Politics & Stuff

[Vesper 28,763]

8 minutes ago, cosmicway said:

So I 'm baffled with the advertisters logic. Who are they ?

clearly they are commies

[Fulham Broadway 16,825]

On 11/09/2024 at 09:24, cosmicway said:

How many times have we seen  the perpetrators return with the same gobledy gook ?

I think @Vesper and myself and others said to you to use an adblocker

[Vesper 28,763]

 

New video, witnesses challenge Israel’s account of U.S. activist’s killing

The IDF said Aysenur Eygi was shot “unintentionally” during a “violent riot.” A Post analysis shows clashes had subsided and protesters had retreated.

 

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/09/11/american-activist-aysenur-eygi-killed-idf-west-bank/

 

Left: In a photo taken on the day of Aysenur Eygi's death, she poses with fellow activists. Right: A photo captures the presence of Israeli troops near the protest she attended in the hour before she was shot and killed. (Obtained by The Washington Post)

BEITA, West Bank — It was Aysenur Eygi’s first time at a West Bank demonstration, and she was nervous.

The 26-year-old Turkish American told fellow activists she hoped to be a “protective presence” for Palestinians at a time of spiraling violence across the Israeli-occupied territory.

“We had both decided we did not want to be near any action at all,” said Helen, a volunteer from Australia in her early 60s who was with Eygi throughout the day.

Eygi’s caution did not protect her. She was fatally shot in the head on Friday in the village of Beita, near Nablus, following brief clashes after Friday prayers. The Israel Defense Forces said Tuesday it was “very likely” she had been hit “unintentionally” by one of its soldiers. “The incident took place during a violent riot,” the statement said, and the fire was aimed at “the key instigator.”

But a Washington Post investigation has found that Eygi was shot more than a half-hour after the height of confrontations in Beita, and some 20 minutes after protesters had moved down the main road — more than 200 yards away from Israeli forces. A Palestinian teenager, who witnesses say was standing about 20 yards from Eygi, was wounded by Israeli fire; the IDF would not say if he was a target.

Citing an ongoing investigation, the IDF also declined to answer questions from The Post about why its forces fired toward the demonstrators so long after they had retreated, and from a distance where they posed no apparent threat.

To reconstruct the day’s events, The Post spoke to 13 eyewitnesses and Beita residents and reviewed more than 50 videos and photos provided exclusively by the International Solidarity Movement, the organization Eygi was volunteering with, and Faz3a, another Palestinian advocacy group. Some foreign activists spoke on the condition they be identified by their first name, or on the condition of anonymity, for fear of Israeli reprisals, including being barred from reentering the country.

 

On Wednesday, President Joe Biden called Eygi’s death “totally unacceptable,” adding that Israel’s “preliminary investigation has indicated that it was the result of a tragic error resulting from an unnecessary escalation.” On Tuesday, Secretary of State Antony Blinken called on Israeli security forces to make “fundamental changes” in the way they operate in the West Bank, including to their rules of engagement.

The military’s rules of engagement in the West Bank are confidential, but Israeli rights groups have tried for years to shed light on them. Joel Carmel, the advocacy director of Breaking the Silence, an organization of IDF veterans that collects extensive testimonies from current and former troops, said soldiers and junior commanders are given broad latitude to open fire, including based on speculation about future threats posed by alleged suspects. During some protests, testifiers have said that shots to the legs of “central instigators” are deemed acceptable to deter other demonstrators, according to Carmel.

 

 

Since 2021, the IDF has killed 15 Palestinians during demonstrations in Beita, according to Faz3a and Hisham Dweikat, a local resident and member of the Palestinian National Council. Last month, another American citizen, Daniel Santiago, a 32-year-old teacher from New Jersey, was shot in the thigh by Israeli forces in the same olive grove where Eygi was killed. The IDF said Santiago was “accidentally injured” when soldiers “fired live rounds in the air” to disperse protesters.

Violence has been surging in the West Bank since the Oct. 7 Hamas-led attacks on Israel. At least 634 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli forces over that period, according to the United Nations, whose figures do not distinguish between combatants and civilians. The majority have died in escalating military raids on Palestinian refugee camps where militants hold sway; others have been killed by extremist settlers, or in regular confrontations with soldiers in places like Beita.

“It happens every week: tear gas and live ammunition,” Santiago said. “It could have been me, it could have been others too.”

A memorial for Turkish American activist Aysenur Eygi at the site where she was shot dead near Beita. (Heidi Levine for The Washington Post)

‘Gunshot!’

On Friday morning, activists said, Eygi and four other volunteers hired a taxi in Ramallah, the de facto Palestinian capital in the West Bank, and drove about 30 miles north to Beita, a familiar flash point.

Palestinians there have been battling for decades to hold off the steady advance of Israeli settlers. In 2021, in violation of international and Israeli law, settlers erected a cluster of homes and caravans on a nearby hilltop that became the Jewish outpost of Evyatar.

Military evacuation orders never stuck. In June, Evyatar was one of five outposts legalized by Israel’s far-right government — part of a sweeping effort led by Bezalel Smotrich, a longtime settler activist who now serves as finance minister, to solidify Israeli control of the West Bank. Palestinian residents hold weekly prayers on the hillside opposite the settlement as an act of symbolic protest.

“The Israeli army started to come to the area on a weekly basis and tried to prevent the Friday prayer several times,” Dweikat said. “They suppress us with tear gas and bullets, but the activities continued.”

 

 

Eygi had hoped to “bear witness,” said Helen, the Australian activist, who was assigned as her “buddy” to observe Friday’s demonstration. It was her first West Bank protest, too.

The Friday prayer site — a park with a children’s swing and slide atop a steep hill — was quiet when the international observers arrived. But Israeli soldiers were already positioned along the perimeter, residents and activists said.

Villagers started to gather by foot and by car and mingle with the volunteers.

A British activist recounted talking to Eygi as they eyed the soldiers on the other side of the park’s fence. “I’m nervous, because the army’s right there,” he recalled her saying.

