World War I & II topic

The desecration of a war grave is a serious offence. In the last few years, we've been in the grip of this terrible grave robbery:

Dutch call on Indonesia to investigate reports of mass graves and war wrecks

Reports that human remains buried in unmarked mass graves on eastern Java after illegal salvage of second world war shipwrecks

The Netherlands has pressed Indonesia to investigate reports that the remains of Dutch sailors from illegally salvaged second world war shipwrecks off its coast were dumped in a mass grave.

The request comes after reports earlier this month that human remains were recovered from three Dutch shipwrecks, sunk during the decisive 1942 Battle of the Java Sea.

The remains were buried in an unmarked grave on eastern Java, according to an Indonesian investigative website.

The reports also said the remains of British sailors had been recovered from British wrecks.

In recent years a series of huge wrecks have been all but removed from the waters off Indonesia by operators seeking to cash in on the valuable metals on board.

The ships that have been dismantled or vanished included the Royal Navy destroyer HMS Electra, on which 119 men perished, HMS Exeter, a 175-metre heavy cruiser on which 54 died, and HMS Encounter, which was scuttled to avoid capture by the Japanese.

More than 900 Dutch and 250 Indo-Dutch sailors died during the Battle of the Java Sea, in which the Allied navies suffered a disastrous defeat by the Imperial Japanese Navy.

“The unconfirmed information from the recent reports, for instance about human remains ... will have to be investigated further locally,” Dutch Defence Minister Ank Bijleveld said.

“The investigation is needed to ascertain whether there’s a link to the three Dutch warships,” she said in a letter to the Dutch parliament, published Thursday.

Bijleveld said the Dutch ambassador met Indonesian officials about the issue and would speak to the transport minister.

“The Indonesian authorities confirmed they were looking into the reports and will see whether new information comes to light ... and will inform us if it does,” Bijleveld said, adding “it’s too early to speculate about the outcome of an investigation”.

Indonesian Navy spokesman Gig Jonias Mozes Sipasulta declined to comment to AFP on the reports.

“I have nothing to add on this matter,” he said.

Last week, Bijleveld said an initial probe by Dutch and Indonesian experts into the disappearance of the shipwrecks had provided “no definitive answers”.

But some angry Dutch parliamentarians fired back that her response left the impression “that the culprits will never be found,” the daily tabloid De Telegraaf reported.

Indonesia initially refused to take the blame for the missing ships, saying it had not been asked to protect the wrecks and therefore was not responsible for them, but later agreed to work with the Netherlands.

Amateur divers discovered the long-lost wrecks of three Dutch warships in 2002, 60 years after they sank in the major naval clash.

But an international expedition that sailed to the site ahead of the 75th anniversary of the battle was shocked to discover those wrecks and others had gone missing.

Experts say salvaging operations are rife throughout Indonesia, varying from large commercial operations using cranes and platforms to smaller ventures shipping scrap to dealers along Indonesia’s thousands of kilometres of coastline.
 
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Today the last Dutch survivor of the Battle of the Java Sea (1942) died. At this battle the Netherlands lost 900 men.

In The Hague Felix Jans (93) died. Jans was on the destroyer "Kortenaer", which was sunk by a Japanese torpedo (a Long Lance broke the Kortenaer in two and made it sink rapidly after the hit).
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The British navy saved Jans after he'd spent one night at sea. Later, Jans worked in Thailand on the Burma Railway.

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Johan van Hulst, Who Helped Save 600 Children From the Nazis, Dies at 107

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Johan van Hulst in 1969. He headed a teachers’ college in Amsterdam when he came up with a plan to save hundreds of children from being sent to Nazi death camps.

In the spring and summer of 1943 in Amsterdam, Johan van Hulst was at the center of a daring scheme to save Jewish children from being sent to a concentration camp.

The children — from infants to 12-year-olds — had been taken from their parents at a deportation center and brought by nursery workers to a nursery next to the teachers’ college where Mr. van Hulst was the principal.

The rescue plan was simple but risky: the children were surreptitiously handed over a hedge between the nursery and the college and hidden in a classroom until they could be smuggled to the countryside by Dutch Resistance groups.

Mr. van Hulst is credited with helping to rescue as many as 600 children, yet he was haunted by what he could not do. With up to 100 children still in the nursery as it was about to be shut down that September, Mr. van Hulst was asked how many more he could smuggle out.

“That was the most difficult day of my life,” he told Yad Vashem, the Holocaust remembrance center in Jerusalem, which in 1972 named him one of the Righteous Among the Nations, a designation for non-Jews who rescued Jews. He is one of 5,595 Dutch people given the honor.

