Vast Nazi Facility Uncovered In Austria; Purported A-Bomb Development Site 292
schwit1 (797399) writes "Suspiciously high radiation levels around the Austrian town of St. Georgen an der Gusen had long fueled theories that there was a buried bunker nearby where Nazis had tested nuclear weapons during WWII. Those suspicions came one step closer to being confirmed last week after the opening of a 75-acre underground complex was dug out from below the earth and granite used to seal off the entrance, the Times of Israel reports. The excavation team was led by Austrian filmmaker Andreas Sulzer, who says the site was "likely the biggest secret weapons production facility of the Third Reich" — a facility that probably relied on forced labor from the nearby Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp and may have even been the testing location for a nuclear bomb, the Daily Mirror reports. The weapons facility was believed to have been manned by SS General Hans Kammler and situated near the B8 Bergkristall factory, where the first working jet-powered fighter was created, International Business Times reports; Sulzer first got wind of the site after seeing references to it in an Austrian physicist's diary.
The Washington Post cautions that while "the full scope of what occurred inside those reported chambers in the Austrian town of St. Georgen remains unclear and Sulzer’s conclusions are speculative, some analysts are already trumpeting the findings. ... The reported findings, if corroborated by further inquiry, could add fresh fodder to an ongoing debate over the Third Reich’s ultimately failed attempt to secure an atomic weapon."
Non-scientist at work (Score:5, Insightful)
Film-maker digs through granite, measures radiation, concludes there have been nuclear weapons. Right. It's not like granite is one of the most radioactive materials in the world.
Re:Non-scientist at work (Score:5, Insightful)
Film-maker digs through granite, measures radiation, concludes there have been nuclear weapons. Right.
A 75 acre underground site would have involved thousands of workers. After the war, they would have had no reason to keep it secret. Yet we are supposed to believe that no one talked for 70 years?
Re:Non-scientist at work (Score:5, Informative)
This is a funny thing about secret facilities. Often, their locations are kept secret from even the people working in them. Of course those building it would have a clue but slave labor was often killed so a lot of those builders could have been dead before the end of the war.
Now we do know that some people did talk about it. They just couldn't point to the location which makes sense if it was secret. So a handful of people at the end of the war probably knew the location and it is possible that they were killed during the end of the war or put on civilian clothing to pretend to be a foot soldier and not imprisoned or executed. Of course those people are not going to officially talk because we still go after Nazis for qar crimes. What we end up with is rumors like what was there for years.
I can see it happening. But only because most the people involced died and people though it was nornal to happen.
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Of course those people are not going to officially talk because we still go after Nazis for qar crimes.
Yes, this is a problem. If we want to learn what happened, then we need to hand out immunity against further prosecutions for people who talk.
Re:Non-scientist at work (Score:5, Informative)
If we want to learn what happened, then we need to hand out immunity against further prosecutions for people who talk.
Lots and lots and lots of people were given immunity for talking [wikipedia.org]. Werner von Braun was an early member of the Nazi party, a member of the SS, and was involved in the deaths of thousands of slave laborers and civilians. He was not only given immunity for his cooperation, but in 1975 was awarded a medal by the US government.
Re: Non-scientist at work (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: Non-scientist at work (Score:5, Insightful)
It's very easy, in hind-sight, to judge people for decisions or actions they took when they didn't know what the outcome of that decision, or of combined decisions and outcomes several combinations later, would be. Did von Braun get off easy? Yes. Could he have been prosecuted for his participation in an entity that engaged in war crimes? Probably. Would he have had a defense much better than, "just following orders," or, "I would have been killed if I didn't continue," or such? Probably not. Had the Soviet Union not gotten their hands on their own slate of Nazi rocket scientists he probably would have been prosecuted rather than embraced, but once the decision was made to embrace him, that was that. He did go on to make the most historic and arguably significant human achievement possible.
von Braun's legacy will always be complicated. His name will probably only be applied to celebrate things that are related to his field, as his name is forever tarnished by his Nazi past and unsuitable for celebration as any kind of hero outside of his field.
