fuck nazis for taking the beautiful, intricate stories from norse and irish mythologies and turning them into metaphors for their disgusting ideology. also just fuck nazis in general

She took up acting because the malnutrition she suffered under the nazis permanently damaged her health and prevented her from pursuing her dream to be a ballerina. During the war, she danced to raise money for the resistance - even though she was literally starving, she used what strength she had to make sure more nazis got shot. 

She and her mom also denounced their royal heritage because of the Nazis in their family

Also Audrey was a humanitarian until her death, though ill with cancer, she continued her work for UNICEF, travelling to Somalia, Kenya, the United Kingdom, Switzerland, France and the United States.

These are things I literally never would have known about. I’m tired of women being painted as just being pretty.

I’M SO HAPPY TO SEE HER AT AN OLDER AGE I SWEAR!

Here’s another nice one.

For the longest time I assumed she had died really young because I never saw any pictures of her at an older age. She was an amazing woman.

25th April 1945, Italian Liberation Day. On 25th April 1945, Italy is liberated from Nazi occupation and the Fascist dictatorship is ended.  The Partisans, the group of resistance against the German invasion and the Fascist dictatorship, along with the American army, liberated Turin and Milan on April 25, 1945, and then freed the rest of Northern Italy, putting an end to the most painful and difficult historical period of Italy.

   Another photo of the Navajos banning the swastika.

The document they are signing starts off: “Because the above ornament, which may have been a sign of friendship among our forefathers for many centuries has been desecrated recently by another nation of peoples.”

Think about why it’s illegal to hire a hit man.

All you’re really doing is speaking and giving someone money.

It’s legal to speak.

It’s legal to give someone money.

Even if they actually complete the job, you’re not the one who committed the murder.

So why is it illegal to hire a hit man?

Could it be because inciting violence is not protected under free speech?

And if that’s the case, why should free speech protect Nazis advocating genocide?

Never reblogged something harder in my life

Holy shit… As if on cue.

The Newark Advocate, Ohio, August 7, 1936

a good way for goyim to help combat antisemitism right now would be to remind those who exclude jewish people from the charlottesville conversation that jewish people are being explicitly targeted – in chants, in statements, in the adoption of nazi ideology.

please reblog if you’re not jewish.

this is really important considering how many Jewish people speaking out about this have gotten messages saying “it’s not all about the jews,”! we aren’t saying it’s all about us. the riots by white supremacists targeted all people of color, all lgbt folk, jewish people, and muslims. and we get that! we know this. but acting as though antisemitism wasn’t present in charlottesville, as though we don’t have a right to talk about it, is disgusting. silencing us and pretending there werent literal nazis participating in the terrorism that took place, is disgusting. your dismissive responses towards our pain make your feelings towards us very clear.

LINKS TO DONATE TO DIRECTLY SUPPORT CHARLOTTESVILLE

I am a citizen of Charlottesville, Virginia. Today (August 12th, 2017) and yesterday (August 11th, 2017) our city saw violent and chaotic rallies by Nazis and white supremacists. Counter-protesters, many of them students of the University of Virginia, which is here in this city, met the Nazi rallies bravely. People have been injured and arressted. People threw bottles filled with cement or urine, and mace and tear gas filled the air. A state of emergency was declared, and store owners nearby cited having police in riot gear blocking the doors of their buildings.

If you wish to donate to directly support protesters, citizens, and minority students at the University of Virginia, here are four links for you.

Solidarity Cville Anti-Racist Legal Fund

#A12 General Fund

The Charlottesville Chapter of the NAACP’s PayPal

UVA’s Donation Page for their Black Student Alliance

These are all links in which the money is guaranteed to directly go towards helping Charlottesville citizens specifically, whether through legal fees, or through raising support and awareness for the minority members of our community. I especially recommend choosing either the Solidarity Cville Fund or the Black Student Alliance’s donation page.

Thank you for all the support being sent our city’s way. #DEFENDCVILLE

“The Nazis didn’t just kill the Jews; they made use of every inch of them. Women’s hair was shaved off and weaved into blankets for Nazi soldiers. Fat from Jews’ bodies was used to make soap. Gold teeth were pulled out to make gold bars for the Reichsbank. 384,000 pairs of men’s shoes were sent to Germany from Auschwitz. 646,000 men’s suits. 184,000 pairs of eyeglasses. The most frightening thing is not the gas chambers or the crematoria. It’s the rooms piled to the ceiling with children’s shoes. That gives you have an idea what the Holocaust was. Shoes. Once worn by real people.” - via jewishhistory.org

In the Holocaust Museum in DC, they have a room just for the shoes and hair of the victims. It’s really startling to see it so up close since it makes you realize the sheer scale of this. The pile of hair in the museum weighs several tons, and bear in mind that this several ton pile of hair is only but a small fraction of all of the horrible things found in the camps.

