Anne Nelson (1)Reseñas

This is a deeply troubling account of the currents of political activism that brought Donald Trump to power.

I would call it a sister to Jane Mayer’s “Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right.”

And it explains Republicans’ intransigence on even minor matters of public policy.

While indeed money fuels American politics, it is the demonstration of an ideological purity that keeps elected officers in line.

And it is so ironic that the American system was designed to prevent this very scenario where religious ideologues could have such a domineering say over public policy.

There are some very cynical people at the heart of the American radical right, no better than some of the Eastern European leaders or trans-Asian republic potentates, or Putin or royal families of the Middle East.

I happened to be reading this book at the same time I am engrossed in a podcast series about the misbehaviour of Becki and Jerry Falwell Jr. and Falwell’s unwholesome management of Liberty University of Lynchburg, Virginia.

Donald Trump embraced these people because they brought him to power. And Trump in turn gave them the influence over public policy they had coveted for decades.

But they are as awful as he is. And the election of Biden will not stop them.

RED ORCHESTRA, by Anne Nelson

Anne Nelson, who wrote the play I did last spring, THE GUYS, has revealed in this book a facet of her wide-ranging persona I was not initially aware of when I worked with her in April. I knew she was a renowned war correspondent, playwright, human-rights reporter, and professor, but I hadn't known she was also a historian. I've just finished her book RED ORCHESTRA and am thrilled (particularly thrilled, as one is when one finds something a friend has done has been done extremely well) to recommend it.

Red Orchestra (or Die Rote Kapelle) is the name given to Germans who formed the underground resistance to Hitler and the Nazis inside Germany. Some were members of the military or elite society, some were artists and intellectuals, some were simple working people, but all were devoted to bringing about the collapse of the Nazi regime and an end to its horrific abuses. The book is a sad chronicle of the times, particularly sad because so much of the bravery and effort exhibited by these women and men went for naught. Case after case is illustrated wherein Herculean attempts were made to assassinate Hitler or to convey to the countries allied against the Nazis the scope of the holocaust under way in Germany and to provide help in defeating Germany's war-and-murder machine, only to see chance or stupidity or arrogance defeat the effort. In the end, thousands of Germans loyal to the idea of a humane and free Germany paid with their lives for their refusal to bow down before dictatorship, and even then many of their stories were distorted and radicalized for political purposes by the victorious Anglo-American and Soviet governments. What is left is a dramatic and powerful story of human bravery in the face of near-certain death, and an understanding of how easily nations can be corrupted.

Additionally, RED ORCHESTRA provides a concise and extremely clear picture of what life in Germany was like between the World Wars and exactly how events progressed as a defeated and dispirited nation turned itself into a juggernaut of hate under the leadership of evil, spiteful, remorseless men. I've never understood so clearly before the sense of progression as the Nazis arose from the ashes of World War I on their road to destiny and infamy.

This is a terrific book, full of intimate detail and insight. I swear I'd think so even if the author weren't a friend of mine. But if she weren't, I'd probably never have known about this book, nor about the men and women of the so-called Red Orchestra, who stood up against evil when doing so was at the cost of life itself.

Fræðandi frásögn um andspyrnu Þjóðverja við ógnarstjórn nasista í síðari heimsstyrjöld. Þetta var fjölmennur hópur sem stundaði njósnir, hjálpaði gyðingum að flýja og dreifðu andófsfréttum á meðal Þjóðverja. Fólkið var af öllum stéttum og barðist af hugsjón fyrir málefnum sínum.
Gestapo, leyniþjónusta Þjóðverja, gaf þeim nafnið Rauða hljómsveitin vegna fjölda senditækjanna sem sendu leynilegar upplýsingar en sjálf höfðu þau ekki gefið sér neitt nafn.
Upp komst um þau fyrir heimskulegt klúður leyniþjónustu Sovétríkjanna en njósnarar hópsins höfðu gefið nákvæmar upplýsingar um hernað og fyrirætlanir Þjóðverja til Sovétríkjanna.
Frásagnir um andspyrnuhópinn hafa ekki farið hátt því að eftir stríð tókust stórveldin á um arfleifð hans. Bandaríkjamönnum var ekki um það gefið að margir einstaklinganna höfðu verið vinstri menn og Sovétmenn ritstýrðu sögum eftirlifenda sér til hróss. Hins vegar höfðu aðilar hópsins ítrekað leitað aðstoðar bæði Breta og Bandaríkjamanna fyrir og við upphaf stríðsins en verið hafnað af ýmsum ástæðum.