Re: Non-scientist at work (Score:5, Interesting)
Let me add to your excellent post -- having grown up in Huntsville during the 60's and the peak of von Braun's American fame (not infamy, yet), he serves as an almost perfect corner case for techies to consider as to how they would fit into their larger society to advance their technical dreams. von Braun did not ask to be born into what would become Nazi Germany and when he started working for the army there it was before the Nazi atrocities started. He wasn't particularly interested in weapons and by all accounts his goal was always space flight. The German army resources allowed him to pursue the development of the rockets he had been working on for years before, at that time Germany was not yet the horror it would become. By the time the really bad stuff started happening there -- the deadly slave labor, which his project was involved in, he was stuck -- continue the work or head to prison or execution, most likely the latter by that time in the war; he was arrested in 1944 and released only due to the intervention at the highest levels (Albert Speer, Minister of War Production). Those slave laborers (which he claims to not know the extent of) were doomed from the start; there is nothing he could have done for them. So, just what was he supposed to do? -- given that there was nothing he could have done to improve the lot of the populations under Nazi control? The fact that he was working on weapons aimed at the civil population of England could be problematic but by then the English and American bombers were incinerating German cities. He didn't have the option of just quitting and going away to work on something else. Given the same circumstances what would any of us techies had done? I don't know and I'm glad I will never have to find out. There is an excellent recent bio (2007) of von Braun by Michael Neufeld which tries to address the moral ambiguities of von Braun's life -- worth a read.
Re: Non-scientist at work (Score:5, Interesting)
True. I have to say as a Brit visiting Huntsville in Alabama, it was a shock to find that they named the local exhibition centre after the designer of the V rockets that hit London during WW2.
And I was not shocked when I visited the United Kingdom and found that they had built a memorial to Lord Kitchener, a man that was responsible for the murder of tens of thousands of South African civilians through neglect born of incompetence, arrogance and mindless prejudice. It seems visiting South African Boers, it seems, regularly go there with the intention of urinating on the memorial. That may shock the sentiments of the average patriotic Briton but the Boers hated both Kitchener and his country with such passion that many of them fought with the Germans during WWI although these days most of them reserve their hatred for Kitchener in particular.
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So, as a Brit, have you ever visited Dresden? "In four raids between 13 and 15 February 1945, 722 heavy bombers of the British Royal Air Force (RAF) and 527 of the United States Army Air Forces (USAAF) dropped more than 3,900 tons of high-explosive bombs and incendiary devices on the city. The bombing and the resulting firestorm destroyed over 1,600 acres (6.5 km2) of the city centre. An estimated 22,700 to 25,000 people were killed." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B... [wikipedia.org]
Re: Non-scientist at work (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Non-scientist at work (Score:5, Informative)
Yes, your convoluted conspiracy theory involving thousands of people may be correct. Or some film maker may be doing some self-promotion. Gee, I wonder what William of Ockham would think?
More evidence for theory #2: There has been no third party confirmation. There is no photo of the site. The photo accompanying the article is of a completely different underground bunker, in Bavaria.
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The point was not whether the secret bunker was real or used for weapons research or not, it is that the common logic about how hard it would be to keep a secret on a scale so large would be limited by factors not present in modern days.
Of course it might be most likely self promotion- even if it turns out to be a real nuclear test facility. But the idea that many people would know about and talk about it given enough time is severely limited to dead people and people wishing to avoid prison terms with a fe
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Also from the article:
"The existence of the facility was mentioned in the diaries of an Austrian physicist who worked for the Nazis, and Sulzer used ground-penetrating radar technology to pinpoint its location...
'Declassified intelligence documents as well as testimony from witnesses helped excavators
Re: Non-scientist at work (Score:4, Informative)
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Re: Non-scientist at work (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Non-scientist at work (Score:5, Interesting)
While I lived at RAF Gatow, Berlin (dad was in the RAF) during the 1980s, we used to play a heck of a lot in the extensive woods on base - we even played in and around the fairly large bunker on the edge of the airfield. Until, that is, someone discovered a second entrance to the bunker, and a second level - full of aircraft engines, parts, and about 200 tonnes of WW2 era high explosive in the form of rockets, bombs and other stuff. There were two chambers each about the size of a basket ball court.
In the four years we were there, they discovered previously unknown cellars in three major buildings on base (including the Havel School), and a two mile long tunnel linking the airfield with the Havel river.
All of this on an RAF airbase which covered only a few square miles, and had been active in allied hands since the end of WW2.
There is plenty yet to be discovered in ex-Nazi occupied land, mark my words.
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From what I gather, it's still somewhat common for people to find relics of the prohibition era (e.g. remains of speakeasies and distilleries) buried underground somewhere even today.
