‘I Saw The Horrors’: How Australian Journalists Bore Witness To The Holocaust

The day after Kristallnacht, Berlin, November 1938. Public doman, via Wikimedia Commons

BY FAY ANDERSON

ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF JOURNALISM 

STUDIES, MONASH U NIVERSITY

In the dying days of World War II, startling news about “horror camps” in Germany began to emerge, as Western war correspondents accompanied British and American forces advancing towards Berlin. During the liberation of the camps, soldiers and journalists, including 15 Australian journalists and two artists, encountered thousands of dead. Some victims were in locked rail cars; others were piled in mounds or tossed into pits. Traumatised survivors wandered about the camps, while those too weak to walk remained in stifling huts as their Nazi captors fled.

International Holocaust Remembrance Day is the anniversary of the Soviet liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau Concentration and Extermination Camp on January 27 1945. It is timely, as we commemorate, to reflect on what was known and believed at the time.

As living memory of the Holocaust fades, we need to continue to strive for an accurate reckoning of what took place and account for how it was reported. This obligation is perhaps all the more compelling in the wake of Israel’s relentless and remorseless destruction of Gaza in response to Hamas’ horrific attacks on October 7 2023, which has complicated and perhaps clouded cultural memory of the Holocaust.

Understanding how the press covered the Holocaust illuminates the role of journalism and its contemporary importance. It is not only about looking back.

The Australian press offers a unique dimension to our understanding of the Holocaust. It reveals things about journalism’s complicated engagement with the Nazi’s campaign of extermination, the political and cultural context of the 1930s and 1940s, the comforting myth that emerged after the war that the press “did not know”, and how the Holocaust has influenced modern journalism.

Personal stories were treated as credible. The idea of objectivity was challenged. The importance of visual evidence became widely accepted.

The pre-war coverage

The Australian press coverage of the Third Reich in the 1930s is strikingly reminiscent of how authoritarian figures are characterised today. Hitler was underestimated. He was an object of press fascination and the butt of bemused ridicule.

Throughout the decade, the Australian press published accurate accounts of Hitler’s brand of racial hatred and aggression. It reported his venomous antisemitism and intimidation, the Nuremberg Laws and expropriation decrees, the exodus of Jews and their status as refugees, the infamous pogrom on November 9 and 10 1938 known as Kristallnacht, and the proliferation of concentration camps, a reality in Nazi Germany since 1933.

And yet the coverage was inconsistent, entirely dependent on the will of editors. Widespread coverage did not necessarily translate into empathy or protest.

This was the era of the Immigration Restriction Act – the “White Australia Policy”. A narrow sense of what constituted an Australian national identity informed a discriminatory immigration program predicated on exclusion. The political, cultural and racial values underpinning Australian society complicated the nation’s response to Jewish persecution.

Australia’s discriminatory legislation was hardly unique, but the ambivalent pre-war treatment of Jewish victimisation reflected entrenched anxieties about race. The dehumanising language that has infected current debates about refugees and “border control” in Australia has its antecedents in the 1930s and 1940s.

Jewish refugees were conceived as a problem and a threat. Jewish migrants, particularly those from Eastern Europe, were regarded as clannish and overly “political” (either covertly communist or innately Zionist) and simply not “white” enough. Sections of the national press staunchly defended the national immigration policy, echoing entrenched grievances and pandering to xenophobia. Other editors frequently echoed the pervasive political belief that Jewish refugees and all non-white migrants threatened social cohesion.

In response to the tumultuous events in Germany, several news editors began to campaign (with qualifications) for a relaxation of the restrictive immigration policy. But other publications continued to defend the restrictions, calling on the government to “halt unrestricted Jewish influx”.

Accounts of Nazi terror

Unlike the racial policies and persecution of the 1930s, the mass extermination of the Jews during the war was not committed openly. Despite the secrecy and military priorities, the Australian press published fragmented but frequent wire accounts of “Nazi terror”. Deportations, enforced slavery, executions, ghettos and the establishment of concentration and extermination camps all featured in the press.

The number of articles in Australian daily newspapers recording the killing of Jews increased dramatically in the second half of 1942, after the London-based Polish government-in-exile released a shocking report they had received from the Bund, the Jewish Socialist Labor Party in Warsaw. The report documented the slaughter of 700,000 Jews and stated that “mass extermination” had begun.

The frequency of such articles revealed an editorial willingness to focus on the Jewish plight, despite the fierce competition for news space as the war against the Japanese intensified. Some news outlets, including small regional mastheads, diligently published extensive and accurate coverage of the persecution of Jews throughout the war.

Other publications, however, failed to maintain continuous coverage, despite the agonising enormity of events. Relying for the most part on wire accounts rather than journalists’ eyewitness reports, the news did not always generate sustained interest.

Godfrey Blunden, an Australian war correspondent accredited with Sydney’s Daily Telegraph, was based in the Soviet Union for 16 months. He insisted that his reports on the murder of the Jews in Russia be read and believed.

Blunden suspected there was a resistance to acknowledging what was happening, within the newspaper industry and the wider public. But if the Australian public in Sydney and Melbourne paid close attention, the evidence of the Jewish fate was unambiguous.

Liberation reports

On 22 July 1944, Soviet forces reached Majdanek near Lublin, Poland. The Soviets had invited a phalanx of journalists and photographers, including James Aldridge, a journalist with the Melbourne Herald, to witness the liberation. It was another six months before Auschwitz-Birkenau was liberated.

It is striking that, while the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau has taken on an epochal significance, the event was not regarded as especially significant at the time. The absence of Western journalists and the resistance to acknowledging the Soviet role in the liberation meant that most major newspapers provided only vague details. Many reports were buried in the inner recesses of newspapers or not published at all, suggesting to the public that the revelations were not of central significance and possibly unreliable.

By late April 1945, however, the revelations of the “Final Solution” were no longer deemed secondary by Australian news organisations. Western war correspondents and photographers descended on the newly liberated concentration camps and the newspapers published their harrowing dispatches. The News in Adelaide published Ronald Monson’s searing report under the headline “I saw the Horrors of Belsen camp”.

What can the reporting of the liberation of the camps tell us about the Australian press? The overwhelming preoccupation in the eyewitness accounts was the insistence that the testimony had to be both believed and remembered, and that their role provided moral clarity. It was also apparent that these first-hand accounts by Western journalists were privileged and accepted.

Historians have tended to focus on the impact and representational ramifications of the visual coverage of the concentration camp horrors. But the textual reports were crucial and would have a lasting influence. In Australia, it ushered a new style of journalism: personal and intimate, subjective and emotional. Journalists did not just relate news of the camps; they became central to the story as first-person narrators, eyewitnesses to a vast and terrible crime against humanity.

Another dimension of the reports was the journalists’ self-awareness in recognising the limitations of their professional craft. Although they were cognisant of the Nazi extermination campaign, most had not viewed the physical evidence. They were forced to process their trauma as they gathered information. Reporting difficulties were compounded by a male-dominated work culture that extolled stoicism and emotional detachment.

Objectivity, the cherished principle of reporting practice, was challenged by the camps. Here is the noted war reporter Osmar White (best known for his vivid rendering of Australia’s military campaign in New Guinea), after visiting Buchenwald and moving among its “living dead”:


I cannot now, or ever will be able to write objectively about what I have seen. One cannot observe war for three and a half years as a newspaperman and remain either a sentimentalist or be super sensitive of spectacles of human suffering. Yet what I saw today moved me to physical illness.

Journalists accepted and at times embraced the Australian brand of journalistic swagger. But their humbling experience of the camps encouraged a gentler, more empathetic form of reporting, one that allowed the survivors’ humanity to emerge.

