A memorial to National Socialist warriors in Washington DC

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Jim Mathias
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A memorial to National Socialist warriors in Washington DC

Post by Jim Mathias » Fri Jun 23, 2017 11:19 pm

http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/six-na ... gnoutFound here:
A team of power company workers were trudging through a seldom-visited thicket in Southwest Washington when they spotted something odd in a ditch.

Protruding from the grass was a rectangular slab of granite.
They looked closer, and an inscription on the surface came into focus. What they saw astonished them.

It was a memorial. In honor of Nazi spies. On U.S. government property.

“In memory of agents of the German Abwehr,” the engraving began, “executed August 8, 1942.”

Below that were six names and below those was another cryptic line: “Donated by the N.S.W.P.P.”

News of the unsettling discovery soon reached Jim Rosenstock, who worked in resource management for the National Park Service and also happened to be a local history buff. He was curious, but also skeptical. How could someone have planted such an item there? And why? And — above all — who?

Rosenstock needed to see it for himself so he, too, made the hike into Blue Plains, a woody area known best for a wastewater treatment plant and an abundance of mosquitoes. And that’s when he saw the stone.

“I kind of started doing a little bit of my own research,” Rosenstock recalled of that day in 2006 when he began to help unravel an only-in-Washington mystery, complete with World War II espionage, nationwide panic, a mass electrocution, J. Edgar Hoover chicanery, white supremacists, classic federal bureaucracy and a U.S. Supreme Court case that played a significant role in America’s modern war on terror.

***

For decades, very few people in Washington, or elsewhere, knew of the stone’s existence. It wasn’t a secret so much as something that just never got out — remarkable in a town famous for its leaks.

Only when a former Park Police detective mentioned it in passing to a Washington Post reporter, then provided photographic evidence, did anyone ask the Park Service about it.

A spokeswoman referred the Post to the now-retired Rosenstock, because perhaps no one has thought more about the 31-by-26-by-8-inch object than he has.

At the start of World War II, Rosenstock discovered when he began his research, Adolf Hitler had been determined to show the world just how susceptible America was to a Nazi attack, so he ordered his military to devise a plan.

The high command, according to a 2002 Post story, recruited eight Germans for the mission. In teams of four, the men were loaded onto a pair of U-boats, one destined for Jacksonville and the other for a beach near the tip of Long Island.

On June 13, 1942, the New York group reached shore — and was almost immediately discovered by an unarmed Coast Guardsman on foot patrol. The men escaped, but by morning, the Coast Guard had unearthed the Germans’ buried supplies: fuses, pre-made bombs and four crates of TNT.

That wouldn’t have mattered to their leader, George John Dasch, who hadn’t intended to wreak devastation on Hitler’s behalf anyway. When the group reached New York City, he and a comrade decided to turn the others in, so Dasch phoned the FBI.

Four days later, he took the $82,000 he’d been given for the operation — more than $1 million in today’s money — and boarded a train for Washington. There, he met with FBI agents, whom he expected to welcome him as a hero.

They didn’t.

J. Edgar Hoover, the infamous head of the bureau, recognized an opportunity. In late June, with all eight men caught, Hoover announced their capture in New York — and claimed credit for his agency.

He made no mention of Dasch.

“The country went wild,” Francis Biddle, then attorney general, later wrote in a memoir.

Hundreds of German aliens were rounded up and others, suspected of spying, were arrested. The Justice Department banned German and Italian barbers, servers and busboys from Washington’s hotels and restaurants because three of the would-be saboteurs had worked as waiters in America.
Ignoring due process, President Franklin Roosevelt ordered that the men be tried in secret before a military commission — a tactic, then backed by the U.S. Supreme Court, that President George W. Bush would replicate 59 years later in his directive that Guantanamo Bay detainees be judged in a similar fashion.

In mid-summer 1942, seven U.S. Army generals found all eight men guilty but left their punishment to the president. He sentenced six to death and two, including Dasch, to lengthy prison terms, though both were deported after the war.

The electrocutions began at 12:01 p.m. on Aug. 8. By 1:04, all six were dead.

Three days later, they were secretly buried amid a seldom-visited thicket of Southwest Washington known as Blue Plains.

***

Rosenstock quickly learned the backstory of the six Nazi spies listed on the stone, but another question remained: Who had placed it there?

The line at the bottom — referencing the “N.S.W.P.P.” — offered a clue.

Until the mid-1960s, the National Socialist White People’s Party had gone by a more familiar name: the American Nazi Party. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, the group’s founder, George Lincoln Rockwell, had given it the new title shortly before his assassination in 1967.

By the 1970s, though, the group had begun to split apart and had lost much of its relevance, leading Rosenstock to believe the Nazi memorial dates back to that time.

The party didn’t entirely cease to exist until 1983, the law center said, so the stone may had been carved more recently — though that still means it likely sat on Park Service land for more than two decades before the power company’s discovery.

For Rosenstock and his colleagues, the memorial presented a conundrum. It was deplorable, and certainly not something that belonged on public property, but none of their handbooks suggested how to deal with a 200-plus pound monument to Nazis installed on public land by white supremacists.

Plus, the Park Service couldn’t do anything until they were sure it hadn’t been placed atop someone’s bones.

What if, they wondered, the Nazis were buried beneath it?

The Park Service scoured World War II-era records for details on their bodies, but researchers could find nothing that provided a definitive answer. Old maps showed conflicting spots, including one beneath a building.

“The location is a little bit confusing,” he said, “and I think deliberately so.”