Check out my review here:

http://shannonsbookbag.blogspot.com/2015/02/the-guys-nelson.html

Not even Stephen King could come up with something this brutally frightening. Children Of The Corn on acid. And, it’s non-fiction.

Fascinating. There was a lot going on in the resistance in Germany thruout the war that simply hasn't been big news to us. Mainly because the dreaded Communists were involved we've actively tried to hide that fact. An important and very interesting read.

This is freakin scary. Our democracy is about to be pulled out from under our noses.

A fascinating book about current politics in United States. Explains much about the hatred that infiltrates society. The "End Justifies the Means" philosophy expressed by many who want things their way.
"It was a unique challenge: to engineer the mechanisms of American democracy and media to convince voters to support candidates who would compromise the safety of their water. Soil, air, and limit their families access to health care and public education. It would require all the strengths of American corporate culture, including strategy, messaging, and marketing. But the Koch's, increasingly impatient with the traditional Republican Party, were ready to make an end run."
I just wish it had a flow chart to make the interlinking groups and money easier to follow.

If you like being scared, read Anne Nelson’s Shadow Network. It’s the alarming story of how Christian fundamentalists coalesced into a political force and have essentially taken over the Trump administration. They promulgate their hate and intolerance from there, from Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s references to The Rapture to Betsy DeVos’ dismantling of Education, to a flood of young ultraconservative life appointees to the bench.

It is so dramatic and complex, Nelson feels she has to provide a Dramatis Personae – a list of the major players, organizations, religious influencers and media manipulators. The book itself is a chronological climb to the top.

The conservatives were jealous of the Democrats, and came up with organizations inspired by them, copying even their names except for a word or two. Their goal was to outperform the Democrats’ efforts, and they have. Some hard work and huge dollops of money paved the way.

At the center is the Council for National Policy, the CNP, as close to a Deep State as there is. It was a blatant copy of the Council for Foreign Relations, with some stunning differences. Where the CFR is open, fair and credible, the CNP is totally closed — a secret society of evangelicals. It is only through the occasional leak of a list that we know who is a member or who is leading some aspect of it. Public events are purely and totally onesided. Members are the top players in other fields, like grassroots movements, the right-wing media, fundraising, and of course, religion. Lots of evangelical pastors with radio and TV shows. The whole foundation is based on fundamentalist religion, and imposing it on the entire country. At times I thought I was reading The Handmaid’s Tale only for real.

All the secrecy is the striking thing about this entire effort by Republican evangelicals. Some of the organizations are not even listed in their building’s directory. Security guards have no access to their floors. Membership rosters are only known if leaked. Don’t ask where the money comes from, just know there’s lots more where that came from.

The task of putting this whole story together is nothing shy of monumental. Nelson had to trace dozens of whole careers, meetings and announcements and the interconnections among the players as they intersected again and again. Criminal records played a large role. Bigotry is rampant. The connections between all the organizations is incestuous; all the same names keep popping up. They are busy all year long transferring money to each other.

What becomes obvious very quickly is the extraordinarily low quality of the players. They are not mere racists, bigots, white supremacists and xenophobes. They are lechers, adulterers, fraudsters, influence peddlers, perverts and the just plain dishonest. They are constantly having to resign, be arrested, and be covered up by their organizations. The CNP “took these speed bumps with aplomb, wrangling college presidents with feeble academic credentials, media moguls with no commitment to journalism, and self-righteous crusaders who committed criminal abuses. The CNP’s uncompromising vision required a surprising amount of compromise,“ Nelson explains. That neatly explains their support of Donald Trump.