It was a little after 12:30 p.m. when the prayers began. Men lined up in rows. Eygi, sitting off to the side, put her hands up to worship. Videos taken by activists show a serene scene.

A screenshot from a video shows men gathering in a children's park to pray on Sept. 6 in Beita. (Obtained by The Washington Post)

As soon as the service ended around 1:05 p.m., the mood shifted, according to videos and eyewitnesses. Older residents drove away. Young men and children took up positions on the road leading down from the park.

It’s unclear how the confrontation began, those present said, but initially it followed the regular rhythm of clashes between heavily armed soldiers and Palestinian protesters. Some threw stones, including with slingshots, while others burned tires on the hillside, photographs show.

Israeli forces used tear gas to disperse the crowd, then resorted almost immediately to live ammunition, residents and activists said.

 

 

“The Israeli soldiers were very provocative,” said Jonathan Pollak, a longtime Israeli activist with Faz3a, who frequently attends the Beita demonstrations and was there that day.

Since October, Pollak said, the use of live fire has become routine in Beita as the military’s “dispersal means of choice.” The IDF declined to comment on its use of live fire during protests.

Alex Chabbott, another American volunteer with Faz3a, was running late. When he began walking up the hill to the prayer area he pulled out his phone to start filming. It was 1:14 p.m., according to a Post review of the video’s metadata.

“Gas, gas, gas!” someone shouts in a second video he filmed two minutes later. Burning tires are visible in the road.

“The soldiers are just out of sight,” Chabbott, 43, said as he filmed, backing down the hill. He turned to run, then paused not far from a child using a slingshot.

Eygi, shocked by the swift escalation, had already started “back down the road, behind the boys, behind the other volunteers,” Helen said.

Other activists and Palestinians took cover behind trees, rocks and terraces, they said, while others put obstacles at various points down the road, including rocks and a dumpster. Protesters said it was a common tactic used to waylay Israeli troops, who often raid the village after Friday prayers.

A photograph taken at 1:21 p.m. shows at least four Israeli soldiers at the top of the hill. Video and photos from the next several minutes show soldiers taking up positions on higher ground — including on the rooftop of Beita resident Ali Maali’s home, and near a military vehicle.

A photo taken by a protester shows Israeli soldiers gathering at the top of a nearby hill.

Obtained by The Washington Post

Maali’s house is built into the slope of the hill. About 80 yards from the prayer site, it offers a clear view of the olive groves below.

Israeli forces frequently commandeer his roof on Fridays, the 44-year-old said, as “it’s a strategic location.” That day, he said, they arrived “immediately after the prayer” and at least four soldiers climbed to the roof. Maali and several others gathered on his veranda below, he said, and tried to stay out of sight.

Helen slipped and fell during “the scary race down the road,” at one point spraining her ankle, she said, but the younger woman stayed with her, “being a protective strength.”

A video filmed at 1:22 p.m. shows the road next to the olive grove. A shot rings out.

“They’re shooting with regular guns!” an activist says off-camera in Japanese. Steven Beck, an audio forensic expert who consulted for the FBI and reviewed the footage for The Post, said the pop heard on the video was consistent with a gunshot — a finding corroborated by a second audio expert, Rob Maher.

 

 

A minute later, the British activist called Eygi to check where she was, according to a call log viewed by The Post. Eygi told him she had already made it down the hill to the olive grove.

“Stay there,” he recalls telling her.

Helen positioned herself behind a tree, she said, with Eygi to her left.

The next few minutes were “calm,” she said. “We had a chance to take a deep breath ... standing in what we thought was a safe distance.”

A video filmed at 1:29 p.m. shows people loitering at the bottom of the hill; a man stands with his hands on his hips.

“They haven’t shot any more live rounds, no more tear gas, yet,” Chabbott, the American volunteer, says in another video filmed around the same time. For nearly 20 minutes after that, the scene remained relatively calm, Palestinians and volunteers said.

But one of the soldiers on the roof was “training his gun in our direction,” recalled Pollak, who was standing next to a dumpster that had been moved into the middle of the road at the bottom of the hill. He and other activists said he was the closest person to Israeli troops at the time, just over 200 yards away; Eygi was around 30 yards farther.

 

 

He saw a muzzle flash and heard two shots, he said.

From his veranda, Maali heard a “strong” sound of a gun firing from above, he said, and the impact “shook the house.”

Helen, standing next to Eygi, “heard a large crack sound of live ammunition.”

The moment of the gunshots was not caught on any of the footage reviewed by The Post. There was nothing much happening at the time to film, activists and residents said.

“Some people say there were two shots, some people say they were three,” said Chabbott, who thought he heard one ping off the dumpster in front of him. “It was chaos.”

At 1:48 p.m., he began filming.

“Gunshot!” an unseen woman can be heard screaming in the background. She pleads for an ambulance.

In the olive grove, Helen saw Eygi drop facedown to the ground beside her. The older woman rolled her over. Blood was pouring from the left side of Eygi’s head, she said, and she was unresponsive.

The investigation

The IDF’s initial inquiry into Eygi’s death “found that it is highly likely that she was hit indirectly and unintentionally by IDF fire which was not aimed at her, but aimed at the key instigator of the riot.”

Yet the shots fired toward the activists, including the one that claimed Eygi’s life, came some 20 minutes after they had retreated to the bottom of the hill — more than two football fields away from the nearest Israeli soldiers.

“Even an Olympic stone thrower cannot make half that distance,” Pollak said.

The IDF did not respond to Post questions about the identity of the “instigator,” or why live fire was justified under the circumstances.

The military’s rules of engagement “are an instrument for justifying use of fire rather than a means for controlling it,” said Carmel, from Breaking the Silence.

 

 

Eran Maoz, 23, who had escaped down the hill with the rest of the crowd, was standing beside a 17 year-old-Palestinian when the shots rang out.

“I saw the boy immediately putting his hand on his stomach,” he said. “I started screaming to the ambulance.”

The Palestinian teenager — who Maoz said was lightly injured by a ricocheting bullet — declined multiple requests to be interviewed via intermediaries, as did his family members.

