It not only seeks to explain why they joined the SS, but also narrates their escape from Europe. During the war, they made a pact with the Dutch resistance in case the Nazi empire should collapse. Once it did, the Dutch resistance helped them find their way to Latin America, receiving aid from both a Catholic and a former collaborator's network. While Wim escaped to Argentina through Ireland, Alfons was recruited by foreign intelligence services as a so-called "Abwehr" specialist. He was tasked with dismantling "Wehrwolf" networks and penetrating communists cells. Once it was discovered that his intelligence reports were based on nothing more than fantasy, he too escaped. With the aid of the famous Spanish General Moscardó of the Siege of Alcázar he managed to reach Ecuador. There, his true intelligence work started. Together with his brother-in-arms Wim, he was reunited with Nazi diehards including Luftwaffe ace Hans Ulrich Rudel, and Mussolini-liberator Otto Skorzeny. This moment was the starting point of complex intrigues between secret services, arms dealers, Latin American dictators like Augusto Pinochet and Alfredo Stroessner, and drug-lords in Bolivia. These intrigues earned Wim and Alfons, respectively, the reputation of international arms-trafficker, and advisor to military juntas all over the world.




Mein Kampf


Book Description

Madman, tyrant, animal—history has given Adolf Hitler many names. In Mein Kampf (My Struggle), often called the Nazi bible, Hitler describes his life, frustrations, ideals, and dreams. Born to an impoverished couple in a small town in Austria, the young Adolf grew up with the fervent desire to become a painter. The death of his parents and outright rejection from art schools in Vienna forced him into underpaid work as a laborer. During the First World War, Hitler served in the infantry and was decorated for bravery. After the war, he became actively involved with socialist political groups and quickly rose to power, establishing himself as Chairman of the National Socialist German Worker's party. In 1924, Hitler led a coalition of nationalist groups in a bid to overthrow the Bavarian government in Munich. The infamous Munich "Beer-hall putsch" was unsuccessful, and Hitler was arrested. During the nine months he was in prison, an embittered and frustrated Hitler dictated a personal manifesto to his loyal follower Rudolph Hess. He vented his sentiments against communism and the Jewish people in this document, which was to become Mein Kampf, the controversial book that is seen as the blue-print for Hitler's political and military campaign. In Mein Kampf, Hitler describes his strategy for rebuilding Germany and conquering Europe. It is a glimpse into the mind of a man who destabilized world peace and pursued the genocide now known as the Holocaust.




Paris Requiem


Book Description

A gripping World War II murder mystery—and a beautifully drawn portrait of Paris under Nazi occupation—with compelling and conflicted hero Detective Eddie Giral at its heart. Paris, 1940. As the city adjusts to life under Nazi occupation, Detective Eddie Giral struggles to reconcile his job as a policeman with his new role enforcing a regime he cannot believe in, but must work under. He's sacrificed so much in order to survive in this new world, but the past is not so easily forgotten. When an old friend—and an old flame—reappear, begging for his help, Eddie must decide how far he will go to help those he loves. The notion of justice itself quickly becomes as dangerous, blurred, and confused as the war itself. And Eddie’s morale compass, ever on unreliable foundations, will be questioned again and again as the ravages of the German occupation steadily attempt to grind him—and the city he loves—into submission. Negotiating a path between resistance and collaboration, he can remain a good man and do nothing—or risk everything he has achieved in a desperate act of resistance.




Folk Devils and Moral Panics


Book Description

'Richly documented and convincingly presented' -- New Society Mods and Rockers, skinheads, video nasties, designer drugs, bogus asylum seeks and hoodies. Every era has its own moral panics. It was Stanley Cohen's classic account, first published in the early 1970s and regularly revised, that brought the term 'moral panic' into widespread discussion. It is an outstanding investigation of the way in which the media and often those in a position of political power define a condition, or group, as a threat to societal values and interests. Fanned by screaming media headlines, Cohen brilliantly demonstrates how this leads to such groups being marginalised and vilified in the popular imagination, inhibiting rational debate about solutions to the social problems such groups represent. Furthermore, he argues that moral panics go even further by identifying the very fault lines of power in society. Full of sharp insight and analysis, Folk Devils and Moral Panics is essential reading for anyone wanting to understand this powerful and enduring phenomenon. Professor Stanley Cohen is Emeritus Professor of Sociology at the London School of Economics. He received the Sellin-Glueck Award of the American Society of Criminology (1985) and is on the Board of the International Council on Human Rights. He is a member of the British Academy.