Re: Non-scientist at work (Score:4, Informative)
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After actually RTFA (at the Mirror), part of the facility was discovered and cannibalized by the Russians, but they missed a bit (a bit: 75 acres is 300 000 sqm, 3.27 million sqft...)
Re:Non-scientist at work (Score:5, Informative)
It took reading all of the articles, but finally it became clear they were talking about a facility of unknown size located under a perimeter of 75 acres of land rather than a facility of 75 acres under the ground.
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Well, we know the Nazi regime asembled ME 262s in an elaborate network of underground tunnels to avoid Allied bombers who late in the war were operating over Germany with near impunity. The tunnels were excavated and ME 262s assembled with Jewish slave labor under horrific conditions.
If you were involved with such a thing you'd have plenty of reason to keep it secret.
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An awful lot of them probably died in the process... and 'dead men tell no tales'.
TFA says 320000 imates from the local concentration camp, and the Russians did discover the plant... just not all of it.
Hitler and the NAZIs were so stupid. (Score:5, Funny)
If they were truly the Master Race, they would have realized that banking is the way to go to control or destroy the World.
Look it now. Merkel pretty much controls Europe - thanks to the Deutsche Bundesbank. And without a single shot fired. I think I'm gonna send my kids to Merkel Youth camp where they can grow up to be bankers, make billions for doing nothing other than rent seeking, fees, bonuses and commissions.
STEM?! Pfft! That's just a fairy tale that's told to you peons to keep you in line.
Re: Hitler and the NAZIs were so stupid. (Score:3, Interesting)
First, Nazi is a noun not an acronym. Second, the Euro is controlled by the ECB where the Bundesbank has only one vote. It is led by an Italian. However, Merkel is a neoliberal politician fueled by a strategy based on demobilizing the opposition. Key is her phrase of "no alternatives". Her goal is similar to other neoliberals like Cameron to reduce state influnce as much as possible. If you feel conquered its by the world upper class.
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Her goal is similar to other neoliberals like Cameron to reduce state influnce[sic] as much as possible.
Which probably explains why Merkel is moving at a breakneck pace to put a referendum on EU membership in front of German voters.
Oh, wait: she isn't. Probably because she's kind of a statist tool, like the rest of the Eurocrats.
Re: Hitler and the NAZIs were so stupid. (Score:5, Insightful)
I do not believe that she is only a puppet. She is doing her job too well. However, she is a friend of Friede Springer (a German news corporation) which has in its charter to be anti communist and to foster the bonds towards the US. Merkel has perfectly understood how to stay in power in a democracy when backed by media and other influential figures of the upper class/global elite. However, she is not a democrat of her own. She is also not interested in the idea of a united Europe. She is more interested in free trade, as this suits herself and her cast. She also only opposed Cameron when he was against open borders, as this would hinder free movement of the poor people and be anti-neoliberal.
BTW: Cameron only promised a vote on EU membership, as straight conservatives in his party and UKIP required that from him. And in Germany votes on such topics are not expressed in the constitution, because when the constitution was written, allies and German politicians did not trust the population enough to give the people so much power.
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No, she is a neo-liberal. The state works for the bank to execute its austerity measures, but she does have to pacify the 'opposition' to keep things from getting too lopsided there also. They may have more than two parties, but they play it the same way as the Americans, The link between corporate and government is not so overt, but it actually is a stronger, strong enough to influence American policy
'statist tool' - you're trolling again with that nonsense :-) The state exists to serve. That you believe t
Man (Score:3)
FTFY
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Actually, it's an acronym for NAtionale soZIalist, the political party.
What, you didn't know the NAZIs were socialists?
Yeah, about as socialist as the KKK....
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it's not an acronym, it's a portmanteau [wikipedia.org] like CalTech.
Re: Hitler and the NAZIs were so stupid. (Score:4, Informative)
While you are right about the origin of the name from "Nationalsozialisten" it is still a noun according to the German language standard (see http://www.duden.de/suchen/dud... [duden.de]). On a second note: They claimed to be socialists, but there was nothing social what they did. While they started many expensive building programs to bring people into jobs, this was a) already planned by previous governments and b) a "Keynes" like action to boost economy in an capitalistic way. They also cooperated with the heavy industry in Germany.
A key feature of socialism (on paper) is that all humans are equal. As history has shown that does not work in a dictatorship. And it does not work with racism.
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As history has shown that does not work in a dictatorship.
History has shown that Socialism does not work period. It does not matter the type of government.