Maoz doesn’t know if he was hit by a first or second shot, or where exactly the bullet caromed off of — Beita residents said it was probably an electricity pole or the dumpster. It all happened too fast, Maoz said.

And when he realized someone had been more seriously hurt, he ran to the olive grove.

A video he filmed at 1:49 p.m. shows Eygi bleeding and surrounded by paramedics. “Bring a stretcher quickly,” someone cries. “Quickly!” Eygi is lifted into an ambulance.

She was pronounced dead around 2:35 p.m. at Rafidia Hospital, according to director Fouad Nafaa, after multiple attempts at resuscitation.

 

 

During her training with ISM, Eygi had spoken about her fear that she “wouldn’t make a difference,” fellow activists said. Her death has now become a test case for U.S.-Israel relations, after 11 months of growing tensions between the two allies over the war in Gaza and Israeli policy in the West Bank.

“The U.S. government has had full access to Israel’s preliminary investigation, and expects continued access as the investigation continues, so that we can have confidence in the result,” Biden said Wednesday.

Eygi’s loved ones say that’s not enough. “Let us be clear, an American citizen was killed by a foreign military in a targeted attack,” the family said in a statement Wednesday. “The appropriate action is for President Biden and Vice President Harris to speak with the family directly, and order an independent, transparent investigation into the killing of Ayşenur, a volunteer for peace.”

Palestinians and international activists stand inside the morgue where Eygi's body is kept at Rafidia Hospital in Nablus. (Heidi Levine for The Washington Post)

Morris reported from Berlin, Ley from New York and Kelly from Washington. Samuel Granados in Montilla, Spain, and Louisa Loveluck in London contributed to this report.

 

[cosmicway 1,318]

8 minutes ago, Fulham Broadway said:

I think @Vesper and myself and others said to you to use an adblocker

No you said don't use and outta respect I 'm not using.
But my reasons to object are different.

[cosmicway 1,318]

51 minutes ago, Fulham Broadway said:

I think @Vesper and myself and others said to you to use an adblocker

Goebbels is the most famous of them all.
But the commies are also good.
I always had doubts about both.
How can one be called the king of propaganda when all the opposition is silenced and if all of the opposition is silenced why not me the king of prpaganda ?
Nevertheless both Goebbels and international communism are to be commented for their skills and mastery of the art.
The advertisers have studied both and they are just as good in making fools of the public as well as making fools of company bosses.

There was once a smarmy character I knew and he was pestering me every time to place an ad in his magazine.
I knew he was looking for victims but in the end I gave in. Maybe I felt pity because he had broken his leg.
Surprisingly I got the money back from a customer - exactly the same amount as I paid.

Here however I 'm not charging them for smarminess or vagabondry.
I 'm charging them for doing things the wrong way.

Edited September 12 by cosmicway

[Fulham Broadway 16,825]

On 11/09/2024 at 09:24, cosmicway said:

How many times have we seen various arguments demolished from their foundation and then the perpetrators return with the same gobledy gook ?

Yet still it happens....

[Fulham Broadway 16,825]

2 minutes ago, cosmicway said:

Goebbels is the most famous of them all.

Goebbels adblocker plus. Try that one

[Vesper 28,763]

Trump Claims He “Won” the Debate Despite Rambling Incoherently About Transgender Operations, Baby Executions, and Pet-Eating

It’s pretty clear the candidate who said “they’re eating the dogs…they’re eating the cats” did not win.

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/story/trump-claims-he-won-debate-despite-baby-executions-pet-eating

 

If you watched Tuesday night’s presidential debate, and you haven’t had your brain scrambled by the MAGA universe, you know that Kamala Harris resoundingly beat Donald Trump. She expertly nailed the ex-president for the failures of his time in office, for stripping women of reproductive rights, and for being an easily manipulated target of foreign leaders who do not have the United States’ or the world’s best interests at heart. She demonstrated what it would be like to have a compassionate, intelligent, capable leader in the White House, and she did all this while reminding people that her opponent is an out-of-touch, country-dividing narcissist who lies almost every time he speaks and whose grasp on reality is tenuous at best. The contest, to those who are of sound mind, was not even close.

Of course, Trump himself is not of sound mind, which would explain why he apparently believes he emerged from the debate victorious. Speaking to Fox News host Sean Hannity last night, the ex-president said, in regard to a report that Harris’s team had proposed another debate: “She wants it because she lost…. If you won the debate, I sort of think, maybe I shouldn’t do it. Why should I do another debate?… When you’re a prize fighter and you lose, you immediately want a new fight; you want a rematch. The guy that won is sort of happy and thinking about it.”

Obviously, in no sane universe did Trump win. Even if he had laid out sensible policy proposals for a second term—which he absolutely did not—most people would find his completely unhinged remarks disqualifying at best, if not clear evidence that he needs to be placed under some sort of conservatorship. As a reminder, the following are just some of the verbatim things he said last night:

“They’re eating the dogs”

 

“A lot of towns don’t want to talk about it because they’re so embarrassed by it. In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs. The people that came in, they’re eating the cats. They’re eating—they’re eating the pets of the people that live there. And this is what’s happening in our country. And it’s a shame.”

That claim then led to this—again, verbatim—exchange between moderator David Muir and Trump:

Muir: I just want to clarify here—you bring up Springfield, Ohio, and ABC News did reach out to the city manager there. He told us there have been no credible reports of specific claims of pets being harmed, injured, or abused by individuals within the immigrant community—

Trump: Well, I’ve seen people on television.

Muir: Let me just say here, this is—

Trump: The people on television say my dog was taken and used for food. So maybe he said that and maybe that’s a good thing to say for a city manager.

Muir: I’m not taking this from television. I’m taking it from the city manager.

Trump: But the people on television say their dog was eaten by the people that went there.

Muir: Again, the Springfield city manager says there’s no evidence of that.

Trump: We’ll find out.

