Free Republic

On the surface there would seem to be little to unite the Aryan racialists of the neo-Nazi movement with the terrorists of radical Islam. To the neo-Nazis, Muslims are almost all members of ``inferior`` races; and to the Islamic terrorists, the neo-Nazis are almost without exception either atheists or members of fringe quasi-Christian sects. But the reality is that there has been close cooperation between Muslim extremists and Fascists ever since the founding of the Nazi movement in the 1920`s. For all of their differences, Muslim extremists and Nazis have always been united by a common group of beliefs and...

Pope John Paul II's 1981 attacker, Mehmet Ali Agca, has alleged that Vatican prelates helped him carry out the shooting in St. Peter's Square - a claim that was dismissed yesterday by Cardinal Roberto Tucci, a former organizer of papal trips. Agca has given conflicting reasons for the attack, and his motives remain unclear. "Without the help of priests and cardinals, I would have not been able to carry out that action," he was quoted as saying in an interview with the Italian daily La Repubblica. "The devil is within the Vatican." But in an apparent contradiction, he said that...

CIA to Release Additional Documents About Nazi War CriminalsBy Malia Rulon Associated Press Writer Published: Feb 6, 2005 WASHINGTON (AP) - The CIA has agreed to release more information about Nazi war criminals it hired during the Cold War, ending a standoff between the intelligence agency and the group seeking the documents, Sen. Mike DeWine said Sunday. DeWine, R-Ohio, was lead Senator author of a 1998 law that required all U.S. government documents related to Nazi war crimes to be declassified, but the Central Intelligence Agency had resisted giving up details about the work performed by agents with Nazi ties....

For Bakhtiar Amin the chance yesterday to visit the former headquarters of East Germany's Stasi secret police had personal significance beyond his duties as human rights minister in Iraq's interim government. As he examined thousands of file cards in the archives of the ugly east Berlin ex-Stasi compound, he recalled a previous visit to Berlin, in 1980, when an assassination attempt against him and other Iraqi dissidents was foiled only at the last minute. Iraqi diplomats loyal to the former dictator Saddam Hussein, based in communist East Berlin, crossed into West Berlin carrying explosives, to blow up a conference involving...

GERMANS’ seemingly insatiable desire to relive the hardships of the communist era is about to find a new outlet in a "theme hotel" in the former female political prison of the old Stasi secret police.The themes on offer to the paying guests at Schloss Hoheneck are pretty much what the Stasi offered to its captives: deprivation, discomfort and "abysmal food". The towering fortress-style place of incarceration is not dissimilar to the infamous Colditz Castle, where prominent Allied POWs were incarcerated during the Second World War. For £66 a night Bernhard Freiberger is offering "dissident breaks". No "wellness" or hydro-therapy cures...

BERLIN – An ugly complex of buildings here that once housed the East German secret police is the stuff of dreams for two Iraqi exiles. The climate-controlled rooms, storing millions of pages of material gathered by Stasi spies - neatly categorized and ready for examination - are the kind of place Hassan Mneimneh and his colleague Kanan Makiya would like to see in Baghdad one day. "What you have here, we can only dream about," says Mr. Mneimneh, who with Mr. Makiya is trying to set up an archive documenting the Baathist regime that could be used to help bring...

<p>BERLIN -- German scientists said Monday they have developed a computer system to reconstruct millions of files on informants torn up by the East German secret police -- within years rather than centuries.</p> <p>After the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, the Stasi security police tore up into jigsaw puzzle-size pieces documents on their huge network, which include meticulous observations on East Germans and foreigners deemed a threat to the state. About 15 people have been working at the Berlin archive for Stasi documents meticulously piecing together scraps by hand.</p>

They are "traitors to the Fatherland." That was former German Chancellor Helmut Kohl's angry response to the recent, sensational revelations concerning West German citizens who spied during the Cold War for the Stasi, the dreaded East German secret police. Kohl was West Germany's conservative leader during the crucial 1980s, who, along with Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, helped win the Cold War for the West. The exposure of these leftist turncoats has come about thanks to the United States, Kohl's anti-Communist ally. After the Berlin Wall fell, many Stasi archives were destroyed, but a complete copy of the files of...

<p>Cold War historians and spy novelists have long conjectured about hit squads working for communist East Germany. But a recent arrest is the strongest official acknowledgment yet that state-sponsored assassins were on the loose before the fall of the Berlin Wall.</p>

The Swedish television journalist Cats Falk and a friend were murdered in 1984 on the orders of the East German security service Stasi, the newspaper BERLINER ZEITUNG reports today. According to the newspaper, Cats Falk, who worked for Rapport [Swedish television news programme], was murdered because she had found out too much about the smuggling of high-technology equipment, weapons and ammunition to the Communist regime in East Germany through her investigations. According to the newspaper the women were poisoned and put in a car which was rolled over the quayside into the Hammarby Canal in Stockholm.

