“Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist.”
Pablo Picasso

Complicated week - war, supply chains disruptions, propaganda overload might need some low cost comfort food popularized before the last World War before this is over.

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTrEqtiTytk]
The recipe.

How can America and Europe support modern day Nazis in Ukraine? The history of national alliances and personal friendships is complicated. Partially hidden by our national habit of focusing on the future and not wanting to review the mistakes (horrors) of the past.

Propaganda on potential likability of Nazi soldiers and fear of Russians started mid 60's and continued for years with reruns.

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NTDrLEOB1lA]

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[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XgZzGGZ3jO0]

'The Flat' is a fascinating detective story National Catholic Reporter Oct 12, 2012

"The Flat," an award-winning documentary, follows the story of Israeli documentary filmmaker Arnon Goldfinger, whose 98-year-old grandmother died in Tel Aviv a few years ago, sparking a search to understand who the woman really was.
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Yet two artifacts surface that capture Goldfinger's attention. One is a Nazi newspaper from 1934, Der Angriff ("The Attack," the worst of Nazi newspapers). The featured story is about an SS officer, Leopold von Mildenstein, who traveled with his wife and a Jewish couple to Palestine. The Jewish couple was Goldfinger's grandparents, Kurt and Gerta Tuchler. It is astonishing news to Goldfinger, who knew nothing of his grandparents' past.

The second artifact to capture Goldfinger's attention is a magazine in the flat that leads Goldfinger to seek out journalists who interviewed his grandmother in the 1980s. They wrote about the German Zionist Federation, to which his grandparents belonged. The writers still have the tiny travel photos that appeared in the magazine, which they give to Goldfinger. In the photos, the two couples look like trendy German tourists of the day.
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The crux of this documentary is everything Goldfinger never knew about his family and everything his mother, a daughter of Zionist German Jews, and Edda, the daughter of an SS officer, refused to know or talk about.

There is so much more to this completely fascinating, simply told detective story. I want to read a book about it. In doing more research, I learned von Mildenstein was raised a Catholic, and I was deeply saddened, once again, at the part that Catholics played in the Holocaust.

The film could have been called "Cleaning Closets" because Goldfinger's grandparents and the von Mildensteins packed away a history neither of the daughters now wants to confront. It is better left alone to some, but not to Goldfinger, the one grandson to whom the past, the story, now belongs. He has found that "he could not relinquish the smallest piece of paper" from the flat.

More Americans Supported Hitler Than You May Think. Here's Why One Expert Thinks That History Isn't Better Known Time Oct 4, 2018

So why was that past overlooked for so long?

In part, Hart theorizes, it’s because the American story of World War II is such a powerful national narrative. The United States, that narrative says, helped save the world. Rocked by Pearl Harbor, Americans stepped up to turn the tide for the Allies and thus solidified their nation’s place as a global superpower. That narrative doesn’t have much room for the relatively small, but significant, number of Americans who were rooting for the other side.

“It’s always been uncomfortable in this country to talk about isolationism, though the ideas are still out there,” he says, “It’s part of the American mythology. We want to remember ourselves as always having been on the right side in this war.”

It was also possible for those who had participated in Nazi-sympathetic groups to later cloak their beliefs in the Cold War’s anti-communist push — a dynamic that had in fact driven some of them to fascism in the first place, as it seemed “tougher on communism than democracy is,” as Hart puts it. (One survey he cites found that in 1938, more Americans thought that communism was worse than fascism than vice versa.) Such people could truthfully insist that they’d always been anti-communist without revealing that they’d been fascists, and their fellow Americans were still so worried about communism that they might not press the matter.

“We still don’t totally know the scope of this,” he adds, noting that some important documents are still classified.

The CIA’s Worst-Kept Secret: Newly Declassified Files Confirm United States Collaboration with Nazis Institute for Policy Studies May 1, 2001

Pried loose by Congress, which passed the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act three years ago, a long-hidden trove of once-classified CIA documents confirms one of the worst-kept secrets of the cold war–the CIA’s use of an extensive Nazi spy network to wage a clandestine campaign against the Soviet Union.

The CIA reports show that U.S. officials knew they were subsidizing numerous Third Reich veterans who had committed horrible crimes against humanity, but these atrocities were overlooked as the anti-Communist crusade acquired its own momentum. For Nazis who would otherwise have been charged with war crimes, signing on with American intelligence enabled them to avoid a prison term.
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These are “not just dry historical documents,” insists former congresswoman Elizabeth Holtzman, a member of the panel examining the CIA files. As far as Holtzman is concerned, the CIA papers raise critical questions about American foreign policy and the origins of the cold war.

The decision to recruit Nazi operatives had a negative impact on U.S.-Soviet relations and set the stage for Washington’s tolerance of human rights abuses and other criminal acts in the name of anti-Communism. With that fateful sub-rosa embrace, the die was cast for a litany of antidemocratic CIA interventions around the world.

An Unexpected Partnership: Nazi Germany and the Republic of China War History Online Mar 31, 2016

A quick first glance at these photos would have most military history enthusiasts fooled. You would be forgiven to assume that these are German-trained Imperial Japanese Army (IJA) personnel. But that could not be further from the truth – they are in fact Nazi-trained Chinese soldiers of the National Revolutionary Army (NRA), destined to fight Japanese invaders. The Wehrmacht officer is Chiang Wei-Kuo, adopted son of Chinese Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek. Chiang Wei-Kuo commanded a German Panzer during Anschluss, earned a commission as a Wehrmacht lieutenant in anticipation of Fall Weiss, before being recalled back to China.

We all know that China was the ‘first to fight’ Imperial Japan, first in 1931, when Manchuria was annexed to form Japan’s Manchukuo puppet, only to be followed by full-scale invasion in 1937. Facing a far superior enemy both technologically and organisationally, backed by an industrialized war economy, China naturally sought foreign military assistance from any willing partners. Ironically, one of these partners was Nazi Germany, Japan’s soon-to-be ally.

Nazi support was motivated by two reasons: the economic need for China’s raw materials, and the anti-communism of Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist Party, or Kuomintang (KMT). Most surprisingly, Hitler’s personal view that ‘I have never regarded the Chinese or the Japanese as being inferior to ourselves’ also excluded the Chinese from Nazi racial antagonism in foreign relations
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Through German-educated KMT officials like Chu Chia-Hua, soldiers of fortune like Max Bauer were recruited to China as individuals during the Weimar years, avoiding treaty prohibition of Germany’s foreign military investments. Mostly officers from WWI sharing the anti-communist sentiments of the right-wing KMT faction led by Chiang Kai-shek (Bauer was personally involved in the Kapp Putsch), they were more than happy to advise the KMT.
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In fact, Chiang’s personal ties to Germany was so widespread that, even after the 1937 outbreak of Sino-Japanese war, a significant Chinese lobby remained in Berlin, calling for a resumption of full Nazi-China ties despite the Sino-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact.

When they were finally recalled, von Falkenhausen and his fellow German advisors promised not to share any information on Chinese war plans with their new Japanese allies. When the 1941 Tripartite Pact formalized the Germany-Italy-Japan Axis, German assistance to China completely terminated, but the military foundations that the partnership had already laid contributed to the eventual Chinese victory.

Von Falkenhausen, for his part, kept his word and continued writing to Chiang, exchanging gifts until long after the war ended.

What is on your mind today? (Responses to Covid questions and dialog to be conducted at The Dose diary)