 

“Transgender operations on illegal aliens that are in prison”

 

“She went out in Minnesota and wanted to let criminals that killed people, that burned down Minneapolis—she went out and raised money to get ’em out of jail. She did things that nobody would ever think of. Now she wants to do transgender operations on illegal aliens that are in prison. This is a radical-left liberal that would do this.”

 

“Execution after birth…is okay”

 

“You can look at the governor of West Virginia, the previous governor of West Virginia, not the current governor, who’s doing an excellent job, but the governor before—he said the baby will be born and we will decide what to do with the baby. In other words, we’ll execute the baby…. The Democrats are radical in that. And her vice presidential pick, which I think was a horrible pick, by the way, for our country, because he is really out of it, but her vice presidential pick says abortion in the ninth month is absolutely fine. He also says execution after birth—it’s execution, no longer abortion, because the baby is born—is okay. And that’s not okay with me.”

This claim—which Trump has made on several occasions—led to this fact check from moderator Linsey Davis: “There is no state in this country where it is legal to kill a baby after it’s born.”

Elsewhere, Trump shouted out his relationships with right-wing authoritarians Viktor Orbán and Vladimir Putin; revealed that, beyond “concepts of a plan,” he has no idea what could replace the Affordable Care Act; refused to admit he lost the 2020 election; blamed Nancy Pelosi for January 6; and said that, aside from “show[ing] up for a speech,” he had nothing whatsoever to do with the attack on the Capitol. Meanwhile, Harris made him look like a small, sad man. So you can probably understand why he’s not entirely enthusiastic about facing off with her again.

[cosmicway 1,318]

3 minutes ago, Fulham Broadway said:

Goebbels adblocker plus. Try that one

Limey.
Le me explain in plain Italian again:
It's not only the forum. Many sites say "turn off adblocker or you stay out".
So why are they displaying the ads in crazy way ?
That's what I 'm asking.
 

[Vesper 28,763]

1 minute ago, cosmicway said:

So why are they displaying the ads in crazy way ?

because adverts are based off what you surf on the net

so you must be going to crazy sites

perhaps less time spent on

WellSeasonedGreeks4HotCommieSugarBabies.co.uk

mighr yield less crazy adverts on TC

[cosmicway 1,318]

Just now, Vesper said:

because adverts are based off what you surf on the net

so you must be going to crazy sites

perhaps less time spent on

WellSeasonedGreeks4HotCommieSugarBabies.co.uk

mighr yield less crazy adverts on TC

I 'm spending time on your footy sites.

[cosmicway 1,318]

Own up.
You don't know the answer.
Once I managed to get to chat with a footy Vesper site owner and he did n't know the answer either.
He said "this is what they pay me for" and I had no grounds to disagree with that.

[Vesper 28,763]

4 minutes ago, cosmicway said:

I 'm spending time on your footy sites.

https://feet4cash.com/

[Vesper 28,763]

25 minutes ago, Fulham Broadway said:

Goebbels adblocker plus. Try that one

RedBlock Pro

[Vesper 28,763]

THE BILLIONAIRE’S SECRET

october 2024 Issue

The Richest Man in Germany Is Worth $44 Billion. The Source of His Family Fortune? The Nazis Know.

Klaus-Michael Kuehne, born in 1937, has more money than Ken Griffin, MacKenzie Scott, or François Pinault. Just don’t ask him how he got so rich.

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/story/richest-german-nazi-billions

 

 

I. A DIRTY BUSINESS

On a Thursday afternoon in mid-November 2023, an elderly man was walking through Hamburg’s Ohlsdorf Cemetery, the world’s fourth-largest graveyard, to visit the burial place of his favorite soccer player when he noticed something very wrong. Someone had sprayed “Nazi Kapital” (“Nazi fortune”) on the Kuehne family’s tombstone, in red and black, while the cryptic term “M-Aktion” was tagged on Alfred Kuehne’s tombstone.

These weren’t just any family tombs: The Kuehne dynasty is industrial royalty in Germany. Klaus-Michael Kuehne, the only child of Alfred and Mercedes Kuehne, is the country’s wealthiest person, with a fortune estimated at $44 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. The 87-year-old billionaire owes his fortune to Kuehne + Nagel, the world’s largest freight forwarder, founded by Kuehne’s grandfather and Friedrich Nagel in 1890. Kuehne has used his wealth to build up a global transportation empire. He is also the largest shareholder of the German airline Lufthansa, shipping behemoth Hapag-Lloyd, chemicals distributor Brenntag, Hamburg soccer club HSV, and the company that owns North America’s Greyhound bus lines. In 2023 alone, according to Bloomberg, he stood to pocket $4.5 billion in dividends from his empire.

In the context of Germany’s discreet but clubby old money, where aristocratic and industrialist heirs mingle at hunting parties or go skiing in the Alps, Kuehne is a loner. Despite his billions, he remains outside Germany’s power circles and is only spotted occasionally at financier and merchant hangouts such as Hamburg’s Übersee-Club, a century-old private members establishment founded by the city’s Warburg banking dynasty. Kuehne, who once described himself as “exhausting, impatient, and unpleasant” to work with, prefers to keep to himself, either at his estate and office near Lake Zurich, at his chalet in the Swiss Alps, on his yacht, or at his villa on Mallorca, to which he flies commercial. Despite having been based in Switzerland for almost 50 years, Kuehne has said his roots remain in his hometown, Hamburg, where he was born and raised.

Nazi graffiti on the Kuehne family gravestone at Ohlsdorf cemetery in 2023.PICTURE ALLIANCE/GETTY IMAGES.

Kuehne is so devoted to Hamburg that he has become its largest private investor and philanthropist in recent years, even though he spends most of his time outside the city of 1.8 million residents, Germany’s second largest. The billionaire has invested more than 100 million euros in HSV and another 100 million euros in the development of The Fontenay, a luxury hotel in Hamburg. (He also owns the five-star hotel Castell Son Claret on Mallorca.) He has donated more than 70 million euros to the Kuehne Logistics University, a private business school in Hamburg, and gave millions to help build Hamburg’s philharmonic, which resides in a Herzog & de Meuron–designed concert hall. Kuehne is negotiating with Hamburg’s senate to finance the building of a new opera house and told the city’s largest newspaper in 2023 that his charitable foundation is willing to contribute up to 300 million euros for the construction.

