Free Republic

Sixty-nine years after the end of World War II, nearly a third of Austrians would like to have a “strong leader” (Führer) at the helm of their country “who doesn’t have to deal with elections and a parliament”, according to a new study published on Wednesday in Vienna. Asked about what Nazi rule from 1938 to 1945 had given the country, 36 percent of the 1,015 Austrians surveyed answered “both good and bad things” while three percent said “primarily good things”. […] A clear majority of respondents (56 percent) said discussions about the Holocaust and the Second World War should...

....Fest's book, in its description of his family's difficult life in Berlin, also testifies to the absolute trivialization of the Nazi era (and demonization of America) present in blogs seeking to create a category of Good Americans, comparable in their submissiveness on Iraq to the so-called Good Germans who went along with Hitler. Superimpose this episode from "Ich Nicht," for example, against all those crushing terrors and pressures for political conformity in American suburban life in 2007: Fest's father, Johannes, is out of a job as a school principal because he will not sign a statement of allegiance to the...

NEW YORK - Jaap Penraat, an architect and industrial designer who helped 406 Jews sneak out of Nazi-occupied Netherlands and withstood torture to protect fellow members of the resistance, has died. He was 88. Penraat died June 25 at his home in Catskill, N.Y., of esophageal cancer, said his daughter, Noelle Penraat. Penraat was in his 20s when he began forging identity cards for Jews. He was arrested, imprisoned for several months and tortured, but refused to tell his captors anything. After his release from prison, Penraat and other resistance members disguised Jews as construction workers hired to work on...