San Francisco Chronicle newspaper reports the death of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a great President of the United States of America, in peace and in war.  Roosevelt's death, in the dying days of the war, occasioned celebration among the Nazi leadership, who thought that this might have triggered a split in the western Alliance  in the face of what (from their viewpoint) was an increasingly obvious Soviet threat to the West.  They were deluded on this point - by this time, the Western powers, as democracies, had no way, politically,  of doing an about-face to assist the Germans in resistance to the Soviets.  In any event, there was no enthusiasm at all among the Western powers for the idea of a new  war in Eastern Europe against "former" ally, the Soviet  Union, which would obviously be a formidable opponent.  That having been said, when it came to the prospect of the Soviets as a new opponent to the West, there, at least, the Nazis had a point ... Best regards, JR.

Death of a great man.

Humorous US postcard commenting on the German's difficulties in Russia.  Best regards, JR.

Bear essentials ...

"Europe against Bolshevism", a poster part of the ongoing campaign of the German authorities to raise enthusiasm and recruits from the populations of occupied western European states for their "crusade in the East".  This example is specifically targeted at the French; variants existed for use in other occupied states.  This call to arms met with a substantial response from anti-Communists in the West.  Substantial numbers of volunteers answered this call, almost always on a purely voluntary basis, almost always subject to a guarantee (always honoured) that these recruits would be employed in fighting the Soviets only.  The situation of "volunteers" to German formations in the East was quite different; there, substantial recourse was had to conscription in various forms, especially when it came to local ethnic Germans, to fill out the ranks of supposedly "volunteer" units.

This "Nazi heritage" is an uncomfortable legacy of the war in a number of west European countries, for understandable reasons.  The discomfort is enhanced for those who are aware of the matter by the fact that several of the "founding fathers" of the present European Union had distinctly spotty records when it came to pro-Nazi wartime activities.  This is not to say that the EU is National Socialist in any direct way; it is, however, approaching the point of becoming a totalitarian "consultative bureaucracy", and recent accessions to the Union, not to mention recent developments in the Ukraine, suggest to some that the EU has an agenda of bringing eastern Europe under its sway by substituting a particular brand of politics and diplomacy for panzers.  One of the people so convinced would appear to be Vladimir Putin and, up to a point at least, it is hard to deny that he may have a point ... Yours from under the desk, JR.