I’m reading about Hitler’s intelligence agencies. Can’t imagine why

Posted on May 3, 2025 by Naomi

Re-reading, actually, the exhaustive history of Hitler’s intelligence operations, Hitler’s Spies: German Military Intelligence In World War II, by David Kahn.

Exhaustive it may be, but Kahn was such a terrific storyteller the book reads like the complex thriller it is.

Since my copy is hard cover, I’m assuming I bought it and first read it in 1978 when it was published. What caused me to take it down (and dust it off, literally — I’m a lousy and lazy housekeeper) from my WWII shelves is what’s going on here, now, in 2025.

While a lot of highly informed and intelligent people were warning us as early as 2017 about the advent of a Hitler-type of fascism, I was sticking to my guns. So to speak. And my guns were saying, no, Trump is not Hitler and his sort of tyranny can’t happen here because we have a history of rejecting tyranny in many forms. (And Trump is stupid.) We were founded in rebellion and I think we’ve never entirely lost that part of the national character, even if it’s declined somewhat into a multifarious kvetch about whatever’s going on.

The criticism of our elected and selected higher-ups from some constituency or another never lets up. We keep our eyes fixed on each and every imperfection and complain about them, loudly. (And Trump is stupid.)

Despite the results of the previous election, I’ve not relinquished my view that we will not drop off the cliff into fascism, and whenever someone I’m talking to says, “This country is stupid,” or “crazy,” I say, “Well, some of the country but not even half of it.” (And Trump is stupid.)

But the speed and irrationality of the acts of destruction continue to be both shocking and bad horror-movie-quality. I’m not going to enumerate the awful things Trump and Elon’s berserkers have done, except to re-emphasize they make no sense in any form of reality. What does make sense is the slew of lawsuits defending our Constitution, and the judges who decide them. The Terrible-Two Trump may make it feel slow, but in reality it’s remarkably fast.

Trump (who is stupid) exists within the chaos of his intimate White House. It’s relentlessly anti-reality and tragi-comically chaotic. To me, it seems psychotic, a bunch of weird people of outstanding mediocrity — and that’s being kind. Plus, it’s relatively small, and shrinking as responsible and law-abiding career civil servants depart.

So if it isn’t Hitlerian fascism, what is it? Pocket-pretend Hitlerian fascism, without the despotic rigor (and instantaneous death penalty) that could make it effective. If any entity drops off the cliff, it’ll be Trump’s lunatics, not this country.

Ergo, I’m re-reading Hitler history to be reminded of how fascism actually worked, and didn’t.

In an early chapter, “The Institutions of Control,” Kahn provides a meticulous description of how Hitler’s showy (the uniforms!), personalized paramilitary forces were invented and who came to power within them. There is a two-page chart entitled “Principal Agencies of German Foreign Intelligence at End of 1943,” squeezed into small print to accomodate the mind-boggling number of branches, and directors of these branches, each of which grew arms and legs. (The branches; the directors presumably already had arms and legs.)

Some of the directors wound up commanding a bunch of offices (like Marco Rubio, maybe?). But at the top, in large bold letters, it reads “ADOLF HITLER, Führer of the Nazi Party and Commander in Chief, Armed Forces.” Just so you don’t wander through the hundreds of power bases and think you’ve gotten to the gist of anything.

Here’s how Kahn summarizes it:

This gigantic, jerry-built apparatus, Germany’s intelligence system, consisting of numerous uncoordinated and often competing mechanisms, sucked up torrents of information–some of it duplicated–through its remote and multiform termini. Each unit refined its information, passing it either through special evaluating agencies, as with the military or through the general bureaucracy, as with the Foreign Office. Then the jealous ministers, the arrogant party officials, the proud warlords of the high commands all scrambled to bring their tidbits to the Führer.

Hitler wanted it that way. The disunity and the rivalries remitted control of the intelligence apparatus to him. And, as the only person with access to all intelligence, he could judge it as he alone saw fit. He would not readily abdicate these powers to anyone else, and he never did. But this afflicted German intelligence with two fatal flaws: inefficiency, and subjugation to a madman.

This does sounds familiar: Inefficiency and subjugation to a madman. (But a stupid and incompetent madman.)

 

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Teslaspotting

Posted on May 1, 2025 by Naomi

The first Tesla I ever saw was parked on a street near City Hall in lower Manhattan. It was orange, I think, and striking enough in design so that passersby like me stopped to look at it. “Is that a Tesla?” we murmured, and yes, it was.

That was a long, long time ago. Nowadays, all sorts of once-striking (and still strikingly expensive) cars have taken the aerodynamic design path of regular old…cars. So when I saw a Tesla parked on a block near my house, I failed immediately to identify it. It looked like any old car.