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Re: Hitler and the NAZIs were so stupid. (Score:5, Insightful)
the happiest and richest countries in the world are in northern europe, and they are a solid stable mixture of capitalism and socialism
it is true that pure socialist, or pure capitalist countries, are terrible societies
the best is a mix, the middle, not an extreme
social safety nets remove the unjust and abusive extremes of pure capitalism
nevermind that pure capitalism isn't a meritocracy at all, it's a static class of structure of a few ultrarich and a sea of miserable poor
capitalism is just a tool, not a religion. the idea is to put capitalism to work, and have government structures that mitigate the injustices and imbalances that capitalism inevitably creates
to worship the idea of capitalism as some sort of perfect utopia is naive, ignorant, and just dumb, really. it reveals a lack of education and a heavy indoctrination into a dimwitted propaganda without any critical thought
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nevermind that pure capitalism isn't a meritocracy at all, it's a static class of structure of a few ultrarich and a sea of miserable poor
Interesting how one has to strain credulity in order to say anything particularly bad about "pure capitalism", but "pure socialism" leaves its failures in plain view. My view on this is that a capitalist society is a very dynamic one. It may as you assert tend to social stratefication, but you are ignore tremendous wealth transfers from rich to poor (such as employment, charity, costly displays of social status, etc) that act to alleviate this disparity.
to worship the idea of capitalism as some sort of perfect utopia is naive, ignorant, and just dumb, really. it reveals a lack of education and a heavy indoctrination into a dimwitted propaganda without any critical thought
Yes, so "capitalism worshippers" are doubleplus ungood
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to worship the idea of capitalism as some sort of perfect utopia is naive, ignorant, and just dumb, really. it reveals a lack of education and a heavy indoctrination into a dimwitted propaganda without any critical thought
Yes, so "capitalism worshippers" are doubleplus ungood? I guess nobody ought to be one then!
How on earth did you reach that conclusion? His entire post made the argument that the societies with the highest happiness index [wikipedia.org] are the ones that compromise between capitalism (newspeak: Goodthink [From your point of view]) and socialism (newspeak: Crimethink [From your point of view]). The nordic countries he cited, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland and Iceland occupy half of the top ten lists in the 2014 world happiness report. The much more capitalist USA, many of whose inhabitants seem to consider the
Re: Hitler and the NAZIs were so stupid. (Score:5, Insightful)
are you willfully ignorant? many countries are socialist. One could just as well say the periodic econonomic collapses in capitalist systems through history shows capitalism doesn't work period. Get your head out of the kool-aide bowl, boy, none of man's systems are perfectly successful in a all cases.
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many countries are socialist.
False. Many countries are social democrat, but no country outside of a tiny number of failed states like Cuba are socialist.
I don't think that most US Americans are capable of understanding the very substantial difference between the two. To to about half the US population anything to the left of the Republican/Tea party is communism. It cracks me up whenever somebody on Fox News calls Obama or the Clintons 'socialists' or even 'communists' which is even funnier than the 'socialist' label. Both the Clintons and Obama are pretty much in the pocket of Wall Street which is anathema to any real socialist. It is however entirely thin
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Mainstream definition of socialism prevails over your nonsense: China is socialist and seems to be doing well, Viet Nam is socialist and doing well. Cuba doing better every year, by the way, keep an eye on them.
Note I don't even like socialism, I prefer something from other end of spectrum
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Socialism implies equality, equality implies equal for all, no ruling class.
Given that equality is likewise a myth, one suspects that political systems premised on it's existence are doomed to failure.
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Actually, it's an acronym for NAtionale soZIalist, the political party.
Actually, it's a contraction, German style.
German has a lot of compound words, which means it has a lot of long words, which means it needs a better system of contractions than we have in English. We remove one letter or a contiguous string and replace it with an apostrophe; Germans remove letters from any number of places in the word and don't bother with the apostrophe.
Examples you might have heard at the movies: Kaleun = Kapitanleutnant; Uffz = Unteroffizier; Stalag = Stammlager
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Actually, it's neither; it's the first two syllables of "Nationalsozialistische" (i.e. 'Na-tzi-o-naal...'), with more than a bit of Austro-Bavarian baggage attached...
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Yes, the National-Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP) was a socialist party.
