The book was Max Weinreich’s History Of The Yiddish Language. Originally published in two volumes in Yiddish. An English translation was published in 1980 though I think it was only of volume one. My university library had a copy. If I remember rightly, Weinreich’s point was that knowledge of Yiddish spread to non-Jews, in this case employees of Jews.

In a book on Yiddish I read years ago, there is a passing reference to Ukrainians including Cossacks turning on Jews they worked for and killing them, at the time of the Khmelnytski revolt. Sometimes the employees taunted their employers/victims in Yiddish before killing them.

(a) If you feel that way, express it then. Though I think it helps them, unfortunately. But if you are prepared to take the heat that may go with it, then go for it. It may not matter in practical terms whether you accept the label or not – to quote one example, Jeremy Corbyn denied being anti-Semitic and I believe him. It did not stop the vicious attacks on him. Then again he was a prominent politician. People like me or you might have more space to operate.
(b) It has less pejorative value than it did in the 1970s, partly due to the passage of time, but it still has some. Otherwise they would not use it to target people.

My thoughts might change with time, some other views I have had changed, but the Zionist eagerness to paint “anti-Semitic” target signs on those who challenge them make me disinclined to apply the target sign to myself, and I feel others should not do so either.

What I would concede is that we should not let being labelled as anti-Semitic deter us from being anti-Zionist. However, we should not embrace the label.
In terms of historical precedents, I have been interested by older history textbooks, usually British, that maintained there was something intrinsic to Germans that made them militaristic, and hence Hitler. Yet these now read oddly. I think it was possible to fight the Third Reich without being hostile to Germans as such. If you hated Germans, of course it simplified carrying out the Hamburg firestorm or Dresden. But the latter did not actually defeat the Third Reich and the effect of the former is at least debatable.
It is said that William III (died 1702) made the following remark about a hostile, pro-Jacobite clergyman or pamphleteer: “X has set his heart on becoming a martyr. And I have set mine on disappointing him.” I think we should disappoint Zionists in the same way, by not yielding to the provocations aimed at turning us anti-Semitic.

I have never let the possibility of being considered anti-Semitic deter me from supporting Palestine. The fact that mainstream media outlets run for cover is because that is their MO. I worked in the media myself – I know what goes on there.
It certainly hasn’t barred my friend from action – I have just seen her on Instagram demonstrating outside the US embassy in her country, over Venezuela. She is the sort of sea-green incorruptible the world should turn out in greater quantity but doesn’t.

This is no doubt a controversial point, especially on this site, but I think the Zionists want us to be anti-Semitic, and I don’t think we should oblige them.

More likely he was being preserved for a projected trial. Rather like Georg Elser.

A friend of mine in another country was labelled a dangerous anti-Semite by the Israeli embassy in her country. I can see their problem – she is charismatic, a good organiser and is one of those relatively few people who can draw large numbers of other people into political action. She was active in pro-Palestinian causes long before this but her work has really hit its stride now.

Rosenberg was a fluent Russian speaker and had actually been born in the Tsarist Empire. But he lost out in the power struggles. The somewhat prominent writer Edwin Erich Dwinger, a junior officer in the Waffen-SS, advocated more humane treatment of Slavs (his description of badly wounded Soviet POWs in late 1941 in one of his articles suggests he admired their stoicism and wished they were being treated better – he describes them leaving trails of blood in the snow when crawling to collect food handouts). But Dwinger had some Russian ancestry and perhaps his opinions were dismissed for that reason.

The Third Reich also tended to be more unrestrained in eastern Europe. In the west, occupied peoples initially found the Germans to be more disciplined and less barbaric than expected, but in the east, the gloves were off right from the start.

A clip from the British 1990s TV series Absolutely Fabulous. This is the “Morocco” episode in which Edwina Monsoon, her parasitical friend Patsy and her well-educated but naive daughter Saffy decide to go to Morocco. They encounter a certain amount of sexual harassment from male locals and Edwina and Patsy spend much time unconscious after scoring hashish. Patsy, who hates Saffy, sells her to the locals, saying Saffy always wanted to get to know other cultures and this is her chance. Edwina remarks that spending the rest of her life in “painful servitude” was probably not quite what Saffy intended. Because it’s black comedy rather than tragedy, they encounter Saffy dressed as a local woman and carrying a water container on her head and they all get back to England, no doubt somewhat relieved…

Too many threads and needles. They were remarkably poor at making friends. For example they spent WW2 grinding Poles’ faces in the dirt even though many were anti-Bolshevik and anti-Semitic. In 1940 a Polish fascist was as likely to be executed by them as a Polish leftist.