Kuehne’s public appearance has remained virtually the same over the years. A hulking figure in a suit, he has ice-gray hair that looks like it’s been parted with a ruler; his eyes look straight ahead; his facial features are strong, including his prominent overbite. He met his wife, Christine, a cheerful woman with short blond hair, late in life, on a holiday in the Swiss mountains. They married in December 1989 when he was 52 and she was 51. Kuehne writes poems by hand to her for their wedding anniversary and her birthday, he told the German newspaper Die Zeit. She sometimes spontaneously serenades him with arias by Puccini. Neither of them like men with beards, according to the tabloid Bild. Which is why a captain of their Benetti-built 130-foot yacht, Chrimi III (which stands for Christine and Michael), had to shave before being hired.

The only person he reveres more than his wife is his late father, Alfred, whom he succeeded as Kuehne + Nagel CEO when he was 29. In 1975 Klaus-Michael and his father moved Kuehne + Nagel’s corporate seat and headquarters from Germany to Schindellegi, a Swiss hillside hamlet near Zurich, for tax reasons. The only decoration on the wall of the Kuehne + Nagel boardroom is a portrait of Alfred. “I learned the most from him,” Kuehne has said about his father. “Companies have to be managed individually—like a family business.”

The thing about Alfred is that he built part of the family business profiting from the Nazi regime’s persecution and genocide of European Jews. After Adolf Hitler seized power in Germany, Alfred and his brother Werner, Klaus-Michael’s uncle, ousted their Jewish shareholder from Kuehne + Nagel. During World War II, Kuehne + Nagel, led by Alfred and Werner, transported looted Jewish property, primarily furniture, books, and art, from occupied Western Europe to Nazi Germany as part of the so-called “M-Aktion,” an abbreviation of “Möbelaktion,” which translates to “furniture operation.” Over two years, between 1942 and 1944, almost 70,000 homes belonging to Jews in the Netherlands, France, Belgium, and Luxembourg were systematically looted after their inhabitants had been deported by train to ghettos and death camps. The task force overseeing the operation was part of a Nazi organization dedicated to appropriating property during the war, named after Alfred Rosenberg, the Nazi Party’s chief ideologue. After the war, the Kuehne brothers may have escaped punishment for their activities during the Third Reich because of their ties to American, British, and German intelligence agencies.

Kuehne + Nagel had a quasi-monopoly on the furniture operation, according to Frank Bajohr, head of the Center for Holocaust Studies at the Institute of Contemporary History in Munich. “Even in the most remote places, the company doing the furniture transports was always Kuehne + Nagel,” says Bajohr. “Kuehne + Nagel is in the same category of firms like the ones that sold Zyklon B for use in the gas chambers or that built the crematoria in the extermination camps. Transporting the stolen goods of people after they were deported,” he adds, “is a kind of dirty business far beyond anything I can comprehend.” Yet the role of Klaus-Michael Kuehne’s firm and family in the Third Reich is little known to the outside world.

Big German firms such as Deutsche Bank, Volkswagen, and Bertelsmann opened their archives years ago to allow historians to examine their own lucrative Nazi collaborations. The commissioned studies unearthed that Deutsche Bank aided the expropriation of hundreds of Jewish-owned businesses and helped finance the construction of Auschwitz; that tens of thousands of men and women were used as forced and slave laborers to mass-produce weapons at the Volkswagen factory; and that Bertelsmann published antisemitic literature and exploited Jewish slave labor. In 2000 the three firms joined more than 6,500 German companies, including Kuehne + Nagel, in agreeing to pay about $2.5 billion to a reparations fund that provided financial compensation to surviving forced and slave laborers. But Kuehne + Nagel has never opened its archives.

In 2022 Kuehne told the Swiss newspaper SonntagsZeitung that no company documents from the Nazi era were available, claiming that the company archives in Hamburg and Bremen were destroyed by Allied bombings in World War II. An index of German company archives from the 1990s shows that at least 10 meters (30 feet) of archival files should be present at Kuehne + Nagel. This most likely includes material from before and during World War II, as the collection begins in 1902, according to Kuehne + Nagel’s index page. “Use only possible with management approval,” it says on the page.

 “Kuehne’s stance places him in the ranks of those who want to ‘exonerate’ German history from its Nazi past.”

Kuehne also said in the SonntagsZeitung interview that he finds commissioning independent historians to investigate his company history akin to blackmail. “We were approached by some who would have liked to do this and they asked for several hundred thousand euros. They said we were obliged to do it. I found that almost a bit extortionate,” Kuehne told the Swiss newspaper. “So I said, ‘We won’t do that. We have nothing to hide, we acknowledge our guilt.’ ”

What Kuehne has not explained is why he won’t release the study that sources say he commissioned.

In early 2014 Kuehne commissioned Handelsblatt Research Institute, the independent research arm of German newspaper Handelsblatt, to conduct a study of his family firm’s entire history for Kuehne + Nagel’s 125th anniversary in July 2015. Researchers were even given access to the company archive in Hamburg and a guarantee of academic freedom and independence, according to people familiar with the matter. But when the final result was sent to Kuehne in early 2015, including a chapter on the activities of his father, uncle, and firm during the Third Reich, he refused to have the study published. Kuehne rejected the study by saying “my father wasn’t a Nazi” during a phone conference, according to people familiar with the conversation. When the researchers refused to change the chapter, according to these sources, Kuehne said the study wouldn’t be published and ended the call. The 180-page study, contractually owned by Kuehne + Nagel, remains unpublished and inaccessible. Jan Kleibrink, the managing director of Handelsblatt Research Institute, would neither confirm nor deny Kuehne’s commissioning and shelving of the study.