Freedom in the World 2006


Book Description

Freedom in the World, the Freedom House flagship survey whose findings have been published annually since 1972, is the standard-setting comparative assessment of global political rights and civil liberties. The survey ratings and narrative reports on 192 countries and a group of select territories are used by policy makers, the media, international corporations, and civic activists and human rights defenders to monitor trends in democracy and track improvements and setbacks in freedom worldwide. Press accounts of the survey findings appear in hundreds of influential newspapers in the United States and abroad and form the basis of numerous radio and television reports. The Freedom in the World political rights and civil liberties ratings are determined through a multi-layered process of research and evaluation by a team of regional analysts and eminent scholars. The analysts used a broad range of sources of information, including foreign and domestic news reports, academic studies, nongovernmental organizations, think tanks, individual professional contacts, and visits to the region, in conducting their research. The methodology of the survey is derived in large measure from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and these standards are applied to all countries and territories, irrespective of geographical location, ethnic or religious composition, or level of economic development.




New Germans, New Dutch


Book Description

In today’s globalized world, traditions of a national Self and a national Other no longer hold. This timely volume considers the stakes in our changing definitions of national boundaries in light of the unmistakable transformation of German and Dutch societies. Examining how the literature of migration intervenes in public discourses on multiculturality and including detailed analysis of works by the Turkish-German writers Emine Sevgi Özdamer and Feridun Zaimoglu and the Moroccan-Dutch writers Abdelkader Benali and Hafid Bouazza, New Germans, New Dutch offers crucial insights into the ways in which literature negotiates both difference and the national context of its writing.




To Tell You the Truth


Book Description




Narratives of Low Countries History and Culture


Book Description

This edited collection explores the ways in which our understanding of the past in Dutch history and culture can be rethought to consider not only how it forms part of the present but how it can relate also to the future. Divided into three parts – The Uses of Myth and History, The Past as Illumination of Cultural Context, and Historiography in Focus – this book seeks to demonstrate the importance of the past by investigating the transmission of culture and its transformations. It reflects on the history of historiography and looks critically at the products of the historiographic process, such as Dutch and Afrikaans literary history. The chapters cover a range of disciplines and approaches: some authors offer a broad view of a particular period, such as Jonathan Israel's contribution on myth and history in the ideological politics of the Dutch Golden Age, while others zoom in on specific genres, texts or historical moments, such as Benjamin Schmidt’s study of the doolhof, a word that today means ‘labyrinth’ but once described a 17th-century educational amusement park. This volume, enlightening and home to multiple paths of enquiry leading in different directions, is an excellent example of what a past-present doolhof might look like.




Freedom in the World 2011


Book Description

Freedom in the World, the Freedom House flagship survey whose findings have been published annually since 1972, is the standard-setting comparative assessment of global political rights and civil liberties. The survey ratings and narrative reports on 194 countries and 14 territories are used by policymakers, the media, international corporations, civic activists, and human rights defenders to monitor trends in democracy and track improvements and setbacks in freedom worldwide. The Freedom in the World political rights and civil liberties ratings are determined through a multi-layered process of research and evaluation by a team of regional analysts and eminent scholars. The analysts used a broad range of sources of information, including foreign and domestic news reports, academic studies, nongovernmental organizations, think tanks, individual professional contacts, and visits to the region, in conducting their research. The methodology of the survey is derived in large measure from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and these standards are applied to all countries and territories, irrespective of geographical location, ethnic or religious composition, or level of economic development.