Possibly Vienna. Jan Sobieski brought 4,000 Polish troops who were among the forces sent to break the siege in 1683, and many were cavalry.

The film is pretty accurate historically. It illustrates also how Cossacks ended up in the Russian Empire, after rebelling against the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.

Polish Winged Hussars as antagonists for Cossacks, from a film of Sienkiewicz’s Fire And Sword. The Winged Hussar mystique puzzles me, as Hussars are more traditionally associated with the Hungarians. Lancers or Uhlans were the quintessential Polish cavalry type, with lancers in other armies frequently adopting versions of the Polish konfederatka cap as their headgear.

Grynszpan’s fate is unknown. One theory is he was kept alive during the war because the Third Reich wanted to hold a trial at war’s end indicting an international Jewish conspiracy against Germany. Georg Elser may have been kept alive for the same reason. But it became clear such a trial would never happen. Elser was certainly killed, perhaps also Grynszpan.

I remember a British TV interview with Irving c.1981 and he mentioned having political ambitions. I don’t think he realised at the time that his non-standard view of WW2 was likely to seriously interfere with such ambitions.

It would appear so. The American authorities charged him with illegally entering the USA. The Canadians applied for his extradition. The German consulate arranged for him to leave the USA – clearly Von Werra was not closely guarded.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franz_von_Werra

A German fighter pilot and POW who escaped to the USA from Canada while it was neutral. With German consular help he got out of the USA as quickly as possible in case he was extradited back to Canada. Until December 1941, Third Reich films could be shown in the USA, escaping German POWs could regard the USA as a destination on the road to getting back to Germany, and I have doubts whether German White Books could be banned.

The claim made me do a little research on blood transfusion. In 1938 even the discovery that there are different blood types was rather recent.
“He had distinguished the main blood groups in 1901, having developed the modern system of classification of blood groups from his identification of the presence of agglutinins in the blood. In 1937, with Alexander S. Wiener, he identified the Rhesus factor, thus enabling physicians to transfuse blood without endangering the patient’s life.” (Wikipedia article on Karl Landsteiner) Landsteiner, who was born Jewish but later converted to Christianity, did his later research into blood types in the USA, and German doctors in 1938 would presumably not have had access to his latest findings. German blood transfusion in WW2 was apparently more primitive and also riskier than the procedures used by American and British doctors.

Goebbels was a rather notorious womaniser (his involvement with the German film industry seems to have involved a certain amount of “casting couch” behaviour) and it did not help that Lida Baarova was a Slav. A lot of his behaviour during the war was a gradual climb back into favour after losing ground before the war – because of the Baarova business, among others. The claim that it significantly contributed to the outbreak of WW2 is, I think, far too flattering to both Goebbels and Baarova.

Roy Cohn’s strident anti-Communism after WW2 was no doubt a product of this. His politics in general are something of an enigma for me – he was a life-long Democrat but seems to have preferred Republicans. He was a classic example of a “Democrat In Name Only”. Then again, the much more liberal Gore Vidal once campaigned on behalf of a Republican he seems to have liked personally, despite Vidal being a Democrat, a Kennedy associate etc. Not like politics on this side of the Atlantic at all.
Cohn’s mentor, a certain George Sokolsky, had commented back in the 1930s that “a Communist parade looks Jewish”.

I am sceptical, though it fits with the arrogant chutzpah they often show – “We can do whatever we want!”
About the same time at least one US armoured vehicle fired on a hotel, killing and wounding media workers – I believe at least one was from Al Jazeera and it may have been a deliberate punishment of “non-embedded” media.

I’ve been re-reading some of George Orwell’s essays and journalism (in my view often more perceptive than his more famous novels) and he mentions toe the line being wrongly spelled back in the 194os.

‘America should have stood up for Christians in Iraq, who were there before Islam was even invented. Destroying mosques should have been a normal operating procedure.’