I suggest watching the whole thing some time: The Soviet Story [youtube.com]
Liberal Fascism [nationalreview.com]
Benito Mussolini was a socialist and earned the title “Il Duce” as the leader of the socialists in Italy. When he founded the fascist party, its program called for implementing a minimum wage, expropriating property from landowners, repealing titles of nobility, creating state-run secular schools and imposing a progressive tax rate. Mussolini took socialism and turned it in a more populist and militaristic direction, but remained a modernizing, secular man of the left.
The Nazis too were socialists, “enemies, deadly enemies, of today’s capitalist economic system,” in the words of the party’s ideologist Gregor Strasser. The party’s platform sounded a lot like that of the Italian fascists. The Nazis wanted to chase conventional Christianity from public life and overturn tradition, replacing them with an all-powerful state. Both Hitler and Mussolini were revolutionaries, bitterly opposed to “reactionary” forces in their societies.
Leftists become incandescent when reminded of the socialist roots of Nazism [telegraph.co.uk]
On 16 June 1941, as Hitler readied his forces for Operation Barbarossa, Josef Goebbels looked forward to the new order that the Nazis would impose on a conquered Russia. There would be no come-back, he wrote, for capitalists nor priests nor Tsars. Rather, in the place of debased, Jewish Bolshevism, the Wehrmacht would deliver “der echte Sozialismus”: real socialism.
Goebbels never doubted that he was a socialist. He understood Nazism to be a better and more plausible form of socialism than that propagated by Lenin. Instead of spreading itself across different nations, it would operate within the unit of the Volk.
So total is the cultural victory of the modern Left that the merely to recount this fact is jarring. But few at the time would have found it especially contentious. As George Watson put it in The Lost Literature of Socialism:
It is now clear beyond all reasonable doubt that Hitler and his associates believed they were socialists, and that others, including democratic socialists, thought so too.
. . . . Hitler told Hermann Rauschning, a Prussian who briefly worked for the Nazis before rejecting them and fleeing the country, that he had admired much of the thinking of the revolutionaries he had known as a young man; but he felt that they had been talkers, not doers. “I have put into practice what these peddlers and pen pushers have timidly begun,” he boasted, adding that “the whole of National Socialism” was “based on Marx”.
Marx’s error, Hitler believed, had been to foster class war instead of national unity – to set workers against industrialists instead of conscripting both groups into a corporatist order. His aim, he told his economic adviser, Otto Wagener, was to “convert the German Volk to socialism without simply killing off the old individualists” – by which he meant the bankers and factory owners who could, he thought, serve socialism better by generating revenue for the state. “What Marxism, Leninism and Stalinism failed to accomplish,” he told Wagener, “we shall be in a position to achieve.”
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While the NSDAP (acronym for "National Socialist German Workers Party") started of with some elements they had "borrowed" from socialists the ideology changed soon to the absolute opposite. Some of the early members, like the Gregor Strasser you mentioned, stuck to some of those ideas, but they lost all influence. And Strasser is a good example: he was killed in the "night of the long knieves" in 1934 once Hitler felt he was in a position strong enough to get rid of former allies that didn't follow the new
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How do you control a financial system without the "M" in STEM?
Re:Hitler and the NAZIs were so stupid. (Score:5, Interesting)
Look it now. Merkel pretty much controls Europe -
Look at Angela Merkel now . . . she has Ph.D. in Physics, and a bad bowl-head haircut to boot! A German TV camera team caught her last year buying a jar of mustard in a supermarket in Berlin. The team was filming an advertisement, until one of the crew said. Hey, isn't that the Channcellor or something?"
When was the last time you saw President Obama anywhere, without a half Marine Brigade protecting him . . . ?
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When was the last time you saw President Obama anywhere, without a half Marine Brigade protecting him . . . ?
What's your point? How many assassinations, or attempted assassinations, have recent leaders of Germany experienced?
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Look it now. Merkel pretty much controls Europe -
Look at Angela Merkel now . . . she has Ph.D. in Physics, and a bad bowl-head haircut to boot! A German TV camera team caught her last year buying a jar of mustard in a supermarket in Berlin. The team was filming an advertisement, until one of the crew said. Hey, isn't that the Channcellor or something?"
When was the last time you saw President Obama anywhere, without a half Marine Brigade protecting him . . . ?
On a trip to Iceland years ago I once shared a hot tub with a bunch of locals (which seems to be a favourite Icelandic activity) one of whom turned out to be the president of the country. He was unaccompanied, no aides, no staff, no body guards, no snipers on rooftops no drones packing hellfire missiles hovering above. His driver just dropped him off at the local bathing facility and then used the down time to have the presidential Mercedes changed to summer tires. We had a pleasant conversation about geoth
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It is amazing how much some leaders just don't freak out. The Prime Minister of Australia, John Howard, used to go jogging every day along the same track. He had 2 or 3 security guards with him. One day he was stopped by a person who wanted to meet him and give him a hug, which he did and which everyone was okay with.
