I am totally biased but, the side eye by Erskine 😂

To be fair, she did hire Zola- so there's a big chance Erskine saw the red flags.

gunna have to start asking people not to jumpscare me like this

The Brave Headmaster: Dr. Erich Klibansky

He saved five entire classes.

Dr. Erich Klibansky was the headmaster of a Jewish high school in Germany who saved dozens of his students by teaching them English and arranging for them to join the Kindertransport to safety in Great Britain.

Born in Frankfurt to a religious family in 1900, Erich was an exceptional student who studied history, German literature and Romanian languages at university. He married Meta David and together they moved to Breslau, where they both taught at Jewish schools. Their son Hans-Rafael was born in 1928, and the next year the family moved to Cologne, where they had two more sons, Alexander and Michael. Erich became headmaster at the Yavne Jewish gymnasium (high school) in Cologne. It was the only Jewish high school in that part of Germany, the Rhineland. Yavne was a co-ed school teaching both Jewish and secular subjects. His wife Meta also worked at Yavne teaching English. The family found a spacious apartment in Volksgartenstrasse, a desirable part of town.

Erich – known to his students as Dr. Klibansky – was immediately popular with students and staff at the school. They appreciated his warm manner and personal interest in every student, as well as his strong leadership at a difficult time.

Germany was in a severe economic crisis, and as a private school Yavne didn’t get any subsidy from the state. Erich’s job as headmaster became focused on fundraising. Motivated to ensure that any Jewish student in Cologne could get a good education despite financial hardship, Erich successfully raised money to keep the school open. As his reputation grew, young Jews started coming to Yavneh from outside Cologne and soon the newcomers made up a quarter of the student body.

As the Nazis came to power in the 1930’s the situation grew grim for Jews in Germany. In 1937 the Klibansky family was forced out of their nice apartment in Volksgartenstrasse and relocated to a tiny flat in a squalid slum. After the Kristallnacht pogrom in November 1938, it became clear there was no future for Jews in Germany. At this point, Erich’s mission as headmaster of Yavne changed. Previously, the school was focused on training the students for exams and university but now the only important thing was survival. He heard about the Kindertransport, an organized rescue effort bringing Jewish children from Nazi-controlled areas to safety in England. Erich determined to get his students on the Kindertransport, and in fact hoped to relocate the entire school to England.

He re-focused the school curriculum to provide intensive English-language instruction for all students in preparation for their escape. Erich reached out to prominent Jews in London and got support for his plan to move Yavne high school to England. The Central British Council for Refugees arranged for the students to stay in a college dormitory.

By summer 1939, Erich was able to send five entire classes of students – a total of 130 people – on the Kindertransport to England. His plan was to get all the students out and then join them in England with his family. However everything came to a halt when war broke out in 1939. The borders were sealed, as was the fate of the Klibansky family and those students who hadn’t left yet. Erich, his wife and three young sons managed to hide from the Nazis until July 1942, when they were arrested and transported to an unknown location. On July 25, the family of five was shot in a wooded area in Belarus and, dying, dumped in a prepared pit.

The brave headmaster’s story has been largely forgotten, but in 1990 a square in Cologne where Yavne high school used to be was dedicated to him and renamed the Erich Klibansky Platz.

For saving the lives of 130 Jewish students, we honor Erich Klibansky as this week’s Thursday Hero.

Are you living the timeline your were originally supposed to???

Speaking of things that might keep ya up at night, and I'm not talking about all the Wars in the world, Global Warming, Climate Change, Aliens from outer space or our political arena's chaos,..... Nope, I'm talking about something much more mind boggling and perplexing to the human senses than any of that forementioned.....

......It's Time Travel Possibilities!

Yeah, and some pretty smart people in the world think it's possible and may have already been done a few times, and if that don't scare the crap out of your cognitive processes then nothing will, because if time travel is a possibility even in the extreme,..... and knowing how our governments work on this planet,.......... we could all be seriously fucked!

The possibilities are endless, and just as dangerous to humanity.

Did you also know some scientists who work for the government are exploring ideas that could theoretically allow time travel,.... Right fuckin now they are researching that possiility, have been for decades without YOU knowing about it!

Just the fact that governing authorities are contemplating that concept is Bizzar to think WHAT ARE THEY THINKING???

One concept involves wormholes, or hypothetical Quantum Mechanics tunnels in space that could create shortcuts for journeys across universel time as we know it.

Imagine that,......... Time Travel is actually being studied and researched by government and civilian scientists.

So then why is it that any claims of government involvement in time travel are typically based on conspiracy theories or fictional narratives?

And why pay scientists top dollar to look into the theory of Time Travel?

And why is the answer to that question always... "There is no credible evidence or official acknowledgment of the United States research into The Time Travel Theory?

Why would there even be the question???

Because millions of tax dollars have been spent trying to find out!

Did ya also know in 1939 Physicists Leo Szilard and Albert Einstein concerned by Nazi Germany's research into nuclear weapons sent a letter to the American president, Franklin D. Roosevelt warning him about the Nazi nuclear program and urged him to create an American program to counter the threat from Germany.

Then in 1942 Einstein found out Adolf Hitler was going beyond nuclear fusion research, and attempting the manipulation of quantum time and space itself. And,... Albert Einstein was concerned that Hitler's scientists were becoming successful in doing this phenomenon!

(NOTE: All this information is in our own governments documents archives for anyone to read under the information freedom act)

Ya see,..... Albert Einstein considered Time Travel a bigger threat to humanity then the Atomic bomb we used on japan in the second world war,..... and as stated in his letters to president Roosevelt.

That's "Albert Fuckin Einstein", the man who changed our world literally with the knowledge of Quantum Mechanics and things like string theory and the phenomenon of "spooky action at a distance" suggesting quantum particles contained hidden variables, and instructions that predetermined their states, like a programmable drone can be!!

After hearing about Hitler's time travel program President Roosevelt met with Einstein in a secret meeting at the white house.

Soon after their meeting president Roosevelt started a research initiative named "The Indiana Project"..... the project's main objective was to produce a machine capable of traveling through and altering time?!?!?!?

Yeah, that was the Gist of it, and all of it real history most of us knew nothing about,........

I'm not suggesting time travel is a reality,........ but it is fascinating to be horrified by its complications that might have already changed the world without anyone knowing.

Lets face it,..... it's all a great big bag of shit if half this government secrecy crap is true, so ignore it all and just live your life for YOU,...and not anyone else, not even for the government, but don't tell them, and fuck who's running for president, because the powers that be can probably change it if the person who wins wasn't the one they wanted, and can go back in time and change the reality to something else,........ and no one the wiser!

Now that's scary to think about,..... especially since I think I won that billion dollar lottery last year, but someone went back in time to change something so my timeline changed to not winning the lottery,.......... which pisses me off to no end, because I will never know if my timeline has been changed for the worse........ Lol

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Louis Renault was born on February 12, 1877. He was a French industrialist, one of the founders of Renault and a pioneer of the automobile industry.

Renault built one of France's largest automobile manufacturing concerns, which bears his name to this day. During World War I his factories contributed massively to the war effort notably so by the creation and manufacture of the first tank of modern configuration: the Renault FT tank.

Accused of collaborating with the Germans during World War II, he died while awaiting trial in liberated France toward the end of 1944 under uncertain circumstances. His company was seized and nationalized by the provisional government of France although he died before he could be tried. His factories were the only ones permanently expropriated by the French government.

In 1956, Time Magazine described Renault as "rich, powerful and famous, cantankerous, brilliant, often brutal, the little Napoleon of an automaking empire — vulgar, loud, domineering, impatient, he was a terror to associates, a friend to practically none," adding that to the French working man, Renault became known as "the ogre of Billancourt."

In 1938, Renault visited Adolf Hitler, and by 1939 he had become an important supplier for the French army. At the time Hitler's Wehrmacht invaded France in 1940, Louis Renault was in the US, sent by his government to ask for tanks. He returned to find the Franco-German armistice in place. Renault was faced with the choice of cooperating with the Germans and possibly forestalling them from moving his factory and equipment to Germany, which would lead to an accusation of collaboration with the enemy. He put his factories at the service of Vichy France, which meant that he was also assisting the Nazis. Over a period of four years, Renault manufactured 34,232 vehicles for the Germans. Renault argued that "by continuing operations he had saved thousands of workers from being transported to Germany", but Life in 1942 described him as a "notorious Paris collaborationist".

During the occupation of France the company was under the control of the Germans, with people from Daimler-Benz in key positions. Renault himself became unpopular among members of the French resistance. The Renault factories on Île Seguin in Billancourt had become top priority targets for the British bombers of the Royal Air Force and were ultimately severely damaged on 3 March 1942. Renault's health issues worsened, including his severely diminished renal function, and in late 1942, he suffered aphasia, and was unable to speak or write.

Three weeks after France was liberated in 1944, Renault surrendered "on condition that he would not be jailed until indicted." He was arrested outside Paris on 22 September 1944, on charges of industrial collaboration with Nazi Germany. At the time of his arrest, Renault "denied that his firm had received $120,000,000 from the Germans for war materials, said that he had kept his huge, much-bombed plant going at the request of Vichy to keep its materials and equipment out of Nazi hands and to save workers from deportation." He was incarcerated in Paris's Fresnes Prison being already seriously ill at the time. The records for the exact period of his incarceration at Fresnes would later turn out to be missing. Renault was moved on 5 October to a psychiatric hospital at Ville-Evrard in Neuilly-sur-Marne.

When Renault's health quickly declined on 9 October 1944 he was again moved to a private nursing home at the clinic Saint-Jean-de-Dieu in the Rue Oudinot, Paris at the request of his family and supporters, having gone into a coma. He died on 24 October 1944, four weeks after his incarceration, still awaiting trial and having claimed to have been mistreated in Fresnes Prison, with his 1918 French Legion of Honor for exceptional contribution to the victory of the First World War, having been expunged by the Vichy régime.

No autopsy was performed and the exact cause of Renault's death remains unclear. An official report at the time gave the cause of death as uremia.

Louis Renault is buried at his country home Chateau Herqueville, in Herqueville dans l'Eure.

In October 1944, the provisional French government seized Louis Renault's company. The Minister of Information, Henri Teitgen, said at the time this was not a confiscation, rather "it was merely a step to get French industry back into production. Later a commission would examine the books, confiscate war profits, bring charges."

On 1 January 1945, four months after Louis Renault's death, an order of General Charles de Gaulle's provisional government decreed the dissolution of Société Anonyme des Usines Renault and its nationalization, giving it the new name Régie Nationale des Usines Renault (RNUR).

Thus, the company Louis Renault had created was nationalized on the official case of collaboration. Renault was charged posthumously with "guilty enrichment obtained by those who worked for the enemy".

In 1944, after the expropriation of his company and his subsequent death, Renault's last will and testament was opened to reveal that he had left his company to his 40,000 employees. At the time the company was nationalized, Renault's wife Christiane and her son Jean-Louis owned 95% of the company stock and had received nothing, while the other stockholders were in fact compensated. By 1956 "Renault [was] now France's largest nationalized company, employing 51,000 Frenchmen, making 200,000 automobiles and a profit of $11 million a year."

The director of the plant during the war obtained a judgment in 1949 stating that he and the plant had not collaborated.

In 1956, Renault's widow, Christiane Renault, claimed that Louis Renault was murdered and sought "to establish that Louis Renault was another of the more than 9,000 Frenchmen listed by the government as having been killed by "irregular executions" in the post-Liberation vengeance," and Louis Renault's body was subsequently exhumed for autopsy. Madam Renault cited as evidence "a report showing Renault's urea content to be normal a week before his death, and an X-ray showing a fractured vertebra."

In 2005, the UK Daily Telegraph reported that "according to eyewitness and family accounts, the previously wiry little 67-year-old had been tortured and beaten," and that "a nun at Fresnes testified that she saw Renault collapse after being hit over the head by a jailer wielding a helmet. An X-ray organised by his family indicated a broken neck vertebra."

In 2005, the Daily Telegraph said Renault had "felt that his duty was to preserve France’s manufacturing base. Military and Daimler-Benz officials arrived at the gates of his Billancourt factory to assess it for removal into Germany, together with its workforce. Renault fended them off by agreeing to make vehicles for the Wehrmacht." According to Anthony Rhodes's Louis Renault: A Biography, Renault once said of the Germans "It is better to give them the butter, or they'll take the cows." The 2005 Daily Telegraph report said Renault attempted to save his company from displacement and absorption by Daimler-Benz: "But for his efforts, Renault factories and employees would have been shipped to Germany."

Subsequent studies showed that while Renault had collaborated, "he also hived off strategic materials and sabotaged trucks. Dipsticks were marked low, for example, and engines dried and seized in action, an outcome much in evidence on the Russian Front." Suggestions that Renault management had slowed production for German occupiers was countered with the argument that workers rather than management had organized the production slow-downs. A 2005 article in Daily Telegraph said it could legally be argued that the Renault company, the "jewel in the country’s industrial crown" was procured by theft, and that "admission that Louis Renault and his company had received rough justice would raise the question of compensation – huge compensation."

In 2011, Patrick Fridenson (at Wikipedia Français), a business history professor at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris and the author of a book on Renault said “It’s extremely difficult to say to what extent Louis Renault should be considered a collaborator, he ran the risk of complete dispossession if he resisted the Germans.” Scholar Monika Ostler Riess, who had studied French and German sources found no evidence that Mr. Renault collaborated any more than his peers. “He just tried to save what he had, what he had built. The alternative to cooperating with the occupiers was to see the Germans take over his company"

Robert Paxton suggested in his 1975 book, Vichy France: old guard and new order: 1940–1944, that the Renault factory might have been returned to Louis Renault and his family, had he lived longer. The Berliet truck factory in Lyon remained in Marius Berliet's family possession, despite his having manufactured 2,330 trucks for the Germans. Marius Berliet, who died in 1949, had, however, "stubbornly refused to recognize legal actions against him after the war."

On 29 July 1967, Louis-Jean Renault, the only heir, received minor compensation, specifically for non-industrial, personal losses. In 1982, representatives of the Organisation Civile et Militaire and their counterparts at the company Robert de Longcamps, worked in vain for the rehabilitation of Louis Renault, saying he had been "wrongfully accused of collaboration with the enemy", their requests to Robert Badinter, French Minister of Justice, unheeded.

Renault's were the only factories permanently expropriated by the French government. As of 2005, Renault officials avoid mention of Louis Renault. For the centennial in 1999 of the original Renault Frères company, celebrated by Régie Renault, the company ignored the grandchildren of Louis Renault.

Despite the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, which mandates just and preliminary compensation before expropriation, Louis Renault and his heirs were otherwise never officially compensated for their company. Renault returned to the private sector as a Société Anonyme (S.A) in 1996 when the French government sold 80% of the company.

In 2011, his heirs again sought to restore Renault's reputation and receive compensation for what they see as the illegal confiscation of his company by the state.

Daily inspiration. Discover more photos at http://justforbooks.tumblr.com

Treat Your S(h)elf: A German Officer in Occupied Paris: The War Journals, 1941-1945 by Ernst Jünger (2019)

Keeping a journal: The short entries are often as dry as instant tea. Writing them down is like pouring hot water over them to release their aroma.

- Ernst Jünger,  A German Officer in Occupied Paris: The War Journals, 1941-1945 (2019)

Paris is very much my home these days and so I enjoy reading about the history of this beautiful city. It is difficult to live in Paris today and conjure up much sense of the city in the early 1940s. It is indeed, as it is called throughout the world, the City of Light. But back in 1940 when France fell and Paris occupied until its liberation on 24 August 1944, it was a city in darkness. Like so much else that happened in France during World War II, the Nazi occupation of Paris was something entirely more complex and ambiguous than has generally been understood.

We tend to think of those four years as difficult but minimally destructive by comparison with the hell the Nazis wreaked elsewhere in the country. But as recent historians have shown the Nazi occupation was a terrible time for Paris, not just because the Nazis were there but because Paris itself was complicit in its own humiliation. As the historian Ronald Risbottom has shown in his compelling book, ‘When Paris went Dark’, “Even today, the French endeavour both to remember and to find ways to forget their country’s trials during World War II; their ambivalence stems from the cunning and original arrangement they devised with the Nazis, which was approved by Hitler and assented to by Philipe Petain, the recently appointed head of the Third Republic, that had ended the Battle of France in June of 1940. This treaty - known by all as the Armistice - had entangled France and the French in a web of cooperation, resistance, accommodation, and, later, of defensiveness, forgetfulness, and guilt from which they are still trying to escape.”

It is almost certainly a unique event in human history, one in which a ruthless and unscrupulous invader occupied a city known for its sophistication and liberality, declining to destroy it or even to exact physical damage on more than a minority of its citizens yet leaving it in a state of “embarrassment, self-abasement, guilt and a felt loss of masculine superiority that would mark the years of the Occupation. To this day, more than one visitor or foreigners living in Paris are struck by how sensitive Paris and Parisians remain about the role of the city and its citizens in its most humiliating moment of the twentieth century.

Indeed bringing up the subject with French friends, my French partner’s family, or even relatives (by marriage - such as a French aunt married to my Norwegian uncle or the French partners of my cousins here in France) is like walking on egg shells. It brings up too many distant ghosts for many families. Nearly every household has a story. It can be one of resistance or one of collaboration or (more likely) one of passive indifference and acceptance.

And yet I remain fascinated and intrigued partly because of historical interest and partly out of curiosity about the human condition under stress. In Britain - despite the trauma of daily bombardment from German bombers - the country was never invaded. And so whilst war brings out the best and worst in people, it was altogether a different experience to the one experienced by mainland European countries. I don’t think we British truly have understood of life was really like under occupation and the choices people are willingly or not made just to survive the war.

The history of Paris from 1940 to 1944 gives the lie to the old childhood taunt: Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never hurt me. The Germans for the most part spared Parisians sticks and stones (except, of course, Parisians who were Jewish), but the “names” they inflicted in the form of truncated freedoms, greatly reduced food and supplies, an unceasing fear of the unexpected and calamitous, and the simple fact of their inescapable, looming presence did deep damage of a different kind. It traumatised the city and its inhabitants in ways very little understood by others, especially Britain.

The carefully curated image of French resistance against the Nazis has been asked to serve critical functions in that nation’s collective memory. The manufactured myth served to postpone for a quarter of a century deeper analyses of how easily France had been beaten and how feckless had been the nation’s reaction to German authority, especially between 1940 and 1943. And yet the myth of a universal resistance was important to France’s idea of itself as a beacon for human liberty. It was also badly needed as an example of the courage one needed in the face of monstrous political ideologies.

There remained the ethical questions that would haunt France for decades: Which actions, exactly, constitute collaboration and which constitute resistance? It is still asking these questions over 70 years later. But behind such question lies a deeper and more haunting question of moral culpability that many are quick to throw responsibility - along with their own shame of inaction - onto others but not look inwards at their own guilt and passivity.

But what about the occupiers? What did they feel? Were the German Wehrmacht during the day simply tourists sitting in cafes, dining on gourmand food, buying silk stockings and the latest fashions for their wives back home and by night drinking and debauching on the cultural and seedy delights of Paris?

Moral culpability is a question that Ernst Jünger, the celebrated German author, never asks himself of his time as a German officer in Paris. But culpability is a question that looms large after reading the war journals of Ernst Jünger from 1941-1945, now published by Columbia University Press as A German Officer in Occupied Paris: The War Journals, 1941-1945. It should have been re-titled as a ‘A German writer pre-occupied by Parisian night life and his navel’.

Ernst Jünger (1895-1998) was what is sometimes called a “controversial” figure. A First World War hero who was wounded seven times, he was undoubtedly uncommonly brave. He also insisted that those who were less brave should play their part, forcing retreating soldiers to join his unit at gunpoint. His 1920 book Storm of Steel (In Stahlgewittern), recounting his war experiences and portraying war in a heroic light, made him famous. In the 1920s he became involved in anti-democratic right-wing groups like the paramilitary Freikorps and wrote for a number of nationalist journals. He remained aloof from the Nazis, however, and, while he boasted that he “hated democracy like the plague”, was more of a nationalist than a racist. 

Jünger spent much of the Second as an officer stationed in Paris, where these war journals are an almost daily record of the views and impressions of a well-read literary figure, entomologist, and cultural critic, now available for the first time in English translation in A German Officer in Occupied Paris. Posted in white-collar positions in Paris with the German military during the 1940-1944 occupation.

Nazi Germany produced two wartime diaries of equal literary and historical significance but written from the most different perspectives conceivable: Victor Klemperer and Ernst Jünger. Victor Klemperer wrote furtively, in daily dread of transport to an extermination camp, a fate he was spared by the firebombing of Dresden. Ernst Jünger, by contrast, had what was once called a “good war.” As a bestselling German author, he drew cushy occupation duty in Paris, where he could hobnob with famous artists and writers, prowl antiquarian bookstores, and forage for the rare beetles he collected. Yet Klemperer and Jünger both found themselves anxiously sifting propaganda and hearsay to learn the truth about distant events on which their lives hung.

For English-speaking readers who do not know his work, A German Officer in Occupied Paris shows the many sides of this complex, elusive writer.

In the judicious and helpful foreword by San Francisco-based historian Elliot Neaman, who says. “Like a God in France, Jünger operated on the edge of politics in Paris, rather like a butterfly fluttering among the resistors and collaborators. He didn’t trust the generals, who had taken a personal oath to Hitler, to be able to carry out a coup.”

Jünger had visited the city prior to the war, was fluent in French, and now had the contacts and the time to become even more familiar with the French capital. During his stay in Paris he met painters such as Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso as well as literary figures including Louis-Ferdinand Céline and Jean Cocteau, all of whom figure in his Journals, which reflect a view of Paris that had become a tourism mecca during the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

To Jünger, Paris was “a capital, symbol and fortress of an ancient tradition of heightened life and unifying ideas, which nations especially lack nowadays” (30 May 1941). After wandering around the Place du Tertre, near the Sacré Cœur Cathedral in the Montmartre section of Paris, he wrote: “The city has become my second spiritual home and represents more and more strongly the essence of what I love and cherish about ancient culture” (18 September 1942). At the same time, Jünger was aware of the “shafts of glaring looks” with which he was sometimes viewed by locals as he wandered in uniform through the city’s streets and byways (18 August 1942, 89, and 29 September 1943).