‘Standing up’ for the Christians in Iraq would have involved leaving Saddam Hussein in power, not deposing him and inviting a Shi’a resurgance, Sunni fanaticism, and so on.

America (and Britain) didn’t go into Iraq to “stand up” for any of the locals. Not even the Kurds, because the Turkish authorities complained about the pro-Kurdish noises being made to justify the invasion. And I suspect the tank commander, if he was indeed Jewish, would have been as happy to put a shell into a Christian church as into a minaret. It’s not like the Israelis spared Christian institutions in Gaza, is it?

Tariq Aziz, Saddam’s Foreign Minister, was Christian, at least by origin. He was imprisoned after Saddam’s overthrow and died in jail.

Just after the Americans arrived in Baghdad in 2003, I saw TV footage of a hole in a mosque’s minaret. A couple of locals said, at least according to the English subtitles, that an American tank had fired a round into the minaret and the tank commander told them he was Jewish.

Leopold Bloom, one of the novel’s principal characters, has a Hungarian Jewish father who converted to Protestantism, and an Irish Catholic mother.
Jonathan Miller, a Jewish atheist media personality in Britain who died in 2019, claimed in an interview that an ancestor, possibly his grandfather, wanted to emigrate to the USA in the late 19th century but got off the boat at Cork, Ireland, thinking it was New York.

Basically, he drank himself to death. People like Hoover (with whom he had played golf in the past) and Nixon kept their distance from him after 1954 – they were good politicians and decided he was toxic.
To a considerable extent he was a victim of his own deputy, Roy Cohn. Whether or not Cohn was deliberately trying to undermine McCarthy is far from clear. But intended or not, the effects of what Cohn was doing were much the same. Cohn maintained some sort of career as a lawyer until being disbarred shortly before his death in 1986, but for McCarthy it was all over.

Correct. The ACLU ran for cover at this time. Some lawyers who defended Communists were actually jailed during the period, and Communists noted that they found it difficult to obtain legal representation. One praised a particular lawyer who turned him down – not for turning him down but for admitting that he feared that taking on the defence of a Communist would destroy his career. Others were less forthright about their reasons.

Medieval Latin increasingly deviated from the Classical version, for a number of reasons. Especially if their native language was a Romance one the Latin of users tended to be influenced by their actual spoken language. And people were aware of it – at least one glossary exists showing “incorrect” words in use and placing alongside them the “correct” ones. The glossary’s “incorrect” vocabulary is in fact proto-Italian.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appendix_Probi
It could be that current errors are just another stage in the development of English, though it just looks like slipshod use of language to me. The actual grasp of Latin among clerics varied – a letter by Luther before his break with Rome comments on the ignorance of grammar shown by some of his opponents – ie. their Latin wasn’t very good.

Well, there is as bad and worse out there. Rein in is very often spelled reign in and I have even encountered the semi-literate spelling rain in. A surprisingly large number of people write there when they mean their and vice versa.
“Pedantic” – well, I used to edit and proofread, and it probably shows…

On the Web, I notice at least as many such errors in toe the line as accurate spellings. The slow death of the English language?

Clutching at straws.
It reminds me of a character in James Joyce’s Ulysses who remarks half-seriously that Ireland did not persecute the Jews because it did not let them in in the first place.

Ended by defeat in WW1 and the proclamation of the Republic, though many Germans did not accept the latter.

Learning could be propagandistic. In Protestant universities, doctorates could be awarded for theses maintaining that the Pope was Antichrist. This certainly happened in universities like Oxford and Cambridge. Polemics during the Reformation could be vicious. Until the early 20th century, Catholic polemicists maintained that Martin Luther worshipped the Devil.

Sometimes under Thatcher there would be calls for old-fashioned values, and the media morality watchdog Mary Whitehouse was keen on her, but just under the surface the Thatcherite Tories were quite louche. (Sometimes it was no longer just under the surface but quite obvious.) That she tried several times to get Jimmy Savile a knighthood, finally succeeding just before she left office, is a very telling fact.

The British comedian Kenny Everett died of AIDS in 1995. I read his biography. He contracted the disease from a highly promiscuous male friend, Nikolai Grishanovich, who was from Russia. The biography skated past this but Grishanovich came to Britain at a time when virtually nobody from the USSR was getting to the West except on the “Jewish quota”.