Other accounts, however, seemed to revel in the horror and reduce the victims to anonymous caricatures. The immense linguistic and representational challenge of communicating a crime as big as the Holocaust was one thing; the tendency to minimise, distort and even deny the known facts was another.

In Australia, there is evidence that some news outlets recognised the camps as the terrible consummation of an incremental anti-Jewish policy. Yet doubts about the revelations of the Nazis’ extermination campaign persisted. Brian Penton, the editor of the Daily Telegraph, was moved to issue a damning editorial in April 1945, headlined “You Must Believe It Now!”. Significantly, some newspapers presented the graphic concentration camp photographs as the ultimate proof of the Nazi atrocity, though photographs of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau would not be published in Australian newspapers until the Nuremberg trials began in November 1945.

For all the prejudices and insecurities that infiltrated the national reckoning with the Holocaust, the Australian coverage compares favourably to that of the British and American press. In Australia, there was not a pervasive tendency to universalise or conflate the Jewish plight with other populations – a tendency that negated the fact that Jews were systematically targeted.

Postwar coverage

Australian coverage of the Holocaust was marked by numerous examples of tenacious reporting and courageous editorial commitment to publishing the truth. But it was also marred by degrees of editorial indifference, denial and disbelief, and the selective and self-serving exercise of memory.

The most disturbing example was the myth, propagated by some Australian newspapers at the time, that the annihilation of European Jewry was something of a surprise. The press were inconsistent for most of the war in their treatment of the genocide. Arguably a greater failure was the coverage of the victims after their liberation from the camps.

The treatment of the revelations in Australia varied according to the editors. Some, like Brian Penton, published frequent accounts on the brutalities committed against Jews. Others treated these as isolated incidents, burying such reports or, worse still, omitting the Jewish experience entirely. The evidence and memories were distorted in the postwar debates in Australia about Jewish migration.

Jewish persecution did not cease with the end of the war, nor did the survivors’ suffering end with their liberation. Unfortunately, the robustness of the Australian coverage of the long ordeal did not extend to its aftermath. The documented atrocities quickly faded from public consciousness. The survivors’ stories and faces seemed paradoxically to be confined to the moment of their liberation.

The sensational war trials refocused attention on the Jewish plight, but were quickly forgotten and overtaken by other events. News practices and priorities, which relegated the Holocaust to old news, diminished the Jewish fate and diluted public sympathy.

This, in turn, influenced attitudes to Jewish refugees at the very time the federal Labor government was launching Australia’s postwar immigration program. The partial obfuscation of Jews as the key targets of the Nazi regime was useful to those who sought to exclude Jewish migrants. Widespread resistance to acknowledging the extent of their mistreatment led to the revival of antisemitic tropes and stereotypes, uncomfortably redolent of Nazi sentiment.

Access and reporting

Nonetheless, as the years passed, the liberation of the concentration camps became one of the defining memories of the war for the journalists themselves. Holocaust consciousness and the journalists’ pride in their role as witnesses to the truly calamitous events had taken hold by the 1970s. There was also a growing acknowledgement of the Jewish people’s immense contribution to Australia.

Tragically, International Holocaust Remembrance Day this year will be marked in Australia in the wake of the horrifying Bondi Beach massacre, and amid increased and emboldened antisemitism and online disinformation.

The Holocaust had a profound influence on Australian journalism and, more specifically, the coverage of genocide. But in one way, it did not change reporting. The representation of crisis and conflict in the media continues to be determined by who does the seeing and who does the telling. More importantly, it is shaped by the political agendas of editors and media owners, and by politics itself.

If journalists are silenced or denied access, and if press organisations refuse to cover a story (or if they provide a skewed rendering), humanitarian crises become a secondary story at best. This is seen most recently and starkly in Gaza today, with Israel’s tight control of the conflict’s narrative by limiting entry into Gaza itself, preventing independent journalism and regaling journalists with carefully curated versions of events.

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When It Comes To Neo-Nazis, We Can’t Legislate Our Way To Safety

Neo-Nazi leader Thomas Sewell (centre) speaks to media outside court. Con Chronis/AAP

BY GREG BARTON

CHAIR IN GLOBAL ISLAMIC POLITICS,

ALFRED DEAKIN INSTITUTE FOR

CITENZENSHIP AND GLOBALIZATION,

DEAKIN UNIVERSITY

What sort of legislation do we need to stop neo-Nazis marching through our streets and threatening our social cohesion?

It certainly makes sense to consider incremental changes such as banning the Nazi swastika and the wearing of full-face masks when protesting.

But really, the question is not what sort of legislation we need. The question is what sort of legislature - sort of parliament - will keep us safe?

It is reasonable to adjust laws to respond to changing threats, but we need to recognise we can’t legislate our way to safety. Australia already has some of the most extensive counterterrorism legislation in the world. Any changes we make now will bring – at best – incremental gains. And nothing we do is without cost and risk. If we succumb to the temptation to broaden the meaning of terrorism in the law, we will almost certainly weaken our counterterrorism apparatus and discredit it in the process.

Lessons from Germany

Instead of focusing on improving legislation, our focus needs to be on strengthening democracy. The experience of two leading Western democracies serve as salient reminders of the challenge we’re facing.

Probably no Western democracy has done more to counter Nazi and neo-Nazi ideas and their expression than modern Germany. If ever tighter legislation was going to keep us safe from the rise of fascism, it would have done so in Germany.

Sadly, that is not the case. Germany faces a massive problem of neo-Nazi recruitment in the ranks of the uniformed services and across German society, despite all the carefully constructed barriers against it.

Even more worrying is the rise of support for far-right politics in Germany. Every year the extremist Alternative Für Deutschland (AfD) party steadily gains ground, and were it not for the “firewall” designed to keep parties such as the AfD out of governing coalitions, the strength of its popular support would surely have earned it a place in government by now.

In fact, it is looking increasingly difficult to see how AfD can be kept out of power in Germany. And while it denies its clear neo-Nazi heritage, the party openly campaigns on ideas associated with white supremacists and “Germany for Germans”.

An alternative: strengthening democracy

Even more worrying than the case of Germany is that of the United States and the great Republican elephant in the room. In his first term as president, Donald Trump’s administration was divided and reluctant to implement his radical agenda. But in his second presidency, a very different administration team is working with a worrying sense of sycophantic purpose to bring about a radical reinvention of US politics and the end of US democracy as we have known it.

The Republican Party in Congress no longer works to block the president’s radical agenda. Instead, we are witnessing the implementation at scale and at a rapid pace of the radical Project 2025 plans that were carefully drawn up before Trump’s remarkable electoral victory.

The fact that court after court has declared his actions illegal does little to impede the project. The flood-the-zone strategy is clearly working and the guardrails of tradition and public expectation have shown themselves to be disturbingly weak or non-existent.

The nature of this radical agenda is seen most sharply in the ideas, and now fully implemented policy, of Trump’s homeland security advisor Stephen Miller. He has been behind the expansion and aggressive implementation of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) campaign of arrest and deportation. It may not be legal for unidentified, masked ICE officers to profile Latino and other brown Americans then violently apprehend them and bundle them into unmarked vans, and disappear them to remote detention sites for weeks at a time. But that is exactly what ICE is doing.

It would be inaccurate to call Miller a neo-Nazi. But what is not debatable is that he is openly supporting, and implementing, white supremacist “great replacement” ideas without any sense of shame or any level of accountability. Trump’s so-called Big Beautiful Bill expanded the ICE budget to the point it is larger than all but a few of the world’s national militaries.