A German Officer in Occupied Paris is divided into four parts: the “First Paris Journal,” his writings from 1941 through October 1942; “Notes from the Caucasus,” continuing his account through February 1943; the “Second Paris Journal,” covering the period from his return to Paris through the liberation of France in the late summer of 1944; and finally the “Kirchhorst Diaries,” his account of having been placed in charge of the local militia [Volkssturm] and his reflections on the bombings and imminent defeat of Germany.

The “First Paris Journal” reflects the comings and goings of a German officer and writer happy to rediscover Paris at a time when it seemed clear that Germany had won the war and would dominate France and perhaps Europe indefinitely. Closer physically to the fighting following his transfer to the East in October 1942, Jünger devoted greater attention to the fighting and the raw nature of the German-Soviet struggle in “Notes from the Caucasus.”

By the time he returned to Paris and began his “Second Paris Journal” in February 1943, the Germans had been defeated at Stalingrad and it had become increasingly evident that a titanic struggle loomed and that the Germans might well lose the war.

The final section, the “Kirchhorst Diaries,” is set against the backdrop of the Allied invasion of Germany, accompanied by intense bombing and the destruction of German cities and homes including Jünger’s own, and the seemingly countless numbers of civilian refugees seeking shelter and food. Through it all, Jünger continues his reading, including that of the Bible, his book collecting, and visits to antiquarian booksellers when possible, and his chats with various literary figures in Paris and, at times, in Germany.

Much of the material in the Journals is introspective, with Jünger addressing his innermost thoughts and dreams. Snakes also appear with some frequency in the Journals, for example, in the entry of 13 July 1943, where during a restless night because of air raid sirens in Paris, he recalls having dreamt of dark black snakes devouring more brightly colored ones. In the Journal entry, he linked snakes back to primal forces incarnating life and death, and good and evil. This connection, he noted, was the reason people fear the sight of a snake, “almost stronger than the sight of sexual organs, with which there is also a connection” (13 July 1943). Following a conversation with the “Doctoresse,” the name that Jünger used for Sophie Ravoux, with whom he was intimate and had an affair in Paris, he described his own manner of thinking as “atomistically by osmosis and filtration of the smallest particles of thoughts.” His thought process, he explained, ran not according to principles of cause and effect but rather at the “level” of the vowels of a sentence, on the molecular level; “This explains why I know people who couldn’t help becoming my friends, even through dreams” (22 January 1944). Addressing Eros and sexual organs, Jünger added that he wished to study the connections between language and physique. Colours also had spiritual values, “Just as green and red are part of white, higher entities are polarised in intellectual couples—as is the universe into blue and red”.

Jünger’s position as an army captain gave him a panorama of the war that left no room for heroes. Violence became a grim leveller that made ideologies interchangeable. Germans on the eastern front were reading On the Marble Cliffs as a condemnation of Soviet Russia rather than of Nazi Germany. Hitler had unleashed a dehumanising force on the world, one that made Russians, Germans, the French Resistance and Allied pilots all look the same, locked in an escalating cycle of cruelty. Jünger witnessed Allied planes strafing screaming children in the streets, releasing bombs timed to explode while presents were handed out on Christmas Eve. Accounts drifted in of Parisian friends, who had once tried to transcend national boundaries with him through measured discussion in the salons, being harassed as collaborators. His summary of this second war could have been a reverse of the first: ‘Inactivity brings men together, whereas battle separates them.’

The picture of Jünger’s political views that emerges in his Journals, however, is a highly chivalric and military elitist one in which a small number of bold idealists, for lack of a better term, struggle against demos and technocracy, democracy and technicians, who are destroying the soul of an older European society. Writing while back home in Kirchhorst on 6 November 1944, following the expulsion of the Germans from France and walking around viewing the destruction wrought by the Allied bombs in Germany, he observed: “As I walked, I thought about the cursory style of contemporary thinkers, the way they pronounce judgment on ideas and symbols that people have been working on and creating for millennia. In so doing they are unaware of their own place in the universe, and of that little bit of destructive work allocated to them by the world spirit.”

He went on to criticise “the old liberals, Dadaists, and free-thinkers, as they begin to moralise at the end of a life devoted to the destruction of the old guard and the undermining of order.” Jünger then referred to Dostoevsky’s novel The Demons, in which the sons of Stepan Trofimovich “are encouraged to scorn anything that had formerly been considered fundamental.” Having destroyed their father, these “young conservatives,” now sensing “the new elemental power” of “the demos,” are then dragged to their deaths. In the ensuing chaos, “only the nihilist retains his fearsome power.” Jünger mentions Hindenburg, and the destruction of the conservatives by the Nazis is clearly implied (6 November 1944).

In August 1943, he described his political views as a combination of Guelph (relating to the medieval supporters of the Pope against the Holy Roman Emperor), Prussian, Gross-Deutscher (in support of a Greater Germany including Austria), European, and citizen of the world “all at once.” As he put it, “My political core is like a clock with cog wheels that work against each other.” However, he added: “Yet, when I look at the face of the clock, I could imagine a noon when all these identities coincide” (1 August 1943).

While violence raged all around, Jünger continued his secret diary, for publication after the war. This ended for him when American tanks rumbled through his village in April 1945, Jünger proclaiming that the deeper the fall, the greater the ensuing rise. Jünger survived investigation in the immediate postwar period and went on to become a grand old man of German literature, with a considerable following at home and abroad. A year before his death he was – as the phrase goes – received into the Catholic church. Having lived through a violent century he expired in his bed in his 103rd year.

The war journals is a highly nuanced, albeit self-made, picture of a human being in the middle of World War II, who is a flirtatious fascist, yet who apparently seems to care for other human beings, regardless of their so-called social strata or race. Take for example this entry dated Paris, 28 July 1942, “The unfortunate pharmacist on the corner: his wife has been deported. Such benign individuals would not think of defending themselves, except with reasons. Even when they kill themselves, they are not choosing the lot of the free who have retreated into their last bastions, rather they seek the night as frightened children seek their mothers. It is appalling how blind even young people have become to the sufferings of the vulnerable; they have simply lost any feeling for it. They have become too weak for the chivalrous life. They have even lost the simple decency that prevents us from injuring the weak. The opposite is true: they take pride in it.”

Having said that, I found some of the contents repugnant as Jünger, a devout entomologist, easily writes about finding a new insect while fires are burning all around Paris in 1943. Indeed Jünger paints himself as the detached botanist-scholar, determined to survive and help the world recover in peacetime. For him, the best way to avoid being sucked into the vortex of violence was to disconnect from emotion and group mentalities: to feel nothing and be on no one’s side, only bearing witness. A detached eye in the storm.

His journal is a hedonistic carousel, as he frequented theatres, literary salons and Left bank bookstalls along the Seine, as well as having a meeting of artistic minds with Picasso, Braque and Cocteau. It’s possible to make your way through this collection and have a grand ole time, enjoying the moments when Jünger encounters celebrities like Picasso, or when Monet’s daughter-in-law gives him the key to the gardens at Giverny for his own private tour, or when he describes another gourmet meal with the well-heeled of Parisian society: “The salad was served on silver, the ice cream on a heavy gold service that had belonged to Sarah Bernhardt.” Jünger relishes his name-dropping and his contacts with the upper crust. He sees himself as one of the Übermenschen: “In this country the superior man lives like Odysseus, taunted by worthless usurpers in his own palace.”

The author himself gets lost in the fog of mystic self regard as all artistic writers are prone to do and confesses that in an entry labeled 26 Aug 1942: “At times I have difficulty distinguishing between my conscious and unconscious existence. I mean between that part of my life that has been knit together by dreams and the other.”

To read the diary in chronological order is to realise that Jünger’s submersion in art and literature was his way of preserving his humanity while serving the machinery of a lethally violent state. One way of doing this was through a voracious program of reading, chiefly literature and history, often reading two or three books at once. One is not surprised at the German and French reading but at the abundance of English writers, whom he read in the original—Melville, Joyce, Poe, Conrad, Kipling, Thomas Wolfe, Thornton Wilder, the Brontës, ad infinitum. The range is also remarkable. Jünger pivots from the 1772 fantasy Diable amoureux to a biography of the painter Turner to Crime and Punishment. And throughout the entire diary, one finds him reading the Bible, cover to cover, which he began shortly after his posting to Paris.

Over and over again I had to remind myself this is a diary. Diaries by definition have one eye on self serving posterity.  

So it’s not surprising that Jünger would tweak reality to create this image of poetic detachment. With his constant  stories of indulgence in Paris, the reader might assume he had no job while he was  there. In fact he was censoring letters and newspapers, a cog in the Nazi machine he so despised. He omits anything that would make him appear a villain. An ongoing extramarital affair in Paris is barely hinted at. But neither does he try to look a hero, omitting how he passed on to Jews information of upcoming deportations, buying them time to escape.

Should he have continued to enjoy his life as a flâneur for so long? He had solid proof of what was going on, debriefed as he was on the mass shootings and death camps on the eastern front. Throughout his career he had railed against inertia, lauding men of action who sacrificed themselves for a just cause. And then such a cause presented itself. Jünger’s colleagues in Paris were involved in the Stauffenberg plot of 1944, and asked for his help. He was one of the most influential conservative voices in Germany at the time, one of the few that Hitler’s followers might have taken seriously. Yet he refused to commit himself during the chaos. Instead, Jünger waited for evil to destroy itself: a fireman who fought the blaze by waiting for the building to burn down. As usual, he inhabited a grey area.

Jünger remains a problematic figure of controversy, perhaps even emblematic of the aged old question how does one respond to brutish evil? There are no easy answers. Addressing the French who collaborated with Germany during the war Robert Paxton, a well regarded historian of Vichy France wrote, “Even Frenchmen of the best intentions, faced with the harsh alternative of doing one’s job, whose risks were moral and abstract, or practicing civil disobedience, whose risks were material and immediate, went on doing the job. The same may be said of the German occupiers. Many of them were “good Germans,” men of cultivation, confident that their country’s success outweighed a few moral blemishes, dutifully fulfilling some minor blameless function in a regime whose cumulative effect was brutish.”

Was Jünger one of those they called a ‘good German’? Eating sole and duck  at the famous Tour d’Argent restaurant, while gazing down at the hungry civilians in the buildings below was the choice Jünger made. In his 4 Just 1942 diary entry he wrote, “upon the grey sea of roofs at their feet, beneath which the starving eke out their living. In times like this - eating well and much - brings a feeling of power”.

We are always told to speak truth to power. Before we can speak one must think. But thinking truth to power is never enough in itself unless one acts out truth to power. Words without action is nothing. So the question one has to ask even as one reads from the detached safety of distance and time: how would one act in his shoes or indeed a Frenchman’s shoes?

More than anything, the diary raises, for me at least, the question of moral culpability. It’s impossible to tell what Jünger was really thinking, and so perhaps one tantalising aspect of these war journals is psychological more than anything else. All this stuff is swirling around his life but we hear about the harmless social fluff for the most part. For example, he notes “In Charleville, I was a witness at a military tribunal. I used the opportunity to buy books, like novels by Gide and various works by Rimbaud.” I wanted to hear about the tribunal, but alas, it vanished into Jünger’s damn book buying.

And yet if you judge Jünger by his diary entries alone then it would be very easy to find him guilty. But diaries conceal as much as they reveal. For all the criticism that Jünger has served up a self-serving exculpatory diary, the truth is that he leaves his most selfless acts unmentioned. It is known that he gave advance warning to Jews facing deportation: The writer Joseph Breitbach was one, as he subsequently confirmed, and Walter Benjamin was possibly another.

None of this, for obvious reason, could be committed to paper, nor could the names of Adolf Hitler or any of his henchmen. Instead, their appearances are marked by Jünger’s felicitous code names. Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi chief propagandist, is “Grandgoschier,” a character from Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel meaning “Big Throat.” SS Chief Heinrich Himmler is “Schinderhannes,” the name of a notorious German highwayman but also a pun on horse knacker. And Hermann Goering is simply “Head Forester,” citing the most fatuous of his many official titles.

Jünger thought a great deal about the mystic and symbolic power of sounds, and he reserved his most apposite pseudonym for Hitler, “Kniébolo,” a name that is at once menacing and absurd. It suggests a kneeling demon (Diabolos), a leitmotif of the diary as Jünger became ever more convinced of Hitler’s essentially Satanic character- in the literal biblical sense.

So grey areas get more grey when we either try to step back and be detached to render a verdict on Jünger or if we step into his shoes to get inside his head. This is the limitation of a secret and coded diary, no matter how scrupulously written and how fascinating they are to read. Diaries are written for oneself or an imagined other; they play on the satisfactions of monologue. Letters are shaped by the contingencies of distance and time between writer and recipient; they become over time scattered in various places and must be "collected" to form a single body of writing.

Diaries are shaped by moments of inspiration but also by habit; they are woven together by a single voice and usually are contained between covers. Diarists play with the tension between concealing and revealing, between "telling all" and speaking obliquely or keeping silent. Like letter writing, diarists inscribe the risks and pleasures of expression and trust. The diary is an uncertain genre uneasily balanced between literary and historic writing. The diary belongs to the woman where history and literature overlap. So it’s easy to conclude that we will always have ambiguity and tension between these two polar opposites.

After 1945, Jünger again withdrew into private life, but continued to publish. Seclusion encouraged attention. His reputation grew. Scholarly editions appeared. In three last decades, doubters aside, he enjoyed growing recognition, travelled the world, deepened his knowledge of nature and voiced concern about human damage to the planet. Jünger poured out books late into his nineties. By then he had swept Germany’s top literary prizes and been visited in his Swabian retreat by the statesmen of Europe, including Helmut Kohl and François Mitterrand.

Jünger’s experience of life did little to dent his loathing of liberalism and democracy. On a country walk along a bomb-pitted road near his home late in 1944, Jünger indulges a moment of conservative relish, telling himself that it is liberals who are to blame for all that has befallen. How wonderful it is, he writes sarcastically, “to watch the drama of the old liberals, Dadaists and freethinkers, as they begin to moralise at the end of a life devoted completely to the destruction of the old guard and the undermining of order”. “Blame the liberals!” was the reactionary’s charge at birth (there is a profound difference between true conservatism and the extreme reactionary). It hobbled the Weimar Republic and bedevils politics today. Politically, he had learnt nothing. Today Western Europe society is eating itself inwards through the corrosive influence of the woke-ness of cultural Marxism and the conservative now finds himself/herself in the sweetly ironic position of defending the tenets of true liberalism.

For English-speaking readers who do not know his work, A German Officer in Occupied Paris shows the many sides of this complex, elusive writer. These diaries are invaluable about the man and his times. Jünger is nowadays probably less read than read about. So these war journals are to be welcomed and to be read with great interest. 

For some these journal entries alone will still provide material to debate the moral choices made - and evaded - by Jünger. To critics, Jünger participated too much and judged too little. To defenders, he was indeed on the hard right, but no fascist and, besides, his prose was what mattered, not his politics. Not to pity Jünger’s personal travails would be defective. Not to respond to his prose would be deaf. But all of us can ponder Jean Cocteau’s final verdict, who liked Jünger and considered him a friend but whose aloofness troubled him: “Some people had dirty hands, some had clean hands, but Jünger had no hands.” Jünger may have washed his hands of his time in Paris but the hand of history forever tapping on his shoulder is less forgiving.

all evidence that points towards Magneto being Jewish before it was first explicitly established in 1991

!!None of this is my writing!! It’s a useful but outdated source that I merely revised to replace the G slur. It was written by Rivka Jacobs and the original can be found at http://www.alara.net/opeople/xbooks/magjew.html

The Magneto Is Jewish FAQ (revised 11/9/98)

Rivka Jacobs

(1) In Uncanny #113 (Classic X-Men #19), the added material has Magneto on Asteroid M, talking about the deaths of Magda, Anya, and he mentions Auschwitz for the first time. "I endured one death camp ... in Auschwitz ... I will not see another people fear what they do not understand and destroy what they fear." Uncanny #113 is from 1978. The additional scenes were included in 1988's Classic X-Men #19. So, we know Magnus was at Auschwitz, a death camp, not just a concentration camp. (Many fans [and writers] seem to get the two types of camps confused). There could have been a number of reasons he was at Auschwitz: he was a Polish political prisoner, a Russian prisoner of war, a member of the French underground, a homosexual from Germany, Roma, or, with a high probability, a Jew. (Out of 1.5 million victims of Auschwitz, between 1.1 and 1.2 million were Jews).

(2) In Uncanny #150 (one of my favorites) Magneto mentions, in a fight with Cyclops, "I know something of grief. Search throughout my homeland, you will find NONE who bear my name. Mine was a large family, and it was slaughtered ... without mercy, without remorse." So that eliminates German homosexual and French partisan, because the entire familes of such prisoners were not slaughtered throughout an entire "homeland." After Magneto thinks he has killed Kitty, he says: "I remember my own childhood ... the gas chambers at Auschwitz, the guards joking as they herded my family to their death. As our lives were nothing to them, so human lives became nothing to me." Storm is about to blast him for "killing" Kitty, and she says, "If you have a diety, butcher, pray to it!" Magneto answers, "As a boy, I believed. As a boy, I turned my back on god forever." So now we know that Magnus is not a political prisoner (German political prisoners were sent to camps on German soil, like Dachau, or Bergen-Belsen), he is not Polish, since whole Polish families were not herded to the gas chambers. The Poles were not the target of pre-meditated Nazi genocide. While the Russian people were the target of genocide, only Russian POWs were in Auschwitz, not whole families. So, we are now left with only two groups of people that Magnus could be from, the Roma and the Jews. Uncanny #150 is from Oct. 1981; already Magnus says something very interesting here. He says he "remembers" the gas chambers of Auschwitz, "remembers" his family being herded, he "remembers" the guards joking. Fact: no one remembers the gas chambers of Auschwitz except in two ways (or three if you believe the dead can speak to the living), either you were a Nazi SS guard or doctor or official, or you were a member of the Sonderkommando. The Sonderkommando, Jewish prisoners who were forced by the Nazis -- in all the death camps -- to do the dirty work of killing. It was Nazi official policy. The Jews, the lowest of the low to the Nazis, in Auschwitz hierarchy, followed by the Russians, and then the Roma, the Jews would be the ones to lead the victims to the gas chamber, to haul the bodies from the gas chambers to the ovens, to burn and bury the dead. The Jews would pull the teeth of the corpses, cut the hair, pile the bodies three at a time on the retorts of the ovens in just the right way. The Sonderkommando had a few kapos (overseers) who were German and Polish prisoners, criminals from civil prisons in Germany and Poland. During the summer of 1944, 19 Russian POWs from Mauthausen were sent to augment the Auschwitz Sonderkommando. Totally documented, on paper and by eye witness accounts. All other members of the Auschwitz Sonderkommando were Jews.

(3) In Uncanny #161, Sept. 1982, we have the story of Xavier's trip to Israel. There he meets Magnus for the first time. However, it should be noted that the entire story is a Charlie-dream, while he is with Lilandra. In Uncanny #161 we see for the first and last time Magnus' tattoo from Auschwitz. His number is #214782. Xavier says, "That tattoo, Magnus, were you ...?" Magnus answers, "Auschwitz. I grew up there." So now we know that Magneto was first in Auschwitz as a very young person, but we can't pinpoint the age yet. Also, his number is high for someone who was there from the beginning of the camp. The first Polish prisoners, like author Wieslaw Kielar, had very low numbers, like in the 200s. Sonderkommando survivor Filip Muller's number was in the 20,000s. He arrived in early 1942. Magnus' number is a standard number, however, without the A of the 1944 arrivals, or the Z of the Roma, or the other special classification symbols. Of course the penciller didn't know these details. So a standard Auschwitz number, which is too big, but it doesn't tell us anything.

4) Vision and the Scarlet Witch, Vol. 1, #4. Magneto has just found out Wanda and Pietro are his children. (This is from Feb. 1983). He is on the moon, in the Inhuman city of Attilan, telling VIsion about his youth. "I was born into a time and place ... Android ... where both man and mutant were persecuted for being ... different." Picture of the Auschwitz camp, guards tormenting emaciated prisoners, one of whom displays a very prominent and exaggerated Star of David on his clothing. Remember Jews and Roma were kept apart in the camp. In the next panel, however, Magneto sort-of goes into a fantasy. He says, "But unlike the other victims, I possessed the power to fight back." He imagines he's hurling Nazi tanks away with magnetic energy. What's this? In 1983, the reader doesn't know what to make of this. Keep in mind, he's meeting with Wanda, Pietro, Vision, and Crystal, and has held Luna for the first time. Is he exaggerating? Showing off for them?

(5) Now for the second most important comic proving Magneto is Jewish, Uncanny #199, Nov. 1985. Magneto with Lee Forrester and Kitty Pryde arrive at the National Holocaust Memorial in Washington, DC. (It's not really Lee, but Mystique, trying to capture Magneto). Magneto has been having an affair with Lee, he loves her. He brings her to the Holocaust Memorial? Why? Fun date, huh? Why, because he has no other family. These people are his family. Jewish survivors of the Holocaust. (The Roma have their own name for the genocide, and their own gatherings, with their own rituals and customs. Magneto has no reason to go to a Jewish gathering if he isn't Jewish). Lee/Mystique says: "Man's inhumanity to man ... how easily the race kills." Magneto answers: "Then, Lee, it was the Jews. My nightmare has ever been that tomorrow it will be Mutants." Why would he say that, why wouldn't he mention another ethnic group, if he weren't Jewish? Next, Magneto tells Kitty EXACTLY how to address the gathering in order to get information about dead or missing family members. How does Magneto know how to do this? Isn't it obvious that he's done this before? Why would he address a Jewish Holocaust gathering looking for information about his family if his family weren't Jewish? (And it is a Jewish gathering, besides the use of the word Holocaust, a speaker says in the background: "... the systematic institutionalized extermination of one people by another."). Kitty asks about her great-aunt Chava, who died at Auschwitz, and Magneto is recognized by two survivors, Ruth and David Shulman, two Jewish survivors. (Shul is another name for synagogue -- Shulman means man of the temple, or man of the synagogue). They remember Magneto as a youth in Auschwitz, and say he helped them survive. And witness him as having been there. (No implanted memories, please). They testify that he " ... Had been at that accursed place from the very start..."