It reminds me of the film Con Air at the start. The main character, Cameron Poe, (Nicholas Cage), a US Army Ranger, kills a man while defending his girl friend and gets sent to jail for seven years. People commenting on the film tend to believe such a thing would never happen but I’m not so sure.

German pacifists in the 1932 election campaigns warned that an NSDAP victory sooner or later meant war. They were right, of course, but either they convinced few or there was a significant constituency of Germans who wanted war and naturally were not turned off by the prospect of one.
According to The Weimar Chronicle one of the tunes played in Berlin to celebrate Hitler being made Chancellor was entitled Victoriously We Will Crush The French.
William Shirer commented on how fit and healthy young German soldiers looked in 1940, in contrast to British POWs who looked like the Depression had taken a toll of them – pasty-faced, missing teeth etc. Shirer may have been reacting to selected propaganda newsreel images but there was undoubtedly a kernel of truth in them. Germany had looked after its young, particularly its males, and Britain had not. However, it was preparing them for war, and Britain was not.

Ironically, types like Engel agree with the more hard-shelled Third Reich apologists – it was all about the Jews. Hitler rehabilitation goes hand in hand with a Jewish version of pre-WW1 Italy’s “sacred egoism”.
I would also mention the Third Reich’s drive to Lebensraum in the east. The Poles and even more the Soviets were a barrier to this. Though the Poles were themselves frequently anti-Semitic, their continued existence was an obstacle to these Third Reich ambitions. So the Poles were to be assimilated as Volksdeutsch, expelled or killed.

26,000! Such diligence. I’ve only logged about 4,000. I must up my game…

The Masonic connection reminds me – the Polish Franciscan priest Maximilian Kolbe put a fair amount of effort into anti-Masonic campaigns, regarding Freemasons as enemies of the Catholic Church. He was sent to Auschwitz in 1941 and killed there.
Andrei Shingarev, Freemason, was imprisoned shortly after the October Revolution and, along with Kokoshkin, another Provisional Government member, killed in early 1918 when Red sailors broke into the prison where they were held (whether they did so with authorisation by the new Soviet government is still uncertain, but they were not punished for the murders).
Anti-Masonic, pro-Masonic… Didn’t necessarily matter in the 20th century. Perhaps because other factors were at work.

https://www.famousfix.com/topic/przyjazn-magazine-poland-15-july-1983

When in the Soviet Union in 1984, I remember seeing this magazine in hotels, aimed at Polish visitors. Przyjaźń (“Friendship”) was published by the Polish-Soviet Friendship Society. It did not survive the end of the Soviet bloc.

Possibly Thackeray, or even Kubrick, read the memoirs of Bräker. Incidentally they were on my university syllabus as an example of German literature, though I found them more interesting as history than as literature.
Bräker’s regiment, called Itzenplitz (in a number of armies of the 18th century, regiments were named after their commander) was apparently regarded as one of the elite infantry regiments in the Prussian Army in 1756, but Bräker was not even the only Swiss man enrolled in it unwillingly, not to speak of other non-Prussians. I can only suppose less well-regarded regiments had even larger numbers of troops conscripted by force.

Stuart Reid, a somewhat controversial expert on the 1745-6 Jacobite rebellion, detects rejection of the 1707 Act Of Union as a factor in the support of some Scottish Jacobites for the rebellion. And he attributes this to nascent Scottish nationalism. Certainly compared to the 1715 rebellion, active Jacobites were overwhelmingly Scots. The earlier rebellion had had a significant English element. In 1745 the only significant English participation was by the Manchester Regiment, and when the rebellion was defeated they were treated with special harshness. Jacobite sympathy was widespread in England (Samuel Johnson for example may have harboured such sentiments) but few were prepared to take up arms.
The other points, though, yes. A Swiss by the name of Ulrich Bräker was unwillingly drafted into the Prussian Army in 1756. Here is an extract from his memoirs:

“For God’s sake, Herr Zittemann,” I went on, “what does this mean?” – “Nothing, sir”, answered he, “except that you, like me and the other gentlemen here, are a soldier, and consequently we’re all brothers, and making objections won’t help you any, but will put you on bread and water in the guardhouse, and tie you hand and foot, and flog you so your ribs crack, and then maybe you’ll be satisfied.” I: “By Christ, that would be an outrage, a godless thing!” He: “Take my word for it, that’s how it goes and not otherwise.” I:”Then I will make complaint to the King.” Here they all laughed loudly. He: “Never in your life would you get to see him”. I:”Who should I ask, then?” He: “Our Major, if you like. But it will do you no good, no good at all.” I:”Well, I shall try it at all events, and see if – and see if it’s really as you say”. The lads laughed again, but I resolved nevertheless to go to the Major next morning and enquire after my faithless master.
So soon as next day dawned in the sky, I found out the way to the Major’s lodgings. Ye gods! it seemed to me like a king’s palace, and the Major was like the King himself, so majestic did he appear to me, a big powerful man, with the face of a hero and a pair of fiery eyes like stars. I trembled before him and stuttered: “Herr…Major! I am…Herr Lieutenant Markoni’s ser…servant. F…f…for that he took me on, and n…nothing else b…besides. Y…you can ask him your…s…self. I…I don’t know where he i…is. Now they’re saying I must b…be a s…o…soldier, wh…whether I like it or not”. – “So”, he broke in, “you are the meritorious little servant, are you! Your fine master has been spending our money fit to make one laugh, and no doubt you got your share. In short, you are to serve the King now, and that’s the last word on the subject”. I: “But, Herr Major” He: “Silence, my lad or you’ll be under guard!” I: “But I have no contract or enlistment bounty! Ah, could I only speak with my master!” He: “You won’t see him again for the present, and in the enlistment bounty you have already cost as much as ten others. Your Lieutenant has made a pretty account of his expenses, and you stand at the head of it. But as for your contract, you shall have it.” I: “But -” He: “Out with you, why, you little runt -” I: “I b…beg of you -” He: “You rascal! Go to the devil!” With that he drew his sword. I was out of the house like a thief caught red-handed, and off to my lodging, hardly able to find the way again, such was my grief and fear.

There I bewailed my wretchedness long and loud to Zittemann. The good man tried to hearten me: “Patience, my son! Things will go better soon. Now you have fallen on evil days, and many likely lads from good families must do the same. For, granted that Markoni could and would keep you on, even so, he would have to put you into his regiment, as soon as word came for quick march to the front! And indeed, he would be in no position to maintain a servant for the present, for he is said to have paid out monstrous sums on his recruiting, and yet have brought in so few men, that I’ve many a time heard our colonel and our major lamenting over him, and they won’t be in any hurry to send him out on that business again.” Thus Zittemann comforted me, and I had to be content with it, for no better comfort could I get. But I said to myself: it’s the great ones of the earth who prepare such dishes, and us lesser folk have to lick the plates.

46. So it’s true that I’m a soldier?

In the afternoon the sergeant-major brought me my bread-ration and my weapons, and asked me if I were now better content with my situation. “And why not?” answered Zittemann for me, “He’s as good a lad as you can find.” Then I was led into the uniform store, and fitted out with breeches, boots and gaiters, and given a hat, a stock, hose and so forth. Then, together with about twenty other recruits, I was sent to Colonel Latorf. They led us into a hall as big as a church, brought out some banners, all tattered and torn, and ordered us each to take hold of an edge. An adjutant, or somebody, read us out a whole pack of Articles of War, and pronounced some words which most of us murmured after him. I kept my jaw shut, thinking of nothing in particular, Ännchen maybe; then he waved the flag over our heads and dismissed us.

Bräker had been hired as a servant by the Markoni mentioned in the text, who despite the Italian-sounding name was a Pole. But he turned out to be a lieutenant in the Prussian Army, hence the situation Bräker was now in. Bräker went on to describe taking part in the battle of Lobositz, where he deserted, and eventually was able to return to Switzerland. Note that he is described as serving the King, ie. Frederick the Great, not Prussia. Bräker had little loyalty to either, naturally.

You strike me as being reasonably objective on the subject of Poland. Whether that qualifies or disqualifies me from scoring the match, who can say?

To take the theme a bit further, the best “French” general of the 18th century prior to Napoleon, Maurice de Saxe, was an illegitimate son of the king of Poland and Saxony. Perhaps he was a sort of compensation for the best “Austrian” general of the late 17th and early 18th century being in fact a Frenchman.