The basic attitude is that “God doesn’t need a majority.” Whereas the Democrats like to think they are inclusive with labor, immigrants, women and the left, conservatives take under their wing haters, right wing extremists, racists and anti-everything except guns. As Nelson profiles them, many of the key players had to be fired, or went to prison or were sued into premature retirement.

The three biggest planks of their mission are abortion, homosexuality and the Christian bible. Their job is to make those three the most important issues to voters. Here are some the big names from the movement and how they do it:
-James Dobson’s empire was radio show and organization called Focus on the Family. He is famous for saying homosexuality comes from “a home where the mother is dominating, overprotective and possessive, while the father rejects or ridicules the child.” He announced that the only question about corporal punishment was whether to use a hand or an object to strike a child. On women as wives: “That functional role … is one of subjection. It is one of submission.” His Family Research Council is at the very core of the CNP, working with untold other groups to implant his attitudes.
-Evangelist Billy James Hargis promoted segregation as “one of God’s natural laws.”
-Pastor James Robison once rejected a million dollar donation of jade and ivory on the basis it consisted of “graven images”. (The irony escaped him.) He was best known for his homophobic tirades, claiming homosexuals were “prone to molesting and murdering young boys.” The larger irony would wait for decades, when one of the founders of the CNP, Judge Paul Pressler, was hauled into court for just that kind of activity, as was Billy James Hargis in connection with his bible students — of both sexes.
-Jerry Falwell raised money on the air by claiming homosexuals “want to transform America in a modern Sodom and Gomorrah.”
-Juan Pablo Andrade posted on a video: “The only thing the Nazis didn’t get right is they didn’t keep f***ing going.”
-On Jews, Pastor Bailey Smith asked a Dallas rally: “How in the world can God hear the prayer of a man who says Jesus Christ is not the true Messiah?”
-The Southern Baptist Convention maintains that homosexuality is ”a deviant behavior that has caused havoc in the lives of millions.” It continues to press for recriminalization and “conversion therapy”.
-Roberto D’aubuisson was the right-wing death squad leader in El Salvador. Nelson says she was right there in 1981 when D’aubuisson announced “it would be necessary to kill a quarter of a million people to pacify the country.” He was guest of honor at a Washington confab of fundamentalists.
-Oliver North, Edwin Meese, Pat Robertson and many other of the fallen make up this A-team for the evangelicals.

In imitating other organizations, the fundamentalists even created their own version of the Girl Scouts, in which six to nine year olds can earn badges by picketing abortion clinics and participating in select protests.

In addition to the millions donated annually by the rich (Templeton, DeVos, Prince, Brooks, Koch, Mercer et al.), the organizations collect vast sums from tens of thousands of churches. They pressure pastors to help raise money. They specify sermons, handouts and tithing to the cause of turning America into a Christian bible-run country.

The large donations are freely given, because it is all deductible, greatly benefitting the donor. These recipient organizations are almost all non-profit and charitable, which is a farce in itself, as those kinds of outfits are not allowed to participate in political activity by law (the Johnson Amendment). It is a continual criminal act that goes completely unpunished as funding is cut back at the IRS. One of the conservatives’ top goals is to repeal the Johnson Amendment and specifically allow churches to participate in politics and promoting sponsored candidates.

Evangelicals hated the thought of Trump in the White House. They were totally against him, his lies, vulgarity and divorces. But with no religious alternative, they embraced him, and delivered in a big way. Now, they are giddy with Trump. Because he had no network of his own to draw on, he has picked his people for their adherence to evangelical organizations. So they are everywhere, in every government department and agency, undermining them. From Mike Pence on down, they were the CNP’s choice. For the evangelicals, it is euphoric. Every day brings new easy access and victories. They are enjoying such success that CNP leaders had their own images portrayed in stained-glass windows in a megachurch in Texas, including their wives and one’s dog, overtaking for the space usually reserved for Jesus. (Those panels have since been removed).