Somewhere in those shoes were the shoes of my great aunts and their children. 

Same with eyeglasses.

It’s something I can never, ever forget.

The above are photos I took at Auschwitz. The shoes and suitcases were each encased in a hallway - kept behind glass on both sides. And again comprise only a fraction of what the Nazis took.

Now the significance of these collections can not be understated or undermined, the horrors of the Holocaust, the Shoah, are embodied in these piles of stolen clothing and cases.

We look at them and recoil, promising that we’ll never forget and yet the systematic slaughter of human beings continues around the world.

In different places, for different reasons. Who didn’t learn the lesson? Who still needs to be reached? Who needs to be protected?

Do not forget. Remember and react. Radical evil is not a memory of the past, it is a present and continuous force.

Reblogging in honor International Holocaust Remembrance Day: 70 year anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camps. 

It’s International Holocaust - Shoah Remembrance day again, but this year the remembrance feels weighted with the fear of repetition. With more and more stories springing up of violence against Jews in Europe and the potential of candidacy for the US president by a proto-Hitleresque Trump who is targeting Muslims and immigrants in the place of Jews.

This history is still so fresh and clearly not relegated to the backs of history books. There is still bonedust intermingled with the dirt at Auschwitz. We cannot forget, we must not repeat.

Annual reblog of remembrance. But this year I also have a plea, forgive me if it is a little Christian-centric, but I feel it is U.S. Christians who most need a note of reminder or this day considering our current political situation.

Today we remember the price paid by the victims of racism, anti-semitism, ableism, homophobia, anti-intellectualism, nationalism, apathy, and hate. 6 million+ Jews, 250,000+ disabled people, 200,000+ Roma, millions of prisoners of war plus thousands more of Jehovah’s witnesses, Catholics, homosexuals, intellectuals, etc.

It has been said: “ Never Again” - what good is that if we do not back it up with actions?

Love more than we hate, open our arms to refugees fleeing in terror, longing for peace and welcoming. Open our minds to the truth of science which is the uncovering of the fingerprints of God on our universe. The truth takes nothing away from faith. Loving those who pray differently than you or not at all, or who love differently than you, or who experence the world differently than you takes nothing from you except your fear.

Leave your fear behind and seek the path of radical love which requires actions over words. Be hot, be forceful, do not wait for heaven on earth, make heaven on earth where there is neither male nor female, gentile or Jew, slave or free. The world is steeped in blood, and bone, and ash, the only recompense for our hate. Imagine how much greater the recompense of our love will be.

When the Nazi concentration camps were liberated by the Allies, it was a time of great jubilation for the tens of thousands of people incarcerated in them. But an often forgotten fact of this time is that prisoners who happened to be wearing the pink triangle (the Nazis’ way of marking and identifying homosexuals) were forced to serve out the rest of their sentence. This was due to a part of German law simply known as “Paragraph 175” which criminalized homosexuality. The law wasn’t repealed until 1969.

This should be required learning, internationally. 

You need to know this. You need to remember this. This is not something to swept under the carpet nor be forgotten. 

Never. Too many have died for the way they have loved. That needs stop now. 

Make it stop? 

I did a report on this in my World History class my sophomore year of high school. It was incredibly unsettling.

My teacher shown the class this. Mostly everyone in the class felt uncomfortable. 

I have reblogged this in the past, but it is so ironic that it comes across my dash right now. I a currently working as a docent at my city’s Holocaust Education Center (( I say currently because I’ve also done research and translation for them )) and out current exhibit is one on loan from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum ((USHMM)). This is a little known historical fact that Paragraph 175 was not repealed after the war and those convicted under Nazi laws as a danger to society because they were gay were not released because they had be convicted in a court of law. There was no liberation or justice for them as they weren’t considered criminals, or even victims for that matter. They were criminals who remained persecuted and ostracized and kept on the fringes of society for decades after the war had been won. Paragraph175 wasn’t actually repealed until 1994. And it was only in May 2002, that the German parliament completed legislation to pardon all homosexuals convicted under Paragraph175 during the Nazi era. History has forgotten about these men and women — please educate yourselves so this does not happen again. Remember this history. Remember them.

@mindlesshumor ok how the fuck did I miss this when I’ve studied The Holocaust like nobody’s business??? wtf

Because the history we have left regarding it is literally the contents of this first hand account.

It is a thin little book.

When I first opened it, I wondered why it was so thin.

Why there wasn’t other books like it.

Other first hand accounts.

By the time I finished it, I didn’t wonder anymore.

Further reading:

I, Pierre Seel, Deported Homosexual: A Memoir of Nazi Terror by Pierre Seel

An Underground Life: Memoirs of a Gay Jew in Nazi Berlin by Gad Beck

The Pink Triangle: The Nazi War Against Homosexuals by Richard Plant

Branded By The Pink Triangle by Ken Setterington

Bent by Martin Sherman (fiction; however, it’s often credited with bringing attention to gay Holocaust victims for the first time since the war ended)

The famous La Marseillaise scene from Casablanca.