By today’s standards he was certainly a Frenchman. For a variety of reasons he was denied the opportunity to make a career in France. Interestingly, his entering military service with an enemy of France does not seem to have been regarded as treason.

Nazi Party Golden Badge on his lapel, and what looks like the SA badge though that organisation was in decline by then.

Quite possibly. Arguments for example over whether Copernicus was a Pole or a German may be beside the point – he himself may never have given it much thought. The Emperor Charles V had French as his native language though he knew several others – Hapsburgs often had to. He had no difficulty fighting France in war and his troops captured the French king Francis I. Later Eugene of Savoy tried to get a commission in Louis XIV’s army (he too was a native French speaker), was rather contemptuously turned down and became one of Louis’ most dangerous opponents on the battlefield, fighting for Austria.
Even later on, in the 18th century, the future Prussian Marshal Blücher, born in Mecklenburg-Schwerin, became a hussar in the Swedish army. Sweden at the time still held a chunk of Pomerania, a relic of the Thirty Years’ War. The Prussians captured him in 1760 and he had little difficulty in becoming a Prussian officer. It was probably not until the Napoleonic Wars and after that modern nationalism took hold.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manfred_Freiherr_von_Killinger

He reminds me of this guy, though Killinger seems to have been beefier physically. Also a sadist. When the German position collapsed in Romania in 1944, Killinger failed to escape and ended up committing suicide.

I read that the military judge who sentenced the Ceausescus to death committed suicide not long after, despite having been promoted. Perhaps he was Epsteined…

“He gave a different account of the Warsaw uprising and seemed sincere.” Wow, that’s convincing. If he was defending a less Third Reich-friendly position I doubt whether you would be satisfied with a bland “he seemed sincere”.
Dirlewanger… The late Richard Plant wrote a book called The Pink Triangle about the treatment of homosexuals in the Third Reich. Plant interviewed a German or Austrian who had been imprisoned for homosexuality, which was illegal. The man was released from his jail or concentration camp and then drafted into Dirlewanger’s unit which received all manner of criminals or those perceived as such. Dirlewanger was angered at being sent homosexuals as reinforcements, so they were taken to a forest and tied to trees, with pink triangles attached to their uniforms. The soldiers who tied them up spat on them and then left – it was the winter of 1944/5 and the intention behind leaving them there was that they should freeze to death. However, Plant’s source reported that a Red Army patrol found them and he was released – it is not clear that the others who were tied up were still alive. The Soviets did not understand what the pink triangles meant and may have assumed they had been treated like that for being anti-fascists. Plant’s source formed a homosexual relationship with an Armenian medical orderly in the Red Army. His lover used the Armenian diaspora network to arrange emigration to the USA. They both went to the USA post-war but the Armenian later died.

Dirlewanger was partial to child molestation. Among his other characteristics…

In August 1932, before the advent of the Third Reich, SA men broke into the home of Konrad Pietrzuch, a Communist sympathiser who was also a member of Germany’s Polish minority. They beat Pietrzuch to death. It was called the Potempa affair, as Pietrzuch lived in the hamlet of Potempa, in Upper Silesia, a few kilometres from the border with Poland at that time. A law mandating death for political murder had come into force shortly before they killed Pietrzuch, and the five were sentenced to death. The NSDAP went into overdrive, shouting that five “decent Germans” should not be punished with death for killing a Pole. Hitler declared his “unlimited loyalty” to the murderers. The agitation succeeded in having the death sentences turned into life imprisonment in September 1932. With the Nazis coming to power the following year, the SA men were released. Which suggested at the time that killing a Pole, albeit a German citizen, was not considered a crime at all in the Third Reich.

As he [Ceausescu] confidently approached the microphone from the balcony and began mechanically repeating the tired old slogans of communism, suddenly a voice broke through with a high pitched scream, followed by an increasing din. The discordant sounds of protest rendered Ceausescu speechless and confused. That second, when the false edifice of his rule was punctured and the impossibility of his position exposed, communist rule died in Romania.

So somebody from the crowd talked back and that ended one of the most brutal dictatorships in the history of the world? Wouldn’t that person be simply picked up by the Romanian KGB and never seen again?

