International • 10:40 • Modified at 10:40
German intelligence: AfD is far-right organization
Author : Matthijs Damsteeg
Germany's Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution has labeled the political party Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) a "proven far-right organization." A press release from the agency said the evidence had intensified. The party now holds 152 of the 630 seats in the German parliament. The ruling allows authorities to use more powers to investigate the party.

Local branches of the party had previously been labelled as right-wing extremist, but this was not the case for the national party. It had already been designated as a suspect case, but the Verfassungsschutz still conducted extensive investigations into the party.

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According to the service, violations of human dignity, the rule of law and the principle of democracy were decisive in the judgment. According to German media, the investigation comprises around a thousand pages and is based on current, public information about the party.

Recruiting informants
The status means that authorities will have more powers to keep an eye on the AfD. For example, it will now be allowed to recruit informants and intercept communications. The party will not be banned.

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The AfD has always considered the investigation by the service to be politically motivated. The results of the investigation were reportedly postponed to limit the influence on the February elections. The AfD is expected to appeal the decision of the service.

Party ban
In Germany, opponents of the party have been talking about a party ban for years. The ruling does not bring such a ban any closer: a ban procedure is different. The parliament, the senate or the government can submit an application to the German Federal Constitutional Court, which will then consider the matter. The last time a member of the Bundestag called for such an application, it came to nothing, there were too few supporters.

Riots at Scheveningen.The seaside resort is the most popular seaside resort in the Netherlands.

I put my money on this next pope.

Tarcisio Isao Kikuchi, SVD is a Japanese Catholic prelate who has served as Archbishop of Tokyo since 2017.

No wrorries H our wonderful president has just tossed his hat into the ring. No word from the conclave yet

The Barbie Tapes
Gestapo executioner Klaus Barbie speaks about 'good old days' in unique audio tapes
Rick Hartkamp
•
May 2, 2025 2:16 PM
In the context of eighty years of freedom, journalist Foeke de Koe delved into the story of Gestapo chief Klaus Barbie. In previously unaired audio recordings, the war criminal speaks freely about deported Jewish children, arrests and executions. "During those hours in the hotel room, the atmosphere of the Third Reich was there again," says De Koe in Goedemorgen Nederland on NPO 1.


Summary
In 1979, controversial German journalist Gerd Heidemann made audio recordings of war criminal Barbie, who was enjoying a whiskey with former SS leader Karl Wolff (for many years Heinrich Himmler's right-hand man) in a hotel in the Bolivian capital La Paz. Barbie was completely unaware that a tape recorder was recording their conversations. "In that hotel room, the SS codes were in force again. They addressed each other by their SS rank in a casual setting. Shocking."

Gerd Heidemann
De Koe found the tapes in the archive of Heidemann, who died in December 2024. In the 1970s he made a splash as the war reporter for the German weekly Stern , who later became known as the journalist who allegedly found false diaries of Adolf Hitler. "He shouted that he had found the original. That's why he disappeared into prison."

Heidemann's collecting mania resulted in a massive private Nazi archive. "He had the tapes in his possession, but the man was so contaminated that no one went to look in his archive. When I heard about it, I thought: I'm curious to see what he has. Then I came across this audio material."

"He says he kicked the stool away"
The audio tapes reveal that Barbie greatly exaggerated his role and that he was only too happy to portray himself as bigger than he was. "Barbie said that he looked up to Wolff enormously, who was his superior. He was only too happy to share all the stories about the war and the occupation. He wanted to show that he was a very tough guy."


Foeke de Koe
Journalist
“In that hotel room, the SS codes were in effect again. They addressed each other by their SS rank in a casual setting. Shocking.”

Wolff was a person who was close to the center of power, " Hitler's inner circle ," De Koe continues. "Men of this caliber who talk about war crimes, we actually only heard after the war during a tribunal or in a courtroom, often under oath. But here they poured a glass of whiskey, sat back and talked freely about the 'good old days'. They didn't mince their words. That makes the material very special, because it is unfiltered."

Barbie arrived in Amsterdam in May 1940, "where he took the hunt for Jews very seriously". On the tapes, he talks about discipline within the SS during his time in the Netherlands. "He says that at one point he heard that non-commissioned officers had committed looting and rape. He gave the order to hang them himself at his headquarters at six in the morning, in the presence of all colleagues. Barbie says that he was the one who kicked the stool away. It is ruthless and sadistic."