Later, Mystique reveals herself, and arrests Magneto in front of all these people. Magneto says that he recognizes no authority. "My land ...all the countries of the world ... turned their back on me and mine when we were condemned to Hitler's death camps. Therefore, in return, I have sworn to deny them." So let's clear this up ... the Roma were not persecuted in Greece, the Greek Jewish community was decimated. A small number of Roma and Jews in Rumania were exiled to a new border country called "Transnistria" but the remainder of the Roma were left alone. Several hundred thousand of them. 350,000 Rumanian Jews were savagely murdered throughout the country. In Slovakia, the Roma were left alone, the Slovakian Jews were among the first sent to Auschwitz. After the Slovakian uprising was crushed in 1944, several hundred Roma who had courageously helped in the rebellion were murdered, along with the remainder of the Jews of Slovakia. Bulgaria did not persecute its Romani people. Bulgaria, although resisting deportations of its Jews, persecuted them locally. In the Netherlands, only the "wandering" Roma who were captured in camps and wagons were deported, about 500. The remaining who had bought homes or found shelter with neighbors, were left alone. The Netherlands is where Gabrielle Haller comes from -- in under two years 100,000 Dutch Jews were deported, most were killed. I could go on. There is no other people who were hunted everywhere the Nazis went or had influence but the Jews. There is no other people who had the gates of escape cut off after the war started, but the European Jews. Magneto's reasoning is based on this most extreme situation.

(6) Uncanny #211, Nov. 1986. The Mutant Massacre. Page 9 -- Betsy Braddock has just come in from discovering what happened to a wounded Morlock, who has just died. Magneto, Storm, and Wolverine are standing there in Xavier's infirmary. Betsy says, "... I saw a cadre of super-beings ... massacring every living thing in the Morlock tunnels." Magneto reacts immediately, out of pure emotion. "NO! The horrors of my childhood, born again...only this time, Mutants are the victims, instead of Jews." What else does this mean? He's talking about HIS childhood, he's making a parallel. If he weren't Jewish, he wouldn't have said Jews, he would have said Roma. The two groups of people are not interchangeable.

(7) New Mutants #49, March 1987. Magneto is dreaming. It is an entire page representation of the massacre of his family. Here we see for the first time, his family -- father, mother, sister -- as they were gunned down in front of open graves. The family members are dressed in middle class urban clothes. No peasant dress, no Roma clothing. (And it is not a cliche. Roma women always wore, at this time, their flowing skirts and distinctive scarves and clothing, similar to the Bosnian women of today). Being massacred with Magnus' family is a mixed group of people. Men in bowler hats and suits, one old woman in a long skirt. One man in a bowler hat has the side-locks of the devout Jew, but the other people could be anyone. Poles or Jews or Roma. It's Magnus and his family who are out of place. They are well-dressed, Magnus's sister in a proper school uniform with the prim collar. Every picture I've seen of the German Rom show: a people of color, having left India and Armenia five- to six-hundred years ago, the men wearing Fedoras (favorite style of hat) and normal suits and ties, and the women and girls always dressed in the long skirts and distinctive flowered scarves. The boys wear a mixture of urban short pants but scarf belts, some have socks, some don't. New Mutants #49, page 17, could show some Roma in the crowd, but Magnus' family members are definitely not Romani in this picture.

(8) X-Men Classics #12, back-up story, Aug. 1987. The actual scenes of Magneto's escape from Auschwitz. "And with World War II ending... the Third Reich defeated...it's guards wanted no witnesses left...to tell the tale of this horror..." Picture of an SS soldier about to shoot a fallen and stricken Madga. "He had been there from the start ..." Magnus has just slammed a wooden beam into the head of the SS soldier. "Grown to manhood within its electrified barbed wire fence. If he was to die, it would not be in this abattoir ... and not without a fight!" Magnus grabs a terrified Magda by the hand and drags her with him in his escape. (a) The war is almost over, it is winter, it is the winter of 1944-1945. The Roma were gone by 1945. All the Roma women were gone. Only 4 clerks, high-status friends of Nazi officials in Camp I, were left. The Romani camp was murdered in the gas chambers in August 1944. (b) This scene, by Claremont and Bolton, is completely accurate. It takes place on Jan. 20, 1945, two days after thecamp was evacuated and the Death marches began. Some 70 of the Sonderkommando were kept to help destroy the evidence of the death factory, before they were to be killed. Some 200 women from the woman's camp, Jews, were chosen to fill in the huge pits where bodies were burned. They had to haul ashes, break up human bones, all in the coldest part of winter. The SS soldiers sent back on Jan. 20th were sent to kill the women. That is exactly what you see in this comic book, because Claremont and Bolton took the time and cared enough, to do their research. Magneto was saving Magda becasue at that point, he wasn't the target, yet. If they were out by the burial pits to the northwest of the camp, that is a point close to the forest. It just makes sense.

(9) New Mutants #61, March 1988. On page 22, Magneto is alone, kneeling over the dead body of Doug Ramsey, thinking thoughts only the reader can see. This is one moment he would not misrepresent anything, to himself especially. He says, "An ill wind is coming ... they are registering mutants ... like they once registered my people in Poland ...! Who knows what horrors await us." Only the Jews were registered, and forced to wear armbands with the Star of David on them, in Poland (at the end of 1939). Efforts to murder the Polska Roma (the Polish Roma) began in 1942, but they weren't registered first. Young Magnus wouldn't have known about any of that in any case-- he was already at Auschwitz by 1942. He would only have known that "my people" the Jewish people in Poland, including the German Jews who had already been deported there in the first months of the War, were registered.

(10) Classic X-Men #19, March 1988, back-up story. Magneto is apparently working for the CIA hunting Nazis. He is about to be betrayed by them, and his lady love of that time, Isabelle, is about to be murdered. But as he is apprehending a Nazi war criminal he gets one of his massive headaches. "Pain," he thinks, "again indescribable." "Worse than the bite of the kapo's whip. The murder of parents and family, the death of a child ... the loss of a beloved wife!" So here we see that Magneto was the victim of kapos. He could not have been a kapo. He was too young anyway, as we've seen. He grew up in Auschwitz. Here he says the murder of parents, and family. The parents separate, gunned down. The remainder of his family, no doubt sent to the gas chambers later, while he was in the Sonderkommando. Remember what he said in UX #150, his entire family wiped out. So as a Jew in the Sonderkommando he not only watched his family die, he helped kill them. How can any other comic book character ever come close to Magneto for dramatic intensity, but only if he is a Jew.

(11) X-Factor Annual #4, 1989. Doom challenges Magneto to a duel of wills, with a helmet that pulls out unpleasant memories and torments the wearer. Who will crack first? Magneto takes his turn -- Doom describes what he sees, "...after the ignoble defeat of the Nazis in Germany, you and the woman Magda you rescued, fled the prison camp Auschwitz, in Poland."

"Auschwitz, where your family had perished --living skeletons -- and you had grown to manhood amid horrors most men could not conceive." First, Doom confirms that Magnus and Magda "fled" or escaped Auschwitz before liberation and after the Roma camp was murdered. Then he describes some of Magneto's family perishing, as living skeletons, at Auschwitz. They could either have been kept as prisoners, or brought in, starving, from ghettoes in Poland and gassed. They could have been either Roma or Jews. But then it's Doom's turn to wear the helmet. Doom's Romani heritage is discussed at great length. Doom is proud to be a Rom, he knows he is a Rom. Why would he not acknowledge that Magneto is also a Rom? Why did he say your family, implying your people, to Magneto? Not "our" people?

(12) And now the most important evidence, and just about my favorite X-Men comic, Uncanny #274, from March 1991. In the Savage Land, the entire comic is told from the point of view of Magneto. It is a first person narrative, he is talking directly to us, the readers. He is not exaggerating, he is not showing off. The writing is elegant and wonderful ... "My life's ambition has been to safeguard my fellow mutants," Magneto says. "Zaladane has no such compunction. And I hear the echo of Der Fuhrer's voice in the radio of memory, smell the awful stench of the sick and dying as the cattle cars brought the comdemned to Auschwitz. I wear red, the color of blood, in tribute to their lost lives. And the harder I try to cast it aside, to find a gentler path ... the more irresistibly I'm drawn back. I should have died myself with those I loved. Instead, I carted the bodies by the hundreds, by the thousands ... from the death house to the crematorium ... and the ashes to the burial ground. Asking now what I could not then ... why was I spared?!" So there it is. He describes his job at Auschwitz. That is it. This is no vague job description, this is what the Sonderkommando did. This is fundamental to the history of the Holocaust, to the history of Nazi Germany. Making the Jews the ones who had to do all the dirty work in the death camps.

Marvel cannot say they have their own version of Holocaust history. What kind of reasoning is that? Where do the editors and writers of Marvel get off making up their own history of the Holocaust? Where do they draw the line? Has any reader out there ever seen any major publisher or entertainment outfit, outside Neo-Nazi groups and the Militias or Far Right Splinter groups, who just took it upon themselves to change a Jew into a Romany and change Holocaust and Auschwitz history to make it fit? Magneto says it here, he was a member of the Sonderkommando. He was not a kapo. He was not a Russian POW. He was a Jew! On page 14 of UXM #274, Magneto is dreaming again. He again sees his family being gunned down. He again feels what it was like to be buried alive. Rogue wakes him up.

(13) Uncanny X-Men #275, April 1991, which concludes the Savage Land story from UXM #274, referred to above, also contains confirmation as to what happened to young Magnus. Magneto says, directly to the reader, in diary-like narration, as he uses the last strength of his emaciated body to push away his captors, "They think me beaten, finished. A mistake many have made in the past. As I found the strength, as a boy, to survive being machine-gunned and buried alive, and later the unimaginable horror of Auschwitz ... so do I find it in me, here and now, to break free."

(14) X-Men Vol. 2, No. 2, Nov. 1991. The beginning of the end for Magneto. But on page 24 he says to Moira MacTaggart, who has seemingly betrayed him, and enraged him, "Of course not. You worked for the betterment of the world and the race. I heard those same rationales as a boy, in the Auschwitz Death Camp. From Dr. Joseph Mengele himself!" Mengele's first victims were the Roma, he liked the Roma. He brought the children candy and extra food. And in August of 1944, after trying unsuccessfully to save the Romani Family Camp (also for his own experimental purposes) Mengele obeyed his orders and vigorously hunted down and helped exterminate all remaining Roma. He then dissected those of most interest to him, and sent body parts to Berlin. Then he turned his attention to the Jews of Auschwitz. Only his Jewish victims have survived. His Romani victims, those transfered out of the camp in the spring and summer of 1944, have rarely come forward. If Magneto is alive in Auschwitz after the start of 1945, and he personally heard Dr. Mengele, he is a Jew.

Magneto is a Jew especially since Mengele would have been one of his supervisors in the Sonderkommando.

(15) X-Men, Vol. 2, No. 3, Dec. 1991 -- Magneto to Xavier, "You speak to the best in humanity. I have endured the worst. You imagine the reality of the Holocaust, of the Nazi Death Camps. I grew up in one." Magneto says The Holocaust. This is the translation of SHOAH, and was first used after the war, and popularized by Eli Wiesel. It means the Jewish Holocaust. One can say the Romani genocide, and today sometimes you'll hear the Romani holocaust, or the Russian holocaust, or the holocaust perpetrated against the mentally ill and the handicapped. (Nazi pre-meditated genocide was really only carried to the fullest extreme against three groups, the first were the mentally ill and the handicapped, who were the first victims of genocide. The second and third groups were the Jews and the Roma). But the Holocaust is what Jewish people say when they refer to the calculated campaign of Nazi Germany to kill every Jew in the world. (They actually made lists of every country in the Western world, and all the Jewish populations. They made no such list for any other people). Nazi Germany succeeded in killing almost 6 million of their foremost victims, until the Third Reich was defeated.

(16) X-Factor #92, July, 1993. Havok and X-Factor are battling Cortez and the Acolytes, in this opening chapter of Fatal Attractions. Cortez is ranting about the "flatscans" and how mutants have to subjugate them. Havok says, "Out to destroy the "inferior" race ... in Magneto's name? Don't you know what an insult that is to the memory of the very man you claim to worship? Fifty years ago, Magnus barely survived a Holocaust that destroyed almost all of his people: all because some lunatic took it upon himself to decide who deserved to live ... and who didn't. Where's the sense in resurrecting that kind of evil ... in the name of one of its victims?!" Cortez answers, "You've seen this place Havok! You've seen the sentinels! You tell me ... where's the sense in letting the flatscans do to the mutants what Hitler did to the Jews? ..." Cortez has done research on Magneto, he says the Jews, as a parallel metaphor. Why say that, if Magneto isn't Jewish?

(17) Then comes the infamous Unlimited #2. This is a long and involved FAQ I've got going here, so I won't go into detail at the moment. But the bottom line is, everything that Gabrielle Haller says about Magneto's history is false. I don't want to go line by line over it now. Everything! Danzig was not annexed. It was a Free City, under League of Nations protection, that voted itself a Nazi government and welcomed the Nazi troops in like liberators. Gauleiter Forster, the extremely anti-Semitic Nazi leader of Danzig ordered all 10,000 Jews of Danzig to be kicked out of the city in 1939, not the Roma. The Jews. Auschwitz wasn't opened as a Polish political prisoner camp until the summer of 1940, not 1939. The Roma were sent to German municipal camps, in Germany and the Greater Reich, as early as 1933. But they were not sent to Auschwitz from Germany until 1943. The only people who were in a work camp in Auschwitz before it opened were 300 Jews from the town of Auschwitz who were forced to transform a collection of horse stables and army barracks into the Polish prisoner camp. "Genocide, extermination ..." of Poles? No. The Polish people suffered terribly, and were considered "sub-human" by the Nazis. Millions of Polish citizens were killed throughout the course of the war, as soldiers, as slave laborers, as underground fighters, as members of the intelligentsia. But this was Nazi suppression of a conquered country, not planned genocide. Roma, Yes. The homosexuals, no. Not genocide. Persecution and imprisonment. Treated terribly. But people weren't sent to the gas chambers just because they were homosexuals. And "intellectuals" ? (How could Nicieza have written this?) Intellectuals were targets of genocide? Well, I hardly think so, since Goebbels, and Albert Speer, and even Mengele were considered intellectuals.

No one was sent to the gas chambers, or was shot in an open grave, or was tortured and murdered JUST because they happened to be an intellectual. Thousands of Polish citizens who were members of the intelligentsia (the educated class, the vanguard or elite of the educated class), were murdered in the first months of the war. But there was no planned campaign to hunt down every intellectual in Europe and exterminate them. The mentally ill and handicapped, the Jews, and the Roma were the primary targets of Nazi genocide. The Russians came next. Everything Haller says about Magneto in Unlimited #2 contradicts most of Magneto's history as presented in 15 years worth of comics.

(18) Until recently, when, in Road to Onslaught, Marvel once again published that outrageous Gabrielle Haller speech about Magneto like they were proud of it (??) the next references in the Age of Apocalypse comics portrayed Magneto once again as Jewish. In X-Men Vol. 2, No. 40, where David Haller, Legion, pulls Magneto's memories out, you see young Magnus with the men, standing behind and below a high, barred window. This is an accurate portrayal of the quarters of the Sonderkommando at Auschwitz I. At Auschwitz I, only the Sonderkommando (other than prisoners awaiting execution) were kept in isolated basement cells, the windows of which were high, barred, and as seen from the outside, half-below ground level.

And why is Magneto in Israel anyway? How could he have come there? Well, why would a Romany go to Israel when at least 30,000 Roma lived in Germany in the late 1960s and early 1970s? And many more Rom formed a thriving community in Paris. Why not just go home to his own clan and tribe? Roma have a complex system of extended familes, clans, and tribes. Why go to Israel to "find himself" or find his "soul"? A German Jew had no place to go but somewhere else. A Polish Jew definitely had no place to go back to, since some Polish fanatics continued to murder returning Holocaust survivors well into the late 1940s. Any Jew can emigrate to Israel, under the Law of Return. All Magneto had to do was show them the tattoo on his arm. And he was home. (And in case some of you were wondering, as some of us have discussed, with the exception of the Muslim Bosnians, only the Jews of Europe practiced circumcision. It was a religious rite, not a medical procedure. Only Jewish men and boys were circumcised among the prisoners at Auschwitz. The Nazis already knew what Magneto was. He was chosen for the Sonderkommando, he was Jewish. He was not pretending to be a Jew. He wasn't misidentified as a Jew. He was a circumcised, young Jewish man). Furthermore, Magnus at this time had forged papers, that identified him as "Erik Magnus Lehnsherr." He could have immigrated to any country in the world, including the United States! If he were Roma, and didn't want to self-identify as such, why not go to America? Why go to the one country that represents enormous pain for modern Roma -- i.e., the Rom today deeply resent the focus on Israel, and the support Israel enjoys among nations of the Western world, while the Roma continue to be persecuted and ignored.

(19) In Astonishing X-Men #3, formerly Uncanny, from May 1995, we have the most clear reference to Magneto's being Jewish, written by Scott Lobdell. Magneto has just hit Bishop, and is helping him to his feet. He says, "Long before Xavier died ... before this point of divergence ... I stood by helplessly as millions of my people were led to slaughter in the name of 'genetic purity." Now the AOA is not a what-if story. It is a divergent timeline. Magneto says, before the timeline diverged. What other people were lead by the millions, led to the slaughter, in the name of genetic purity? Many people suffered and died in World War II. 250,000 to 500,000 Roma were murdered. Millions of Russians and Poles during the course of the invasions, and in political violence, and in acts of pure murder, were exterminated. But only the European Jews were "led to the slaughter" in the millions because of one man's racial beliefs. Only the Jews of Europe Persecutionand incarceration are not the same as genocide and extermination.

20) X-Men #72, cover date February 1998, published in mid-December 1997. This comic book makes a significant contribution to Magneto's history. Basically, the book reveals that the name *Erik Lehnsherr* which was revealed by Gabrielle Haller in Unlimited #2 to be Magneto's real name, is fake, and so Haller's assertion that Magneto is a *Sinte* Rom was based on false and forged identity papers.

The scenario begins with Gabrielle Haller, lying on her bed, working on a lap- top computer, writing the American Sen. Kelly, begging him to help find and secure the release of Charles Xavier. Sabra, the Israeli super-hero, a mutant and Mossad agent, suddenly appears floating in the air outside Haller's balcony doors. Haller has just pushed open the doors, saying, "You're too important to lose, Charles. I will see you ... FREE?" And Sabra says, "Sometimes, Ambassador Haller ... freedom, like the truth, is little more than an illusion. Don't you think?"

Sabra has come to Haller with information. She says to Gabrielle Haller: "I"m sure you recall shocking the world when you announced that you had UNDENIABLE proof ofMagneto's identity as Erik Lehnsherr. The undeniable has just been DENIED." Sabra then goes on to show Haller, and the readers, the file on a master forger named George Odekirk. In this file, apparently, is a computer analysis of the identity papers of Erik Lehnsherr, which shows that Odekirk forged those documents. Haller says, "He created Erik Lehnsherr? If this is true ... you must take me to him! He could be our only link to Magneto's true identity ... our last chance to stop him once and for all!"

But just as Sabra is flying Haller to the Transylvanian Alps, to meet with Odekirk, the scene switches to Odekirk, who is working on another forged passport, sitting in bed while his wife sleeps beside him. Suddenly, Odekirk looks up -- he has a visitor. It's Magneto, in full costume.

Magneto is floating in the air. He surrounds Odekirk's bed with his magnetic energy, and uses his power to keep Odekirk's wife unconscious. He says, "You failed me." Odekirk responds, "Please ... please, my wife ..." Magneto answers, "She will sleep the sleep of the innocent. She has done nothing ... but you ... YOU, my friend, have BETRAYED me." Odekirk protests his innocence, and then Magneto makes this remarkable speech: "Do you remember what you promised me the night I came to you, torn and filthy, nearly a quarter century ago? I was searching for my beloved MAGDA, determined not to lose her as I had lost so many others in the fire that engulfed all of Europe during my childhood. The authorities were in pursuit of me for the "crime" of avenging my daughter's murder. I was willing to deny who I was ... everything that my family died for ... so that I could find one woman ... so that I would not be caged AGAIN. The Erik Lehnsherr fabrication was a convenient means of ensuring that. You swore that the forged papers were FLAWLESS, that your skills were unsurpassed... but now, you have proven to be a liability. Your work has been called into queston by my enemies, and they will trace Erik Lehnsherr the Sinte BACK to you." Odekirk protests, "That is impossible! That forgery was impeccable! My work is ... " Magneto answers: "It was not ENOUGH! You gave birth to Erik Lehnsherr, Odekirk. And tonight, you have killed him. My secrets shall die with him. All that remains now ... is MAGNUS."

This scene says, subtly but clearly, that Magnus denied who he was, gave up everything his famly died for, to take the false identity of a Sinte Rom named Erik Lehnsherr. Since this entire FAQ has gone into great detail showing exactly how and why Magnus was born Jewish, it seems there is no doubt now, that Magneto's family and he himself, were Jews. Magnus would not say he denied *everything* his family died for, by taking a Romani identity, if his family were indeed Roma. As I pointed out above, only the Jews and Roms were targeted as entire peoples, and killed for no reason other than they were Jews and Roms. Magnus was either one, or the other. Since in XM #72, it is revealed that he is NOT a Rom, we must conclude he was born a Jew.