What you wrote reads like a movie trailer script.

I’ll tell you what ended his dictatorship. Ceausescu payed off Romania’s debt to the bankers and refused to take new loans – that is what ended his rule. He was publicly executed along with his wife as an example to all those that do not like taking loans. In other words, that was Regime Change (TM) and not Romanian people freeing themselves.

You are welcome.

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A cut-price female Stavisky? Or a lower-rent Heidi Fleiss?

I don’t think he is the novelist I was referring to earlier but Gustav Freytag (1816-1895) published Soll Und Haben (“Debit And Credit”) in 1855. The Gutenberg Project has online an English translation that came out a few years later. The German original seems to have been highly popular but the novel is nowadays almost forgotten. Probably because the villains of the piece are Jews, in particular a certain Veitel Itzig (Itzig is a contemptuous term in German for “Jew”), and chaotic Poles who riot and stage an uprising which at one point has the virtuous German characters under siege in a sort of manor.

Polish Wikipedia in an article on it mentions it was never translated into Polish – perhaps not surprisingly.

Who was there in Germany in 1939-45 who actually advocated a ‘good neighbor’ policy towards the Poles?

Nobody – the German officers I referred to in an earlier post were pragmatically interested in building bridges to Poles, especially as the Red Army was getting closer, but “good neighbour” would be overdoing it. Incidentally the collaborator they addressed, Jan Emil Skiwski, managed to escape to Venezuela at war’s end and died there in 1956.

Violent clashes over territory, especially in Silesia, at the end of WW1 didn’t do much for relations. There was a certain amount of animosity well before that. Frederick the Great picked up some Polish territory in the First Partition in 1772 and negatively compared the Poles he acquired to the Iroquois of North America. A 19th century German novelist featured German conflict with Poles in one of his novels, including with a devious Catholic priest named Gorka, although the novel is as much anti-Catholic as anything else.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Radical_Organization

Noticeable that even this highly pro-German organisation was not tolerated after spring 1940. Probably because it still counted as a Polish organisation as opposed to a German one.

The German “New Order” was not trying to make friends in Poland, that’s for sure. For comparison, French fascists were encouraged under the German occupation of that country, though the Germans also fostered rivalries among the various groups. Far from being allowed to organise, Polish fascists featured on German kill lists.
I’m not a fan of “alternative history” but the Germans could have reached out to the anti-Semitic and anti-Bolshevik attitudes of so many Poles. Instead they chose to crush the Poles underfoot – even Polish collaborators were required to adopt German identity. According to an account of Polish collaboration in an issue of The New York Review Of Books in 1995, some German army officers approached a Polish collaborator with them quite late in the war and asked what they could to improve relations with Poles. The collaborator told them it was just too damn late.

The Tczew bridge wasn’t even blown up until several hours after heavy fighting had started. A German attempt to seize the bridge before this happened was thwarted.

The Germans were more cruel and more oppressive in the East than in the West. Foreign workers in Germany from Western Europe were subject to varying qualities of treatment but were not expected to wear discriminatory badges. Poles and Ostvolk were. The former a yellow and purple badge with the letter P, the latter a badge with OST (“East”) on it. Poles were not even given a badge in the national colours white and red – the Nazis feared Polish nationalism.

The more radical Zionists didn’t even wait for WW2 to end before killing Lord Moyne, in November 1944. The Germans were the Germans, but these Zionists prioritized ending the British mandate.

In fact the film is Forbidden Songs, Little Red Apple is the title of the song of the street singer.

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/oz6W5d5TdL8

Clip from Little Red Apple from 1946, one of the first Polish films after war’s end. Note the contemptuous reference to the Volksdeutsch…
Also obvious bullet holes in the building behind, though I am not sure which city this was filmed in.