The campaigning ahead of the 2025 federal elections in Australia saw some political actors promoting a narrative based on the politics of fear. They were spectacularly unsuccessful, and that that should give us confidence in our democratic system.

But we cannot afford to take it for granted that we will not quickly face the sort of problems currently seen in Germany and the US. Australia has a long history of institutionalised racism, from the frontier wars through the decades of the white Australia policy, and the demonising of asylum seekers arriving by boat.

At the same time our social cohesion holds strong. Each week, thousands take to the street to protest peacefully. So far, the extremist elements who would seek to take advantage of this have gained little traction.

As ugly and pathetic as the sight of neo-Nazis grandstanding in public places is, we must not let their attention-seeking define our framing of the problem. In an open society, there will always be fringe elements saying and doing things that lie on the very edge of the law and that challenge mainstream sensibilities.

In the weeks before the recent anti-immigration marches, Australians of colour experienced the chilling fear that can come from these kinds of political stunts.

But the real risk in Australia comes not from the shrill voices of fascist extremists prancing in public places. Rather, it comes from a slide into the wholesale demonising of migrants in our public discourse. If we can address this, not only will we see fewer Australians drawn to the ugly intolerance and open racism of neo-Nazism, we will be doing the one thing that can really make us safer: strengthening our democracy.

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BOOK REVIEW: A Personal Ad Saved His Father From The Nazis. That Was Just The Start.

At age 11, the author’s father fled Austria and, thanks to an ad in The Manchester Guardian, found a foster home in Wales.Credit...via Julian Borger

BY SYLVIA BROWNRIGG

In October 1938, soon after Robert Borger arrived at the Welsh home of his new foster parents, a teacher friend of theirs offered to take the 11-year-old refugee for a walk. “He went along, pale and trembling,” his son Julian Borger writes, reconstructing his father’s early days in Britain after a fraught exit from Austria. Robert Borger admitted later that he had been sure the man intended to kill him.

His foster parents, the Bingleys, removed their teakettle’s whistle, as the sound reminded Bobby of the violent mobs of SA Brownshirts and Hitler Youth who had recently chased him through Vienna’s streets. Borger’s riveting book is filled with such vivid details, as he recounts seven Jewish children’s escapes from Austria after the Anschluss, “the original catastrophe” in their lives, when Hitler’s troops marched into their country and were met with ecstatic crowds welcoming the new regime. Through painstaking research the author, a Guardian writer and editor, has traced the paths of his young subjects, whose parents placed ads in the same paper, then called The Manchester Guardian, in the hopes of finding British sponsors.

Borger’s book has a personal angle. It was only in 2021 that, seeking to explore his father’s history, he first read the following words in the Aug. 3, 1938, archive: “I Seek a kind person who will educate my intelligent Boy, aged 11, Viennese of good family. Borger, 5/12 Hintzerstrasse, Vienna 3.”

The tragedy that opens Borger’s narrative is not, however, Kristallnacht or Robert’s own father being sent to Dachau; it is, rather, Robert’s death by suicide in 1983.

As Julian and his family reel, it falls to him as the eldest sibling to make some of the necessary calls. When he reaches Nans Bingley, who continued to be “a kind, calm, grandmotherly presence” in their lives, her response is stark: “Robert was the Nazis’ last victim. They got him in the end.”

Decades later, the author recalls that perceptive remark as he uncovers episodes from Robert’s early years, the Nazi theft of his father’s successful business and Robert’s subsequent train departure with his mother, who found a position in England as a domestic servant.

Borger’s painstaking search for others listed in the ads leads him to correspondents in Israel and California, New York and the Netherlands. Folding in these other experiences, largely gleaned from exchanges with the survivors’ children, broadens and deepens Borger’s poignant account.

These heartbreaking ads — “FERVENT prayer in great distress. Who would give a Home to a grammar school scholar aged 13: healthy, clever, very musical” — appeared amid the mundane surround of a daily newspaper. Like all the ads, a Boy called Fred’s “was on the second page, alongside the listener’s guide to radio programs, which that day included some new film music by Arthur Bliss.” (This was before the lifesaving Kindertransport, started in November 1938; throughout “I Seek a Kind Person,” the reader is reminded of an earlier Britain, which took to its post-imperial heart the mission of rescuing at least some asylum seekers.)

Each harrowing story has its own specific surprises of circumstance or geography. We’re taken as far afield as Shanghai, the outpost of resilient Jewish refugees who established a “Little Vienna” loosely governed by the Japanese, until the Nazis arrived to turn the place into a ghetto.

There are those whose ads did not yield placements, but who were able to attain a visa for the United States. One teenager named Gertrude, who was passed repeatedly among foster families in Britain, later wrote agonizingly about “a slow orphanhood,” the period of uncertain years during which she hoped to be reunited with her beloved parents. Their deaths were confirmed only at war’s end, when Gertrude received a letter from the International Committee of the Red Cross.

Encountering Holocaust stories, we never lose the primal shock of the before scenes of normalcy and thriving, contrasted with the after of danger, threat, flight, loss. Perhaps this form crystallizes how possible such catastrophic change always is; certainly it is employed by countless dramas, including Tom Stoppard’s play “Leopoldstadt,” whose Viennese characters and their fates have several echoes in these pages.

Julian Borger’s haunting, revelatory book exists in the shadow of a parent who, like many survivors, spoke little about his past. Part of Borger’s task is to illuminate that anguishing tension between forgetting and remembering.

As Gertrude, who later became Yehudith and moved to Israel, expressed it in a line Borger uses as his epigraph: “I feel as though half of me is fighting the other half by trying to forget, rather than remember, and I realize that is probably what I have been doing all my life.”

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Universities In Nazi Germany and The Soviet Union Thought Giving In To Government Demands Would Save Their Independence

Students and other Nazi supporters gather at Humboldt University in Berlin in 1933. AP Photo

BY IVETA SILOVA

PROFESSOR OF COMPARATIVE 

AND INTERNATIONAL EDUCATION,

ARIZONA STATE UNIVERSITY

Many American universities, widely seen globally as beacons of academic integrity and free speech, are giving in to demands from the Trump administration, which has been targeting academia since it took office.

In one of his first acts, President Donald Trump branded diversity, equity and inclusion programs as discriminatory. His administration also launched federal investigations into more than 50 universities, from smaller regional schools such as Grand Valley State University in Michigan and the New England College of Optometry in Massachusetts to elite private universities such as Harvard and Yale.

Trump ramped up the pressure by threatening university research funding and targeting specific schools. In one example, the Trump administration revoked US$400 million in grants to Columbia University over its alleged failures to curb antisemitic harassment on campus. The school later agreed to most of Trump’s demands, from tightening student protest policies to placing an entire academic department under administrative oversight – though the funding remains frozen.

Cornell, Northwestern, Princeton, Brown and the University of Pennsylvania have also recently had grants frozen. Harvard was sent a list of demands in order to keep $9 billion in federal funding.

Now, across the United States, many universities are trying to avoid being Trump’s next target. Administrators are dismantling DEI initiatives – closing and rebranding offices, eliminating positions, revising training programs and sanitizing diversity statements – while professors are preemptively self-censoring.

Not all institutions are complying. Some schools, such as Wesleyan, have refused to abandon their diversity principles. And organizations including the American Association of University Professors have filed lawsuits challenging Trump’s executive orders, arguing they violate academic freedom and the First Amendment.

But these remain exceptions, as the broader trend leans toward institutional caution and retreat.

As a scholar of comparative and international education, I study how academic institutions respond to authoritarian pressure – across political systems, cultural contexts and historical moments. While some universities may believe that compliance with the administration will protect their funding and independence, a few historical parallels suggest otherwise.