There are several continuity problems that arise from the revelations of XM #72. Several unanswered questions:

1) How much of Haller's speech (Unlimited #2) was based information contained in Odekirk's forgery, how much was based on what she personally knew, and how much did she "fabricate" herself? She makes a large number of mistakes, about nearly every aspect of Magneto's history and life. She also gets her Holocaust history and dates wrong. Did she perhaps add her own *facts* to what she found in those old identity papers? Was she perhaps trying to make the story coherent? As in, trying to make what she knew about Magnus and his history fit what she learned about *Erik Lehnsherr*? For example, where she says, on page 19 of Unlimited #2, "...Lehnsherr had taken to calling himself MAGNUS ... as if by choosing his MIDDLE name, he could bring some semblance of BALANCE and SIMPLICITY to his haunted life." This is Haller's supposition -- the reason he was calling himself MAGNUS in Israel. She knew him as Magnus back then, she had just found out, his full name was supposedly *Erik Lehnsherr.* Did she try to splice together the information?

2) While XM #72 makes it clear why Magnus cloaked himself in this false identity and ethnic background initially, what is not so understandable is why he continued to maintain that false identity after his search for Magda was over, and he immigrated to Israel. Did he use the forged *Erik Lehnsherr* passport to enter Israel? Why would he use a false identity and ethnic background to enter Israel, when he was a Jew?

3) Why would Magnus continue to use the Erik Lehnsherr identity during the Age of Apocalypse, especially since he publicly identified with being a Jew? (Astonishing X-Men #3, quoted above.)

4) Magnus worked for at least one intelligence agency, most likely the CIA (Classic X-Men #19). He then hunted dangerous mutants, for his own mysterious purposes, as shown in a brief cameo in Generation X #10 -- which was a memory belonging to Sean Cassidy, telepathically accessed by Emma Frost. During the time he was working for the CIA, his code-name was Magneto. In Classic X-Men #19, he is called only Magneto. In Generaton X #10, Interpol agent Sean Cassidy doesn't know who the man is who is helping him track down Arcady (the future Omega Red). Emma Frost, commenting from the present as a psionic guide to Cassidy's memories, calls the man *Erik Lehnsherr.* But the question is, after he left Israel, did Magnus use the false identity Erik Lehnsherr?

5) During the time that Magneto tried to follow Xavier's path, roughly from UXM #196 through UXM #253, and New Mutants issues #35 through #75, including UXM #188, NM #21, #23, #24, #26, #28, and #29, he referred to himself as Magnus, and others like Storm and Kitty Pryde called him Magnus. Even though he was disguised as Michael Xavier for the outside world, the X-Men and their associates all knew Magneto as Magnus. During this time, Magnus also identified strongly with his Jewish and Jewish Holocaust history. The question now is, what happened to the *Erik Lehnsherr the SInte* identity during this time?

6) Why, now, after so many years, did Magneto find it necessary to kill George Odekirk in order to protect his identity? We know why he took the false name and ethnic background to begin with. But we have no evidence that he continued to use *Erik Lehnhserr*, during each stage of his pre-Magneto career. After he became Magneto, after all the battles with the X-Men, after the events of Fatal Attractions, after the mind-wipe and the appearance of Joseph, after Onslaught, why would Magnus be so concerned with protecting his true identity? Was he trying to protect the memory of his family? Has he maintained contact with pre-Holocaust family grave sites, or places where he once lived? Is he worried that the very bones of his ancestors might be violated by those looking for his genetic material? Then there's Anya, his beloved daughter -- she was never Anya *Lehnsherr*. Her last name is now unknown -- is Magneto trying to protect something concerning her? George Odekirk wouldn't be the only witness to Magneto's true identity, either. What about those Carpathian villagers, who accepted Auschwitz escapees Magnus and Magda in 1945? Did anyone in Vinnitsa who knew Magnus' true last name survive his burst of electromagnetic radiation? What about Ruth and David Shulman, who knew him at Auschwitz, and recognized him, in UXM #199?

These, and other unanswered questions, remain.

By removing the *Erik Lehnsherr the Sinte* identity, fixing that particular retcon from Unlimited #2, and leaving the rest of Magneto's history intact, writer Joe Kelly and editor Bob Harras have not officially stated that Magneto was born Jewish, and was a Jewish survivor of Auschwitz. But, as was the case during the years Chris Claremont wrote the character, the references to Magneto's Jewish identity are there, subtle and at the same time, obvious.

• Friedrich Paulus

Friedrich Wilhelm Ernst Paulus was a German field marshal during World War II who commanded the 6th Army during the Battle of Stalingrad.

Paulus was born in Guxhagen on September 23rd, 1890 and grew up in Kassel, Hesse-Nassau, the son of a treasurer. He tried, unsuccessfully, to secure a cadetship in the Imperial German Navy and briefly studied law at Marburg University. After leaving the university without a degree, he joined the 111th Infantry Regiment as an officer cadet in February 1910. On July 4th, 1912 he married the Romanian Elena Rosetti-Solescu, the sister of a colleague who served in the same regiment. When World War I began, Paulus' regiment was part of the thrust into France, and he saw action in the Vosges and around Arras in the autumn of 1914. After a leave of absence due to illness, he joined the Alpenkorps as a staff officer, serving in France, Romania and Serbia. By the end of the war, he was a captain.

After the Armistice, Paulus was a brigade adjutant with the Freikorps. He was chosen as one of only 4,000 officers to serve in the Reichswehr, the defensive army that the Treaty of Versailles had limited to 100,000 men. He was assigned to the 13th Infantry Regiment at Stuttgart as a company commander. He served in various staff positions for over a decade. In 1920s, as part of the military cooperation between Weimar Republic and Soviet Union to escape Treaty of Versailles, Paulus presented guest lectures in Moscow, Soviet Union. Later, Paulus briefly commanded a motorized battalion before being named chief of staff for Panzer headquarters in October 1935. This was a new formation under the direction of Oswald Lutz that directed the training and development of the Panzerwaffen, or tank forces of the German army.

In February 1938 Paulus was appointed Chef des Generalstabes to Gen. Heinz Guderian's new XVI Armeekorps (Motorisiert), which replaced Lutz's command. Guderian described him as "brilliantly clever, conscientious, hard working, original and talented" but had severe doubts about his decisiveness, toughness and lack of command experience. He remained in that post until May 1939, when he was promoted to major general and became chief of staff for the German Tenth Army, with which he saw service in Poland. The unit was renamed the Sixth Army and engaged in the spring offensives of 1940 through the Netherlands and Belgium. Paulus was promoted to lieutenant general in August 1940. The following month he was named deputy chief of the German General Staff (Oberquartiermeister I). In that role he helped draft the plans for the invasion of the Soviet Union, Operation Barbarossa.

In November 1941, after German Sixth Army's commander Field Marshal Walther von Reichenau, Paulus' patron became commander of the entire Army Group South, Paulus, who had never commanded a larger unit than a battalion prior to this time, was promoted to General der Panzertruppe and became commander of the Sixth Army. However, he only took over his new command on January 20th, six days after the sudden death of Reichenau, leaving him on his own and without the support of his more experienced sponsor. Paulus led the drive on Stalingrad during that summer. His troops fought Soviet forces defending Stalingrad over three months in increasingly brutal urban warfare. In November 1942, when the Soviet Red Army launched a massive counter-offensive, code-named Operation Uranus, Paulus found himself surrounded by an entire Soviet Army Group. Paulus did not request to evacuate the city when the counter-offensive began. Paulus followed Adolf Hitler's orders to hold his forces' position in Stalingrad under all circumstances, despite the fact that he was completely surrounded by strong Soviet forces. Operation Winter Storm, a relief effort by Army Group Don under Field Marshal Erich von Manstein, was launched in December. Following his orders, Paulus prepared to cooperate with the offensive by trying to break out of Stalingrad. In the meantime, he kept his entire army in fixed defensive positions.

Manstein told Paulus that the relief would need assistance from the Sixth Army, but the order to initiate the breakout never came. Paulus remained absolutely firm in obeying the orders he had been given. Manstein's forces were unable to reach Stalingrad on their own and their efforts were eventually halted due to Soviet offensives elsewhere. For the next two months Paulus and his men fought on. However, the lack of food and ammunition, equipment attrition and the deteriorating physical condition of the German troops gradually wore down the German defense. With the new year Hitler promoted Paulus to Colonel General. On 7 January 1943 General Konstantin Rokossovsky, commander of the Red Army on the Don front, called a cease-fire and offered Paulus' men generous surrender terms: normal rations, medical treatment for the ill and wounded, permission to retain their badges, decorations, uniforms and personal effects. As part of his communication, Rokossovsky advised Paulus that he was in an impossible situation. Paulus requested permission from Hitler to surrender. Even though it was obvious the Sixth Army was in an untenable position, the German Army High Command rejected Paulus' request. After a heavy Soviet offensive overran the last emergency airstrip in Stalingrad on 25 January, the Soviets again offered Paulus a chance to surrender. Paulus radioed Hitler once again for permission. Telling Hitler that collapse was "inevitable," Paulus stressed that his men were without ammunition or food, and he was no longer able to command them. Once again, Hitler rejected Paulus' request out of hand, and ordered Paulus to hold Stalingrad to the death. On January 30th Paulus informed Hitler that his men were only hours from collapse. Hitler promoted Paulus to field marshal. In deciding to promote him, Hitler noted that there was no known record of a Prussian or German field marshal ever having surrendered. The implication was clear: Paulus was to commit suicide. Hitler implied that if Paulus allowed himself to be taken alive, he would shame Germany's military history.

Paulus and his staff were captured on the morning of January 31st, 1943. On 2 February 1943 the remainder of Sixth Army capitulated. Upon finding out about Paulus' "surrender", Hitler flew into a rage and vowed never to appoint another field marshal again. He would, in fact, go on to appoint another seven field marshals during the last two years of the war. Shortly before surrendering, Paulus sent his wedding ring back to his wife on the last plane departing his position. He had not seen her since 1942 and would not see her again, as she died in 1949 while he was still in captivity. At first Paulus refused to collaborate with the Soviets. However, after the attempted assassination of Hitler on July 20th, 1944, he became a vocal critic of the Nazi regime while in Soviet captivity, joining the Soviet-sponsored National Committee for a Free Germany appealing to Germans to surrender. He later acted as a witness for the prosecution at the Nuremberg Trials. During the Nuremberg Trials, Paulus was asked about the Stalingrad prisoners by a journalist. He told the journalist to tell the wives and mothers that their husbands and sons were well. Of the 91,000 German prisoners taken at Stalingrad, half had died on the march to Siberian prison camps, and nearly as many died in captivity; only about 6,000 survived and returned home. From 1953-56 he lived in Dresden, East Germany, where he worked as the civilian chief of the East German Military History Research Institute. In late 1956 he developed amyotrophic lateral sclerosis and became progressively weaker. He died within a few months, in Dresden, on February 1st, 1957, 14 years and one day after his surrender at Stalingrad. In his will he requested to be buried next to his wife.

Name: Erik Magnus Lehnsherr

Meaning of Name: Erik: 'eternal ruler', Magnus: ‘great’, Lehnsherr:  ‘feudal lord’

Nickname/Alias(s): Magneto, Max Eisenhardt (”Real Name”, Contestable), The Master of Magnetism, Prisoner #214782, The Creator, White Pilgrim, Erik the Red,  Michael Xavier,  Grey King, White King, The Devil, Auschwitz I.D.  #24005(retcon from #214782), King Erik Magnus, The Leader,Magnus, Master (by Toad), Merciless Magneto, Miraculous Magneto, Mr. Sullivan, Phantom Saboteur, "Red,”, Henryk Gurzsky, 

Age: Appearing in 30s-40s (Biologically: 92 or so, De-aged at two points)

Birthday/Place/Time: November 28, Nuremberg/Germany, 1928-30ish.

Species/Nationality: Mutant, German, Genoshan, Krakoan

Accent: Yes

Language spoken:

German, Hebrew, English, Arabic, French, Polish, Russian, Ukrainian, Yiddish,

Powers:

Magnetism Manipulation

Electromagnetism Manipulation

Metal Manipulation

Organic Manipulation

Light Manipulation

Immortality

Reality Warping

Matter Manipulation

Energy Manipulation

Psionics

Gravity Manipulation

Gadget Usage

Peak Human Intelligence/Enhanced

Invulnerability(Depending on variables)

Leadership Intuition

Longevity

Peak Human Stamina/Enhanced

Peak Human Strength/Enhanced

Enhanced Unarmed Combat

Indomitable Will

Elemental Manipulation

Wormhole Creation

Social Magnetism

Psychic Immunity (Partial, Resistance but not complete immunity)

Invisibility

Weaknesses/Illness/Allergies: Physical Condition: Magneto's ability to wield his superhuman powers effectively is dependent upon his physical condition. When severely injured, his body is unable to withstand the strain of manipulating magnetic energy. When his powers are not at their peak, he also appears to have greater difficulty utilizing his magnetism for great feats. He is also susceptible to physical and mental fatigue that can ultimately affect his ability to adequately use his powers, especially if he overuses or extends them in a short amount of time. Magnetic abilities affect his nervous system, Plagued by paranoia and possibly a subconscious realization that he doesn’t deserve to be victorious, PTSD, A need to have superiority over humans combined with his need to have no harm done to mutants,

Pet: He ain’t got time for pets...Nightcrawler.

Occupation(s): Adventurer, Mutant rights activist; Former would-be conqueror, Sovereign ruler of Genosha, Teacher of the New Mutants, Headmaster of Xavier School for Gifted Youngsters, Terrorist, Secret agent, Nazi-hunter, Volunteer hospital orderly, Carpenter, and other odd jobs, Geneticist,

Faceclaim: Michael Fassbender

Description: Black/Brown hair (Silver if your feeling extra spicy), Blue/Grey eyes. Has several’s scars. At least two of them are puncture wounds on his stomach. There’s a band around the entirety of his throat from once being decapitated by laser beams.

Outfit/Accessories/Jewelry: Helmet, Armour, Utility belt, Coin,

Height: 6′2″

Weight: 127

Body Build: Lean/Toned

Backstory/Background:

Past

Born into a middle class Jewish family, Erik was the second and youngest child of Jakob and Edie Lehnsherr. He had an older sister who was named Ruth. Born in Germany with the rise of the Nazi's extremism, Erik's family kept mostly to themselves to avoid the scornful eyes of their fellow German brother en. Erik had spent the first years of his life living in a world of constant turmoil and speculation of what horror was to come next as the Nazi party continued to grow more and more extreme as the years had gone by. By the time Erik had gotten into school there were Nazi rally's almost everywhere he went. As well as beatings of Jewish and Romani's people, and anyone else who did not fit under the Nazi umbrella of what was, or what was not acceptable to them. Erik mostly kept to himself however. As a young boy however he was prone to mischievous boyish behavior.

One day while attending school he met a young girl his age. Who he had immediately developed a crush on. Maybe even had fallen in love with her right then in their, if not for the fact that he did not entirely know what that kind of love truly was, yet. Erik learned her name, Magda. He then spent much of his time trying to impress the Romani girl. Who just so happened to be the daughter of the janitor that worked at their school, as well. Erik would make jewelry for Magda and gift them to her, in attempts to woo her. He had also entered himself into sports to gain Magda's attentions. Though one day after school Erik had happened upon yet another rally when he came to see that his Uncle, Enrich had been being beaten and tagged with a sign for shaming a German Woman in some way. Afraid to do anything Erik had decided to look the other way and flee from the scene.

Trying to look passed what he had witnessed Erik continued with school, and trying to win the affections of Magda. This all would lead to the day where he would enter himself into a javelin throwing competition for her attentions. Where he would win a medal for winning. However, he was not allowed to enjoy this win as he was accused of cheating. As well his Jewish heritage was brought up and how it was not right that a Jewish boy do better than his none-Jewish classmates. Erik was then demanded to return his medal for cheating, or to try throwing the javelin again. Erik took on the task a second time, refusing to return his medal. Again, he won the throw and again he was accused of cheating. Following this Erik had been expelled from school and beaten by his fellow classmates, while still accused of cheating, despite the second javelin being 'regulation'.

After this incident Erik had no where else to be so he spent much of his time wandering and learning other skills. Though his father, seeing that Erik had needed some where to be decided one day to bring his son along on a trip to meet a man he had once saved in World War I. That man's name was Major Scharf. While the two waited for Sharf to let them in his office, a troupe of Nazi's came by and beat Erik's father in front of him, accusing the pair of making trouble. By the time Scharf had finally let Jakob and Erik into his office, hours later, Scharf was unwelcoming and the meeting did not last very long. Scharf said he had re-payed his debt to Jakob for being there, and saved his life. Before kicking the two out of his office and sending them on their way, no more harm done. Not long after this things began growing worse in Germany. Jakob had taught his children to always fight back as he knew how bad things were going to become.

With his fathers words in his mind, Erik also took them to heart. But soon the family had to flee from Germany to Poland. Where they took refuge in a Warsaw ghetto, after the events of Reighskriskallnacht. Though it was not long after they got to Warsaw that Poland too was being invaded by Nazi soldiers. During his time in Poland, Erik picked up on smuggling skills in order to attained foods and other supplies for his family. In due time however the Warsaw ghetto was starting to be emptied as residents were removed and taken to the Treblinka Experimentation Camp, in the year 1942, of July. Jakob gathered his family up yet again and they fled from the Warsaw ghetto before they could also be taken to the camp. However, this attempt to escape did not last long and soon Erik and his family were betrayed and subsequently captured by the Nazi's. Erik's uncle and his uncles family were soon gunned down in front of him trying to make an escape.

Though it was not only his uncle Enrich's family that had been struck by the bullets. His sister Ruth had taken one to the back, ultimately being struck in the stomach and bled out as him and his mother and father were being dragged away from the scene. Erik often would wake up in the night hearing his mothers pain's screams and the memory reaching out for his sisters lifeless body. The family had been sent to Auschwitz.

Once the remaining three family members had arrived at Auschwitz, Erik was separated from his mother and father by soldiers. Erik struggled to break free of them, this is where his powers had at first showed some manifestation as the bars on the gates that separate him from his parents had bent to his will. But this did not stop the soldiers from taking Erik to his assigned camp. There Erik had become a teenager and spent his early teenage years in the Vernichtungslager Experimentation Camp. This is where he had first met the man called Mister Sinister and a geneticist by the name of Josef Mengele. He would also find out that the two had been conducting horrible experiments in the camp. In order to escape becoming one of their guinea pigs Erik bid to become a Sonderkommando to avoid being operated on by the two, since he did not trust either of them or their intentions. As a Sonderkommando Erik was forced to remove the bodies of victims that were in the gas chambers.

Unable to at this point in time, to use his power. Due to the fact that he had contracted a brief sickness with hepatitis at this time, along with his puberty being delayed because of his life up till this point in time had delayed the overall manifestation of his powers. However, despite this trying time, Erik is soon reunited with Magda. Who had also been captured and taken to the camp. After reuniting with her Erik again tries to win her affections, often in smuggling foods and other goods for her. As well, he saves her from the gas chambers and other execution attempts on her. But one day he is asked to go to the office of Sebastian Shaw. Where he see's his mother had also been brought. In that room Shaw demands for Erik to move the coin on his desk. As it would seem, word of the solders had spread of a boy who could bend metal. That boy being Erik, Shaw had come to find out. As Shaw again demands for Erik to move the coin, he shoots Edie in front of Erik.

In his rage Erik for another brief moment manages to tap into his powers, destroying things and taking the coin from Shaw’s desk. Shaw then has Erik returned to Auschwitz. There Erik reunites once more with his father and tells him of Edie's death. Saddened by the news of what happened to his wife on top of his sons inhuman abilities, Jakob promises his son he would get him out of there. Some time passed after this, and Erik and Jakob continue on trying to survive inside the camps. However, the pair are assigned to be executed by firing squad.  Being lead to their death Jakob remained silent but close to his young son. Erik didn't notice this as he had been petrified of what he believed was going to happen during this time. He had been preparing to die while Jakob was looking for a way to save his life. Once lined up Jakob saw what he needed to do. As the guns were being aimed and loaded, Erik began to panic, feeling his breaths escaping him and shorting with each passing second. Then the shots rang out.

Everything had been dark for a long time. Laying along the bodies of the dead, with his fathers blood and corpse over him, Erik in time woke up in a mass grave, staring up at the face of his deceased father. He had been saved he quickly realizes. Dragging himself from the bodies of the dead and out of the blood, decaying matter filled pit, Erik sets to motion to finally escape that hell. As well, he was determined to take Magda with him. After leaving the grave he sneaked around the camp, until finally coming to where Magda was being kept. What he was vaguely aware of was that at that very same time, Auschwitz was being liberated. These two events would fall in line together as he and Magda escaped from the camp, avoiding being caught by either factions of soldiers. After their escape Magda and Erik make their way to a group of Romani people where Erik uses the name 'Magnus'. In time the pair eventually get married and some time after have a daughter, Anya.

For a while their lives are a happy one. Erik has taken up up career in carpentry, which is simple and he thinks will cause little or no attention to be brought to him and his family. As well, to further provide for his growing family Erik takes on the odd job here and there. Things are good. The small family soon moved into a home of their own and were living peacefully. That was until one day while Erik was walking home he had been attacked by a group of people. Out of instinct, defending himself Erik lashed out toward his attackers and his powers which had been dormant up to that point woke from their dormancy, killing his attackers. Those who had survived or witnessed the incident had later gone to attack his home and set it on fire. With Anya inside. Erik returned to see the fire raging and hearing Anya's screaming he, without a second though, ran into the burning home in an attempt to save his daughter, but had been unsuccessful. As she had been burned to death by the time he could reach her.

Holding the burned body of his daughter Erik, yet again lost control over himself and in his rage over Anya's death had again activated his powers and killed the surrounding members of the mob that had formed around his home. At this time Magda had by then returned home to the horror of both the death of their daughter and the slaughter of people by her husband. Horrified further by witnessing the latter part Magda fled from the place she once called home with her family and never seen Erik again. After Magda left she gave birth two twins and was soon committed to an asylum where she had later died.