That person had a a massive screwdriver in his hand. The security guards didn't even take it off him. The media freaked out about it though, and then the Chaser Brothers (political satire duo)
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G20 in Brisbane a few months ago. Obama brought about 10 planes with him, flew in via a helicopter from a military airbase escorted by 3 Ospreys which completely screwed traffic on the ICB when they landed due to the dust they kicked up. He parked half the navy off the coast of Australia and had additional planes and support at both Sydney and Coolongatta airports. I never once saw him when he wasn't surrounded by countless secret service agents. Better yet, he brought his own fake Obama in with his own fak
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Oh you mean This? [dailymail.co.uk]
sorry for the crappy source but that document is quite real.
Re:Hitler and the NAZIs were so stupid. (Score:5, Funny)
So you say that the joke is not true?
Merkel goes to Greece after the financial collapse. At the border:
- Name?
- Angela
- Family name?
- Merkel
- Occupation?
- Not yet!
Seriously though, I agree with you and we should have "witty" mod at /. for when the truth is spelled in a funny, witty manner. However, it seems that if you want to be the world's top financial force you also need the largest military force...just in case ;)
Re:Hitler and the NAZIs were so stupid. (Score:5, Insightful)
If you really do not know the difference you need to keep your mouth shut and just listen to people who do for a long while. Even if you are stupid enough to try to equate the two (which is intelectual dishonesty at best), the differences would be real and huge.
Re:Hitler and the NAZIs were so stupid. (Score:4, Informative)
No they completely do not- unless you are going to limit your statement to not looking like they came from Iraq. Bush never imprisoned people and killed them because of their Race or Religion in attempts to cleanse the earth of them. Bush never invaded countries and forced their populations into labor camps to further the war efforts. Bush never Euthanized people deemed not worthy. Bush never forced sterilized people who were borderline not worthy. Bush never killed his political enemies.
About the only things they had in common was that they were both white and leaders of a country. If that is what makes you think they are similar, from any perspective, the vast majority of the developed world looks like Hitler and Nazi Germany. A completely dishonest and fabricated statement from any perspective you wish to push out. That is why there is Godwin's law.
Re: Hitler and the NAZIs were so stupid. (Score:5, Funny)
What unprovoked war of aggression? Iraq was far from unprovoked and it wouldn't even qualify as a war of aggression seeing how the main charge for entering into the war was the failure to meet the terms of the armistice that ended hostilities when Iraq invade Kuwait in a war of aggression.
Please, lets not ignore reality here.
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Iraq was far from unprovoked
Then why were all the reasons we invaded lies?
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Re: Hitler and the NAZIs were so stupid. (Score:4, Informative)
Before I comment on WMDs in Iraq I will remind you that there were something like 20 causes of action against Iraq, many of which were clear cut and indisputable. Others were also confirmed after the invasion, such as finding Iraq's banned long range missiles, and unfilled chemical warheads for those missiles. There have been hundreds of mass graves found in Iraq which amply testify to the many crimes against humanity committed by the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein, not to mention his wars and acts of aggression against many of his neighbors.
As to the WMDs, approximately 5,000 chemical and biological weapons were found, and the allowable number was zero (0).
Iraq's WMD: The Shameless New York Times Moves the Goalposts [townhall.com]
Now comes the 10,000-word, eight-part story in The New York Times. The front-page story, called "The Secret Casualties Of Iraq's Abandoned Chemical Weapons," says WMD were in Iraq: "In all, American troops secretly reported finding roughly 5,000 chemical warheads, shells or aviation bombs, according to interviews with dozens of participants, Iraqi and American officials, and heavily redacted intelligence documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act."
Moreover, the soldiers were told to keep quiet about the WMD:
"Troops and officers were instructed to be silent or give deceptive accounts of what they had found. ?'Nothing of significance' is what I was ordered to say,' said Jarrod Lampier, a recently retired Army major who was present for the largest chemical weapons discovery of the war: more than 2,400 nerve-agent rockets unearthed in 2006 at a former Republican Guard compound.
Some of those weapons were still being held in a major Iraqi military base overrun by ISIS.