Wrong YouTube. Elvis was cool but not Polish…

I also remember what could be called ruling circles in the UK, including Thatcher, not regarding German reunification with unmixed delight. Germany had been an enemy but divided into two, even if the eastern part was on the other side, it was much less dangerous. German reunification in contrast was rather worrisome.
Tarantino’s film has those Jewish revenge elements, though in one scene, a British lieutenant who is a German film buff, a British general and Winston Churchill touch on the Germans referring to Jewish-controlled Hollywood and nobody contradicts the idea…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernesto_Nathan

An Italian Jew born in England, and a keen Freemason, he became mayor of Rome before WW1. Unlikely to have been welcome to the Papacy…

Hebrew. Ichabod literally means “no honour”.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Ichabod

Perhaps not wet dream exactly but this clip from Pan Tadeusz encapsulates Polish nationalism well. Including its paradoxes – the most famous line in Polish literature is included. “Lithuania, my fatherland, you are like health.” Note also the camera panning over the picture of Napoleon – it is 1812, and the Poles were the second-largest contingent in Napoleon’s invasion of Russia.

I’ve mentioned this before, but you would hardly believe this was made less than 20 years after WW2 ended.

That year, he rented the Folies-Marigny Theater for the summer and put on a play that shut down after just two weeks. He never paid back the concessionaires who had put down deposits, and although he was caught, he avoided trial when World War I broke out.

Sounds like a possible real-life inspiration for The Producers.

Even the BBC reports that the Russophobes were throwing Molotov cocktails at the Trade Union building after ethnic Russians were forced to shelter in it, and there are pictures clearly showing that. the The Russophobes clearly started the fires on the ground floor by flinging the petrol bombs at the building.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-27275383?ysclid=mhbys21zj1568466703

They do state that there may have been a fire started accidentally on the third floor by someone throwing a Molotov cocktail from the inside at a window.

You are not giving the full picture and just repeating the lies of Kiev propagandists.

Now about Bucha, what is your take on that?

My take on this is that the “bad German” theme was to some extent kept under control during the Cold War. There was a desire not to antagonise the West Germans, and “good Germans” were also brought forward.
This consideration was no longer necessary after the Wall came down and the Soviet Union collapsed.

At a tangent somewhat, but this is a clip from Andrzej Wajda’s film of Pan Tadeusz which is generally regarded as the Polish national epic, written by Adam Mickiewicz. Polish cavalry, alongside Napoleon’s Guard, are preparing to invade Russia – it is 1812.

18th and 19th century, Scots and Irish were definitely over-represented. In theory Catholic Irish were not supposed to be recruited in the 18th century into the British Army, but often the recruiting sergeants would overlook this, or else Catholic recruits would claim to be Protestant and the claim was accepted without further investigation. Being too strict on the religion question might have encouraged Catholic Irish males to go to France or Spain to join Irish regiments there, which was not desirable.
Re ethnic surveys of the British military today, this is something I need to investigate, but recruits from places like Fiji have been accepted into the British Army, allegedly because indigenous British, and not necessarily just White soldiers but also Blacks or Asians, were not joining the British Army in sufficient numbers. As to the RAF and the Royal Navy, both requiring more technical knowledge in most cases than the Army, I also don’t know the ethnic composition.

Scots have tended to be recruited disproportionately into the British Army. I remember ads frequently being run on Scottish TV. Attitudes were not necessarily positive – the British Army was widely seen as a destination for people physically fit enough to pass a medical but unlikely to get a job anywhere else. This attitude developed after National Service ended c.1960.

were evil pagan worshippers, some of whom sacrificed babies to their god, and that was thousands of years ago.

So the OT says. Of course if I was the ideology chief for a bunch of predatory goat herders and some other tribe had something we wanted, I would probably write how evil they were to justify taking it from them. Which is essentially what the OT is, especially the more blood-curdling passages.

But with Islam, the people Allah aka Satan commands them to kill, ARE YOU AND ME, TODAY!

My neighbourhood is 40% Muslim. I feel terribly threatened by all the little Somali ladies in burqas… not. If it’s a matter of them being alien in some way, I also encounter Haredim who are just as different from me as the Somalis are. Even if they live mostly a bit further down the road…

Kubrick’s film did have such a scene but it did not make the final cut. I don’t know if it features in deleted scenes from the film, on DVD.

George Orwell, I think in Down And Out In Paris And London, mentions going into an eatery in London, shortly after returning from France, and he sees a Jew there “guiltily wolfing bacon”. He doesn’t specify how he knew he was a Jew – possibly he had on Orthodox black clothes or Hasidic garb. Ludicrously this piece of Orwell’s writings has been accused of being anti-Semitism.