Now, I am the opposite of a car maven. Indeed, the only reason I know why all these expensive cars look like whatever cars (aerodynamic design) is because my brother is a car maven. Unlike me, he has owned cars and several subscriptions to car magazines, so when he answers my question (“Why are these cars no different from all other cars?”), I trust his answer.

If, on occasion, I wish to identify a car I see, maybe because it looks like every other car but seems somewhat more substantial, I’m left to spot the emblem, or whatever that thing is called that is usually on the nose of the car (or whatever the “nose” is called in automotive lingo). So although the body of the car could be anything at all, I am able to ID a BMW, a Mercedes, an Audi, a Porsche. Et alii.

(Speaking of Porsche, why did they re-design its body to look like a Nissan, say? Wasn’t Porsche fast enough before it went whole hog into this aerodynamic copycat thing? BMW? Not fast enough until it started to look like a Suburu? And, PS, my knowledge of cars is so vacuous, I had to ask Perplexity how to spell “Suburu.” Which is actually “Subaru.” Thank you.)

Back to Tesla. I’ve come to notice that, unlike the other expensive cars, Tesla does not have its name on the cars, as do BMW and Mercedes, et alii. They have emblems AND names on their cars. But Tesla? No.

So, as I was walking on 74th Street a few weeks ago, I saw a car and for some reason wondered if it was a Tesla, but without the name on the car, I did not know. Because I hadn’t yet been able to identify the unassertive emblem. (It is unassertive; it could be a Kia emblem, for all I know. Which isn’t much, as I’ve already mentioned.)

Hm, I thought, and continued walking.

Now here’s the weird thing. Four more parked cars onward, there was another one of those cars with an emblem I couldn’t identify, but this one had a small plaque on its rear end that read something along the lines of “Anti-Elon Tesla club.” It was near enough to the emblem so I could mentally connect the two. So now I know what a Tesla emblem looks like.

Two Teslas on one Upper West Side block? Parked on the street?

But that isn’t quite my point. Which is, welding on a small plaque announcing you love your Tesla but not its infamous chief is apparently the 2025 version of the 1970’s hand-written signs pasted on the inside of car windows: “No radio, no valuables.” That is, “Please please do not break into my car because you won’t get anything!”

I’m not sure whether that pleading notice worked in the 1970s but I’m fairly sure the Elon-hating Tesla sign isn’t going to do anything in New York City. Except to cause a New Yorker walking by to laugh out loud, derisively.

Pitiful. Yet neither car had a scratch on it. What does this mean? We NYers are too sardonic to key Elon’s cars. (Our preference is to key voodoo dolls that look like Elon.)

 

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What Senator Chris Van Hollen did echoes a remarkable 80-year-old happening

Posted on April 24, 2025 by Naomi

Chris Van Hollen is an impressive guy and a very smart one.

What he did by going to that El Salvador prison and insisting on seeing Kilmar, was a highly effective way to protect Kilmar, to keep him alive. And on April 21, four congresspeople went to El Salvador to amplify Van Hollen’s efforts.

Now, in 2025, with our high-profile social media and news media, these humane moves by politicians have been broadcast to the world, greatly expanding the protective intentions of these visits. They say,”These are our people. You are criminally detaining them and the world knows it. We will be bringing them home. Keep them safe until we do.”

Slightly more than eighty years ago, what our good congresspeople are doing here was done by a group of unheralded Danes who defied the Nazi occupation of Denmark to save their vulnerable countrymen, Danish Jews.

After the Danes helped 99 percent of Danish Jews escape a Gestapo round-up and interrment in Theresienstadt, a Nazi concentration camp in Czechoslovakia, ordinary Danish citizens did not forget the 470 people who had been captured by the Gestapo.

In 1944, the year after that mass rescue, Danish grassroots helpers used the postal service to mail packages of food and other necessities to Danes at Theresienstadt. Later that year, the Swedish Red Cross took over responsibility for getting sustenance into the concentration camp.

Throughout the rest of the war, Danish and Swedish officials insisted on receiving frequent reports about the condition of the imprisoned people. This aggressive attention was one major reason why perhaps only one of the Danish prisoners was transferred to a Nazi extermination camp. All but fifty elderly people survived Theresienstadt.

A month before the war was officially over, Swedish diplomat Folke Bernadotte and the Swedish Red Cross drove buses to Theresienstadt, pulled thousands of inmates, including some four-hundred and twenty Danish Jews, out of the camp and took them to Sweden.

In essence, this is what Senator Van Hollen and Democratic members of the U.S. Congress have done and plan to continue doing: make sure the CECOT prisoners are all right and draw the attention of the world to the crimes Trump’s goon squad, clearly modeled after the Gestapo, is inflicting on the most vulnerable of us.

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