“You realize that you cannot possibly take all the children with you,” he said. “You know for a fact that the children you leave behind are going to die. I took 12 with me. Later on, I asked myself, ‘Why not 13?’ ”

Nearly 70 years later, when Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel visited the Netherlands in 2012, he met Mr. van Hulst and told him: “We say those who save one life saves a universe. You saved hundreds of universes.”

Mr. van Hulst died on March 22 in Amsterdam, the Dutch Senate announced. He was 107.

Mr. van Hulst started teaching at the Reformed Teachers’ Training College in 1938. Two years later, he was named deputy principal. But after the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands began in May 1940, the school came under great financial pressure. The Dutch government eliminated a subsidy for teachers’ salaries, seemingly dooming the school to closing.

But Mr. van Hulst came up with a plan to ask the students’ parents to fund the school, and it succeeded, saving the school and helping him rise to principal.

When Germany invaded the Netherlands, there were about 140,000 Jews, and by September 1944, more than 100,000 of them had been sent to concentration camps, according to Yad Vashem. Jews from Amsterdam were taken to the transit camp in Westerbork, in the Netherlands, before being transported to Nazi extermination centers in Poland like Auschwitz.

The teachers’ college represented one side of the children’s rescue triangle. The deportation center — a former theater — was managed by Walter Süskind, a German refugee. The nursery was run by Henriëtte Pimentel, who asked Mr. van Hulst to let the children play in the college’s garden and take naps in a classroom. Then, as the plan took hold, the children were whisked to safety.

The plan necessitated deception — and led to difficult conversations with parents whose children had been wrested from them.

read on here:
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/01/...-600-children-from-the-nazis-dies-at-107.html
 
I was in Tokyo a few weeks ago and went to a war shrine ... really beautiful place (really a garden) .. but some pretty disgusting signs excusing war criminals around things like "the China Incident" , "the Manchurain Incident", etc.
 
We all know recent US military history. It's gross. They're the chief breaker of Geneva conventions and general human rights in warzones since 1945. But this is about Japan - they haven't exactly reconciled with the past like Germans did post WW2. The stuff bearfan describes is society wide and even in the highest echelons of military today. Imagine German Navy's new ships, to be deployed to Baltic, named Bismarck, Tirpitz, Gneissenau, Scharnhorst, Graf Spee, etc...This is what Japanese are doing all the time.
 
Finished reading Masters of Death by Richard Rhodes. It is a very detailed book about the Einsatzgruppen (SS death squads that followed the Wermacht through Eastern Europe and Western Russia shooting all Jews). They were responsible for the killing of 2 million people.

The book details the leaders, their psychology early on when only men were shot and how that changed when Himmler ordered them to start shooting the women and children as well. There are many survivor testimonies, speeches by Himmler; it was a very enlightening book.
 
We all know recent US military history. It's gross. They're the chief breaker of Geneva conventions and general human rights in warzones since 1945. But this is about Japan - they haven't exactly reconciled with the past like Germans did post WW2. The stuff bearfan describes is society wide and even in the highest echelons of military today. Imagine German Navy's new ships, to be deployed to Baltic, named Bismarck, Tirpitz, Gneissenau, Scharnhorst, Graf Spee, etc...This is what Japanese are doing all the time.


I have a neat pamphlet from the place essentially calling the Tokyo Trials a fraud ... no mention of the Bataan Death March, Rape of Nanking, etc. If anything, I think the Germans are still too closely tied to WWII ... but Japan is quite the opposite .. and at this point it is not really going to change, pretty much anyone who had anything to do with the many and major atrocities are long since dead.
 
Just read The Man Who Broke Into Auschwitz by Denis Avery. Amazing experiences of a British WWII vet. Started out in North Africa campaign. During 2nd tour is captured by Italians. Escapes the POW camp several times and so he is finally sent to Auschwitz.

In the building where the POW's are kept, they have better food and bunks than the Jews. During hard labor 6 to 7 days a week, he sees the conditions of the Jews and hears their stories of their treatment. He wants to see for himself so he TRADES PLACES with 1 of them.

Unreal
 
Saw a free advance screening last night of a new film called Operation Finale. It is the story of the capture of Adolf Eichmann. He is played by Ben Kingsley who, at times, is sickening good (as always). Very well made film.

I recommend first watching the HBO film Conspiracy to familiarize yourself with Eichmann's direct involvement with The Final Solution.

 
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