German universities: A lesson

In the 1975 book “The Abuse of Learning: The Failure of German Universities,” historian Frederic Lilge chronicles how German universities, which entered the 20th century in a golden age of global intellectual influence, did not resist the Nazi regime but instead adapted to it.

Even before seizing national power in 1933, the Nazi Party was closely monitoring German universities through nationalist student groups and sympathetic faculty, flagging professors deemed politically unreliable – particularly Jews, Marxists, liberals and pacifists.

After Hitler took office in 1933, his regime moved swiftly to purge academic institutions of Jews and political opponents. The 1933 Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service mandated the firing of Jewish and other “non-Aryan” professors and members of the faculty deemed politically suspect.

Soon after, professors were required to swear loyalty to Hitler, curricula were overhauled to emphasize “national defense” and “racial science” – a pseudoscientific framework used to justify antisemitism and Aryan supremacy – and entire departments were restructured to serve Nazi ideology.

Some institutions, such as the Technische Hochschule Stuttgart, even rushed to honor Hitler with an honorary doctorate within weeks of his rise to power. He declined the offer, though the gesture signaled the university’s eagerness to align with the regime. Professional associations, such as the Association of German Universities, stayed silent, ignoring key opportunities to resist before universities lost their autonomy and became subservient to the Nazi state.

As linguist Max Weinreich wrote in his 1999 book “Hitler’s Professors,” many academics didn’t just comply, they enabled the regime by reshaping their research. This legitimized state doctrine, helping build the intellectual framework of the regime.

A few academics resisted and were dismissed, exiled or executed. Most did not.

The transformation of German academia was not a slow drift but a swift and systemic overhaul. But what made Hitler’s orders stick was the eagerness of many academic leaders to comply, justify and normalize the new order. Each decision – each erased name, each revised syllabus, each closed program and department – was framed as necessary, even patriotic. Within a few years, German universities no longer served knowledge – they served power.

It would take more than a decade after the war, through denazification, reinvestment and international reintegration, for West German universities to begin regaining their intellectual standing and academic credibility.

USSR and fascist Italy suffer similar fate

Other countries that have fallen under authoritarian regimes followed similar trajectories.

In fascist Italy, the shift began not with violence but with a signature. In 1931, the Mussolini regime required all university professors to swear an oath of loyalty to the state. Out of more than 1,200, only 12 refused.

Many justified their compliance by insisting the oath had no bearing on their teaching or research. But by publicly affirming loyalty and offering no organized resistance, the academic community signaled its willingness to accommodate the regime. This lack of opposition allowed the fascist government to tighten control over universities and use them to advance its ideological agenda.

In the Soviet Union, this control was not limited to symbolic gestures – it reshaped the entire academic system.

After the Russian Revolution in 1917, the Bolsheviks oscillated between wanting to abolish universities as “feudal relics” and repurposing them to serve a socialist state, as historians John Connelly and Michael Grüttner explain in their book “Universities Under Dictatorship.” Ultimately, they chose the latter, remaking universities as instruments of ideological education and technical training, tightly aligned with Marxist-Leninist goals.

Under Josef Stalin, academic survival depended less on scholarly merit than on conformity to official doctrine. Dissenting scholars were purged or exiled, history was rewritten to glorify the Communist Party, and entire disciplines such as genetics were reshaped to fit political orthodoxy.

This model was exported across Eastern and Central Europe during the Cold War. In East Germany, Czechoslovakia and Poland, ministries dictated curricula, Marxism-Leninism became mandatory across disciplines, and admissions were reengineered to favor students from loyalist backgrounds. In some contexts, adherents to older intellectual traditions pushed back, especially in Poland, where resistance slowed though could not prevent the imposition of ideological control.

By the early 1950s, universities across the region had become what Connelly calls “captive institutions,” stripped of independence and recast to serve the state.

A more recent example is Turkey, where, following the failed 2016 coup, more than 6,000 academics were dismissed, universities were shuttered and research deemed “subversive” was banned.

History’s warning

The Trump administration’s early and direct intervention into higher education governance echoes historical attempts to bring universities under state influence or control.

The administration says it is doing so to eradicate “discrimatory” DEI policies and fight what it sees as antisemitism on college campuses. But by withholding federal funding, the administration is also trying to force universities into ideological conformity – by dictating whose knowledge counts but also whose presence and perspectives are permissible on campus.

Columbia’s reaction to Trump’s demands sent a clear message: Resistance is risky, but compliance may be rewarded – though the $400 million has yet to be restored. The speed and scope of its concessions set a precedent, signaling to other universities that avoiding political fallout now may mean rewriting policies, reshaping departments and retreating from controversy, perhaps before anyone even asks.

The Trump administration has already moved on to other universities, including the University of Pennsylvania over its transgender policies, Princeton for its climate programs and Harvard over alleged antisemitism. The question is which school is next.

The Department of Education has launched investigations into over 50 institutions, accusing them of using “racial preferences and stereotypes in education programs and activities.” How these institutions choose to respond may determine whether higher education remains a space for open inquiry.

The pressure to conform is not just financial – it is also cultural. Faculty at some institutions are being advised not to use “DEI” in emails and public communication, with warnings to not be a target. Academics are removing pronouns from their email signatures and asking their students to comply, too. I’ve been on the receiving end of those warnings, and so have my counterparts at other institutions. And students on visas are being warned not to travel outside the U.S. after several were deported or denied reentry due to alleged involvement in protests.

Meanwhile, people inside and outside academia are combing websites, syllabi, presentations and public writing in search of what they consider ideological infractions. This type of peer surveillance can reward silence, incentivize erasure and turn institutions against their own.

When universities start regulating not just what they say but what they teach, support and stand for – driven by fear rather than principle – they are no longer just reacting to political threats, they are internalizing them. And as history has shown, that may mark the beginning of the end of their academic independence.

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American Liberators Of Nazi Camps Got ‘A Lifelong Vaccine Against Extremism’ − Their Wartime Experiences Are A Warning For Today

American liberators rolling into the Mauthausen concentration camp on May 5, 1945, as photographed by prisoner Francesc Boix. Sgt. Harry Saunders is standing on the left fender. Francesc Boix/Courtesy of Collections of the Mauthausen Memorial

BY SARA J. BRENNEIS

ANDREW W. MELLON

PROFESSOR OF SPANISH,

AMHERST COLLEGE

When American soldiers liberated the Mauthausen Nazi concentration camp in Austria 80 years ago this May, Spanish prisoners welcomed them with a message of antifascist solidarity.

The Spaniards hung a banner made from stolen bed sheets over one of Mauthausen’s gates. In English, Spanish and Russian, it read: “The Spanish Antifascists Greet the Liberating Forces.”

Both American servicemen and Spanish survivors remember the camp’s liberation as a win in their shared fight against extremism, my research on the Spanish prisoners in Mauthausen finds. They all understood the authoritarian governments of Nazi Germany, Italy and Spain as fascist regimes that used extremist views rooted in intolerance and nationalism to persecute millions of people and imperil democracy across Europe.

World War II, the Holocaust and the horrors of Nazi violence have no modern equivalent. Nevertheless, extremism is now threatening democracy in the United States in recognizable ways.

As the Trump administration executes summary deportations, works to suppress dissent, fundamentally restructures the federal government and defies judges, experts warn that the country is turning toward authoritarianism.

As a scholar of the Mauthausen camp, I believe that understanding how American soldiers and Spanish prisoners experienced its liberation offers a valuable lesson on the real and present dangers of extremism.