Unique audio tapes
The documentary maker says that he found more than a hundred hours of material. "And the conversations of these two pensioners is about fifteen hours of audio." On those tapes, among other things, Barbie can be heard looking back on the raids in Amsterdam following the February strike in 1941. "We first raised all the bridges over the canals, except for one. It was a house-to-house fight. The Jews from above and us from below. They threw porcelain, full chamber pots, everything, but we had hand grenades."

Barbie also looks back on a raid on the Koco ice cream parlor in the Van Woustraat in Amsterdam on February 19, 1941, where he was injured by ammonia gas. He vented his frustration on the Jewish shop owner, Ernst Cahn. "I was hit full on. That made me so angry, so when I saw an ashtray, I grabbed it. I hit him and he flew through the whole shop. There were eleven or twelve Jews there, the staff. We arrested them."

Cahn was a Jewish man who had fled from Germany. "There, members of a Jewish resistance group would sometimes meet. Barbie had heard about it, which is why they decided to raid it," De Koe explains. Cahn was arrested along with others and he was the first resistance fighter to be shot dead on the Waalsdorpervlakte. "Barbie claims on the tapes that he was the one who led the firing squad." The arrests and imprisonment were the reason for the February strike.

As many questions as answers
The audio recordings reveal much, but also raise even more questions. Wolff betrayed his SS comrade Barbie by taking journalist Heidemann with him, but why? And what surprised De Koe most is that the most gruesome details are told, but not a word is said about the Holocaust.

After the discovery, De Koe spoke to Cahn's nephews and let them hear what Barbie had to say about their uncle's death. "I thought it would be shocking, but I could tell from the two men that it didn't even affect them much. The story has been going around in the family for eighty years and that doesn't make the suffering any less bad."

Klaus Barbie's audio tapes, his war crimes, his continuation of life in South America under a pseudonym and his eventual conviction at an old age can all be seen in the WNL documentary The Barbie Tapes, on Saturday 3 May at 8:30 PM on NPO 2. The six-part podcast series can be listened to weekly in the podcast apps from Saturday 4 May.

Liberation Day !
Thank you Canada and the other allied forces !

Trump said himself he would be the best pope lol. He's not Catholic like JD Vance though.
People in the Church are upset they posted the AI picture I find it funny after all DJT is a showbizz man dont take it so seriously.

The Jewish boxer Leen Sanders (Rotterdam, 1908) was considered, together with Bep van Klaveren, to be one of the greatest Dutch boxing talents of the early 20th century. He had already achieved international fame when he and his family were deported to Auschwitz via Westerbork on 11 January 1943. His wife and two
sons, aged eight and ten, were murdered immediately upon arrival. Leen escaped the gas chamber after an SS officer recognised the boxer. On condition that he would compete in boxing matches in the camp, for the entertainment of Nazi leaders, he was put to work in the kitchen. For two years, Leen managed to keep himself alive, as well as many of his fellow prisoners, by stealing food and clothing and distributing them among the most vulnerable.
In Leen Sanders: the boxer who saved lives in Auschwitz, Erik Brouwer tells the incredible life story of a true war hero, based on extensive research.

“For some people, no statue was erected, and it was wrong,” wrote resistance fighter Bill Minco shortly after Sanders’ death. Erik Brouwer, author of the new book ‘ Leen Sanders ’, which will be published in April, agrees. “I came across him years ago when I wrote a boxing article for a sports magazine. In an archive, I came across Louis van Sinderen, who, with a group of boxers, picked up pamphlets in the Kralingse Bos that the English dropped. That resistance group also included a certain Leen Sanders, a Jewish boxer. He immediately caught my attention, because you don’t see that very often. I discovered that he survived Auschwitz and saved the lives of fellow prisoners. That story has always stayed with me,” says Brouwer when I meet him in front of the city hall. The English rights to his book have already been sold for publication.

From the city hall we walk through the district where the boxer was born: the notorious Zandstraatbuurt. A shady area full of bars, brothels, criminals, dance halls and prostitutes. Although the impoverished district was demolished in 1912 to make way for the current city hall, among other things, Brouwer brings this exciting district back to life. “I immersed myself in pre-war Rotterdam. Through photos and newspaper articles I came across people like Rie Brusse, a journalist who wrote stories and portraits about the ghetto as it was called. It is a slum where the poorest Rotterdammers lived, mixed with pimps and their 'girls', alcoholics, fighters and in between a Jewish community. That Brusse hung around there with artists like painter Kees van Dongen and poet Koos Speenhoff. Tuschinski had his first cinema here. All the artists came to the Zandstraat, that's where it happened.”
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