Received from Muqata Blog Reader in Germany, Sebastian M.Today, 10.000 people demonstrated against Israel here in my hometown Duisburg (Germany) and to express their solidarity with Hamas. So, my girlfriend and me put two Israel flags out of the windows of our flat in the 3rd floor. During the demonstration which went through our street the police broke into our flat and removed the flag of Israel. The statement of the police was to de-escalate the situation, because many youth demonstrators were on the brink of breaking into our apartment house. Before this they threw snowballs, knifes and stones against our windows and the complete building. We both were standing on the other side of the street and were shocked by seeing a police officer standing in our bedroom and opening the window to get the flag....
In January 2004 the British National Archive released "the first of five million World War II aerial reconnaissance photographs taken over Europe by the RAF." I posted two of them on my blog.
I wonder what happened to those five million photographs. They certainly don't seem to have made much of an impression.

Those little ants you see marching in a line are attending roll call at Auschwitz. Aerial photo taken by Britain's Royal Air Force, a year before the camps were liberated.
To many people, the furnaces at first seem small - perhaps too small to have been able to burn the 1.5 million people who are said to have died at Auschwitz-Birkenau. Some holocaust-deniers have stated that the numbers of dead must have been overestimated, and even that the furnaces were not crematoria at all, but bread ovens.However, when they were put on trial for war crimes after the war, the German firm of Topf und Söhne confirmed that - burning two or three corpses at a time, together with four furnaces at Birkenau - the crematoria at Auschwitz had the capacity to burn 4,576 corpses a day (1.7 million a year). And their defence was not that the furnaces were bread ovens, or even standard a crematorium, but that it was not illegal to burn corpses - only to kill them in the first place.

Posted by: scp | Tuesday, 13 January 2009 at 08:33 AM