Following this incident Erik had moved to the States where he started a new life under a new name and took on a job some time after that in Israel in a psychiatric hospital. This is where he would meet who would later become his best friend, the man named Charles Xavier. Here they would begin their years long friendship one another as they conducted research and played games of chess with one another. This would as well lead to the both having insightful conversations between one another about mutation and mankind. When one day a patient by the name of Gabrielle Haller was attacked and the two had to use their powers to attempt to save her, Charles and Erik discovered that their ideals were not quite exactly the same as they had originally believed them to be.  However, Erik chose to remain with Charles and the pair worked on getting a team together, a team that would later be known as the X-Men. This would lead to other events in the downfall of Erik and Charles relationship.

Erik would become more and more aggressive after finding out about Sebastian Shaw’s involvements with things they were also involved in. Which would in turn lead Erik more and more astray from Charles. Erik had gone so far as to risk his own life trying to get revenge on Shaw for what Shaw had done to him in the past. Despite Charles attempts to sway Erik from his revenge Erik ignore the other and, taking the coin from so long ago send it through Shaw’s brain. Ultimately, finally, moving the coin. However, Charles had been connected to Shaw at this point in time, and felt and seen everything Erik did to Shaw. Even Shaw's death.  It is also after this incident where they are attacked by missiles and other gun fire. In defense Erik accidentally misdirects a bullet meant for him, into Charles' spine as Charles is trying to run behind him, to,..uh,....somewhere... Where the fuck he was going? No one knows. But he sure as fuck didn't get there. Ultimately this would lead to the original time Charles is paralyzed.

After realizing what he's done, a guilt stricken Erik runs to try and help his friend, removing the bullet from their spine though it does very little to help the outcome overall. Erik then decides that he's done enough for one movie and decides to dip. He needs a break from all this hardship. Maybe killing a president will bring him some happiness. Who knows. Anyway, Charles and Beast fuck off for a bit and do whatever in gods name it is they do with each other. Erik is off probably killing a president. Who knows! Never really confirmed. But he was framed guys, he swears! Anyway, somehow he is captured and locked in a plastic cell. First of it's kind, come one, come all. See the man in the plastic bubble hidden under the pentagon for CRIMES. Because he's a crime man now. Anyway, Charles has had enough of this nonsense and decides to break his boyfriend out of prison because it's important. Logan says so. Charles wants his his brat back though, convince me otherwise. So the smart thing to do is recruit Quicksilver.

So they recruit Peter. Nothing bad will happen with that. Because it's the best thing that could have ever happened! Erik has no idea however that Peter is his son. Since everyone decides not to tell him. Even Peter, who believes he's the one that should. Learning that the current Logan they are dealing with is from the future Erik decides, yeah, he will help prevent Mystique from killing Trask. He does this by pulling a gun on her and trying to kill her as she gets in his sights. The two then have a little bit of a skirmish. Which looks pretty bad because it only serves to bring him and Charles father apart, further shoving a wedge in their friendship. On top of all the other things Erik had accidentally done to Charles, like paralyzing him. Oh, and the murders, supposed murders....-Points, nods-, Plus the Shaw thing. It's amazing Charles still likes his Brat this much, honestly. But Charles still in this shit to win this shit, he's getting his brat bitch one way or another. Dead or alive. Preferably in a cell.

However Erik's main focus, despite seemingly wanting to repair his friendship with Charles, is to stop Raven from further fucking up. But as he again attempts to kill Mystique he is stopped by Beast. Escaping from Beast after a moment Erik flees and soon takes control over the Sentinel prototypes that could potentially come to be the threat of the future, if future Logan is to believed that is. Erik Takes control of the prototype and uses it against the other only to have this plan foiled when Mystique knocks his ass the fuck out on live television. Significantly calming down all in all Erik corrects his behavior enough to help Charles and the rest later on when recruiting more mutants with Charles. Both coming to find Jean Grey, a young girl with extremely powerful abilities that had awakened and been causing difficulties. After a visit to her and her parents home the two help in teaching Jean to control her abilities. Charles of course being the one that actually does anything productive here. Of course.  Jean would later go on to become on of the first X-Men of the Xavier Institute.

Though the moment of peace did not last between the two and Erik again decided to branch out from Charles, believing their ideals to be too different from one another. Erik proceeds to go on and join the CIA and hunt down Nazi's in the meantime. But when he learns that the CIA had been murdering mutants, after he had been befriending those they would find. After this incident Erik would disappear for some time only to later reappear once more, this time under the name of Magneto. At this point he has recruited Mystique along with several other mutants into his newly formed Brotherhood of Mutants. After he reappears he and his Brotherhood attack the Cape Citadel but are stopped by the now fully fledged out X-Men. Thus starting of the rivalry between him and the X-Men for the next several decades to come. Because why not.  Along with Mystique, The Brotherhood also included Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver, which had still not been revealed to be his children yet. Peter was still sitting on that knowledge. So it still one big secret!

One of The Brotherhoods demands were that mutants get equal rights. This eventually got the attention of Charles. Bald, Shiny head, Charles. Erik's bestest of friends. Because no way was Erik just acting up to get Charles's attention. So, now that he had it it wasn't long before the Brotherhood were defeated as the X-Men #HandledIt.  This would follow many more fights with X-Men and The Avengers, and an array of other groups no one really cares about. Fuck you specifically The Fantastic Four and Defenders. Charles helped, his brain go brrr...Erik, eventually getting bored with all of that however when and just made himself an entirely new mutant entity called Alpha the Ultimate Mutant. Because why not just make people, right? Who is going to stop him? Erik creates this thing and it just betrays him and turns him and The Brotherhood members into infants. Charles then takes Erik into his care, for a minute. Only Erik, fuck the other baby's. He only wants the Erik baby. Charles then decides to abandon the de-aged Erik off at his ex's house for a couple of months.

Moira MacTaggert then raised Erik for a while. Anyway. Eventually Erik grows back up into his prime again. With the help of a Shi'Ar named Eric The Red. He had also retained his memories from the incident with Alpha and infancy. Which left him over all changed by the experience and made him decide to change his ways. Though it did not ultimately remove his desire to rage against the human race, either. Soon he was again battling against the X-Men before again disappearing because he just doesn't like humans at all, I guess. The X-Men won't let him kill them all, it's really just very rude of them.  But soon enough the X-Men find him again and arrest him. As they are taking him into custody however Wolverine goes all Wolverine on him and stabs Erik, badly injuring him. Which allows Erik time to flee from the X-Men yet again.  Again left to plan a way to get revenge on the X-Men.

His next plans however did not go exactly as he had wished for them to go. After healing from his wounds by Wolverine he again attacks the X-Men and in this exchange he nearly kills the fourteen year old, Kitty Pryde. Upon realizing what he's done he realizes his extremist behavior and that he had never intended to murder children. This shocked some sense into him.  As Erik had never wanted blood just to gain freedom for Mutant kind. AT least, not the blood of a child. He did not sign up for child murder. After this incident Erik renounces his terrorist ways. With this renouncing he dedicates his time to reflect on his past deeds and locate Magda. However, he comes to find that she had died, sometime after giving birth to a pair of twins. Erik, still lost on what to do returns to The Brotherhood to take back up leadership with them and perhaps lead them to be less of a chaotic force. Peter and Wanda accepted them as the leader and continued to run with The Brotherhood, but overall did not care for him in any other aspect. As he had been abusive to them.

Though in time they did come to forgive him and accept him. The closer the three got. Though still they never told him about his being their father. Erik would then leave to go join the X-men, after some persuasion by Charles to do so. Though not long after joining them, Charles is grievously injured in a battle and Magneto has to take over leadership of the School for him. Erik was not welcomed warmly by the older Mutants in the school and had difficulty for some time being accepted. But, in time, he too was part of the team and proved to be a good teacher for the students at the school. Wolverine even grew to trust him. In time he was even willing to be tried for his crimes in France. Though during this trial was interrupted by an attack before it could be concluded. Following this battle, one of Erik's old creations, The Asteroid M Base, lost a piece of it that came hurtling down to earth. Erik went to the side of the crash and destroyed the part that had landed. Only to be be confronted by The Avengers.

They accused him of doing something devious with the piece that had fallen to earth. Erik had attempted to explain himself but The Avengers attacked him. The situation only had been made worse when the X-Men showed up to help him. Which made even worse still when the Soviet Super Soldiers also joined in on the situation. As The soldiers were seeking to arrest Erik causing a volcano eruption in Russia in a prior incident. This information had caused the X-Men to also turn on Erik. Which all of this going on had driven Erik slightly over the edge as he looked toward the wreckage of the fragment where he spotted his old helmet, a taste of temptation to revert to his old ways striking him in this moment as his fate was argued over. In a bit of instability Erik suggested that he use the helmets mind control mechanics to brainwash the world to forget the things he had done in the past. Though Captain America had told him when he asked about it that it wasn't ethical, and would be taking away people's freedoms.

So, instead, Erik decides to surrender to The Avengers instead. Seeing what Steve had meant in the end. Then, Erik went to trial. Where his judge had proven to be bigoted toward Mutants. Using the helmet on the judge Erik changes his judges mind about mutants. After this Magneto proceeds to destroy his helmet and is then found innocent of his past crimes. He was a free man once more. He was going to try and be a source for good now...Or you would like to think. This is not possible though. Erik can never be happy. Remember that. It'll save you a lot of troubles in the future. So anyway shit happens. More attacks. Mutants are killed. Mutants are Hunted, Erik is getting madder and madder about it. Months pass since his trial. In his time as trying to be a good man, Magneto grows attached to one of his students by the code name Cypher, whom has become his star pupil. This boy, however, is eventually also murdered and Erik feels guilty for not being able to protect him. This is one final straw. In his sadness over Cypher's murder his stability yet again begins to show cracks in it.

Despite all these events going on and mutants being murdered, the X-Men go to Australia and Erik cuts ties with them.  Reverting in part to his old ways of hating humans once more. He takes the New Mutants with him to join the Hellfire Club. Wishing to protect them from also being killed. However, the New Mutants have also abandon Erik, no longer feeling loyal to him. Erik, Feeling betrayed by the X-Men and New Mutants on top of abandoned, leaves. He starts to yet again hate humans for what they have done and views his experience with the New Mutants and X-Men as a failure. Erik moves back to Asteroid M and goes into isolation in the end, for some time. Before being approached by another group of mutants. Which was lead by Fabian Cortez, called The Acolytes. Sought Erik out to make him their new leader. Erik, thinking that there might be something to them decides that he will make the base into a save haven for Mutants. With this he decides to try and make better defenses for the base.

However this involved resurfacing a submarine with missiles on it that he sunk years before that had been forgotten, or so it seemed. The X-Men become aware of what Erik is doing and attack the base, which was far out of their jurisdiction, but whatever. We need a story line. Rogue attempted to have the two sides be peaceful. But Erik, too far gone by that point attacked Rogue, stubbing whatever chance for peace they had. In time Fabian also betrays Erik while the X-Men continue their assault on Asteroid M. Injured and defeated Erik flees to his back op station called Avalon. Only becoming more bitter toward the X-Men after this incident. Not too long after the X-Men also find Avalon and attack it, too. Because Erik cannot have anything nice! Not even peace to stew in his bitterness. Though during these attacks Erik had been holding back as he did not want to hurt his former ally's. With his inability to completely wipe the floor with his former ally's Erik hesitated and is again attacked by Wolverine.

Wovlerine again tries to impale Erik, who retaliated by ripping Logan's Adamantium out of his body. All of it. Nearly killing Wolverine, but he got him to stop at least. But because of this situation, Charles shows up, now completely angered by what Erik has done, he invades Erik's mind and incapacitates him completely. Then, Charles puts Erik in a catatonic state, trapping him in his own mind. This action however turns Colossus gainst the X-Men, deciding to help Erik and fled with the other from Avalon, returning again to Asteroid M. Erik is set upon his throne back at the base where he sits as Colossuss does whatever Colossus does at this point. Erik sits upon that throne for who knows how long, completely catatonic and served only by the remaining Acolytes. Though things do change when Age Of Apocalypse starts. Someone named Holocaust soon entered the base with full intent to destroy it. Erik had been defenseless while this was happening, until Colossus managed to rescue him and take him back to earth.

On earth Erik still remains in his catatonic state, unable to communicate. After a time another mutant approaches him called Astra. She restores his memories as well as steals his DNA in order to create the clone of him, named Joseph. Once she had gotten Erik's DNA she had intended to kill Erik. However, her plans are put off when Joseph decides to to go out of control and cause enough of a distraction that the now, more or less mobile Erik, can move enough to escape from Astra and Joseph. In the months that followed Erik spent his time regaining control over his body and breaking free of any remaining effects of his catatonic state, seemingly so. While he is regaining autonomy, Joseph takes on Erik's identity and disguises himself as Magneto, then Joseph also becomes and ally to the X-Men. Erik meanwhile, near the end of these several months pretends to be an average human and comes in contact with a man he uses to decided the fate of human kind. The man does not pass Erik's test.

After the failed test Erik goes to the north pole and threatens to use magnetism to change the magnetic fields if he doesn't get his demands met. Though, again, as is always the case, the X-Men show up and defeat him. But in this attack on him Joseph is killed. Which solves that problem. As well, Erik's demands are met and he is given an entire Island to rule over for mutant-kind. This island is called Genosha. While Mutants and Humans are having a civil war with one another. Erik is transforming his island into a mutant safe haven. Priorities, man. He recruits his son and daughters to help him create his Utopian island as well. But Erik just cannot leave well enough alone. So he abducts Charles Xavier to show his friend what all he has done for Genosha and mutant kind. And just like clock work, the X-Men show up again to take Charles back as the play date is now ever. Wolverine also manages to again impal Erik. Seriously injured, Erik is left to tend to his wounds and the X-Men leave with Charles.

Healing after being stabbed again Erik spends the next few weeks not causing any trouble what so ever. As he is spending most of his time helping the mutants of Genosha, instead. Though, Erik can never be happy, or at peace. A Giant Sentinel soon attacks Genosha, which is being controlled by someone named Cassandra Nova. Erik is apparently one of the first to die as the building he was in is hit by a ship that looks like a fist. Following this the city is mostly destroyed and most of the mutants living there are murdered. The X-Men come to see what has happened, finding the destruction and death. While they searched the ruins they had found a video of Erik made moments before he seemed to have died. However, jokes on you, Erik's not dead. But someone's pretending to be him for a bit. By the time Charles finds out that the real Erik is in fact not the person they believed to be Erik, and is still alive on Genosha he goes to visit the other. There he wished to find out what Erik had planned to do next, now that he was the most hated man on earth due to mistaken identity.

Even though he was not at fault for any of what he was hated for at this time, the accusation had upset and angered Erik, greatly. But instead of exacting some kind of revenge or trying to redeem himself, Erik decides instead to find any survivors of Genosha. Charles joins him in this task and the two reignite their tattered friendship once more over the course of this time together. During this time Erik again rejects his violent ways. Though this peace does not last for long as Wanda had come to have a nervous breakdown, where she attacked and killed many of The Avengers. Erik left the island to go retrieve her and bring her back to be protected in Genosha, and attempt to help her. Once she is brought to the island Charles helps by keeping her unconscious while they figure out the best way to help her. Though The Avengers and others demand that Erik release her to them so she could face judgment. Erik refuses to release her and ultimately the Island is attacked once more. Before they could retrieve Wanda, however, a flash changed everything.

By the time they all woke up again they were in a new world. One that seemed to be ruled by Mutants and humankind had been in a state of decline. As well, it seemed that Erik had sovereignty over the world. With his head base being Genosha, the now superpower of the world of Mutants. In this new reality mutants mistreat humans instead of the other way around. Mutants in this reality wait for the day humans go completely extinct. However, Wolverine and a young girl by the name Layla Miller are aware things aren't quite right. So they set out to restore the memories of everyone else. Soon attacking the Genosha Headquarters with those they restore the memory of. Where it is quickly discovered that it's not Erik who was ruler, but Peter. Peter had manipulated Wanda into having a breakdown, and then convinced her to change reality. After this reveal Wanda again remakes the world, changing reality yet again.

With the change she makes it so that mutants do not exist, for the most part. That includes her own fathers powers being removed. But most of the rest of the world returns completely back to normal. After things are changed back Erik spends the next several months aimlessly walking the earth before finally he contacts Charles. Only for them to then be attacked by Erik's former Acolytes who tried to kill Charles and now ignore Erik for not having his powers. The two are captured by the Acolytes but eventually break free of them and stop them from capturing them again. With this latest incident Charles and Erik decided to separate again. Erik again goes back to wandering before he comes in contact with High Evolutionary, which returns Erik's powers to him. Only discovering this fact after he attacks the X-Men...again...But it doesn't last too long. And with Erik being one of very few mutants left that have their powers after M-Day, Caused by Wanda, Erik has a decision to make. Return to his old way, or Join the  X-Men.

Joining the X-Men Erik goes to their home base. Charles is not happy to see Erik turn up and tells him to go away. But Scott decides to give Erik the change and in the end tells Charles to go away since Charles is being really suspicious of Erik. Which of course, why wouldn't he be. Oh, and Charles also telepathically attacks Erik. So Erik stays and tries to make up for the wrongs of his past, often lamenting of the Mutant future. Scott assures him that they have Mutant Jesus and that they can do anything apparently as long as they have Hope Summers on their side. They can move mountains bro. As Erik is trying to find ways to make life better on the base he realizes that he had to bring Kitty Pryde back, as she has been trapped by the High Evolutionary ever since she made contact with it. After he succeeds in getting her back however, he succumbs to a coma. Where he is placed in Hanks care for that time being. During his coma things continue to happen.

Things that eventually lead to Hope Summers leaving the island base the X-Men call home now. But then being brought back by the dying Nightcrawler some time later. After this Nimrod Sentinels attack the island where a comatose Erik has begun to wake up. Helping Hank to protect the other patients as he did not want to abandon them, Erik eventually moves on to hel protect the entirety of Utopia, which is the name of the Island base. After doing so he gives a speech which endears him to the many young mutants inhabiting the island. After these events there is some downtime before yet again, another situation comes up where Erik learns from Dr. Nemesis about one of his old Nazi tormentors making waves, again. Which Erik then brings up to Wolverine as he asks Logan to take the X-Force and handle the Nazi. Logan decides to do this mission solely on his own and succeeds, of course. While that is going on Scott has Erik and the others of the Execution team that Erik is a part of make a public appearance.

During this appearance the group is attacked by the Hellfire Club, where each member of the team is taken down by a strange form of technology each specifically engineered for hurting the exact mutant that it was aimed at. Erik had ended up being shot by a miniaturized neutron star. Then the Hellfire Club, taking advantage of the incapacitated heroes set slugs upon them to keep them all unconscious. Thankfully Idie, whoever that is turns up and saves the day, killing all of the Hellfire Club. Erik is then placed on a team not long after that involves Storm, it's not important. We just really love Storm. And you should know she was there. Though Erik has also come to a conclusion to leave Peter out of things because of what Peter did to Wanda in the past, that caused her breakdown and all that followed it. He's grounded, essentially, for...um...forever. So anyway, Joseph returns. But it's a NEW Joseph, and he starts killing people and The Avengers get BIG mad about it and go back on thier bullshit.

But because Erik is clearly smarter than pretty much everyone, he realize, hey. That's not me. I'm me, and tells everyone what's really going on. Which circles us back to Astra who has been free this entire time? Despite what she's done? That's just okay with everyone? Stealing DNA from a defenseless man, AND plotting to kill that man? So, anyway, Erik kicks her ass, BEGONE THOT! Joseph gets imprisoned. Erik, does not live happily ever after, but thank god that's over. Then Captain America shows up because he's bored, there's not been enough drama for him lately. Erik and him have a chat. Everyone hates each other now. But they need drama, guys! The fans are gonna leave! So some unimportant fighting breaks out because why not. Erik tries to help both sides but then Hope goes missing and needs to be found. Phoenix bestows powers on some X-Men. Look. A lot of shit happens okay. Scott his arrested. Erik Breaks him out. They all go wrong from the X-Men. The Phoenix Force Breaks the rogue teams powers. They gotta save the mutant Gene it don't work no more. There's no mutant babies. Fix it.

Erik decides to fix it by fuc- So anyway, Erik joins SHEILD for a hot minute. He then plays double agent. Scot gets pissy. How dare, how dare. Erik goes "Ey man it's nothing personal. I was doing it for you guys" Then he fucks off to go build another school in Charles name, a new Xavier Institute. Because everyone's getting a school these days...Then he steals some of Jean Grey's students, he calls is recruiting. Potato/Potatoes.  He fights Dormammu and his demons. His side wins. Scott's big mad because Erik was being pretty sketch to him, I guess? But they work it out with a big boy chat, it's all good. Erik helps some new mutants with their powers. Then they gotta save some douche named Fabio from SHEILD where Maria Hill goes "Come talk to me in private." But then she won't share much else and tells him to meet someone who is named Dazzler instead. Dazzler got them deets yo. Erik goes back to the X-Men Hideout, watches some pro-mutant stuff. Arrives fashionably late to a Blockbuster Sentinel fight--Whatever! WE DON'T CARE!

Dazzler is Raven, that's all you need to know. It's Mystique! Anyway, Raven and Erik go to Madripoor and fuck around and find out for ab it. It's a new safe haven for Mutants and the drug Kick is there, which we found out about during the whole Xorn thing. I did. You didn't. I didn't tell you about it. It's a thing. But it's not important. This is the last time it will be brought up. You're welcome. Anyway! Raven, get to the point. She's getting the old gang back together. The OG squad. Sabertooth, Toad, Glob, others....What the fuck is going on. Who knows. Because Erik has a crisis and he's gotta dip. So he leaves after attacking them all and knocking over a skyscraper in his rage. Then he fucks off for a bit with no one hearing from him for some time. Erik needed some me time and WE can forgive him FOR that.

Erik shows back up though when Red Skull starts using a now DEAD Charles Xaviers brain for his nefarious deeds. Because Erik ain't gonna be havin' none of that now. So he sets out to avenge Charles. Red Skull has also decided, in his infinant wisdom to just go ahead and make some Concentration camps again and starts locking mutants up in them. And what better place to do this on, than...the island of GENOSHA! Erik is not happy, as you can assume. So Erik and the X-Men go to beat Red Skulls ass, and the X-Men get their shit handed to them. Which leaves it all up to Erik in the end. Who beats the ever loving shit out of Red Skull, I guess. Then he takes his island back and starts another group of villains. Because Erik is unstable, remember that. AND he doesn't need to make sane decisions. Fuck Mystique trying to reform the OG gang, Erik does whatever Erik wants to do.