‘We knew then why we had to stop Hitler’

In 1938, the Nazis established Mauthausen, a forced labor camp in Austria, with an international prisoner population. My research shows that the Nazis murdered 16,000 Jews and 66,000 non-Jewish prisoners at Mauthausen between 1938 and 1945, including 60% of the roughly 7,200 Spaniards imprisoned there.

The Spanish prisoners were committed antifascist resistors sent there in 1940 and 1941. Known as Republicans or Loyalists, they had fought against Francisco Franco in the Spanish Civil War and Adolf Hitler in World War II.

The young men with the 11th Armored Division of the U.S. Army who liberated Mauthausen would never forget the moment they discovered the camp. It was May 5, 1945, just days before the war ended in Europe. A platoon led by Staff Sgt. Albert J. Kosiek was repairing bridges in this tucked-away corner of Austria when a Swiss Red Cross delegate alerted them to a large Nazi concentration camp nearby.

Mauthausen’s international survivors were among the Nazis’ last prisoners to be freed.

George Sherman was a 19-year-old tank gunner from Brooklyn when his patrol found Mauthausen. He was Jewish and had read about the Nazi camps in Europe in the Army’s newspaper.

Still, seeing a concentration camp with his own eyes was alarming.

“The piles of bodies” struck him, he remembered in an oral history recorded for the University of South Florida in 2008. So did “these people walking around like God knows – skeletons and whatnot.”

Sgt. Harry Saunders, a 23-year-old radio operator from Chicago, also remembered the moment he saw the Mauthausen survivors. They were men and women of all nationalities.

“The live skeletons, the people that were in the camp, it was indescribable, it was such a shock,” he said in a 2002 interview for the Mauthausen Memorial’s Oral History Collection in Vienna.

One of the Spanish prisoners at Mauthausen, Francesc Boix, had stolen a camera from the SS in the chaotic moments before the camp’s liberation. Boix photographed Sgt. Saunders rumbling into the concentration camp on an armored car.

Saunders kept that photograph for the rest of his life. It captured a moment of clarity for him.

“When we liberated Mauthausen, we really knew then why we had to stop Hitler and why we really went to war,” he said in the interview.

Frank Hartzell, a technical sergeant with the 11th Armored Division, was 20 when he helped to liberate Mauthausen. He turned 100 this year. We met in mid-March 2025 and discussed his wartime experience.

“What I saw and experienced appalled me,” Hartzell told me.

The outrage has stayed with him for 80 years.

‘Starved and crippled but alive’

The American liberators toured the gas chambers and the crematory ovens in Mauthausen.

Maj. Franklin Lee Clark saw the dead stacked up in “piles like cord wood to the point that they had to bring in bulldozers and make mass graves,” and took photos to document it.

Soldiers from the 11th Armored Division directed locals to bury the men and women murdered by the Nazis. The local Austrians claimed they had not known about their town’s concentration camp. But a farmer who lived nearby had been upset about all the dead bodies visible from her property. She filed a complaint asking the Nazis either to stop “these inhuman deeds” or do them “where one does not see it.”

The American liberators made sure that the townspeople could no longer look away from the murderous rampage carried out in their backyards.

While Boix was taking photos of American soldiers during liberation, the soldiers were taking photos of the welcome banner the Spaniards had painted.

On the back of one snapshot, a Signal Corps soldier typed out his impressions of their message: “I really know what that word (antifascist) means. We liberated these prisoners in the Mauthausen concentration camp near Linz, Austria. They were Poles, Hungarians and Spanish Loyalists (remember the Loyalists?). They had men and women in this camp. Starved and crippled but alive.”

After Mauthausen was liberated, the freed Loyalists set to work documenting the Nazis’ crimes. Along with his countrymen Joan de Diego, Casimir Climent and others, Spanish survivor Joaquín López Raimundo compiled lists of Mauthausen victims and their Nazi captors. Using the Nazis’ own typewriters, they spent two weeks listing the names and personal details of Spanish victims of Mauthausen and of the SS who had killed them.

The result was page after page of evidence they handed over to American war crimes investigators and the International Red Cross.

Boix, meanwhile, gave the Americans hundreds of photo negatives he had rescued from the camp’s photography lab.

Boix later testified about these images in the war crime trials at Nuremberg and Dachau. He described seeing the Nazis beat, torture and murder their victims in Mauthausen and then photograph the bodies. For 2½ years, Boix stole the photographic evidence of their crimes.

He “could not keep those negatives because it was so dangerous,” he testified at Dachau, so he “hid them in various places until the liberation.”

A lifelong vaccine against extremism

For the American liberators, their up-close view of the horrors of Mauthausen and their interactions with the Spanish antifascist survivors was a lifelong vaccine against extremism.

They witnessed how a fascist leader tore the world apart. They saw with their own eyes the death and destruction of political extremism.

When I interviewed Hartzell, he expressed concern that the United States is going down a dangerous path.

“The USA today is not the USA I fought and came close to dying for,” Hartzell told me.

As American Mauthausen liberator Maj. George E. King warned an interviewer in 1980:

“This is the lesson we have to learn: It could happen here.”

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Jewelry Seized From Polish Inmates Of Nazi German Concentration Camps Is Returned To Families

The director of Germany's Arolsen Archives Floriane Azoulay, talks to the relatives of 12 inmates of World War ll Nazi Germany's concentration camps at the start of a ceremony in which the relatives were given back personal items and jewelry that the Nazis had seized during the war and which were recently stored at the archives, in Warsaw, Poland, Tuesday September 10, 2024. (AP Photo/Czarek Sokolowski) 

BY MONIKA SCISLOWSKA

WARSAW, POLAND (AP) — Stanislawa Wasilewska was 42 when she was captured by Nazi German troops on Aug. 31, 1944, in Warsaw and sent to the women’s concentration camp at Ravensbrück, Germany. From there, she was sent to the Neuengamme forced labor camp, where she was given prisoner number 7257 and had her valuables seized.

Eighty years later, Germany’s Arolsen Archives returned Wasilewska’s jewelry to her grandson and great-granddaughter at an emotional ceremony in Warsaw late Tuesday during which families of 12 Polish inmates of World War II Nazi German concentration camps were given back their confiscated belongings.

Some relatives had tears in their eyes as they received the mementoes of their long-gone, often unknown family members. More such ceremonies are planned.

Wasilewska’s family was given back her two amber crucifixes, part of a golden bracelet and a gold wristwatch engraved with the initials KW and the date 7-3-1938, probably marking her wedding to Konstanty Wasilewski.

“This is an important moment in our lives, because this is a story that we did not fully know about and it came to light,” Wasilewska’s great-granddaughter, Malgorzata Koryś, 35, told The Associated Press.

When Nazi Germany was defeated in 1945, Wasilewska was taken by the Red Cross from Neuengamme to Sweden, but later returned to Poland. She is buried in her native Grodzisk Mazowiecki, near Warsaw.





From another family, Adam Wierzbicki, 29, was given two rings which belonged to Zofia Strusińska and a golden chain and tooth filling of Józefa Skórka, two married sisters of his great-grandfather, Stanislaw Wierzbicki. Captured together on Aug. 4, like Wasilewska, the sisters also went through Ravensbrück and Neuengamme before the Red Cross took them to Sweden.

A family story has it that a Swedish man fell in love with one of the sisters and wanted them both to stay, promising to take care of them, but they decided to go back to Poland, Wierzbicki said.

The return of their jewelry is “important for sentimental reasons but also for historical reasons,” Wierzbicki told the AP.