The key to their electoral success is individual targeting. They have data on voters that would make Mark Zuckerberg blush. They can target the undecided with specific appeals that don’t expose the hypocrisy, infighting and self-contradictions. They get a higher percentage of people to the polls, giving their votes more weight. In addition, the focus is on the more lightly populated so-called flyover country, where a single vote can have the impact of six votes in a big city. The result is a tyranny of the minority.

Nelson has done an outstanding job of putting the hidden and disparate pieces together and making a coherent, if horrifying story out of it. She shows the connections between the organizations, the direction from the top, and resulting backward steps this movement is imposing on the country. It makes sense of the chaos that has become Washington’s daily routine. Unfortunately.

David Wineberg

I only skimmed this book, but from what I did read, Suzanne Spaak used her wealth and influence to rescue many Jewish children during World War II. However her heroic efforts came at a terrible price. It is a shame that more people did not take care of the children, or stand up to the Nazis. Suzanne is a hero. The pictures are interesting to view, and provide some visuals of the people mentioned in the book.

A great read, I particularly liked that the Author did her homework and started the story in the 1920's well before the Nazi's came to power. It showed the personalities involved and why they opposed Nazism. My only complaint is that there are so many involved that it can be hard to keep track of everyone, but really thats a very minor complaint. If your interested in the Inter war period, WWII, resistance movements, or German society in this period read this book.

A good general history of the Red Orchestra.

This resistance group was far different from the well known July 20, 1944 Valkyrie assassination attempt on Hitler.

The Red Orchestra group was made up of a wide variety of individuals from intellectuals to artists, bureaucrats and some military officers, some with links to the German Communist party.

Sadly their attempts at sending out military information to the Allies' intelligence agencies was largely ignored.

There are a few mistakes in the text such as the commenting on Nazi Germany's toehold in Gibraltar?! News to me!

However I found some surprising information such as "Widows of officers and statesmen who gave their lives in the 20th July coup attempt were denied West German Government pensions until the 1960's." mainly due to "The history of the anti-nazi resistance was suppressed and the West German legal system upheld the convictions of Germans executed for resistance activities"

All in all worth a read especially if you are interested in espionage in World War 2 and German resistance activities.

Performing this piece

This story of German resistance to Nazis is, according to the author, a first attempt to tell the story of the interlocking circles of Germans who tried to undermine the activities and existence of the Nazi regime. Additional documents may indeed reveal gaps and misinterpretations in this account but that it has come to light at all is good news for anyone who wonders why no one resisted Hitler. The answer is that quite a number of Germans did, in large and small ways, and continued to do so despite brutal repression.

The received wisdom of the Holocaust is that all the Jews went passively to their deaths like so many sheep and all Germans either committed heinous war crimes or stood passively by and allowed them to happen. There is also the notion that only Jews died in concentration camps. Then, if you're like me and find history fascinating, you read more and learn about the Warsaw Ghetto and Sobibor and partisan groups of all kinds (even Jewish ones). You learn about the resistance movements in various places (and the very real consequences to taking part in them). The literature (both fictional and non-fictional) is rich and worthwhile. Yet this is the first time that I've really understood that there as an active resistance inside Germany. Yes, I knew that the communists and trade unionists and social democrats and lots of anything else that can be imagined were purged pretty much throughout the time leading up to the war and during the war itself. Yes, I knew that there were a number of different conspiracies to assassinate Hitler. What I didn't know about was the Rote Kapelle (the Red Orchestra) and the gripping story of their courageous resistance from within the highest echelons of German society and the horrible price they paid for it.

Nelson's book documents this group in intricate well-researched detail using as many primary sources as she could get her hands on. Often characterized as Soviet spies, the group was actually filled with artists and intellectuals who passed along information to the Soviets, but who also organized and participated in various resistance efforts in their community. The horror of it all is that it was the sheer ineptitude of the Soviets that ultimately got them caught and executed. The sheer enormity of the risks these people took for so very little gain was both inspiring and terribly tragic. The cast of characters is large, but Nelson does a great job of telling this story. I'd like to say that the aftermath of their sacrifice was justice for the people who perpetrated their deaths, but those individuals were protected by the US in a misguided attempt to fight the demons of communism.