Even if that means being so CHANGEABLE! That's how he defeats Red Skull though, ultimately. Just throw some villains at the man. Good play, sir. Good play. Soon enough the remaining superheroes get enough strength to help out here, too and they manage to defeat Red Skull for good. Or at least till Marvel gets bored again and brings him back. Now back in complete control over Genosha again, Erik tries to live in peace. But how many damn times do I gotta tell you. This man does not deserve happiness. OR to know any peace. Or that's what one should expect from now on. Because the peace does not last. As the universe just starts to ...do stuff. Mmmhm. You read that right. Universal Incursion, baby! The Multiverse starts unraveling even as attempts to stop it are implemented. Even Erik's efforts to stop it does nothing for it. Nothing will ever be the same guys. Ever again.

During this trying time the Secret Wars happens. Erik becomes leaders of the X-men for a bit. There's a cure they need for Terrigen Mist. Healers are wanted, but not appreciated enough. Something about The Dark Riders, which, ugh. We honestly, don't care. Don't have time to get into that. Erik didn't even bother, he sleep. But hey, someones probably controlling them. So let someone else deal with it for a change. Damn.  During ALL this crazy shit however Erik and Rogue hook up, you know, totally over that one time he fucking attacked her when she was trying to be nice. They fuck. Have a son, Erik names that son Charles. Who is still dead by the way. Sad. Apocalypse comes back and starts raising more hell. Apocalypse also thinks it's a good idea to just kill Wanda off. Then he proceeds to capture Erik and Charles. Approaching Erik with a proposal, follow him, or he kills the boy. Erik, takes the offer in his rage, as well as prior traumas in losing his family members being a source of manipulating him.

Thus Erik becomes one of Apocalypses Horsemen. Apocalypse unlocks Erik's true potential, which grants Erik the ability to move earths core. While Apocalypse mind fucks Erik, Charles Xavier is brought back to life and finds out what's going on with Erik and Apocalypse. Charles attempts to reach Erik who believes that his son, Charles, is dead, and that he is alone again at this point time. Charles tries to convince Erik otherwise but ultimately fails to bring Erik to reasoning and turn against Apocalypse. Erik being to lost in his grief and overcome by his rage once more refuses to believe in anything Charles has to say, claiming it's all too late for them. Erik believes Apocalypse is the only way to get revenge for all that had been done to him, against the humans. Later, as Erik is attempting to finally destroy the earth, he is momentarily stopped by Peter, as Wanda had been dead at this time.

Peter tries talk Erik out of destroying earth. Confronting Erik on several things, trying to convince Erik that he isn't alone. That he has family he can still protect. A confused Erik grows frustrated with Peter, and just before Erik is about to attack and Peter hesitates, he blurts out that he is Erik's son, and Wanda is Erik's daughter. The twins he heard about all those years ago, it had been them all along. They had been adopted by the Maximoff family as infants when their mother, Magda had become too unstable to care for them. At this revelation, Erik stops his attack on earth, and turns his power against Apocalypse. Then, Apocalypse is finally defeated, for now. His loyalist are also tracked down and taken care of as well. While Erik and the X-Men are fighting with Apocalypse, Rogue manages to make it to where Charles, their son, is being held captive and rescues the boy from his prison. Which also results in humanity being saved from a bomb, I guess. After this incident Erik is globally named a hero.

As most believe it was him that saved them from the bomb, Erik, knowing full well it wasn't, accepts this claim anyway. Since he has no idea who it was, yet. A year later Erik has created the Bureau for Mutant Affairs to capture those still alive and loyal to Apocalypse. He also comes to figure out it was in fact, Jean Grey who is the one that saved humanity from the bomb. Erik keeps it a secret though since he likes the attention it brings him, as well as Jeans a bit...well...She's a bit sus. And she becomes even more sus when she shows up with the Sinister Six. They reveal what actually happened a year ago. Erik happens to be able to free Jean from her hold by Sinister’s power after this and then Erik straight up KILLS Sinister. Though because he lied he is later imprisoned. Since, hahah....WE arrest liars, I guess. Erik spends much of his time in prison doing fuck all in his plastic cell. That is until Weapon X kills him and becomes the New Apocalypse.

Some time passes before Erik is revived to help with a fight and again starts up his relationship with Rogue once more. They have another son together, Magnus. Who has inherited both Rogue and Erik's powers. And seems like one day he will eventually be better at them than his parents. Because that's how genetics fucking work. So, anyway, Magnus grows up. Nothing bad happens for a while. I know. Shocker. Then one day he just straight up disappears for a bit. Only for his burned corpse to be returned with a letter talking about how he was a hero, in some other dimension. He is given a proper funeral by his parents who for the most part ain't got shit to say about it. As they can't travel through time and space, now can they. Though it is still quite devastating, as you can imagine, for Erik, as well as Rogue. After this Erik's grief and anger builds up and soon he reforms The Brotherhood again, with a new team, and is working with villains now. Which in time leads him into attempting to kill Reed Richards, but The Avengers stop him.

Grief stricken and angered still, Erik continues to act up and during one of these incidents he is directly to blame for the accidental death of Hawkeye. Who is then avenged when Mockingjay kills Erik in kind. Erik again remains dead for quite some time before his remains are stolen and used to create a new mutant with combining his body with several other mutants. This new mutants name would be known as Brother Mutant. Who had possessed Erik's powers, along side all of those whose other bodies he had absorbed into his own. Eventually however, Brother Mutant was defeated by a team created by Wolverine and everyone was split apart once more, as well, Erik was once again alive but bound to a wheel chair after this incident. He was then taken to yet another Concentration Camp that had been built and overseen by Sentinels. Though with Frank Richards help, Erik helped to free the captured mutants. Though sacrificed his own life to make sure the mutants weren't stopped by the Sentinels.

Dead again, Erik remained dead for a long time. Though was, yet again, needed and revived as well as partially de-aged by an unknown person. Erik gets back on his feet, now once more in the prime of his life, he wanders for a while trying to learn more about what was going on while he had been dead, and again hears about the project with Weapon X. At this time it's a little more than familiar. Something he had heard once or twice in his childhood, he had remembered. While investigating he comes to learn that his mother, Edie had been involved with the research and projects for the initial trials of the Weapon X Program. As well as been a supporter of trying to find and 'cure' the mutant gene. He had also learned about what she had done to Erik. Which brought a brief memory back to him of his childhood yet again, one that he had locked away and forgotten do to only being just barely a toddler at the time. But, reading further into his beloved mothers background. He read she had also wished to 'cure' him after finding he had the mutant gene.

All of thus heart breaking news did not go over well for the unstable Erik. Who could not cope with the idea that his beloved mother had tried to potentially kill him for being a mutant. Erik eventually becomes consumed by his anger and confusion that he has a mental breakdown and starts to revert to something even worse than who he had ever been in the past. Becoming for a time someone more ruthless and sadistic. This results in several attacks on the US government and yet again, crippling Charles when Charles tried to talk Erik down. Though at this situation, Erik showed an opening, reliving the horrible things he had done to Charles in the past, with the first time Charles was paralyze because of him. Taking his moment, Charles attacks Erik and brainwashes him to forget his former life. While giving him new memories and making Erik believe he had lived a normal life. After, Charles leaves Erik in an attempt to let him live a normal life.

However, this is Marvel guys, Erik does not get a happy ending. Erik eventually regains his memories of his former life when The Brotherhood frees him of Charles brainwashing. Which brings all the instability that was yet to be resolved before. Erik again attacks the X-Men in his rage, and takes out Peters kneecaps in the process, since he finds out that Peter is working for those disgusting humans. Gross. Then, yet again, in his madness, Erik decides to again threatened to change earths magnetic fields and gets a machine built to amplify his powers.  However, eventually, he is again defeated by the X-Men and imprisoned by SHIELD where he remains for some time. While their, Erik plots to frame his daughter Polaris for a crime and get her imprisoned there as well. During this, another machine is created that will mimic both his powers, and Polaris'. Mystique then comes to visit him and takes on his appearance. She then uses that machine to fool everyone into thinking that she is in fact Erik, by using his powers from the machine.

After a fight with the X-Men Mystique is then arrested and sent to prison which allow, in some way for Erik to escape. Not that he's not off his fucking rocker, he's able to think more clearly. But is still grief stricken by the death of his daughter Wanda, and his mothers evil. Erik eventually also learns of the death of Polaris, too. Which sends him spiraling further into madness. He manages to keep it together long enough however to make his way back to the machine and without much warning, reverses the magnetic poles which also causes a great flood that kills millions of people. Following this incident Erik then proceeds to also kill Charles as well. The X-Men fight him once again, and in the end Scott is able to decapitate Erik with his eye beams.

It is believed that Erik is dead for good, this time. Though when other mutants are brought back to life, so too was Erik. As the X-Men, yet again, needed his help. Significantly chilled the fuck out now, Erik attempts to help. But as everyone else, is unable to prevent the next event from happening. A disease spreads over the world after contact with a space entity. Erik is eventually the only mutant left to defend the remainder of Mankind from the disease that has taken over the rest of the heroes and humans alike. Then one day, Wanda shows up from a different timeline, needing to cut the links between their worlds. While she's there, she reverts time back to before the disease came into contact with anyone, and helps the people of Erik's dimension prevent the disease from reaching earth and so destroying mankind. However, all the good Erik tried to do is also reverted and he is sentenced back to prison.

Present

Though Erik would not stay long in prison as Jean Grey has finally lost complete control over her abilities when she comes into contact with yet another space entity of some sort, by some means. Erik doesn't know how, because he wasn't there when it happened. Jean however has gone mad and started destroying anything in her path however which causes the remaining mutants that she did not kill, the deaths including that of Mystique and Scott. Erik is allowed to go free in order to help. Though his ultimate solution for the problem is to have Jean killed. Which is okay in Beast's book because of Raven's death. Erik finds himself wondering just why no one would just revive her. But doesn't bring the subject up. Overall they managed to defeat Jean and save her.

Following this event Erik tries to again set off on a path for good. Though finds it at times to be a difficult one. Instead he decides to keep with The Brotherhood and make it more of an anti-hero faction, that is not a source for good nor evil at any given time. Following the events of Thanos' snap, Erik does not get snapped. Instead he remains and tries help those that remained. When the avengers also get their shit together, he offers to help them with their time traveling adventures to recover the infinity stones and prevent the snap. Erik then joins everyone at the scene of the fight where he is, as one can imagine, a capable fighter and one of the most powerful people there. 

Future

Many years down the line Erik and Charles, have, once again, in their old age, become good friends and spend much of their time together teaching newer generations of mutants how to control their abilities as well as live among humans peacefully. Erik however still suffers from moments of evil despite his attempts to teach otherwise and eventually ends up in yet another plastic cell, where he and Charles will often converse for long periods of time, and play chess. However, as always, there seems to be something sinister lurking around the corner. This peace will not last...

(Work In Progress)

Personality: Magneto personality Stats

Extremism, Prejudiced (Toward humans), Repressed, Traumatized, Unstable, Calculating, Well spoken, Intense, Good intentions, Vengeful, Cultured, Stylish, Irrational, Fanatical, Ruthless, Powermad, Aggressive, Arrogant, Corrupted, Tense, Protective, Verbally Abusive, Defensive, Guilt Stricken, Hopeful, Idealistic, Radical, Complex, Changeable, Opinionated, Unpredictable, Deceptive, Manipulative, Cunning, Temper Mental, Morally Grey, Sophisticated, Precise, Compassionate, Dedicated, Courteous, Elegant, Responsive, Extraordinary, Scholarly, High-minded, Experimental, Emotional, Paternalistic, Sarcastic, Proud, Familial, Misguided, Self-indulgent, Aloof, Cynical, Intolerant, Boisterous, Condemnatory, Vague, Confused,

Quirks/Savvies/Other: Some public schooling, unspecified advanced training in genetic engineering and robotics, Publicly known, Married, Widowed, Ashkenazi jew (Does not practice), Adores everything about tadpoles, Can wield Thor’s Hammer (Did this because Wanda and Peter were killed by Ultron)(Through his powers, he is not worth, Maybe, -smirks-), Had a mental breakdown over a wooden gun, Ripped Apocalypse in half to prove a point, Is stronger than Apocalypse (NO ONES TALKING TO YOU JEAN! CLOUT STEALER. lol), Gives speeches, Was the Physics teacher at Xavier Institute, Is a mass murderer, Once greeted the X-Men with “Welcome, TO DIE!” because he’s a fucking dork, Sometimes refereed to as one of Four gods (Don’t ask, it’s not important, just a fun fact.), Met Captain America and Wolverine as a child, Is a closet fanfiction author with a hundred stories under their belt, Was potentially going to be Charles Xavier’s brother (But Stan Lee changed his mind, we’ll trust him, for now.), Will literally fucking just abandoned all his plans to go help Charles out, Has a tendency of laughing at the most inappropriate times, Got his solo movie stolen from him and it was made into a three part movie series about Jean Grey(And look how THAT turned out overall, lol), Immune to Rogues powers, Can use Cerebro effectively, Uses electromagnetism to induce mental effects, Inhuman reaction time, Expert at hand to hand combat, Loves bands that wear costumes on stage, Doesn’t prefer guns over his powers, But is not unlikely to use them for serving his purposes if need be, Knife fanatic, Detect and read micro expressions, Genius level polyglot, Genius in the field of genetics, He is an Omega level mutant, Wolverine’s afraid of him, Has an island that’s HP Lovecraftian, Is convinced they know the truth about who shot JFK, 

Likes: Chess, Being difficult, Fighting the X-Men, Bugging Charles Xavier, Rogue, Wolverine, Being Dramatic, Mystique, His idiot son: Peter, Being the smartest person in the room, Being heroic, Theater, Painting, Milkshakes, Donuts, Video games, Camping, Podcasting, Golf, Javelin throwing, Sports, Puzzles, Birdwatching, Traveling, Oranges, Soup, Hunting, Birdhouses, Rocks, Folklore, Tadpoles, Turtles, Outer space, Engineering,

Dislikes: Wooden guns, X-Men, Wolverine, Charles Xavier, Being wrong, Not being forgiven (Come on guys, it was only a million people he’s killed, at least! Give a guy a break.), Being anti-hero, Sharks, Bowties, Renaissance music,

Fears: Losing his family, Being alone(Outside Isolating himself), Abandonment, Betrayal, Being held captive/against his will, The deaths of his children,

Personality Tests: ENTJ-A/INTJ-A, Enneagram 6/8, Slytherin, Slytherdor, Horned Serpent, Thunderbird/Pukwudgie, Choleric, (Alt:Chaotic)Lawful Good/(Lawful)Neutral Evil,

Other: Sagittarius, Tropes,

Parent(s):

  -> Father: Jacob Lehnsherr

  -> Mother: Edie Lehnsherr

Sibling(s): Ruth (sister, deceased),

Children: Anya (deceased), Zala Dane (alleged daughter, presumed deceased), Lorna Dane (Polaris),  Wanda (Scarlet Witch) and Peter/Pietro (Quicksilver)(Shhh,... Shut up. Just shut the fuck up. You’re not the boss of me. I know what I am doing.), Charles(Son with Rogue), Magnus(Son with Rogue), Plague, Alpha, NIGHTCRAWLER?!, Probably countless more, One specifically that I am NOT going to mention,

Wife: Magda (wife, deceased),

Significant Others: Rogue(Bizarre Love Affair, not serious),

Other Relatives: Erich (uncle, deceased), Joseph (clone), Enrique(Ancestor),  William ���Billy” Kaplan (Wiccan, alleged grandson), Thomas “Tommy” Shepherd (Speed, alleged grandson), Luna Maximoff (granddaughter),

Starters

Chat’s

Para’s

Face

Stuff

Information

Asks

All

                                                                              Alternate Universes

Brothers with Charles Xavier AU

AUs

Spoilers

Inspired by Doctor Who “Forest of the Dead” 

AO3 

1942.

He’d been sent back in time to 1942.

Tony had found himself in a number of different difficult situations before, but this one took the cake. 

Like many of bad situations in his life, this was all Reed Richard’s fault. He had asked Tony to consult in a time traveling machine, and in an effort to avoid dinosaurs to attacking New York he’d agreed. All he’d seen was a flash of blue light and then he’d been standing in Nazi Germany during WWII where he’d been found by The Howling Commandoes. 

So far it had been a pretty awkward affair. First he’d had to somehow prove that he was not a Nazi, meet his father - who just happened to be younger than Tony right now - and look into the eyes of Captain America before his 70 year long chilly nap. It took some time but he somehow managed to convince them that he was in fact from the future, but since the technology he needed to get back to his time doesn’t still exist he’s been traveling with Steve and his team in search of tech scraps to help him build his own time machine.  

If Tony was being honest, it had been one of the hardest things he’d ever experience. Seeing the man he loved not recognize him hurt something deep within him. This Steve Rogers didn’t trust Tony very much and had only allowed Tony to join the Commandos because he’d been ordered to. 

This Steve Rogers was also in love with someone else. 

It was hard to miss the loving looks exchanged by Steve and Barnes, the way the two of them just gravitated towards each other, the way that Barnes looked as if Steve had hung the moon and stars and the way Steve would burn the world for Bucky Barnes. 

So yeah, not a fun adventure for Tony, and things only seemed to get worse. 

“Rhodes!” Barnes barked his fake name, “we have a bomb that seems to run on the same energy as those Hydra guns. If this detonates god knows what it would do.  We need a way to shut it down.” 

“If that thing goes off it could destroy all of Europe.” Tony worried and began thinking of everything he knew about the tesseract. He needed to shut it down. “Perhaps it could be shut down by using one of the guns and using it to penetrate the force field and using it the bomb to destroy itself, but that would very likely cause the person doing it to be caught in the blast. Not a large blast but the proximity would cause someone to get caught on the crossfire. Plus we would need something to kickstart it.” Tony rambled, he needed to fix this. There was no way he was letting Steve died in the 1940s. Without ever having met him. 

“Steve! Wait!” Barnes howled. Tony’s heart dropped as he saw Steve run into the base. 

“Steve! What is he doing?!” he demanded. Barnes gritted his teeth and continued shooting.

“He’s being and idiot. Cover me, I need to go after him.” 

“What, no!” Tony grabbed his tools and a weapon, “you stay here. I am going to send him back out here and take a closer look at the bomb and try and stop it from blowing up.”

“Rhodes! You are a civilian. Stay here, I’ll get him.”

“No! Someone has to stop this, and neither of you would leave the other behind. Stay here, I’ll send him out.” And with that he ran after Steve. 

“Mr. Rhodes,” Steve said when he came running in, “what are you doing here? You need to get out, go!”

“No! YOU need to get out of here.” 

“I am trying to stop this bomb from blowing up us all up.”

“I’ll have better luck at this than you. Please leave and let me take care of this.”

“Why? Because you are from the future?” and you could hear the disbelief in his voice, “I am sorry Mr. Rhodes but this is on me. This is my job.” 

“Jesus Christ Steve! I get it, I am a stranger and you don’t trust me, but why would I want to blow this us all up? Please! Leave and let me deal with this bomb.” 

“Is not a matter of trust, I need to stop this, and I am a lot more durable than anyone else. Now get out.”

“May you never steal, lie, or cheat, but if you must steal, then steal away my sorrows, and if you must lie, lie with me all the nights of my life, and if you must cheat, then please cheat death because I couldn’t live a day without you” 

Steve froze where he stood and slowly turned back to face Tony who walked closer to him.

“What? Where did you hear that?” his face was pale and his jaw clenched. 

“Steve, one day I am going to be someone you trust. Completely. But I can’t wait for you to find that out. So I’m going to prove it to you, and I am sorry. I am really very sorry.” Tony pulled at the chain around his neck and showed him.

“Those…those are my dog tags…and my…my father’s ring. Where did you get this?” he thundered. Tony pulled them back to his chest.

“You still have yours, probably around your neck, or Barnes to be honest. But these here? These are mine. You gave them to me. In 2014.”

“What? That’s.. that’s impossible.”

“Then how come I know your parents’ vows.” Steve paled further and Tony took his moment of hesitation to do what he needed to do. 

He activated his watch gauntlet and knocked Steve out. Like hell he was letting him die here. Steve remained unconscious while he place super soldier handcuffs on him, nanotech, and began working on getting the bomb deactivated. 

By the time Steve began waking up again, Tony had already hooked up the  gun and the arc reactor in his chest to the bomb and pulled out his phone.

“Auto-destruct in two minutes.” FRIDAY warned from his phone. 

“Oh, no, no, no! What are you doing? That's my job.” Steve yelled. 

“What, I'm not allowed to have a career, I suppose?” he snarked back. 

“Why am I handcu- Why do you even have handcuffs?”

“Spoilers.”

“This is not a joke. Stop this now. This is gonna kill you! I'll have a chance, you don't have any!”

“You wouldn't have a chance and neither do I! I'm timing it for the end of the countdown. There'll be a blip in the power flow. That way it should improve our chances of a clean shut down.”

“Tony, please, no!”

“Funny thing is, this means you've always known how I was going to die. All the time we've been together, you knew I was coming here. The last time I saw you - the real you, the future you, I mean - you turned up on our doorstep with a new haircut and a suit. You took me to SHIELD’s Helicarrier to see the New York skyline. Oh, what a night that was. The city was safe… and you cried.”

“Auto-destruct in one minute.” FRIDAY said. 

“You wouldn't tell me why, but I suppose you knew it was time - my time, time for this little trip. You even gave me your dog tags to keep safe, even though you weren’t going on a mission, that should have been a clue.” The dog tags and ring laid on Tony’s chest, and Steve struggled to break free from his bonds. 

“There's nothing you can do.” Tony said sorrowfully. 

“Let me do this!”

“If you die here, it'll mean I've never met you.”

“Time can be rewritten!”