The items were returned by the Arolsen Archives, the international center on Nazi persecution, which holds information on about 17.5 million people. It stores some 2,000 items which were seized by the Nazis from concentration camp inmates from more than 30 countries, and are intended to be returned to their relatives.

When the prisoners were sent to concentration camps, their valuables — wedding rings, watches, gold chains, earrings and other items — were confiscated and put in envelopes marked with their owners’ names. That allowed for the items’ return to the families, 80 years later.

It was an uplifting moment when the archives volunteers contacted him, Wierzbicki said, but there was also the thought that “history will catch up with you. It was like my aunts were looking at me from the past.”

The archives launched its restitution campaign, “Warsaw Uprising: 100 Untold Stories,” to mark 80 years since the city rose up against the Nazi invaders on Aug. 1, 1944, with the goal of reaching the families of 100 victims and reviving the memory of them through their belongings.

Archive director Floriane Azoulay said they are only custodians of the belongings, which should be returned to the families.

“Every object that we return is personal,” Azoulay said. “And it’s the last personal thing a person had on them before they became a prisoner, before they became a number. So it is a very important object for a family.”

Volunteer Manuela Golc has found more than 100 Polish families and each time it’s an emotional moment.

“It is often the case that we pass on information that the family was not aware of at all,” Golc said. “So this conversation on the phone ... is also very difficult. But in the end we are very happy that the memento is returning to the family.”

If she was unable to trace a family online or through official records, she traveled to cemeteries, leaving notes waterproofed against the rain for the families on the graves of people whose data matched those in the archives, asking them to get in touch.

The Warsaw Uprising was launched by the underground resistance Home Army with the goal of taking control of the capital city ahead of the advancing Soviet troops. It fell after 63 days of heroic struggle that cost the lives of some 200,000 fighters and civilians. In revenge, the Germans expelled the surviving residents and reduced Warsaw to ruins.

During German occupation in 1939-45, Poland lost some 6 million residents, half of them Jewish, and suffered huge material losses.

The “Return”–Distribution Of Wealth In Germany – A Book Review

BY THOMAS KLIKAUER

Ever since Karl Marx – in fact, with some knowing it even before Marx – capitalism had been distributing wealth unequally. Having established himself as one of Germany’s foremost experts on poverty, Christoph Butterwegge’s most recent book is about the redistribution as well as what he calls the return-distribution of wealth. His German language book is divided into three engaging and highly readable chapters asking the following questions, starting with “Why does socio-economic inequality exist?”. Followed by the second chapter asking, “Why is social inequality on the rise?” while the final chapter is asking “What to do and what will be successful?”.

After quoting Albert Einstein on there is enough money for all if it only were distributed equally (p. 7), Butterwegge notes that there is an upward redistribution of wealth from the poor to the rich. The not-so-socialist RAND corporation thinks that the shifting of wealth towards the rich amounts to about USD2.5 trillion – 2,500,000,000,000 – in the USA alone. In other words, capitalism remains inextricably linked to economic and social inequality. Correctly, Butterwegge argues that ‘inequality is neither natural nor God-given’ (p. 8). Instead, he sees three reasons for inequality in Germany (p. 8):

Faulty decision by Germany’s parliament and the government,
The de-regulation of the labour market,
The destruction of the welfare state and the deformation of the tax system.

As a good-hearted academic, Butterwegge thinks that decisions made by parliaments and governments can be ‘faulty’. However, this might not always be the case since many decisions are, as a matter of fact, made deliberately. It is by no means as Jesus once said, “father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing” (Luke 23:34). Most politicians know exactly what they are doing. Instead of insinuating their innocence, it might be more a case of “we have the best politician that money can buy”. In any case, Butterwegge is also correct when he emphasises that there is ‘no single cause’ (p. 9) for inequality.

It is more likely that Jean-Jacques Rousseau (p. 11) was correct when saying that the trouble started with the first man, having enclosed a piece of ground, bethought himself of saying, this is mine, and found people simple enough to believe him. To make people believe in the positives of private property, corporate media (Ali 2022) never grew tired to hammer just that. Yet, private property also has ‘negative consequences’ (p. 12). And of course, Adam Smith was correct in emphasising that the rich have an interest to ‘keep the established order’ (p. 14) so that all remains as it is.

Butterwegge also argues that the purpose of a ‘bourgeois government is to safeguard wealth against the poor’ (p. 14). In other words, ‘social inequality depends on the complicity of the state’ (p. 15; cf. Pistor 2019). One way to secure wealth against the poor is the idea of a welfare state (p. 16). The author notes, same condition that produces wealth also produces poverty (p. 17). Butterwegge also says that poverty cannot be eliminated within the conditions of an existing order. Such an order cannot even control the ever-increasing level of inequality (p. 17).

Subsequently, Butterwegge notes that if you like ‘to eliminate poverty, you need to eliminate wealth’ (p. 18). This might be so ever since capitalism has created economic inequality. This inequality, so the author says, is a necessary function of capitalism (p. 18). The function of a government “under” capitalism is also to secure the transferal of wealth from one generation to the next. In Germany, this applies mostly to the already wealthy. Butterwegge states that, ‘a large number of families inherit nothing’ (p. 25) outside of a standard bank account, personal belongings, household furniture … and a used car (p. 25).

Yet, there are some who can transfer stratospheric wealth in Germany – wealth that were simply stolen from Jewish families during Nazi-Aryanisation or what Butterwegge calls ‘brown inheritance’ (p. 25). These are Germany’s ‘Günther Quandt, Friedrich Flick, August Baron von Fink, Gustav Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach, and Ferdinand Porsche’ (p. 25) – all of whom enabled or colluded with Hitler’s Nazi regime and all got wealthy. Much of their wealth came from a ‘lucrative collaboration with the Nazi regime’ (p. 25).

Shortly after the liberation form Nazim, Germany’s post-Nazi propaganda sold it as Germany’s Economic Miracle (Alt & Schneider 1962) or Wirtschaftwunder (p. 25). West-German propaganda has even achieved the seemingly unachievable. It was made to appear as if on the ‘eve of June 20, 1948, all Germans started with the same wealth of 40 Reichsmark’ (p. 30) – the predecessor of Germany’s Deutsche Mark. Yet, in addition to owning factories, corporate bosses also received ‘60 Reichsmark per employee’ (p. 30). At the same time, ‘workers and civil servants often lost their entire bank savings’ (p. 30). In the subsequent years, ‘profits exploded while wages grew rather slowly contributing to inequality’ (p. 39). Yet, many Germans continued to believe in the media-induced hope of individual advancement.

Decades later, the rise of ‘neo-liberalism contributed to the production of inequality like nothing before’ (p. 43). Butterwegge argues that neo-liberalism is nothing but ‘the triumph of tax-inequality’ (p. 44). To keep workers in check, ‘globalisation, demographic change, and digitalisation became the new threats’ (p. 48). Despite the many high-sounding claims about the ‘death of neo-liberalism, neo-liberalism continues ‘to contribute decisively to the deepening gap between rich and poor’ (p. 49).

Furthermore, Butterwegge predicts that ‘the stagnating and possibly declining future population and the steady growth of Germany’s GDP should lead to an economic outcome that would be enough for all’ (p. 52). Set against this is the ideology that ‘everyone is responsible for their success or failure’ (p. 59). Yet, ‘nobody can really judge whether the performance of a manager and that of a sales-assistant or pre-school teacher should lead to a higher income’ (p. 63). In other words, ‘it is a myth to associate performance with wealth’ (p. 64). At least since Graeber (2018), we know that there are bullshit jobs – jobs that a society does not need.

