Free Republic

The Nazis attempted to broker a peace offering with Britain—if they were allowed a free path to attack the USSR, a new book has revealed. Rudolf Hess’s flight to Britain during World War Two to sign a peace deal ordered by Adolf Hitler has long been recorded as a bizarre one-man mission to try and reconcile warring West Europe and the Nazis. … But historian Peter Padfield has discovered evidence he claims proves that the deputy Führer held a detailed peace treaty. It proposed that the Nazis would withdraw from western Europe, in exchange for British neutrality over a planned...

Much has been made recently of the unique and ascendant role Turkey is playing in international relations. As a member of NATO, a diplomatic power broker in the Middle East and a rising international economic player, Turkey has become a novelty even in an era of unprecedented global cooperation and political interdependence. But this is actually nothing new. For more than half a century, Turkey has played this unique role, symbolized so succinctly by the bridge over the Bosporus River that links Asia to Europe, East to West. For the United States, the bridge to Turkey spans more than two...

Out of the public eye and far from the daily headlines, a fierce verbal battle is currently being waged about the course of American policy in the long death struggle with Moscow that we call the Cold War. At ground zero of this new dispute is author Diana West, whose recent book, American Betrayal (St. Martin's), is a hard- hitting critique of the strategy toward the Soviet Union pursued in the 1940s by President Franklin Roosevelt, his top assistant Harry Hopkins, and various of their colleagues. Ms. West in particular stresses the infiltration of the government of that era by...

Hitler's ghost was roaming about Europe until 1970 Posted on Saturday, May 07 @ 18:08:37 CDT His mortal remains were reburied 8 times and eventually destroyed by fire Adolf Hitler put down his own funeral arrangements back in 1938 as he dreamt of the world domination and his worldwide glory. He wished to be laid to rest in the city of Lintz, in a giant burial vault of the National Socialist Party. A golden sepulcher decorated with gems from the Ural Mountains should have been installed in the center of the vault. A badly charred corpse of Hitler was found...

Exactly 30 years ago, when early warning systems indicated the Soviet Union was under nuclear attack by the United States, air defence officer Stanislav Petrov went by gut instinct and decided the alarm was false. It was a decision that saved the human race – and ended his career. Place: Serpukhov-15, a ballistic missile early warning command and control post south of Moscow. Time: Just after midnight, September 26, 1983. Officers of the elite Soviet Air Defence Force are about to begin their night shift at the top secret installation. Their commander, Lieutenant Colonel Stanislav Petrov, 44, pushes back in...

America’s National Security Agency may hold crucial evidence about one of the greatest unsolved mysteries of the Cold War—the cause of the 1961 plane crash which killed United Nations Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld, a commission which reviewed the case said Monday. Widely considered the U.N.’s most effective chief, Hammarskjöld died as he was attempting to bring peace to the newly independent Congo. The crash of his DC-6 aircraft in the forest near Ndola Airport in modern-day Zambia has bred a rash of conspiracy theories, many centering on some startling inconsistencies. …

(CNN) -- The idea that Soviet fighter jets would shoot down a Boeing 747 airliner seems shockingly unbelievable. Two-hundred sixty-nine innocent people died in a largely forgotten Cold War attack that took place exactly 30 years ago this weekend. On a sultry August night in 1983 at New York's JFK airport, Alice Ephraimson-Abt, a brilliant, 23-year-old, blue-eyed blonde, was about to board Korean Air Lines Flight 007 for Seoul, South Korea, halfway around the world. For one last time, she held her father, New Jersey businessman Hans Ephraimson-Abt, before saying goodbye. "There were hugs and I-love-yous," her father, now 91,...

Azerbaijan intends to purchase $3 billion modern weapons and military vehicles from South Korea Baku. Viktoria Dementyeva-APA. Azerbaijan intends to purchase modern weapons from South Korea, said a source in the South Korean parliament, APA reports quoting Hankook Ilbo publication. According to the source, the intention to purchase modern military vehicles was expressed during the visit of South Korean parliamentary delegation to Azerbaijan. The Azerbaijani side has expressed wish to purchase from South Korea two submarine boats, mine vessel, transport ship, T-50 training planes, K-9 self-propelled artillery vehicle, drones worth $3 billion. These proposals have been given to the government...

Prague, Aug 19 (CTK) - The police have accused the organiser of the Communist secret service StB plot called Kamen (Stone) aimed to catch people trying to escape from then Czechoslovakia in the early 1950s, daily Mlada fronta Dnes (MfD) writes Monday. If convicted, the man, aged 92, who lives in Prague, may be sentenced up to 10 years in prison, MfD writes. Shortly after the 1948 Communist coup, the StB started catching the escapees in a trap under the cover name Kamen, it adds. A false border was established in order to make them believe that they could forget...