Lastly, I was struck by the information that over a period of twelve years almost 3,000,000 Germans were in and out of concentration camps and penitentiaries for political reasons. About 800,000 were arrest for overt anti-Nazi acts; of these, only 300,000 were still alive after the war so about 500,000 died resisting the Nazi government.

The thirties and the run up to the War and the War itself are crucial to understanding the world today. So much of history repeats itself again and again - the more information we have, the more nuanced our view, the more prepared we will be to fight fascism wherever it occurs.

Red Orchestra tells the story of an anti-Nazi resistance group based in Berlin. While the story has been told elsewhere - and perhaps by more qualified historians - when Anne Nelson came across the Berlin memorial to the Resistance in 1999 she was surprised. The internal civilian German resistance to the Nazis was almost unknown in the West (largely for reasons of Cold war politics). Nelson wanted to write the story for an American audience, in particular.

The so-called Red Orchestra (or Rote Kapelle) was a group of overlapping circles that centered on Arvid Harnack, a high-ranking German government economist, his American wife Mildred, Harro Schulze-Boysen, a Luftwaffe intelligence officer, John Sieg, a Communist and former journalist, and Adam Kuckhoff, a well-known playwright. The focal point for Nelson's story is Greta Kuckhoff - no doubt in large part because Greta survived to tell her story. (My interest in the book was originally piqued by sn interview with the author on Wisconsin Public Radio. It turns out that Greta attended the University of Wisconsin in the 1920's where she met Arvid Harnack and his future wife Mildred Fish. Mildred's birthday is officially observed in all Wisconsin public schools. ).

The group at times engaged in both political resistance activities (for example, printing and distributing newspapers relating news of German atrocities on the eastern front) and intelligence work mostly for the Soviets (The British and American governments were not much interested, although individuals did make some contact with the group). Harnack and Schulze-Boysen were well-positioned to obtain important economic and military information and the risks they ran were consistent with their information's value. How much the group accomplished is open to debate. For example, Stalin had ample warnings, including information from Schulze-Boysen that the Germans were going to invade, but refused to believe it. In any event, Soviet intelligence proved to be fatally inept.

The book raised existential questions for me: what would I have done in their situation? Was it worth the risk of one's life to vandalize a public anti-Jewish exhibit? Surely they recognized the futility of their efforts to provide information to at least some of the German people. But, what is the meaning of life, the purpose of living, if one does nothing but play it safe? Life is sweet when one considers the alternative, however.

This group differed from other resistance groups in that it was neither organized to perform a military coup nor was it made up mostly of Communists and workers. These were middle-class to upper-class people with relatively comfortable lives. In that sense they risked more.

Nelson relates their story in a somewhat disjointed way. Granted that there were a dizzying number of people involved in many different ways, but she does only a middling job of sorting it out for the reader. She also seems to want to deemphasize the Communist beliefs of some of the members. Nelson gives the impression that Greta Kuckhoff was a reluctant Communist. While Kuckhoff did object to the East German government's "Leninist objectification" of her group she also rose to an important position in that government.

I hope I am not giving away too much to tell you that things end badly for the group with torture and gruesome death by being hung from a meat hook. One thing I did not anticipate (but perhaps should have), was the trouble the survivors ran into when the war ended and the Cold War began. The former Nazi prosecutor Manfred Roeder managed to avoid severe punishment by shopping his supposed ability to identify German Communists, including Greta. For many years, the resistors were portrayed by some in West Germany as traitors who put German soldiers at risk. Widows of the resistors were denied government pensions while widows of Gestapo received theirs. East Germany, on the other hand, wanted to portray all resistors as Communists motivated by the class struggle.

I highly recommend this book (with its flaws) to anyone who is unfamiliar with the story of German resistance. Nelson also mentions a couple movies, The Murderers Are Among Us, which is available on Amazon and Netflix, and a documentary, Die Rote Kapelle by Stephen Roloff, which is not, but should be. Roloff is the son of one of the members of the Red Orchestra.½