Simultaneously, some very much needed jobs like cleaners, delivery drivers, recycling workers, etc. have been confined to a seemingly ever-increasing precariat (Standing 2011). These are workers pushed into Germany’s ‘low wage sector … that too, has led to a rise in poverty’ (p. 72). All of this is not natural as there is no natural law that says a society needs to have inequality. It is also not God-given for it is not God that gave us inequality. Instead, inequality is the result of a deliberate policy. In this case, it was the premeditated policy of social-democrat chancellor Gerhard Schröder – the Genosse der Bosse or comrade of the bosses, as he was known. At a Davos meeting on January 28, 2005, Schröder bombastically announced that he has created ‘the biggest low wage sector in Europe’ (p. 73). Behind Schröder’s low wage sector lurked ‘Hartz IV … a reform of Germany’s labour market and social welfare state’ (p. 74). All too often, the word “reform” serves as an ideological euphemism for pro-business re-regulation.

Worse, Germany’s much acclaimed ‘long-term care insurance [Pflegeversicherung] ended a decade- old policy of burden-sharing in which workers and employers shared the burden equally. With the Pflegeversicherung, costs were offloaded onto workers unilaterally – in short, corporate bosses escaped from their responsibility. Overall, it was just as the billionaire Warren Buffett once said (Stein 2006), there’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.

With the kind assistance of willing politicians, the upper class is indeed winning. Guided by the ideology of neo-liberalism, German tax policy favours the ‘Matthew Principle’ (p. 89), for whoever has will be given more, and they will have an abundance. Whoever does not have, even what they have will be taken from them. On this, Butterwegge also argues that despite Germany’s ‘constitutional obligation, established political parties have systematically supported the accumulation of wealth [Reichtumsförderung]’ (p. 90).

Meanwhile, the discovery of the infamous ‘Panama Papers outlining massive tax avoidance, letterbox companies, dubious trust funds, and offshore banking’ (p. 99) has not changed this. Instead, ‘the wealth of German billionaires grew by $95 billion between March 2019 and July 2020’ (p. 110). For example, the ‘two inventors of a COVID-19 vaccine, Ugur Sahin and Özlem Türeci, became billionaires very quickly’ (p. 110). Yet, ‘research for the vaccine was funded to the tune of €375 million [$404 million] by Germany’s ‘Ministry of Science’ (p. 111). Put simply, taxpayers’ money can assist in the creation of billionaires.

In parallel, corporations like ‘Amazon, Alphabet (Google), Apple, Facebook and Microsoft pay no or next to no taxes’ (p. 111). In ‘March 2020, shortly after the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, Germany’s state supported corporations l’ike Lufthansa, TUI, and Galeria Karstadt Kaufhof with €600 billion’ [$644bn] (p. 111). Simultaneously, Germany’s elderlies who depend on state support had to wait fourteen months until finally receiving a one-off payment of €150’ [$161] (p. 112) – another expression of the ‘Matthew Principle’.

Unsurprisingly, even Germany’s very own federal reserve [Bundesbank] had to admit that ‘inequality in Germany remains very high compared to other European countries’ (p. 117). Yet, with the onset of the Russian-Ukrainian war, many expect that ‘poverty and social inequality will only increase’ while Germany’s ‘Rüstungskonzerne or armament corporations will become even more profitable’ (p. 128).

In the final chapter, Butterwegge advocates for a kind of ‘return-distribution [Rückverteilung] of wealth’ (p. 131) arguing that in a more equal society, people will be happier. The author also says, ‘even though poverty is not an infectious disease, poor people are often treated like a leprous person’ (p. 133). At the same time, rising poverty can be seen in the fact that a whopping ‘22% of school children arrive at school with not having had breakfast’ (p. 134). Meanwhile, Germany’s ‘well over 1,000 food banks have to cover twice as much compared to a time when they were still known as soup kitchens’ (p. 153). Today, Germany also has different ‘food banks just for the homeless, clothing exchanges, special shops for the poor, and winter warm-up rooms’ (p. 153).

With that, the author returns to the above-mentioned ‘3Ds of the deregulation of the labour market, the destruction of the welfare state, and the deformation of Germany’s tax system’ (p. 173). Much of this is made possible through a strong ‘lobby of money’ (p. 185). Eventually, Butterwegge reaches the following – and rather unsurprising – conclusion to his book (p. 188; cf. Széll 2022; Artz 2024),

‘as long as the money-lobby defines Germany’s public opinion, political actors will not be game enough to eliminate inequality in Germany’.

Instead, what is likely to continue is the following: ‘the five richest Germans Albrecht/Heister, Böhringer, Kühne, Quandt/Klatten, and Schwarz will own €250bn [$268bn] that is more than half of what all poor people in Germany own’ (p. 189). As recently as March 2024, ‘the Council of Europe demanded from Germany to do more to eliminate mass poverty and the ever-increasing level of social inequality’ (p. 220).

Sadly, Butterwegge and this is despite calling his final chapter “What to do and what will be successful?”, the author offers very little on how to eliminate inequality. Still, his highly illuminating book carries two important lessons: for one, mass poverty and inequality are neither natural, nor God-given, nor caused by an individual simply making bad decisions as neo-liberalism and conservatives like to make us believe; secondly, there are three structural reasons for mass poverty and inequality. The author identifies them as “3Ds”:

the deregulation of the labour market,
the destruction of the welfare state, and
the deformation of Germany’s tax system’

In the end, Butterwegge’s book is magnificent as it outlines the structural causes of mass poverty and rising inequality. In closing his book, the author has correctly identified the link between the state, capitalism, and the media when saying ‘as long as the money-lobby defines Germany’s public opinion, political actors will not be game enough to eliminate inequality in Germany’.

Finally, Butterwegge did not just name the three key actors, namely ‘the money lobby’ (i.e. capitalism), ‘public opinion’ (i.e. the media), and political actors (i.e. the state, governments, and parliaments). But their collusion and their power leads Butterwegge to say that they ‘will not be game enough to eliminate inequality’. In other words, media capitalism has established a system that makes mass poverty and inequality possible – with, as Butterwegge seemingly argues, next to no way out (Lanning 2013; Jeffries 2016).

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German Ties In West Africa 'Not A Charity Campaign'

Annalena Baerbock and Ivorian President Alassane Ouattara pictured in Abidjan on July 16, 2024

BY ROSALIA ROMANIEC

Germany is pulling its military out of the terror-stricken Sahel region. At the same time, it wants to expand ties in West Africa because the European Union's security depends on the region, Germany's top diplomat says.

The streets of Dakar, the capital of Senegal, are changing. They're still packed with many cars, mopeds and even horse-drawn carriages, which are often stuck in traffic jams. But in the north of the city of four million people, in the socially deprived Parcelles Assainies district, a traffic revolution is taking place.

Just three months ago, it took residents an hour and a half to get to work or school in the city center. Now, it's only half of that. The new fast lane for electric buses only skip the traffic jams and bring Senegalese to their destination quicker.

The express bus system has made Dakar a pioneer of urban mobility in Africa. The buses come from China, but the high-tech control units installed come from CarMedialab near Bruchsal — a company that implements transportation systems with renewable energy worldwide.

Henri Depe Tschatchu, CarMedialab executive manager, accompanied German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock on her latest trip to West Africa. And while the continent is not easy for the German economy to tap into, it is definitely a market of the future. After Dakar, the company wants to expand to Kenya, Nigeria and the Ivory Coast, Tschatchu told DW.

Senegal: Beacon of hope

Baerbock's visit comes shortly after Senegal achieved a democratic change of power. She was accompanied by a 10-member business delegation. The trip aimed to seek more investment in West Africa, in order to contribute to the stabilization of the region.

