Free Republic

It all has a familiar ring to it. The enemy believes that it takes only a taste of real war, followed by a few casualties, to send Americans running home with their tails between their legs. The American president, weighed down by public opinion, will then be forced to make concessions and abandon the field. Sixty years ago, Adolf Hitler had exactly such thoughts. He launched a devastating offensive in Western Europe in the hope that he could weaken America's willingness to fight and thus splinter the Allies, leaving him free to deal with the Soviet Union. In retrospect, such...

The two top news stories of the last week were the capture of Saddam Hussein in Tikrit, and the Supreme Court decision in D.C. approving the campaign finance “reform” act. The two are related some curious ways, the first being the incompetence of the American press in covering the story. Let’s begin with the capture of Saddam Hussein, who was pulled out of a “spider hole” on a farm near his home town and taken into custody by some Americans from Texas (how appropriate) without firing a shot. He looked like one of those shopping cart people who are found...

Say goodbye to the love bug. The last original Volkswagen Beetle, the tiny car that became an icon of the flower-power generation, rolled off a Mexican assembly line yesterday. A mariachi band strummed as workers put the finishing touches on a baby-blue model marked No. 21,529,464 - the last of seven decades' worth of the beloved vehicles. "You didn't just participate in the construction of a car, but in the creation of a legend," Volkswagen executive Reinhard Jung told a crowd of workers. The last original bug will be shipped to a museum in Wolfsburg, Germany, home of Volkswagen's world...

LOS ANGELES (Zap2it.com) - The executive producer of a CBS miniseries about Adolf Hitler's rise to power has been fired after giving an interview in which he compared the current mood of Americans to that of the Germans who helped Hitler rise to power. According to The Hollywood Reporter, Gernon was fired Sunday (April 6) from Alliance Atlantis, the production company making "Hitler: The Rise of Evil" for CBS. He had worked there 11 years and was head of the firm's long-form programming division. Neither Gernon nor Alliance Atlantis is commenting on the matter."Hitler" has caused controversy ever since CBS...

Mar. 11, 2003 President who helped Hitler take power stays on Berlin's honor roll By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS BERLIN - The long-dead German president who brought Adolf Hitler to power 70 years ago will remain on Berlin's city honor roll, the capital's governing party said Tuesday after quashing a motion to have him demoted. Left-leaning Greens and ex-communist lawmakers had backed a motion for Paul von Hindenburg to be struck from the list of Berlin honorary citizens to underline the reunified capital's democratic credentials. But Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder's Social Democrats and opposition conservatives joined forces in the Berlin state legislature's...

<p>FRANKFURT, Germany (AP) The government began tearing down six more bunkers from Hitler's infamous West Wall Thursday against the wishes of some German historians and war veterans who want the remaining concrete and steel fortifications saved as historic memorials.</p> <p>The leader of the Third Reich built 20,000 bunkers, trenches and tank dugouts along a 940-mile line, also known as the Siegfried Line, stretching along the German border from near Basel, Switzerland to Kleve in northern Germany.</p>

We will forget. Researchers have long known that the memory of epochal events fades with time. Experts have a name for this phenomenon: flashbulb memory. As time passes, the chronology gets jumbled; we fumble on the details; we reimagine the past to make it more coherent, meaningful, bearable. A new study at the University of Illinois at Chicago of a large, countrywide sample of people is discovering that we have already forgotten some things about Sept. 11. Which tower fell first? Was the Pentagon hit after both World Trade Center towers? We forget. We conflate. We confuse. But we know,...

HOLLYWOOD, Aug. 18 — Can a four-hour CBS mini-series based on the early life of Hitler accurately depict his monstrousness? To CBS executives and the producers, Alliance Atlantis, a respected Canadian film and television company, the film is to be an accurate study of Hitler as a youth until his ascension to power in 1933. To the project's critics — most of whom have not read the script — the very idea of a drama about Hitler's youth is appalling and bound unwittingly to create a sense of sympathy for one of history's great villains. "Why the need or the...