According to Soviet intelligence reports, we now know that one of FDR’s top officials, the Treasury Department’s Harry Dexter White, was a Soviet agent, who, among many other deceptions, subverted relations between the US and Japan by inserting “ultimatum” language into the cable flow that actually spurred the Japanese attack. This was language written in Moscow, passed to White by a Soviet handler in Washington, D.C., and dropped into a State Department communiqué sent to Japan. This brilliantly executed influence operation doesn’t live in infamy – at least not yet. ... “A continuous stream of fighter and pursuit planes is...

Ukrainians dressed in Nazi SS uniform trudge through trenches and fire model rifles in a reconstruction of a key battle against the Soviets during World War II. An Orthodox priest leads a ceremony for fallen soldiers of the Nazi unit, sprinkling his blessing over several men sporting swastikas who lower a coffin in a ritual reburial. -snip- More than 20 years since gaining independence from the Soviet Union, Ukraine remains painfully divided over the legacy of World War II and the actions of Ukrainian nationalist fighters, who are honored as heroes by some and condemned as traitors by others. Some...

The U.S. Department of Justice on Monday afternoon appealed to civil rights groups and community leaders, nationally and in Sanford, for help investigating whether a federal criminal case might be brought against George Zimmerman for the shooting death of Trayvon Martin, one advocate said. The DOJ has also set up a public email address to take in tips on its civil rights investigation. Barbara Arnwine, president and executive director the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law – who earlier in the day joined calls for federal civil rights charges against Zimmerman, said that later in the afternoon, she joined...

As Communist writer Bertolt Brecht offered after East German workers rose against their Moscow-backed masters in 1953, perhaps the Egyptian government should dismiss the people and elect a new one. Don’t laugh. Mexico did this after the debt crisis of the early 1980s: it dismissed the fifth of its population that moved to the United States. China has dismissed its rural population and recreated a new urban population, by 2020 shifting the equivalent of twice the American population from countryside to city. Egypt’s problem is that it has no practical way of acting on Brecht’s advice. The Egyptian people are...

From a speech in Prague, Berlin and Paris. First published in the Paris newspaper "Возрождение (Vozrozhdenie, Revival)", № 15 dated June 17, 1925. *** Today we turn our thoughts to the Russian national hero Lavr (Laurel) Georgiyevich Kornilov. While people are alive and as long as they believe in God, so long out of their midst heroes will arise to lift and carry on himself the burden of their lives. And as long as the nation is alive, which gave birth to such a hero, as long as it is alive and bearing in its heart the faith in God,...

Barack Obama's faith in ‘reconciliation' with the Taliban could prolong the agony of the Afghans. A Taliban-controlled Afghanistan will make the AfPak region an epicentre of global terrorism On February 17, 2009 US President Barack Obama announced that in order to “stabilise the deteriorating situation in Afghanistan” he was authorising the deployment of an additional 17,000 US troops there. He added: “The problem of Afghanistan, the Taliban and the spread of extremism in that region cannot be solved solely by military means”. Shortly thereafter, he announced the deployment of an additional 4,000 troops. At the London Conference in 2010, the...

This man is still teaching the students. As he has done since 1970 in Montclair State University in New Jersey.Isn't there anything American people can do?

The man who tried to make human-ape hybrids Ilya Ivanovich Ivanov was a gifted scientist, a dedicated conservationist, and a practical, grounded man who expanded everyone's understanding of animal husbandry. He also, for years, tried to make human-ape hybrids. The post-revolution USSR was a nation that wanted to wholly embrace new technology and progressive science while reinforcing traditional nationalistic pride. It's no wonder that Ilya Ivanovic Ivanov fit right in. He was a biologist who wanted to split his talents evenly between innovation and preservation. Ivanov got a lot of Soviet and international support because he'd been doing useful work...

The lower house of Russia’s parliament has overwhelmingly passed a bill that stigmatizes the gay community and bans the distribution of information about homosexuality to children. The State Duma voted 434-0 with one abstention on Tuesday to approve the Kremlin-backed legislation, which imposes hefty fines for holding gay pride rallies or providing information about the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community to minors. The bill still needs to be approved by the appointed upper house and signed into law by President Vladimir Putin, but neither step is in doubt.

OSCOW — Russian lawmakers prepared Tuesday to pass a harsh law introducing stiff fines and jail terms for people who promote homosexual "propaganda" to minors, a measure critics fear will be used to justify the repression of gays amid rising homophobia in the country. The Duma lower house was expected to give final approval to the bill banning "propaganda of non-traditional sexual relations" to minors by Russians and foreigners as well as media organisations. The controversial bill would make it an offence to say that gay relationships are equal to heterosexual ones. ... If individuals use media or Internet for...