I hope that helps.
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Iraq did not attack the United States or present even a remote threat to the United States.
They tried to develop nuclear weapons and they invaded a US ally. That's two right there. Just because they weren't capable of doing those things in 2003, doesn't mean that they would have stayed in that state forever after.
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It's not clear that you have a reasonable claim to judge impartiality if you can't follow that.
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Bush, or Hitler?
Eh, what's the difference.
Hitler won an election. *rimshot*
Tunnels everywhere, A-bombs nowhere (Score:5, Insightful)
Some of these claims seem to be overblown.
If you take a look at the Manhattan Project, you get an idea what efforts in research and production (i.e. uranium enrichment) were required.
The Nazis never had a programm that came anywhere near these dimensions.
All they had was a handfull of phsysicists (most of the best had emmigrated to the US anyway) and a small research reactor.
So while there was some nuclear research, there never was a atomic bomb or anything close to it in Germany.
And the tunnels? The whole 3rd Reich and it's occupied territories were tunneled mostly for the purpose of weapons production.
Re:Tunnels everywhere, A-bombs nowhere (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:Tunnels everywhere, A-bombs nowhere (Score:5, Informative)
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There are two branches in nuclear research: weapons and power.
Early on in the Nazis' research, Werner Heisenberg miscalculated* the critical mass necessary to produce a workable bomb, placing it at around one ton. Largely as a result of this, research on weapons production was halted. Hwever, it is entirely possible that research on power poduction continued on. Who really cares how heavy a fixed reactor core is?
*Or he mislead the Nazis for political or moral reasons.
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There are many branches in nuclear research: weapons, power, medicine, nuclear chemistry, particle diffraction, etc.
I actually live here (Score:5, Interesting)
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Wow!
Get a Geiger counter... Who knows what will happen when they start poking at things.
I wish there were more pictures...
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I just realized the pictures they do have are of other facilities... there aren't any pictures at all.
Get down there with your phone man!
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In other words... the article is a dramatization, also known as clickbait.
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Hey I live here too ... It's a good 10 hour flight and then a 20-minute drive from Linz airport.
I live in Austria, first thing I hear about this (Score:5, Informative)
Re:I live in Austria, first thing I hear about thi (Score:5, Informative)
Re:I live in Austria, first thing I hear about thi (Score:4, Insightful)
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Castle Wolfenstein (Score:5, Funny)
That's where BJ Blazkowicz busted out of, with my help.
Does Godwin's Law apply.... (Score:3, Insightful)
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No.
Bah! Already seen in the Captain America movies (Score:5, Funny)
POW Sabotage! (Score:2)
I remember hearing a story about POWs who substitued regular water for a shipment of heavy water and thus delayed the German program.
Lucky for for all of us they were guarded by a blithering Sargent who would willingly ignore their shenanigans!
Bigger Nazi base on the moon: Iron Sky (Score:3)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I... [wikipedia.org]
"Iron Sky is a 2012 Finnish-Australian-German[4] comic science fiction action film directed by Timo Vuorensola and written by Johanna Sinisalo and Michael Kalesniko.[5][6] It tells the story of a group of Nazi Germans who, having been defeated in 1945, fled to the Moon where they built a space fleet to return in 2018 and conquer Earth."
We have only three years left to get ready!!! :-)
Seriously though, the Nazis show what can happen when soulless bureaucracy gets out of control... And modern schooling was invented in Prussia and made possible the Nazi war effort built on people unquestionably following horrific orders... ... Before you can reach a point of effectiveness in defending your own children or your principles against the assault of blind social machinery, you have to stop conspiring against yourself by attempting to negotiate with a set of abstract principles and rules which, by its nature, cannot respond. Under all its disguises, that is what institutional schooling is, an abstraction which has escaped its handlers. Nobody can reform it. First you have to realize that human values are the stuff of madness to a system; in systems-logic the schools we have are already the schools the system needs; the only way they could be much improved is to have kids eat, sleep, live, and die there. Schools got the way they were at the start of the twentieth century as part of a vast, intensely engineered social revolution in which all major institutions were overhauled to work together in harmonious managerial efficiency. ... A huge price had to be paid for business and government efficiency, a price we still pay in the quality of our existence. ... Part of what kids gave up was the prospect of being able to read very well, a historic part of the American genius. Instead, school had to train them for their role in the new overarching social system. But spare yourself the agony of thinking of this as a conspiracy. It was and is a fully rational transaction, the very epitome of rationalization engendered by a group of honorable men, all honorable men -- but with decisive help from ordinary citizens, from almost all of us as we gradually lost touch with the fact that being followers instead of leaders, becoming consumers in place of producers, rendered us incompletely human. It was a naturally occurring conspiracy, one which required no criminal genius. The real conspirators were ourselves. When we sold our liberty for the promise of automatic security, we became like children in a conspiracy against growing up, sad children who conspire against their own children, consigning them over and over to the denaturing vats of compulsory state factory schooling."