Kuehne declined to be interviewed for this article. Dominique Nadelhofer, the spokesperson for the billionaire, his holding company, his foundation, and Kuehne + Nagel, declined to answer detailed questions sent by VF. “Mr. Kuehne was seven years old at the end of World War II and therefore had nothing to do with the war,” Nadelhofer wrote in an emailed statement. “He is now 87 years old and, again, these historical events are beyond his control.”

II. THE POLITICS OF MEMORY

For decades Germany’s political leaders have accepted moral responsibility and acknowledged the sins of the Nazi past, centering remembrance as a component of German society. But recently the country has seemed to regress. As the last witnesses to the Nazi era die and the cultural memory of the Third Reich fades, the right wing, increasingly mainstream, has attacked Germany’s progressive ideals. For much of 2023, the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) polled as the largest party, hitting an all-time high of 23 percent in the polls in December. In June 2024 the AfD won a record number of votes in the European parliament elections. The party captured 16 percent of the German vote and came in second in the elections as concerns about immigration and the economy fanned voter discontent.

 “If Klaus-Michael Kuehne doesn’t want to do something, then he doesn’t do it. Period.”

“Hitler and the Nazis are just a speck of bird shit in over a thousand years of successful German history,” the AfD’s then coleader Alexander Gauland said in a 2018 speech. The AfD’s extremist wing is associated with antisemitism, Islamophobia, and historical revisionism, including the downplaying of Nazi crimes and denigration of the Holocaust. In May and July 2024, Björn Höcke, a leading AfD politician and founder of its extremist wing, was fined twice by a German court for using the banned Nazi slogan “Everything for Germany!” in his campaign speeches. Höcke has lamented the construction of a Holocaust memorial in central Berlin. Calling Germans “the only people in the world who planted a memorial of shame in the heart of their capital,” he has demanded a “180-degree turn” in the country’s “politics of memory.”

Kuehne’s politics could be described as free-market conservative. “I believe that support for the AfD will dwindle again,” he told German newspaper Welt in 2017. “Right-wing movements have no foothold in Germany.” Since 2021 he has donated about 200,000 euros ($220,000) to the Christian conservative CDU, the establishment party for German business and of former chancellor Angela Merkel. Kuehne even once said he could envision himself voting for the left-wing Green Party.

But Kuehne’s refusal to more publicly reckon with his family and firm’s Nazi past plays into the hands of the revisionist movement, says Henning Bleyl, director of the Heinrich Böll Foundation in Bremen, a think tank affiliated with the German Green Party. He has been investigating Kuehne + Nagel’s wartime activities since 2015. These revisionist narratives of Germany’s past are prominently embodied by the AfD, but the far right in Germany, Austria, France, and many other European countries use historical revisionism to manipulate the narrative around the Nazi era and World War II to advance their political agenda.

“Even in past decades, it was unacceptable that Kuehne refused to deal honestly with his family’s actions during the Nazi era,” said Bleyl in an interview on the roof terrace above his office in Bremen. “Now it is even more of an issue because, as I view it, Kuehne’s stance places him in the ranks of those who want to ‘exonerate’ German history from its Nazi past.”

III. “A SO-CALLED ARYANIZATION”

Interviews and newly unearthed archival material by VF in Amsterdam, Bremen, Hamburg, Munich, Montreal, and Washington, DC, detail the extent of Nazi profiteering by the Kuehne brothers and firm. Alfred and Werner Kuehne began profiting from the persecution of Jews much earlier than is known: years before World War II and mere months after Hitler seized power in Germany on January 30, 1933.

In late April of that year, the Kuehne brothers ousted their Jewish partner and co-owner Adolf Maass after he’d spent more than 30 years at the firm. Maass, 57 at the time, owned 45 percent of the Hamburg branch of Kuehne + Nagel, which he had founded in 1902 and which was the largest and most profitable part of the firm. When Friedrich Nagel died heirless in 1907, his shares went to his cofounder, August Kuehne, the father of Alfred and Werner. He died in 1932.

According to a signed and dated contract in the Maass family archive in the Montreal Holocaust museum, Maass signed over his shares and claims to the Kuehne brothers on April 22, 1933, for no compensation. The reason? An alleged inability “to fulfill his capital obligations” to the Kuehnes and the company. Such accusations became a common method in Nazi Germany to oust Jewish shareholders from their own firms. “This wasn’t a free and regular business contract,” says Frank Bajohr. “The Kuehnes used the political situation for their own benefit. It’s no accident that this contract was formulated in spring 1933. Maass wouldn’t have signed this contract in the years before Hitler took power. This was a so-called Aryanization.”

“The constitutional element of an Aryanization contract was that Jewish ownership was completely eliminated and that the company was handed over in its entirety to non-Jewish owners,” says Bajohr. “In this case, the Kuehnes.”

Nine days after ousting Maass, the Kuehne brothers became Nazi Party members, according to their denazification files in the Bremen state archive. In the following years the Kuehnes developed their firm into a “national-socialist model company,” an honorary title that the Nazi regime awarded to Kuehne + Nagel in 1937, the year that Klaus-Michael was born. The Kuehne brothers would declare in their denazification proceedings that Maass’s “Jewish origin caused serious trouble” for the firm and themselves. The siblings claimed that Maass left voluntarily and that they “derived no personal economic advantage from dissolving the partnership.”

In 1938 Kuehne + Nagel acquired the Hamburg subsidiary of the Czech transport company Alfred Deutsch. The owner was Leo Lewitus, a Jewish entrepreneur forced to sell his firm by the Nazi authorities in tandem with the Kuehne brothers. In 180 pages of correspondence during the acquisition discovered by VF in the Hamburg state archive, Kuehne + Nagel managers wrote matter-of-factly that the takeover was an Aryanization.

The start of World War II offered the Kuehne brothers the first opportunity for foreign expansion. In the footsteps of the Wehrmacht’s military conquest of Europe, Kuehne + Nagel grew rapidly: The transportation firm went from seven branches in Germany in early 1939 to 26 branches across Nazi-occupied Europe by late 1944, according to a comparison by VF of company letterhead from the years before and during the war listing all the offices. The company says it delivered supplies to the German army. Another driver of growth for Kuehne + Nagel was an agreement with Nazi authorities to ship looted Jewish-owned property from Western Europe to Germany as part of the furniture operation, which took place from spring 1942 through July 1944.