Last May, Katarina Witt lost a court battle to keep her Stasi file a secret. Witt, the figure skater who won Olympic gold for East Germany in the 1980s, co-operated with her country's dreaded secret police, the heirs to the Nazi Gestapo. Few Communist countries had a secret police as brutal as the Stasi. They were the ones who killed more than 1,000 of their own countrymen who tried to cross the Berlin Wall to freedom in the West; they were the ones who kept a bizarre warehouse of jars filled with the body odor of political dissidents -- so...

Kohl loses battle to keep Stasi files secret By Kate Connolly in Berlin (Filed: 18/09/2003) The former German chancellor Helmut Kohl yesterday lost a legal attempt to prevent the publication of thousands of pages of potentially explosive records compiled about him by the East German secret police, the Stasi. A court in Berlin decided that, as a public figure, Mr Kohl's files should be made accessible to researchers. The ruling, which overturns an earlier decision, is in line with a new law passed by parliament last year. Lawyers for Mr Kohl, who did not appear in court, said they would...

The Olympic skating champion Katarina Witt will bring to a climax a wave of Communist-era nostalgia sweeping Germany with a television show next week highlighting the bright side of life in a totalitarian state.A batch of films, TV shows and series is cashing in on a wave of popular sentiment for the East German Communist era, and nearly all have avoided painful subjects such as the infamous Berlin Wall.The programme's uncritical stance has angered those who suffered under Communism. Former dissidents who have studied East German Stasi secret police files say the shows are an insult to the more than...

Amid calls for his resignation, the leader of the reformed and reconstituted former East German communist party said in a broadcast interview Thursday he had "never made any secret" of his links to the Stasi secret police. "Everyone knows I was unofficially with the Stasi," said Lothar Bisky, chairman of the leftist Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS) which caters to a largely eastern German constituency. "I have never made any secret of my unofficial contacts to the Stasi," he said in an interview with RBB television taped Wednesday and widely broadcast on Thursday. But he insisted he was never an...

The head of Germany's reformed communist party has been unmasked as a spy for the former East German secret police by researchers studying files that have been returned to Germany by the CIA. A team of 50 analysts is going through the "Rosenholtz" (Rosewood) files - the last remaining record of East German espionage - which were taken to Washington during the final days of the GDR (German Democratic Republic) and returned earlier this month. The files, whichcontain 320,000 agent cards and 57,000 spy reports, name Lothar Bisky, the chairman of the German Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS), as an...

Thousands of former East German Stasi agents who spied on the West during the Cold War face the prospect of being unmasked after a decision by the CIA to return a hitherto top-secret espionage document to the German government. The revelations concern about 50,000 former Stasi agents. Their identities are contained in a massive intelligence dossier, codenamed "Rosenholz", which the CIA smuggled out of East Germany shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Yesterday, the German government disclosed that Washington had returned all of the 380 compact discs that made up the Rosenholz file and that, 10...

New Software to Unravel Stasi Puzzle   The orderly habits of communist bureaucrats have made it easier for new technology to uncover secrets they sought to destroy.   Researchers at Berlin's prestigious Frauenhofer Institute are programming software that will piece together documents destroyed by East German secret police workers as the sun set on the communist era. Everyone knows that if you really want no-one to discover your secrets, the trick is to completely destroy all the evidence. But this concept appears to have been lost on the workers at East Germany's secret police agency, the Stasi, during the...

<p>To Harvard University, Greek billionaire Socrates Kokkalis is a generous donor, a visionary promoting democracy and free markets in Eastern and Central Europe.</p> <p>But in Greece, Kokkalis is being investigated for betraying his country to communist spies. The 64-year-old telecommunications magnate has been charged with funneling information to East Germany during the Cold War, and also faces charges of fraud, money-laundering, and embezzlement.</p>

DURING 40 years of Cold War, East Germany’s secret police opened up to 400 million items of mail using steam, chemicals, irons and ultrasonic baths. This is just one of the disclosures to emerge from a new exhibition chronicling the Stasi’s obsession with eavesdropping. A cousin in East Berlin of Gerhard Schröder, the German Chancellor, was one of 436 people employed to snoop on enemies real and imagined. Her remit was eavesdropping on British diplomats, military officials and businessmen. The tape machines she and her cohorts used are on display at An Open Secret: Postal and Telephone Surveillance in the...