While military coup leaders rule in the Sahel and terror continues to increase, countries such as Senegal and Ivory Coast, are seen as anchors of stability in the region.

"Senegal has initiated a political change within the democratic system," Baerbock said.

For about 100 days, Senegal has been led by two former opposition members who were until recently political prisoners: President Bassirou Diomaye Faye and Prime Minister Ousmane Sonko.

Their Patriots of Senegal for Work, Ethics and Fraternity (PASTEF) party stands for a return to national values and a break with the colonial era and tradition. Faye and Sonko want to build a self-determined and self-confident Senegal. And, they are looking for investors.

EU security depends on Africa

Senegal's superpower is its young workforce. But basic education and jobs are lacking.

Baerbock said Germany sought to treat its partners in Africa "as equals." That would mean giving projects on the continent better access to favorable loans and financing. At the moment, African players receive significantly worse conditions than Europeans, Baerbock noted.

"This is not a charity campaign, but in our own security interests," Baerbock said. "Wherever we as democracies and Europe do not invest, others invest, creating dependencies that, in case of doubt, are used against us and our security interests."

In the region, the influence of China, Russia and Turkey is growing.

Baerbock said West Africa's coastal countries were currently considered relatively safe and stable. But if the economic upturn in Senegal fades and frustration increases, the situation could change.

If young people have no prospects, they will be more easily recruited by criminal gangs and terrorists or leave their homeland, she said, which would send more displaced people toward Europe. "The security and future opportunities of this region are closely linked to German security."

 
Security still a dominant issue

When Baerbock landed in Abidjan, Ivory Coast, journalists wanted to know why Germany is withdrawing completely from Niger and where it is investing in African security.

Baerbock said the withdrawal would only affect Germany's military presence. Development funds continue to flow because "the people who are suffering from terror can't help it," she explained.

The German government's decision to pull its soldiers out of Niger by the end of August could mean that the Sahelis left entirely to military coup leaders and Russian mercenaries.

Germany supports Ivorian counterterrorism

Compared with the Sahel, Africa's west coast is stable. But for how long?

"I can assure you that Ivory Coast is a stable country and will remain so," Ivorian President Alassane Quattara said in Abidjan. The government has invested a lot and he trusts the "republican Ivorian army."

Ivory Coast is certainly prepared for conflict: Not far from Abidjan is the country's largest training center for forces fighting terrorists. German support for the International Counter-Terrorism Academy amounts to €2.5 million ($2.7 million) per year.

Baerbock saw a training exercise up close. In "Operation Trampoline," a fictitious village controlled by terrorists is liberated by special forces of the Ivorian army.

The German foreign minister asked the commander how often such raids and operations take place. He could not provide a specific figure, but assured Baerbock it happens several times a year.

As Ivory Coast bucks the trend of destabilizing coups in the region, Germany will have the chance to play a meaningful part in the future of West Africa.

Adapted from German by Silja Fröhlich

Edited by: Benita van Eyssen

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Baerbock: Autocrats Exploit Europe's Errors In Africa

Germany Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock

BY VIKTORIYA MILLER

Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock will compete with Russia and China for partnerships among African countries on equal terms. Authoritarian regimes are increasingly reaching out for power and law, criticized the Green politician in a speech at the Goethe-Institut in the Senegalese capital Dakar on Monday evening, referring to Moscow and Beijing. "They also try to exploit the wounds that Europe has left in the world, right here in Africa," added Baerbock.

If Russia does this and at the same time conducts an imperial war, it is grotesque. "But we in Germany, as so-called 'Westerners', must also ask ourselves, even if it is deeply unfair from our perspective: Why this communication?", considered the Foreign Minister. One must deal with the perception in many countries that Europe only aims for dependency instead of co-decision. One should make offers for cooperation that benefit both sides, Baerbock said.

Baerbock cultivates important European partnerships in the region

The Minister gave her speech on the topic of the new Goethe-Institut in Dakar. In the new building, emphasis was placed on sustainability and climate protection. Key topics are, in addition to language courses, decolonization, regional development, and culture and creative industries. The total costs amount to around 4 million Euro.

Baerbock continues her West Africa visit in the Ivory Coast on this Tuesday. Consultations with President Alassane Ouattara and Foreign Minister Léon Kacou Adom are planned in Abidjan, the seat of government of the Ivory Coast.

Baerbock on military training in anti-terror fight

The Foreign Minister will inform herself about the training of soldiers and security forces at an International Academy for Counter-Terrorism approximately 35 kilometers outside Abidjan. There, she will be shown a simulated liberation of a Sahel village from terrorists.

Germany is contributing to the financing of the infrastructure of the institution with a donation of 2.5 million Euro and has provided approximately the same amount for a ship berth. In the academy, civil, police, and military personnel are trained primarily in anti-terror tactics and hostage rescue. The German special unit GSG9 of the Federal Police also trains there regularly.

Concerns about the spread of Islamic terrorism in the region are growing

The Ivory Coast, with a population of around 30 million, is the economic heavyweight of French-speaking West Africa, mainly due to its status as the world's largest cocoa producer. The country, like its neighbors Ghana, Benin, and Togo, is threatened by the spread of Islamic terrorism from Mali and Burkina Faso, where the terror groups are particularly active in border areas.

While France plans to reduce its troop numbers at its bases in the region, the USA is strengthening its military presence to support the coastal states. According to media reports, a new US base in the Ivory Coast is also under discussion.

Political cracks in the region

Oettinger visits Ivory Coast, one of the most important partners and the largest democracy in French-speaking West Africa. This could be a signal to the putschist governments in Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger, who want to leave the Ecowas regional block and are driving the regional division economically and security-politically. Russia benefits from this, positioning itself as an anti-colonialist and military partner for them, while former anti-terror partners and even UN troops have to withdraw.

Concerns about further military coups

Even in the largely democratic Ivory Coast, many are asking why the 82-year-old President Alassane Ouattara is governing against the constitution in a third term and is lying about a fourth, without international criticism becoming loud. Along the coast, observers are growing concerned about the possibility of a next military coup, as within four years, six former French colonies in West and Central Africa have experienced coups.Annalena Baerbock emphasized the importance of approaching Africa with partnerships on equal terms, including countries like China and Russia.
Baerbock's speech at the Goethe-Institut in Dakar focused on the new facility's emphasis on sustainability and climate protection.

After Dakar, Baerbock's West Africa visit continues in Abidjan, Ivory Coast, where she will meet with President Alassane Ouattara and Foreign Minister Léon Kacou Adom.

In Abidjan, Baerbock will visit an International Academy for Counter-Terrorism, highlighting Germany's donation to the institution's infrastructure.

Concerns about Islamic terrorism spreading from Mali and Burkina Faso have grown in Ivory Coast and neighboring countries.

France is planning to reduce troops at its bases in the region, while the USA is strengthening its military presence to support coastal states, including the possible establishment of a new base in Ivory Coast.
Russia, seeking to position itself as an anti-colonialist partner, has benefited from the political cracks in the region, particularly in Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger.

The largely democratic Ivory Coast, led by President Ouattara, faces criticism over his violation of the constitution by governing in a third term.

Observers in the Ivory Coast and along the coast are concerned about the possibility of a future military coup, as such occurrences have become more frequent in West and Central African former French colonies.

China and Russia's involvement in African partnerships have been criticized for attempting to exploit Europe's past mistakes in the continent.

Baerbock emphasized the need to approach foreign policy and cooperation in Africa with offers that benefit both sides, strictly avoiding dependency on European assistance.

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