As Allied bombing raids on Germany destroyed homes and offices, the demand for household items and furniture soared. In January 1942 Hitler decided that all movable property owned by Jews slated for deportation in Western Europe was to be brought to Germany and distributed.

A ledger from a Rotterdam freighter, discovered by VF in the archive of the Netherlands Institute for War, Holocaust, and Genocide Studies in Amsterdam, provides a glimpse of the enormous size of the operation. The ledger lists 360 ships commissioned by Kuehne + Nagel’s Amsterdam office between June 1942 and August 1943 on behalf of the Nazi authorities, which transported furniture across Germany stolen from Jews, according to a handwritten note accompanying the ledger. One bill of lading, for example, recorded 307 boxes of cutlery and china, 105 beds, 93 bedsteads, 91 stoves, 62 bedside tables, 32 clocks, 17 ironing boards, 11 umbrella stands, 10 deck chairs, and 2 baby carriages being shipped from Amsterdam to Bremen in December 1942.

“The management at Kuehne & Nagel was well informed about the ongoing dispossession of the Jews. It is possible that the managers did not know that the owners of the property they were transporting were to be murdered. But they nevertheless facilitated the economic destruction of European Jewry,” writes historian Johannes Beermann-Schön of Frankfurt’s Goethe University.

Adolf Maass, who was Jewish and forced out of Kuehne + Nagel, with his wife, Käthe, in 1933. The two were killed at Auschwitz in 1944. The company was awarded for conforming to Nazi ideology in the workplace.Public Domain.

Kuehne + Nagel also transported looted art. It didn’t always arrive at its destination. The Office of Strategic Services, the CIA’s predecessor, discovered months after the war ended that Kuehne + Nagel had lost a 1944 shipment of 14 paintings en route from Paris to Germany. Gustav Rochlitz, a German art dealer in Paris who acquired looted art during the war, had bought the paintings from the Nazi task force in charge of the furniture operation. The missing shipment contained, among other works, seven paintings by Matisse and one each by Picasso, Modigliani, Gauguin, Cézanne, Manet, and Pissarro, according to an OSS document from August 1945 found by VF in the National Archives in Washington. Public auction records suggest that if all of these works were genuine, they would be worth tens if not hundreds of millions in today’s art market.

The Third Reich and the transport of looted property during World War II made the Kuehne brothers very rich. After ousting Maass in 1933, Alfred and Werner began earning on average around 175,000 reichsmarks annually, according to their denazification files—about $3.4 million today. By 1942, when the furniture operation began, the brothers had hit their peak earnings: the equivalent of about $4.6 million each.

Even though the Kuehne brothers were considered “high-ranking Nazi industrialists” by American investigators and “big time Nazis” by the British authorities after the war, both ended up being judged as mere “fellow travelers”—Nazi followers who weren’t involved in the regime’s crimes—in denazification proceedings in 1948. No repercussions followed. Their denazification files in the Bremen state archive contain no mention of the furniture operation.

After the war, Kuehne + Nagel fronted a CIA-backed precursor of West Germany’s foreign intelligence agency, the German newspaper Welt reported in 2015. The German spy agency used some of the transport firm’s offices as cover for key operatives. Alfred Kuehne’s denazification file includes a letter, marked “top secret” and dated February 17, 1948, from British intelligence to the American denazification committee in Bremen. “It is considered vital for operations which are already in hand that Mr. Alfred Kuehne be denazified in such a category so that he is able to retain his business,” wrote a chief of British intelligence, who provided his rank, major-general, in the letter, but not his name. “We would be very grateful to you if you could aid us in this matter since it concerns the security of the British and American zones.”

Soon after the letter was sent, the Kuehnes’ businesses and other assets, which had been frozen as part of their denazification proceedings, were returned to them and they were reinstated in their executive positions at Kuehne + Nagel.

Alfred became the company’s major shareholder in 1952 after Werner, a lifelong bachelor, moved to South Africa, where he died in the mid-1950s. Klaus-Michael, Alfred’s only child and anointed successor, began working at the firm in 1958, when he was 21, and took the helm eight years later.

IV. KUEHNE’S BRAZEN REQUEST

Klaus-Michael has built Kuehne + Nagel into a global logistics behemoth in the six decades since, relocating the company seat and headquarters to Switzerland, selling a stake to shore up liquidity and save the firm before buying back the shares to retake control. In 2023 the firm had about $30 billion in revenue, more than 80,000 employees, and 1,300 offices across about 100 countries. “I have worked far too much in my life,” the billionaire told Swiss magazine Bilanz. He has also spoken about neglecting his private life, including not having any children with Christine. That they have remained childless is “sad of course,” Kuehne told SonntagsZeitung. “The third generation is the last in the family. As a family entrepreneur, I think it’s a shame that I can’t pass on the business personally.”

Perhaps because of that, the octogenarian is busy focusing on his legacy—in particular how he will be remembered in Hamburg, the country’s largest port and main gateway to the world.

Through 2023, Kuehne was the main sponsor of Hamburg’s Harbour Front Literature Festival. The main literature prize, endowed with 10,000 euros, even bore his name, the Klaus-Michael Kuehne Prize. That was until 2022, when two nominees for the prize withdrew because of Kuehne’s refusal to deal with his firm and family’s Nazi past, and the prize was renamed. Kuehne’s foundation felt it was “treated extremely unfairly in the matter,” a spokesperson told the German newspaper Taz at the time. It soon stopped sponsoring the festival. It didn’t take place this year because the festival wasn’t able to find a major sponsor to replace the foundation.

Author Sven Pfizenmaier was the first of the two nominees to withdraw from the prize. “I’m no fan of billionaires in general and billionaires who profited from Nazism, deny it, and whitewash themselves by funding art seems very bad, so that’s why I did it,” Pfizenmaier says by phone from Berlin.