http://johntaylorgatto.wordpre... [wordpress.com]
"I'll bring this down to earth. Try to see that an intricately subordinated industrial/commercial system has only limited use for hundreds of millions of self-reliant, resourceful readers and critical thinkers. In an egalitarian, entrepreneurially based economy of confederated families like the one the Amish have or the Mondragon folk in the Basque region of Spain, any number of self-reliant people can be accommodated usefully, but not in a concentrated command-type economy like our own. Where on earth would they fit?
And:
http://www.press.uchicago.edu/... [uchicago.edu]
"What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if the people could not understand it, it could not be released because of national security."
Some comfort (Score:2, Interesting)
Even though we have this distrubing news of a missed WMD program in Austria that lay hidden for 70 years under occupation and democratic governments, we still have the assurance of "top men" that we known all and found everything in Iraq. Yes indeed, ... "top men" .... some even post here.
Could? (Score:2)
If, could, fodder, ultimately, failed, secure. Every one of these words as cast is a pablum-brained Orwellian nightmare.
The German Jesus nut [wikipedia.org] was supremacy in all things. After setbacks in The Battle of Britain and Moscow/Stalingrad, the Germans found themselves in a situation where they needed to tighten their belts (both milita
Kammler and Nukes (Score:4, Interesting)
Kammler can be linked to every fantastic and most absurd idea on nazi secret projects. However there is a caveat - till now I have never seen his name in any document that can be surely sourced to any atomic project nazis may have had. None, zero, nada, nechego...
The most striking fact that Kammler had nothing to do with nukes is how real nazi nuked scientists tried to survive the last days of the Third Reich. Most interesting was how Heisenberg managed to find food and other essential things for his family - he got help from an old acquaintance working at one of Kammler's key labs! For that, he came to town on a bycicle and the acquaintance was shocked by his shabby looks. So Heisenberg was a lost soul at the end of the war.
Nukes and Kammler, until someone proves the contrary, don't cope. However, this does not mean someone may still find some mega-leftovers of Kammler's Underground Empire. For the sake of what? Well he surely was an early participant of "Amerika Bomber" project, still in a very classical form. He also was the V-2/A-4 boss and there are tons of questions on how deep was his knowledge and participation of such projects like the A-10. He once worked at Luftwaffe and seemed to have been in good relations with Goering, so he could know about such wonders as the Silbervogel. And, at the end he was the last boss of the nazi jet projects (which was the reason why von Braun suddenly stopped at Oberammergau, with this guy breathing at his back). While war demanded some humbleness, it was usual to see many nazi projects exploding into mega-machines. I wouldn't be shocked to see the last of the last of Kammler's projects, the Messerschmidt P.1101, having a megabrother nearby. Or maybe it was just for the P.1101 itself! Once tested, they had to be produced somewhere, in large numbers, in very, very large numbers.
So the huge, nearly empty bunkers. Maybe for one of these bloated conceptions of World Domination. And nukes were just speculation, still without any proof of concept. At the end of the War, nazis still thought that the key to victory was the Very Big, Surely Bad and Really Ugly.
Re:Plot twist: There were still Nazi's inside.... (Score:4, Funny)
Nazi zombies?
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Or perhaps this is where Al Capone really built his secret vault!
No one suspects the Cosa Nostra!
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Don't worry, they had to stop digging because the local authorities mysteriously started insisting the excavators apply for some new permits. Those responsible for the safekeeping of the vault with the Holy grail and the Ark of the Covenant, etc are already in the process of using one of the secret secondary backdoors out of the facility to move all the valuables to one of the backup storage vaults.
By the time they resume digging, there will be an empty chamber for them to find.
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That belongs in a museum!
Re:Amazing (Score:4, Informative)
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Never underestimate the creativity of your average slashdotter ;)
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How on earth would you Godwin this? Comparing the Nazis to the Nazis is a bit redundant.
That's just the kind of thing Hitler would have said!