You know, this scene is so powerful to me that sometimes I forget that not everyone who watches it will understand its significance, or will have seen Casablanca. So, because this scene means so much to me, I hope it’s okay if I take a minute to explain what’s going on here for anyone who’s feeling left out.

Casablanca takes place in, well, Casablanca, the largest city in (neutral) Morocco in 1941, at Rick’s American Cafe (Rick is Humphrey Bogart’s character you see there). In 1941, America was also still neutral, and Rick’s establishment is open to everyone: Nazi German officials, officials from Vichy (occupied) France, and refugees from all across Europe desperate to escape the German war engine. A neutral cafe in a netural country is probably the only place you’d have seen a cross-section like this in 1941, only six months after the fall of France.

So, the scene opens with Rick arguing with Laszlo, who is a Czech Resistance fighter fleeing from the Nazis (if you’re wondering what they’re arguing about: Rick has illegal transit papers which would allow Laszlo and his wife, Ilsa, to escape to America, so he could continue raising support against the Germans. Rick refuses to sell because he’s in love with Laszlo’s wife). They’re interrupted by that cadre of German officers singing Die Wacht am Rhein: a German patriotic hymn which was adopted with great verve by the Nazi regime, and which is particularly steeped in anti-French history. This depresses the hell out of everybody at the club, and infuriates Laszlo, who storms downstairs and orders the house band to play La Marseillaise: the national anthem of France.

Wait, but when I say “it’s the national anthem of France,” I don’t want you to think of your national anthem, okay? Wherever you’re from. Because France’s anthem isn’t talking about some glorious long-ago battle, or France’s beautiful hills and countrysides. La Marseillaise is FUCKING BRUTAL. Here’s a translation of what they’re singing:

Arise, children of the Fatherland! The day of glory has arrived! Against us, tyranny raises its bloody banner. Do you hear, in the countryside, the roar of those ferocious soldiers? They’re coming to your land to cut the throats of your women and children!

To arms, citizens! Form your battalions! Let’s march, let’s march! Let their impure blood water our fields!

BRUTAL, like I said. DEFIANT, in these circumstances. And the entire cafe stands up and sings it passionately, drowning out the Germans. The Germans who are, in 1941, still terrifyingly ascendant, and seemingly invincible.

“Vive la France! Vive la France!” the crowd cries when it’s over. France has already been defeated, the German war machine roars on, and the people still refuse to give up hope.

But here’s the real kicker, for me: Casablanca came out in 1942. None of this was ‘history’ to the people who first saw it. Real refugees from the Nazis, afraid for their lives, watched this movie and took heart. These were current events when this aired. Victory over Germany was still far from certain. The hope it gave to people then was as desperately needed as it has been at any time in history.

God I love this scene.

It’s really one step more than this. Paul Henried, Conrad Veidt and Peter Lorre had all escapes Nazi Germany. Most of the speaking roles were done by refugees. Almost all of the extras were refugees. This scene was shot in a room full of actual refugees, every teary eye is real.

   Another photo of the Navajos banning the swastika.

The document they are signing starts off: “Because the above ornament, which has been a sign of friendship among our forefathers for many centuries has been desecrated recently by another nation of peoples.”

[second paragraph] “Therefore it is resolved that henceforth from this date on and forever more our tribes renounce the use of the emblem commonly known today as the swastika or fylfot on our blankets, baskets, art objects, sandpaintings and clothing.”

I wanna shove this in the face of every white person who tries to justify their swastikas with what it originally meant. Symbolism evolves and changes meanings just as language.

Imagine the horror of that, though. Someone literally halfway around the world took something important to you, something part of your history (something part of your history from before you were occupied and decimated by an invading power, no less) and stuck it on giant banners behind them while they conquered and occupied and burned people in furnaces. I’m even more impressed, I think, that a group of people who were at the same time experiencing cultural and physical genocide, having their language and land and rights and property stripped from them constantly, chose to give a symbol up because of how it had been used to hurt others. What grace that took.

The photographer’s caption of the photo reads: Florence Smiley and Evelyn Yathe, Navajos of Tucson, Arizona are shown signing the imposing parchment document which formally outlawed the Swastika symbol from designs in Indian art, such as basket and blanket weaving. Four tribes, Navajos, Papagos, Apaches and Hopis banned the symbol which was in use by the Indians long before it came to have a sinister significance. [source] (the man in the photo is not named)

antisemitic:

From a group of survivors that went to the 70th anniversary of the liberation of the death camp Auschwitz. 

Left image: Survivor Mordechai Ronen is overcome with emotion during visit to Auschwitz (Photo: AFP)

Right image: Survivor Jack Rosenthal from the US displays his prisoner number (Photo: Reuters)