“We believe that being open, honest, and transparent in everything we do will build trust with our stakeholders,” reads the opening sentence on Kuehne + Nagel’s investor relations page. When it comes to the company’s dark history, Kuehne is anything but open and transparent. In April 2015 a regional TV channel in Germany broadcast a short documentary about Kuehne + Nagel’s role in the furniture operation. Shortly before the film aired, Kuehne wrote to the channel director, asking that the outlet reconsider broadcasting the 22-minute documentary, because “old wounds are being reopened.”

Kuehne’s brazen request, which was declined, came only months after he had shelved the Handelsblatt Research Institute study sources say he had commissioned for Kuehne + Nagel’s 125th anniversary.

In the run-up to the broadcast, the transportation firm published a defensive statement on its website. “Like other companies that already existed before 1945, Kuehne + Nagel was involved in the war economy and had to maintain its existence in dark and difficult times,” wrote the company in the German-only statement. “Kuehne + Nagel is aware of the shameful events during the Third Reich and deeply regrets that it carried out some of its activities on behalf of the Nazi regime. The conditions under the dictatorship at the time and the fact that Kuehne + Nagel survived the turmoil of war with all its strength and secured the company’s existence must be taken into account.” It remains the sole acknowledgment to date by the firm about its Nazi activities. Other than the statement, Kuehne + Nagel’s website doesn’t mention the past, as it doesn’t have a history section.

While the firm has stayed silent on its past since 2015, Kuehne has since responded to the criticism that he and his company have not sufficiently addressed the company’s past involvement in Nazi crimes. “I would have understood if people had questioned these things 10 or 20 years after the war. Everything was still fresh in people’s minds then. The people who were responsible at the time were still alive. But to come back to it 70 years later. I find that strange,” Kuehne said in the SonntagsZeitung interview from January 2022. “At some point, one has to let the dust settle on things. That’s my basic attitude. It’s important to learn lessons from what happened back then.”

V. THE TRUTH NEEDS TO BE TOLD

On a sweltering Sunday morning in early September 2023, about 300 people gathered on the waterfront in Bremen’s historical city center. The crowd was there for the inauguration of a monument commemorating the systematic looting of European Jews by Nazi Germany through the practice of Aryanization. The memorial’s chosen location was no accident. High above the waterfront, overlooking the monument, towered the German headquarters of Kuehne + Nagel.

Barbara Maass, granddaughter of Adolf, memorializes her family story to a crowd gathered in Bremen, Germany, in 2023.PICTURE ALLIANCE/GETTY IMAGES.

Down below, Barbara Maass sat near the front row. The granddaughter of Adolf and Käthe Maass had come from Montreal for the memorial’s inauguration. After Adolf Maass was ousted from Kuehne + Nagel in 1933, the couple sent their three children abroad: their eldest son to England, their daughter to the US, Barbara’s father to Canada. Adolf and Käthe weren’t able to escape Nazi Germany in time. They were murdered in Auschwitz in May 1944. Leo Lewitus, who also lost his firm to the Kuehne brothers, did survive the Holocaust and immigrated to Israel.

Barbara Maass disagrees with Klaus-Michael Kuehne’s notion that it’s time to move on. “I believe perhaps naively that we can learn from the past, but to do so means knowing what actually happened in the past,” Maass said in an interview at her home in Montreal. “Crimes against humanity are always relevant. There are moral decisions to be made today, much as there were in the past. I’m profoundly convinced that the truth needs to be told.”

Henning Bleyl, who leads the Böll Foundation, spent eight years persuading the city of Bremen to get the Aryanization monument built. It’s important that Kuehne reckons with his firm and family’s Nazi past before he dies, according to Bleyl. “At this fraught time in Germany, Kuehne, as the country’s richest individual, would set a strong example by coming clean about the past,” said Bleyl in Bremen. “Through his charity, he has built a public position. He can use that for the good and gain inner peace by freeing himself from a sense of obligation to his firm and family.”

Thomas Sorg worked at Kuehne + Nagel Germany for 45 years and spent years battling with the billionaire as chairman of the firm’s workers council. Sorg doesn’t believe Kuehne will reckon with his firm’s Nazi past before he dies. “If Klaus-Michael Kuehne doesn’t want to do something, then he doesn’t do it. Period,” said Sorg at a reception in Bremen after the ceremony. “Kuehne will do everything he can to protect the memory of his father, whom he revered beyond all measure.”

When Kuehne dies, he’ll leave his holding company, which controls his $44 billion fortune, including the majority of Kuehne + Nagel shares, to his family foundation. The Kuehne foundation will become one of the world’s largest private charities by endowment size, focusing on logistics, medicine, climate, and culture.

When he dies, Kuehne knows where he’ll be buried, he told a German magazine. He has reserved a place at Hamburg’s Ohlsdorf cemetery, next to his father.

Edited September 12 by Vesper

[cosmicway 1,318]

The footies are the worst of all.
Here you are showwing me "mykonos blue taverna" - the one where they rob the tourists.
I might as well click on it, because whatever is in Chelsea forum I may as well read five minutes later.
The footy ?
They make me click ads all the time during the match and there is no chance I 'm going to click on one - for obvious reasons.
But all those could be shown on the side.

[Fulham Broadway 16,825]

25 minutes ago, cosmicway said:

Once I managed to get to chat with a footy Vesper site owner and he did n't know the answer either.
He said "this is what they pay me for" and I had no grounds to disagree with that.

Well youve just answered your own rambling question there. Try reading what you posted

 

[cosmicway 1,318]

8 minutes ago, Fulham Broadway said:

Well youve just answered your own rambling question there. Try reading what you posted

 

You try reading.
What does the fellow know about advertisisng ?
He said this is what they pay us for and we accepted the deal.
I was approached by some agent myself. He wanted a splash opening page of a bookie.
It was both hideous and not paying enough so I turned down.
The agent may know the logic, me the webmaster no.
That agent writing from a Portuguese adress said to me "we try to be less obtrusive" but as he was not paying enough there was no further talk.

Edited September 12 by cosmicway