“Not those times. Not one line. Don't you dare. It's okay. It's okay, it's not over for you. You'll see me again. You've got all of that to come. You and me, time and space. You watch us run.”

“Tony you know those vows,”

“Auto-destruct in 10…"

“And you wear my dog tags and my father’s ring.”

“...9, 8, 7, 6…” Tony played with his phone, looking at the last pictures he had of him and his husband. Because that may be Steve tied to that pole, but HIS Steve, his husband, the love of his life, was 80 years in the future. 

“There's only one reason I would ever tell anyone those vows, and give them that ring…”

“…5..."

“There's only one way I could…"

“…4..."

“Hush, now.” Tony consoled.

“...3, 2…"

“Spoilers.”

“…1"

There is a flash of bright light, and when Steve opens his eyes back up, Tony and the bomb are both gone. 

“Steve! Stevie!” Bucky calls out as he runs into the room.

“…I’m here.”

“What happened?” Bucky shoots the handcuffs and they fall off. 

“He’s gone. He sacrificed himself.”

“Oh. You alright?” Steve turns to look at him, gray eyes stare back at him and Steve debates telling him everything. Because Tony had known his parent’s vows, and he had his dog tags and his father’s ring. The same ring that he knows is safe back in his room, just like he knows Bucky wears his dog tags and his mother’s ring hanging from his neck. 

“Yeah, I’m just sorry I didn’t get to know who he really was.”

———NEW YORK CITY, 2020———

Everything hurt.

He could hear a faint beeping coming from the his left side, that he really wish would stop. He groaned and tried to shut whatever that was, but his hand was being held by another one. Slowly he tried to open his eyes and met a harsh bright ceiling. He blinked slowly and tried to get his thoughts in order. The last thing he remembered was…the Hydra base…Steve…the bomb…Steve…

He gasped. The hand holding his squeeze it. He turned to find Steve beside him a tearful smile in his face. 

“Hello, Sweetheart.”

Here’s another one you’re not gonna read...

(...because it’s excruciatingly long, not because it isn’t necessary.)

One of my most faithful followers (unless I’m confusing him with someone else, because what little blowback I get from the other side of the street tends to bleed together these days) checked in about a different post I made for this story, which I entitled (checks notes) ”Geriatric toddler threatens to dismiss a branch of the government during a national emergency unless he gets the toys that he wants”:

First of all, hope you’re doing well in the current situation, and thank you for your thoughtful analysis of the first two words of a joke headline.

The Washington Post article that joke was attached to goes into the president’s threat last week to dismiss Congress under the never-used Article II, Section 3 of the Constitution, with the goal of making recess appointments that bypassed the hearings that have tripped up several high-profile nominees.

Like a lot of things that literally every other POTUS before the current one never attempted, there’s a pretty spirited debate as to what conditions would have to be fulfilled for Trump to successfully pull this maneuver off, assuming it’s not all bluster and no muster. One major condition that would have to exist is that the Senate and the House would have to be in disagreement on adjournment, and according to the National Law Journal, there is no disagreement between the chambers at the moment. The current session officially adjourns on January 3, 2021. So until circumstances prove otherwise, we have to operate under the assumption that he can, in fact, exercise this extraordinary Constitutional power...under a narrow set of conditions which don’t exist right now.

The reason he’s making this threat, and why his supplemental threat to “take it to the courts” is toothless, is that the last man in his current position tried to make a recess appointment between the type of pro forma sessions we’re dealing with now and was shot down by a unanimous Supreme Court decision, one which reaffirmed that Congress is done when Congress says it’s done. 

But one justice went a little bit further in his concurring opinion, issuing a warning about any court decision that “transforms the recess-appointment power from a tool carefully designed to fill a narrow and specific need into a weapon to be wielded by future presidents against future Senates.”

“The Recess Appointments Clause therefore is, or rather, should be, an anachronism—’essentially an historic relic, something whose original purpose has disappeared,’” the justice wrote. “The need it was designed to fill no longer exists, and its only remaining use is the ignoble one of enabling the president to circumvent the Senate’s role in the appointment process.” 

Antonin Scalia, ladies and gentlemen.

Here’s where things get interesting, though, because the statement that came from Mitch McConnell’s office, at least if you squint hard enough, signals “I feel ya, bro, but focus.”:  “The Leader pledged to find ways to confirm nominees considered mission-critical to the COVID-19 pandemic, but under Senate rules will take consent from Leader Schumer.”

Which brings us back to our article up there...

What qualifies as “mission-critical to the COVID-19 pandemic”? There are a few nominees that are cooling their heels at the moment, but for the Voice of America (and yes, now is when we finally get to the linked article), one of them strikes pretty close to home.

U.S. President Donald Trump is threatening to adjourn Congress because lawmakers have not approved his candidates for senior posts in his administration, including his nominee to run the independent agency overseeing the Voice of America.[...]

Documentary filmmaker Michael Pack, whom Trump has selected to run the U.S. Agency for Global Media, is one of 15 key nominees awaiting confirmation by the Senate. Trump cited Pack by name (but erroneously identified the body he would head as USAGM’s predecessor agency, the Broadcasting Board of Governors). 

Michael Pack is a self-described conservative documentary filmmaker, one who has done work with Trump’s ex-chief strategist Steve Bannon. And there’s a pretty damn good reason why the confirmation committee pumped the brakes on his nomination (per CNBC).:

The “problematic revelations” that Menendez says he discovered just before Pack’s confirmation hearing in 2019 include “whether Mr. Pack engaged in inappropriate or unlawful activity related to transactions between his business (Manifold Productions) and his non-profit (Public Media Lab)” and “whether Mr. Pack engaged in self-dealing while in a leadership position at the Claremont Institute through the awarding of a contract to Manifold” even though that company doesn’t appear to have any qualifications to act as a vendor to the conservative think tank.

The letter to Meadows also sheds light on another aspect of Pack’s confirmation, which is that the Democratic committee leader has asked Pack to provide documents and answers to a variety of questions that could clear up these issues, only for Trump’s nominee to respond in a “perfunctory and inadequate” way.

“More than seven months have gone by since my initial questions. Mr. Pack has yet to provide the Committee with the requested information or to engage in a good-faith and serious effort to do so,” Menendez said.

So when confronted with his unethical, possibly illegal wrongdoing, Pack stonewalled, the way all this president’s men do. Sounds like a great guy to trust with public funds.

But seriously, why is this “mission critical to the COVID-19 pandemic”? 

Back to VOA:

Pack’s nomination has “been stuck in committee for two years, preventing us from managing the Voice of America — very important,” the president said. “And if you heard what’s coming out of the Voice of America, it’s disgusting. The things they say are disgusting toward our country. And Michael Pack would get in and do a great job, but he’s been waiting for two years — can’t get him approved.”   

Disgusting, you say? Let’s settle into that accusation for a hot minute.

Here’s the deal about the VOA: It went on the air on February 9, 1942, a little over two months after America found itself pulled into a global conflict of a massive scale with the actual, non-metaphorical Nazi government which had steamrolled over the European continent. That first broadcast came from a small studio in New York City, directed at an aggressor nation which had developed a robust system of delivering misinformation to its enemies. 

So how do you combat lies? Double down on honesty.

“This is a voice speaking from America, a voice from America at war. Our voices are coming to you from New York, across the Atlantic Ocean to London, from where they are relayed to you in Germany. Today, America has been at war for 79 days. Daily at this time, we shall speak to you about America and the war. The news may be good or bad. We shall tell you the truth.“

“The news may be good or bad. We shall tell you the truth.” I’ve never been a journalist, but the first time I read those words I was thunderstruck. In the simplest language possible, there’s the Platonic ideal of what news reporting is supposed to be. It also sets a high bar for how the United States presents itself to the world. We could argue all day on how many American organizations live up to those words, how many American administrations live up to those words, or if any configuration of the American government is equipped to be honest and forthright in every imaginable situation. But that’s the resolution, the goal for all the world to see.

So what is the “disgusting” VOA coverage that President Trump is complaining about? If we look at some recent headlines, we might get a hint.:

US Nowhere Near Ready for Business as Usual, Former CDC Head Says

Fauci: US Economy Won’t Recover Until Coronavirus Controlled

WHO Chief: Worst on Coronavirus Pandemic Yet to Come

WHO Fears US Funding Cuts Will Roll Back Health Gains in Africa

If you actually read these, they’re nothing more than articles recounting expert assessments of the potential consequences of federal actions (or, just as often, inactions) connected to our coronavirus response. Addressing these things in the public square is usually meant to be a corrective, especially when your chief executive pays more attention to the media than his own advisors, and that a broadcast outlet funded by the US government isn’t afraid to publicize criticism of government decisions gives our entire system a much-needed shot of credibility.

But Trump has never been able to take even constructive criticism as anything other than a personal insult, an attitude which he magnifies by using the power of the highest office in the country to scream “FAKE! FAKE! FAKE! FAKE!” at the top of his lungs whenever he sees or hears something that hurts his feelings. 

The only conclusion I can draw is that he wants the Voice of America to be more like the Voice of Korea, and the “mission critical” part of this gambit is that the VOA’s editorial independence distracts and confuses him. Do I seriously think the beacon of the Cold War era, the organization whose current director proudly proclaims “We export the First Amendment,” is going to be converted into a shoddy simulation of the old Eastern bloc broadcasters? Of course not. Would I put it past the current chief executive to at least try, destroying the VOA’s credibility to redesign it into yet another monument to himself? Not a shadow of a doubt.

“The news may be good or bad. We shall tell you the truth.” It’s a core element of America’s self-image, and the image we project to friends and foes alike. And the 45th President of the United States thinks that’s disgusting. 

Because he doesn’t want the truth. He wants to be soothed and coddled. He wants a cookie and a story before bedtime. You know, like a toddler.

(PS: For the record, the “very clever boy” in this account’s original title was always intended to be Donald Trump, because, as you probably figured out a long time ago, I don’t view him as very clever, nor has he been a boy for quite some time. I changed the official name of the blog to Trump Happens because some people don’t get sarcasm.)

Monsieur Klein (Joseph Losey, 1976) is another entry in what might be considered a genre of European film: the inquiry into the fascist period of the thirties and early forties, an almost obsessive probing into a period which is historically close, yet so appallingly distant from what we imagine our political behavior should be that it must be examined over and over. Images of fascism are created and re-created in an attempt to understand and expunge them, but only rarely—as in some of Fassbinder’s films, Resnais’s 1955 documentary Night and Fog, and Marcel Ophuls’s The Sorrow and the Pity (1971)—are they seen as historically continuous, still with us in disguised form. In Mr. Klein, Losey and Solinas choose a small facet of the phenomenon and elaborate from it a psychological fantasy. The moment is Paris during the Nazi occupation, and the subject is the problem of complicity, the way all people, but most especially those who imagined they were outside political events, were deeply involved in the round-up and massacre of the Jews. The narrative structure of Mr. Klein develops the idea of the doppelgänger—the other self. Robert Klein (Alain Delon) is a wealthy art dealer in 1942. The Paris police are rounding up Jews. Klein’s discovery of a Jewish newspaper left at his door, addressed to him, leads him to discover the existence of a Jew with his name whom he feels compelled to find, partly to clear himself of a dangerous association and partly—increasingly, as the film progresses—to discover what it means to exist as a person in danger. The body of the film follows Klein as he follows various clues, visiting people who know the “other” Klein, examining the wretched flat where the other Klein lived, chasing after rich acquaintances and poor ones in a diminishing circle that leads, finally, to his own deportation.

Losey and Solinas use the theme of the double as a device upon which to build a larger structure of inquiry. Mr. Klein is a figure who has every reason to believe that he can remove himself from the realities and demands of history. A rich bourgeois, encased in the elegance of a respected trade, he considers himself something of a disinterested helper of the persecuted. The first time we see him, he is buying the art works of a Jew who needs money. He does it coldly and with arrogance, describing the painting in the impersonal tones of the doctor who, in the very first sequence of the film, is seen examining and cataloguing the traits of a woman for the state’s records of racial origins. The woman, who is naked, is treated like a thing to be dealt with, classified, and sent away. The cut from the doctor’s office to Klein’s rich and secure surroundings, with pictures of human figures on the wall and his mistress lounging in bed, immediately indicates a connection between Klein’s private world and the horrors that are occurring outside it. He too turns the human body into an object, something to be observed and used. And once again the house becomes a primary sign for Losey, an objective indication of Klein’s tenuous security which breaks down as he becomes more obsessed with discovery. For much of the film its elegance stands as a separation from and contrast to the streets where police activity quickens, where barriers and detention centers are set up. But when the police begin to accept Klein as his double, refusing to see a separation, they invade the house and strip it. The other Klein invades it too, by means of his dog, which appears and is adopted by Mr. Klein. When the police search the house, a friend of Mr. Klein’s discovers a piece of music on his piano which Klein says was written by his double. He tells the friend to play it. It is the “Internationale.”

Invaded both by the police and by his double (who, it becomes more and more apparent, is a left-wing member of the Resistance), Klein is forced into history—partly by default and by accident, partly by his own active participation in seeking out the mysterious other Mr. Klein. But here we are not dealing with a psychological convention of confused identities; this is not the microcosm of The Servant, nor the displacement of self that occurs in Fassbinder’s Despair (1977). (That film, set in Germany in the thirties, involves an intricate perceptual dislocation in which an individual adopts and kills a double who looks nothing like him as part of a psychotic escape from a psychotic society). Rather, Losey is depicting a kind of forced march into the world, led by an unseen figure who becomes more of a conscience than a character. The “other” Mr. Klein is that other which is and is not the self (significantly, on a number of occasions when Mr. Klein hears about his double, his first reaction is to glance at himself in a mirror), and which the self must attempt to appropriate. Klein becomes hunter and hunted, his elegance and security finally peeled away until he unconsciously chooses to be the other. That ghostly figure no longer has a separate identity. As the police sweep the city, rounding up its Jewish population (including the “other,” who is turned in by Mr. Klein’s friend), Mr. Klein is loaded into a bus with the other deportees. At the stadium where the Jews are being collected, Klein’s name is called out. A faceless figure in the crowd raises his hand, and we assume that here we may actually see the elusive other Klein. But Mr. Klein, despite the fact that a friend has arrived with a clearance for him, runs after his fugitive self, whose face is never revealed, and is swept up by the crowd and placed in a cattle car. Behind him is the Jew from whom, at the beginning of the film, he purchased a painting.

Klein does not merely “become” his other; he becomes part of the enormous group collectively turned by the Nazis into a cultural “other,” a group determined by the fascist ideology to be its enemy and threat, its dark side that must be destroyed. The irony is that fascism is itself the dark side of bourgeois complacency and selfcenteredness. The “Jewish Question” was the Nazis’ invention of a dialectic where there was none, and an attempt to erase their own relationship to a history they pretended to control. The paranoid view of history, which is a major component of fascism, demands the creation of enemies, the turning of people into things. This is, of course, what Mr. Klein has done, to a lesser extent, in his private life. Now that he is forced to confront history, to see and be his other self, his ability “to be objective” is gone. The world’s terrors become his own, seen by Losey in extraordinary images of commonplace violence. In the film’s final sequences, Losey observes with a removed horror the city in which the Jews are rounded up, noting in the faces of those caught and awaiting deportation a combination of hysteria and stillness, a frantic action and a dumbfounded passivity, an expression of disbelief so thorough as to be paralyzing. The most active figure in this grouping is Mr. Klein, who embraces his destruction with the anticipation of someone making a discovery he cannot resist.

The movement to irresistible discovery is a major quality of Losey’s films. He does not care for epiphanies, for sudden revelations, but for steady processes of understanding and seeing through; he places characters in environments in which they either lose or discover something, often both simultaneously—Mr. Klein loses his life when he discovers that he is, like everyone else, a part of history. Losey allows us as spectators safely to observe the effects of class barriers or political amnesia and perceive what occurs when the safety they offer is removed. That is what all of his best films are concerned with. 

From Robert Kolker’s The Altering Eye: Contemporary International Cinema

The Devil Next Door

Here's the trailer for a five-episode Netflix series called The Devil Next Door.

The series is about John Demjanjuk, who was living in the US when he was accused of being "Ivan the Terrible", a particularly brutal guard at the Treblinka death camp.

Born in Ukraine, John (Iwan) Demjanjuk was the defendant in four different court proceedings relating to crimes that he committed while serving as a collaborator of the Nazi regime.

Investigations of Demjanjuk's Holocaust-era past began in 1975. Proceedings in the United States twice stripped him of his American citizenship, ordered him deported once, and extradited him from the United States twice to stand trial on criminal charges, once to Israel and once to Germany. His trial in Germany, which ended in May 2011, may be the last time that an accused Nazi-era war criminal stands trial. If so, it would mark the culmination of a 65-year period of prosecutions that began with the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg in 1945.

Some facts of Demjanjuk's past are not in dispute. He was born in March 1920 in Dobovi Makharyntsi, a village in Vinnitsa Oblast of what was then Soviet Ukraine. Conscripted into the Soviet army, he was captured by German troops at the battle of Kerch in May 1942. Demjanjuk immigrated to the United States in 1952 and became a naturalized US citizen in 1958. He settled in Seven Hills, Ohio, a suburb of Cleveland, and worked for many years in a Ford auto plant.

The Devil Next Door premieres November 4.

‘We Are All Jews Here’

U.S. Army Master Sgt. Roddie Edmonds, one of five American Righteous Among the Nations, never spoke about the 200 Jews he saved

BY

PATRICK HENRY

As of Jan. 1, 2020, there were 27,712 persons named Righteous Among the Nations (Righteous Gentiles) by Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center in Jerusalem. All of them are non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust. Five of them are American.

In 1994, Varian Fry was the first American named to the list. A New York City native and Harvard graduate with a degree in classics, Fry had volunteered with the Emergency Rescue Committee to go to France to help rescue victims of Nazism. Planning on staying for a month, he arrived in Marseille in August 1940 with $3,000 and a list of 200 Jews he hoped to save. Soon, however, he understood the enormity of his task and judged it “criminally irresponsible” to return home. He stayed until he was forcibly expelled from France 13 months later “for having protected Jews and anti-Nazis.” Fighting the Vichy regime and the U.S. State Department, which tried repeatedly to have him sent home, Fry carried a gun, arranged smugglings into Spain, obtained foreign passports and visas, hired a forger, and with a small staff saved over 2,000 refugees. Mainly interested in writers, artists, and intellectuals, this passionate anti-fascist rescued Marcel Duchamp, Marc Chagall, Jacques Lipchitz, Max Ernst, Hannah Arendt, Max Ophüls, Arthur Koestler, André Breton, and several other surrealist artists.

Martha and Waitstill Sharp were named Righteous Among the Nations in 2005. Waitstill was a minister in the Unitarian Church in Wellesley, Massachusetts, and his wife, Martha, was a noted social worker. They agreed to go to Prague in February 1939 to help members of the Unitarian Church in Czechoslovakia. Once there, they helped smuggle Jews out of the country that had been taken over by the Nazis the month after their arrival. They experienced dangerous encounters with Nazi police but managed to return safely to the United States in August. Once again, however, in late spring 1940, they returned to Europe to help rescue Jewish people from France where they worked with Varian Fry, Hiram Bingham IV, and others smuggling Jews, many of them children, into Spain and Portugal.

Lois Gunden, named “Righteous” in 2013, also rescued Jews in France. Born and raised in Goshen, Indiana, Gunden went to France in October 1941, at the age of 26, to work with the Mennonite Central Committee. Fluent in French, she headed the Ville St. Christophe Children’s Refugee Convalescent Home in Canet Plage in the south of France. It was a 20-room mansion that housed 60 children, mostly those of Spanish refugees from Franco’s Spain and Jewish refugees from Eastern Europe being held in the nearby Rivesaltes internment camp. Gunden continued to run this safe haven for refugee children even after November 1942 when the Germans occupied the entire country. She managed to hide many Jewish children in the home and save them from deportation to Drancy and then Auschwitz. In January 1943, she was detained as an “enemy alien” and transported to Germany. In March 1944, she was released in a prisoner exchange.

On Memorial Day 2021, 76 years after the liberation of Auschwitz, let’s remember the heroics of Master Sgt. Roddie Edmonds, the fifth American Righteous Gentile and the only one to have saved the lives of American Jews.

In early December 1944, the 106th Infantry Division, which comprised the 422nd, 423rd, and 424th Regiments, landed in France and traveled by truck across France and Belgium, reaching the Schnee Eifel area in Eastern Belgium near the German border. On Dec. 10, they took up their positions. On Dec. 16, the 422nd was attacked by the Germans in what would become known as the Battle of the Bulge, during which the Germans would capture 20,000 GIs. Although they were cut off and surrounded, the part of the regiment that Edmonds belonged to held out until Dec. 21 when they surrendered to the Germans. After having been forced to march 50 kilometers to Gerolstein, Germany, the men of the 422nd Regiment were loaded into box cars with no food or water and traveled for four days until they reached Bad Orb, Germany. They spent several weeks in Bad Orb, after which they were divided into three groups (officers, noncommissioned officers, and enlisted men). Roddie Edmonds’ group, the NCOs, were then shipped to Stalag IXA in Ziegenhain. There were 1,275 men in this group and Roddie Edmonds was the highest-ranking NCO among them.’

It was German policy to single out Jewish POWs and send them to extermination or slave labor camps. Accordingly, in January 1945, the Germans announced that all Jewish prisoners in Stalag IXA would report the following morning. Twenty-five-year-old Master Sgt. Edmonds, who was responsible for all the POWs in Stalag IXA, ordered all prisoners, Jews and non-Jews, to fall out. When the German officer in charge, Maj. Siegmann, saw all the prisoners lined up in front of the barracks that next morning, he said to Edmonds: “They cannot all be Jews.” Edmonds responded: “We are all Jews here.”

Siegmann then pointed a pistol to Edmonds’ head, but Edmonds, refusing to back down, replied: “According to the Geneva Convention, we only have to give our name, rank, and serial number. If you shoot me, you will have to shoot all of us, and after the war you will be tried for war crimes.” The German major turned and walked away. Edmonds had saved the lives of the roughly 200 Jewish prisoners among the 1,275 American POWs.

Edmonds, who was named “Righteous” in 2015, did not speak much about his experiences. His family only knew that he had been taken prisoner by the Germans during the Battle of the Bulge and that he had survived 100 days of captivity before returning home. His son, Baptist Rev. Chris Edmonds, mentioned that when he would ask his father about the war, he often told him only that “Some things were too difficult to talk about.” When Roddie died in 1985, his wife gave her son, Chris, two of the diaries he had kept as a POW.

Yet it was only in scouring the internet many years later that Chris discovered the exact story of his father’s heroism. In 2009, Chris’ daughter, Lauren, was given a college assignment to do a video history project about a family member. Lauren opted to work on her paternal grandfather. Chris decided to lend a hand. He googled the words “Master Sergeant Roddie Edmonds,” expecting that it would lead to Army records or the Battle of the Bulge. Instead, it led to a 2008 New York Times article about a New York City lawyer, Lester Tanner, who had sold his Manhattan townhouse to former President Richard Nixon. What could have possibly been the link between Edmonds and the sale of a townhouse to Nixon? Tanner mentioned in the article that Roddie Edmonds had saved his life and that of many other Jews during WWII.

This led Chris Edmonds to Lester Tanner and other Jewish POWs saved by his father, one of whom was Sonny Fox, the American television host and executive. These POWs and in some cases their families filled in many details completely unknown to the Edmonds family. Tanner told them that he admired Roddie for the way he led: “He never threw his rank around ... and was a man of great courage.” Tanner told Yad Vashem that they were all aware at the time that the Germans were murdering Jews. They therefore understood that the order to separate the Jews from the other POWs meant that the Jews were in great danger. “Master Sergeant Edmonds,” he said, “at the risk of his immediate death, defied the Germans with the unexpected consequence that the Jewish prisoners were saved.”

Another of the Jewish POWs saved by Edmonds, Paul Stern, explained that when the 422nd Regiment got to Bad Orb, lower-ranking Jewish POWs from another stalag were in fact sent to slave labor camps where many of them died. Stern, who had learned German in college, could understand what the Germans had in store for the POWs. He also stated that the conversation between the German commandant, Maj. Siegmann, and Roddie Edmonds was in English. “Although seventy years have passed,” Stern claimed, “I can still hear the words he said to the German camp commander.” Finally, Hank Freedman, another POW rescued by Edmonds, told Chris that his father’s faith impacted and emboldened all his men, whether they were believers or not.

On Jan. 27, 2016, in a ceremony at the Israeli Embassy in Washington, D.C., attended by then President of the United States Barack Obama, Master Sgt. Edmonds’ son accepted the Righteous medal and the certificate of honor awarded to his father. Roddie Edmonds has twice been nominated for the Congressional Gold Medal “in recognition of his heroic actions during World War II.” So far, no action has been taken. But Chris’ hope has hardly been extinguished. He wants his father to be awarded the Medal of Honor, our country’s “highest award for valor in action against an enemy force.” The Jewish Foundation for the Righteous’ short but powerful documentary on Edmonds, “Following the Footsteps of My Father,” would offer a great deal of compelling evidence.

In the JFR’s documentary, we learn that Roddie Edmonds might very well have also saved the lives of hundreds of his men by refusing to evacuate the camp where they were being held. The Germans knew the end was near and they did not want to be around when the American soldiers arrived. They told Edmonds to get ready to evacuate. Edmonds told the German officers that his men were too weak to evacuate the camp and begin a long march. The French POWs moved out along with the British POWs. The German officers told Edmonds that the camp was his: They were leaving.

Shortly thereafter, on March 30, 1945, Stalag IXA was liberated by American forces. It was the second day of Passover. As Sonny Fox remarked: “It was the day of our freedom.”

Someday I’m going to write a House with a Clock fanfic but in the meantime since the movie came out I have taken canon bits from both the book and movie verse (basically my favorite things from each) and mashed them together into one multi-media headcanon conglomerate that is mostly about Mrs. Z and Jonathan because they are the best. Also I’m into early - mid 20th century history so it was interesting working out Mrs. Z’s timeline.

Going under a read more because aha whoops I wrote a bunch of stuff

- Mrs. Z is a Michigan native (this is book canon) and she and Jonathan first met when he ran away from home and she was in her twenties via the Capharneum County Magician’s Society (another book feature)

- Mrs. Z was in New Zebedee long enough for them to become good friends before she left to get her doctorate of magical arts in Germany. This would have been sometime probably in the 1920s - The university that Mrs. Z attended in both canons, the University of Göttingen, was (in actual history) a pretty progressive place until Hitler purged it in 1933, so I’m assuming she was gone by then.

- Mrs. Z met her husband, Johannes Zimmermann, while at university. (in book canon she refers to her husband as ‘Honus’ which according to the internet is a nickname for ‘Johannes’ and ‘Johannes Zimmermann’ is such a German name I figured they had to have met in  Göttingen. Also is Johannes the german version of Jonathan because if so that’s really funny.)

- I like to imagine Johannes as this really sweet, laid back guy who was just awestruck by the magnificent force that is Florence and decided he had to marry her.

- After they graduated, Mrs. Z and her hubby returned to New Zebedee for a bit but eventually moved to Paris, I’m thinking in the 1930s? 

- She and Jonathan kept in touch the whole time and definitely visited each other. This was also when she had her daughter who I have named Elise for no reason other than it fits in my brain.

- The Nazi occupation of Paris happened in June of 1940 and I imagine Jonathan was terrified for Mrs. Z, being both Jewish and a witch. I think she and Honus were worried but like, I think at first they figured they would be okay? I mean if the movie canon is to be followed Mrs. Z probably had some pretty powerful friends so I think they were like ‘we’ll probably be fine???’

- Surprise: they definitely weren’t, but by the time they realized things were BAD it was too late for them to get out.

- July of 1942 is when the Nazis rounded up thousands of Jewish people living in Paris and shipped them to Auschwitz. The movie canon establishes that Mrs. Z was in Auschwitz for at least a little while because that was the only camp that did the infamous tattoos. The most logical guess is that both her husband and daughter died in the camp :’( and that she was able to escape somehow (this did, in fact, happen, mostly when people were taken outside the camp for labor duties)

- After the escape she was picked up by British soldiers and wound up at a hospital back in London but I’m guessing she was in super not great shape either physically or mentally at that point, but eventually the doctors got Jonathan’s info and contacted him.

- And keep in mind Jonathan at that point probably hadn’t heard from her for months, possibly over a year and was like, out of his mind worrying. Plus his boyfriend Isaac had been oversees fighting so like jfc???

- Anyway he goes over to England and it’s a huge relief for him to find Mrs. Z alive, but he’s also heartbroken because I imagine he knew Honus pretty well and had at least met their daughter a couple times. But Jonathan Van Olden Barnavelt is a Good Friend so of course he’s going to help Mrs. Z get better so he takes her back to New Zebedee which is nice and quiet for the most part and she knows people there.

- There’s also the question of how did she get that family photo back so I’m guessing that some of her non-Jewish friends in Paris were able to save at least some of her belongings and send them to her once she was settled back in the US.

- In the later books Mrs. Z and Rose Rita become incredibly close friends, which is really, really sweet and I am absolutely going to say that’s because Rose Rita reminds Mrs. Z of her daughter. 

- Mrs. Z was also a former teacher in the books so I think it would make sense to say that’s probably what she did for the decade or so between her return to the US and her retirement shortly before Lewis’ arrival.

 - You cannot tell me that Jonathan and Isaac  weren’t boyfriends PLEASE the movie definitely made it look like they were living together and Jonathan was in the house when Isaac got back from the war so fight me, they were boyfriends.

- But we all know what happened when Isaac got back so Jonathan and Mrs. Z just decided to be a platonic friend couple because man, fuck heartbreak that stuff is some B.S. Also why get married when you can just live in a constant state of being roasted. 

- Speaking of all that, Jonathan tells Lewis that he got kicked out for being into magic but I think the really it was for being into boys, Jonathan just wasn’t ready to have that talk with Lewis yet.

- I could make a pretty strong argument about how the movie version of Jonathan and the book version of Rose Rita are (most likely unintentionally) queer coded but that would be a whole other essay length post aha

I first painted Sophie three years ago. She’s my most popular painting. She died young trying to protect people that needed to be protected. This painting is a two stencil piece on glass. Read below for more information on Sophie. Sophia Magdalena Scholl (9 May 1921 – 22 February 1943) was a German student and anti-Nazi political activist, active within the White Rose non-violent resistance group in Nazi Germany. She was convicted of high treason after having been found distributing anti-war leaflets at the University of Munich (LMU) with her brother, Hans. As a result, she was executed by guillotine. Since the 1970s, Scholl has been extensively commemorated for her anti-Nazi resistance work. Scholl was brought up in the Lutheran church. She entered junior or grade school at the age of seven, learned easily, and had a carefree childhood. In 1930, the family moved to Ludwigsburg and then two years later to Ulmwhere her father had a business consulting office. In 1932, Scholl started attending a secondary school for girls. At the age of twelve, she chose to join the Bund Deutscher Mädel (League of German Girls), as did most of her classmates. Her initial enthusiasm gradually gave way to criticism. She was aware of the dissenting political views of her father, friends, and some teachers. Even her own brother Hans, who once eagerly participated in the Hitler Youth program, became entirely disillusioned with the Nazi Party.Political attitude had become an essential criterion in her choice of friends. The arrest of her brothers and friends in 1937 for participating in the German Youth Movement left a strong impression on her. She had a talent for drawing and painting and for the first time, came into contact with a few so-called “degenerate” artists. An avid reader, she developed a growing interest in philosophy and theology. In spring 1940, she graduated from secondary school, where the subject of her essay was “The Hand that Moved the Cradle, Moved the World.” Scholl nearly did not graduate, having lost any desire to participate in the classes which had largely become Nazi indoctrination. Being fond of children, she became a kindergarten teacher at the Fröbel Institute in Ulm. She had also chosen this job hoping that it would be recognized as an alternative service to Reichsarbeitsdienst (National Labor Service), a prerequisite to be admitted to the university. This was not the case, though, and in spring 1941 she began a six-month stint in the auxiliary war service as a nursery teacher in Blumberg. The military-like regimen of the Labor Service caused her to think very hard about the political situation and to begin practicing passive resistance. After her six months in the National Labor Service, in May 1942, she enrolled at the University of Munich as a student of biology and philosophy. Her brother Hans, who was studying medicine there, introduced her to his friends. Although this group of friends eventually was known for their political views, they initially were drawn together by a shared love of art, music, literature, philosophy, and theology. Hiking in the mountains, skiing and swimming were also of importance to them. They often attended concerts, plays, and lectures together. In Munich, Scholl met a number of artists, writers, and philosophers, particularly Carl Muth and Theodor Haecker, who were important contacts for her. The question they pondered the most was how the individual must act under a dictatorship. During the summer vacation in 1942, Scholl had to do war service in a metallurgical plant in Ulm. At the same time, her father was serving time in prison for having made a critical remark to an employee about Hitler. Between 1940 and 1941, Scholl’s brother, Hans Scholl, a former member of the Hitler Youth, began questioning the principles and policies of the Nazi regime. As a student at the University of Munich, Hans Scholl met two Roman Catholic men of letters who redirected his life, inspiring him to turn from studying medicine and pursue religion, philosophy, and the arts. Gathering around him like-minded friends, Alexander Schmorell, Wil Graff, and Jurgen Wittenstein, they eventually adopted a strategy of passive resistance towards the Nazis by writing and publishing leaflets that called for democracy and social justice, calling themselves the White Rose. In the summer of 1942, four leaflets were written and distributed throughout the school and central Germany. Based upon letters between Scholl and her boyfriend, Fritz Hartnagel (reported and analyzed by Gunter Biemer and Jakob Knab in the journal Newman Studien), she had given two volumes of Cardinal John Henry Newman’s sermons to Hartnagel when he was deployed to the eastern front in May 1942. This discovery by Jakob Knab shows the importance of religion in Scholl’s life and was highlighted in an article in the Catholic Herald in the UK. Scholl learned of the White Rose pamphlet when she found one at her university. Realizing her brother helped write the pamphlet, Scholl herself began to work on the White Rose. The group of authors had been horrified by Hartnagel’s reports of German war crimes on the Eastern Front where Hartnagel witnessed Soviet POWs being shot in a mass grave and learned of the mass killings of Jews. Her correspondence with Hartnagel deeply discussed the “theology of conscience” developed in Newman’s writings. This is seen as her primary defense in her transcribed interrogations leading to her “trial” and execution. Those transcripts became the basis for a 2005 film treatment, Sophie Scholl – The Final Days. With six core members, three more White Rose pamphlets were created and circulated over the summer of 1942. he core members initially included Hans Scholl (Sophie’s brother), Willi Graf, Christoph Probst and Alexander Schmorell (Schmorell was canonized by the Russian Orthodox Church in 2012). Initially her brother had been keen to keep her unaware of their activities, but once she discovered them she joined him and proved valuable to the group because, as a woman, her chances of being randomly stopped by the SS were much smaller. Calling themselves the White Rose, they instructed Germans to passively resist the Nazi government. The pamphlet used both Biblical and philosophical support for an intellectual argument of resistance. In addition to authorship and protection, Scholl helped copy, distribute and mail pamphlets while also managing the group’s finances. She and the rest of the White Rose were arrested for distributing the sixth leaflet at the University of Munich on 18 February 1943. In the People’s Court before Judge Roland Freisler on 21 February 1943, Scholl was recorded as saying these words: Somebody, after all, had to make a start. What we wrote and said is also believed by many others. They just don’t dare express themselves as we did. No testimony was allowed for the defendants; this was their only defense. On 22 February 1943, Scholl, her brother, Hans, and their friend, Christoph Probst, were found guilty of treason and condemned to death. They were all beheaded by a guillotine by executioner Johann Reichhart in Munich’s Stadelheim Prison only a few hours later, at 17:00 hrs. The execution was supervised by Walter Roemer, the enforcement chief of the Munich district court. Prison officials, in later describing the scene, emphasized the courage with which she walked to her execution. Her last words were: “How can we expect righteousness to prevail when there is hardly anyone willing to give himself up individually to a righteous cause? Such a fine, sunny day, and I have to go, but what does my death matter, if through us, thousands of people are awakened and stirred to action?” Fritz Hartnagel was evacuated from Stalingrad in January 1943, but did not return to Germany before Sophie was executed. In October 1945, he married Sophie’s sister Elisabeth. Following her death, a copy of the sixth leaflet was smuggled out of Germany through Scandinavia to the UK by German jurist Helmuth James Graf von Moltke, where it was used by the Allied Forces. In mid-1943, they dropped over Germany millions of propaganda copies of the tract, now retitled The Manifesto of the Students of Munich. In a historical context, the White Rose’s legacy has significance for many commentators, both as a demonstration of exemplary spiritual courage, and as a well-documented case of social dissent in a society of violent repression, censorship, and conformist pressure. Playwright Lillian Garrett-Groag stated in Newsday on 22 February 1993, that “It is possibly the most spectacular moment of resistance that I can think of in the twentieth century … The fact that five little kids, in the mouth of the wolf, where it really counted, had the tremendous courage to do what they did, is spectacular to me. I know that the world is better for them having been there, but I do not know why.” In the same issue of Newsday, Holocaust historian Jud Newborn noted that “You cannot really measure the effect of this kind of resistance in whether or not X number of bridges were blown up or a regime fell … The White Rose really has a more symbolic value, but that’s a very important value.” Else Gebel shared Sophie Scholl’s cell and recorded her last words before being taken away to be executed. “It is such a splendid sunny day, and I have to go. But how many have to die on the battlefield in these days, how many young, promising lives. What does my death matter if by our acts thousands are warned and alerted. Among the student body there will certainly be a revolt.”

Makers of History: Sophie Scholl

“How can we expect righteousness to prevail when there is hardly anyone willing to give himself up individually to a righteous cause? Such a fine, sunny day, and I have to go, but what does my death matter, if through us, thousands of people are awakened and stirred to action?”

These are the last words of Sophie Scholl, just before she was executed for high treason by the guillotine in 1943, aged twenty one, after being caught distributing pamphlets encouraging passive resistance to the Nazis. Known as a symbol for anti-Nazism since the 1970s, Sophie’s role in The White Rose, a non-violent resistance group to Hitler’s government based around active intellectual opposition to the regime, was a stand against the horrors of Nazi Germany. But what about the girl herself? What sort of girl would face martyrdom so calmly at the tender age of twenty one? Here are five points of interest about her life, that perhaps might shed some light on the girl behind the name.

WARNING: What follows discusses in detail actions of the Nazis, such as the Holocaust, euthanasia and homophobia, that some readers may find upsetting.

[source: The White Rose (Life time: 1943) - Original publication: 1942]

Even in secondary school, Sophie was critical of the Nazis

For those of you who don’t know, secondary school is from the ages of 11 to 18, and in Nazi Germany, the curriculum was full of pro-Nazism indoctrination. For example, young children used to be taught how to recognise Jews from their facial features alone as an attempt to introduce them to eugenics and to teach them that the Jews were inferior to the German Aryan ideal. Initially, Sophie was quite enthusiastic to join the Bund Deutscher Mädel (The League of German Girls) aged twelve, the female wing of the Hitler Youth, which her brother Hans was a member of:

'But there was something else that drew us with mysterious power and swept us along: the closed ranks of marching youth with banners waving, eyes fixed straight ahead, keeping time to drumbeat and song. Was not this sense of fellowship overpowering? It is not surprising that all of us, Hans and Sophie and the others, joined the Hitler Youth? We entered into it with body and soul, and we could not understand why our father did not approve, why he was not happy and proud. On the contrary, he was quite displeased with us.’

- Inge Scholl, Sophie’s sister

However, the disillusionment of her friends and family - even Hans eventually, after the Nazis began to target him over a same-sex relationship he had aged 16 - led to her turning against the Nazi Party. She almost didn’t graduate secondary school because she had lost any interest in participating, but she did in the end with an essay titled “The Hand that Moved the Cradle, Moved the World.” Again, Sophie found difficulty in applying to university as it required her to partake in Reichsarbeitsdienst (National Service) - she originally hoped she could teach in kindergarten as an alternative, but this was not accepted and a year later she became a nursery teacher in the auxiliary war service for six months. During this time she was again dismayed by the things she learnt about the operation of the Nazi Party.

2) Sophie was religious

Sophie was discovered to have sent her boyfriend, Fitz Hartnagel, two volumes of the Catholic John Henry Newman’s sermons when he was sent to the Eastern Front. Sophie and Fitz discussed in great depth the ‘theology of conscience’ in their letters to each other, and this greatly impacted how she viewed the political situation in Germany at the time. Catholic Bishop Clemens August Graft von Galen also influenced her, especially his outcry against the Nazis’ euthanasia policies that were intended to ‘protect the gene pool’. Sophie was horrified by what Hartnagel told her of Soviet POWS being shot into mass graves, and when he passed on what he had learnt about the extermination of the Jews in death camps. The euthanasia policies in particular prompted her to distribute Graft von Galen’s sermon as the first leaflet before the official establishment of the White Rose.

[Bishop Graft von Galen: Domkapitular Gustav Albers († 1957) - Bildersammlung des Bistumsarchivs Münster, des Erbnehmers der Urheberrechte ]

"We know by whom we are created, and that we stand in a relationship of moral obligation to our creator. Conscience gives us the capacity to distinguish between good and evil."

- Fitz Hartnagel to Sophie Scholl

Fritz was evacuated from Stalingrad in 1943, but sadly this was after Sophie’s execution. He went on to marry her older sister, Elisabeth. 

3) The fact that she was a woman proved invaluable to her work as part of The White Rose

Not only did the fact that Sophie was a woman mean she was much less likely to be stopped by the SS, thus making her useful for distributing leaflets, but it also meant that when she was arrested, the Gestapo (specifically the interrogator Robert Mohr) originally thought her innocent. It was only after her brother, Hans, confessed to the crime that she assumed full responsibility in the hopes that her brother and other fellow members of the White Rose would he protected.

4) Sophie’s brother was also involved in The White Rose

It was Hans involvement, in fact, which introduced Sophie to the movement. Sophie, after realising that Hans was an author of one of the anti-Nazi pamphlets being distributed around her university, joined him in The White Rose, despite his initial reluctance at her risking her safety. They were both arrested after an incident in the University of Munich in 1943, along with their friend and fellow member, Christoph Probst. Sophie and Hans had been distributing pamphlets throughout the university, but once the bell rang to dismiss class, they discovered that they still had some left over. In an attempt to rid herself of some, Sophie Scholl threw them from the upper level into the atrium, but was spotted by the caretaker, and was reported to the Gestapo along with her brother. Hans attempted to eat his remaining pamphlets before they could be found on him, but the Gestapo retrieved them from his stool and were able to piece them together. One of the pamphlets was authored by Probst, thus incriminating him as well, and all three were executed.

[Hans Scholl: source]

5) Her work left an important legacy

In 2003, Germans voted for Sophie and Hans Scholl as the fourth greatest Germans to ever live. Had the vote taken into account just the votes of people under 40, then they would have come first, over Einstein, Bach and Bismark. At the time, the sixth pamphlet was smuggled into the United Kingdom, and Allied planes in 1943 dropped copies over Germany under the title ‘The Manifesto of the Students of Munich’, thus making all of Germany aware of the actions of The White Rose. Unfortunately however, this did not lead to a great revolt against the totalitarian regime. The White Rose has had more influence post-war.

So, what are your impressions of the courageous Sophie Scholl? Do feel free to drop me an ask and let me know, or correct me if you think I got something wrong! (Politely, of course).

Well, that’s it for now from Makers of History! This may be the last installment, not because I want to stop, but because this new-fangled Article 13 being proposed by the EU means I may have to delete my blog if it passes. So if I do have to, know that it’s been great fun making these, and I’m sorry to go <3

As always, my sources are WIKIPEDIA.

I’m not doing anything special, just trying to get people interested in history!

Until we meet again,

Aurelia x