Rosenstock suspected that whoever disposed of the spies’ bodies didn’t want them found.

What he did learn, though, is that no one was buried beneath the stone because a creek had run through that area in the 1940s.

Still, the Park Service hadn’t decided what should be done.

“It was an illegal monument,” Rosenstock said. “And we certainly did not want to be hosting a site for midnight rituals on Hitler’s birthday.”

That was a legitimate concern. Rosenstock once found deer bones arranged atop the memorial. Others had found candles around it and noticed that it was regularly cleaned.

“At least one fellow in the Park Service suggested breaking it up with sledge hammers and throwing it in the river,” he recalled. “It’s not the argument that historic preservationists make.”

The memorial remained intact.

In 2010, under the direction of a museum curator, a fork lift exhumed the granite block and lowered it into a truck.

The stone, tagged OXCO-475, now spends its days beneath a protective blanket on a shelf at a storage facility in suburban Maryland. Park Service staff asked that the Post be no more specific than that because, though they didn’t mind its long-unknown story being told, they’d prefer that its exact location remain a secret.
While the article is clearly full of smears (one example is the use Jewish-invented epithets like "Nazi") and questionable facts, the Washington Post did show us long lasting evidence of what activists from the NSWPP did years ago with respect to the plaque.

Also notable was the exposure of J. Edgar Hoover as a crass careerist who took credit for the capture of Abwehr agents instead of crediting the one turncoat saboteur's surrender and betrayal of his fellows by failing to mention this fact. Two sleazy characters brought to public eye made reading this article worthwhile.
Activism materials available! ===> Contact me via PM to obtain quantities of the "Send Them Back", "NA Health Warning #1 +#2+#3" stickers, and any fliers listed in the Alliance website's flier webpage.

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Wade Hampton III
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Re: A memorial to National Socialist warriors in Washington

Post by Wade Hampton III » Fri Jun 23, 2017 11:36 pm

Amazing. After all of these years. Simply amazing!

Volker Zorn
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Re: A memorial to National Socialist warriors in Washington

Post by Volker Zorn » Sat Jun 24, 2017 9:14 pm

This is not the first time I have seen a news report on the memorial stone to the six executed German agents. A story on the stone pops up every 10 years or so. It is always described in terms of mystery and hidden intrigue, etc.

Too bad the reporters did not give me a phone call or send me an email: I could have dispelled the "mystery" of the stone for them in about 10 seconds.

The stone was placed in the Blue Plains field in Washington, DC, in September, 1981, by the National Socialist White People's Party. The project was undertaken on the initiative of the Indianapolis Unit of the party, which placed it in the Blue Plains field with the assistance of members of the NSWPP's national headquarters (located in nearby Arlington, Virginia).

A party official telehoned the government agency in control of the site in advance. We asked for permission to place a memorial stone in the pauper's grave section of the area, and to hold a brief ceremony. We were not formally given permission, but were told that there was nothing in government regulations that prohibited our plans. We took that as a "yes."

The following article appeared in the September-October 1981 issue of the NS BULLETIN (Number 280), which was the newsletter of the NSWPP.
Party Comrades Donate Monument
To Murdered Wartime National Socialists


In NS BULLETIN 271 it was reported that Indianapolis Comrade Richard Sharp had discovered that the bodies of six German National Socialists murdered by the Roosevelt government in 1942 were still lying in a pauper's grave in the Washington, DC, city dump. The six were members of the German-American Bund, and one was a US citizen. They were executed as members of the German intelligence service, the Abwehr, after some legal irregularities.

After trying unsuccessfully to get the West German treason regime to move the bodies to a more suitable gravesite - or at least mark the location of their burial appropriately - Comrade Sharp took matters into his own hands.

A special monument to honor these fallen heroes was purchased with money raised by the Indianpolis Unit, and in September Comrades Richard Sharp and Clayton Roots, with the help of comrades from the National Headquarters area, placed a monument at the location of their burial which reads:

In Memory of
Agents of the German Abwehr
Executed August 8, 1942
Herbert Hans Haupt
Heinrich Harm Heinck
Edward John Kerling
Herman Otto Neubauer
Richard Quirn
Werner Thiel
Donated by the NSWPP

The monument cost the comrades some $500, excluding transportation. Anyone wishing to send a donation to the unit to offset the expenses incurred in the course of the project should write to the address listed elsewhere on this issue of the NS BULLETIN.
Claims by the government that it knew nothing about the memorial stone are disingenuous, at best: not only were they informed of our plans to lay the stone in advance, but workers from the Blue Plains facility observed the NS ceremony as it took place from a distance.

After the stone was laid, it was quickly forgotten, although I recall that some comrades went down to check on it on one occasion later on, and reported that it was still intact and in good condition.

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Jim Mathias
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Re: A memorial to National Socialist warriors in Washington

Post by Jim Mathias » Sun Jun 25, 2017 12:17 am

Volker Zorn wrote:Too bad the reporters did not give me a phone call or send me an email: I could have dispelled the "mystery" of the stone for them in about 10 seconds.

A party official telehoned the government agency in control of the site in advance. We asked for permission to place a memorial stone in the pauper's grave section of the area, and to hold a brief ceremony. We were not formally given permission, but were told that there was nothing in government regulations that prohibited our plans. We took that as a "yes."
Hopefully the next time a story like this is done on the memorial they will call or email you, Sir. From time to time you may want to update them with your contact information as a knowledgeable source of information on the history here. ;)

Your service in being a part of placing the memorial there is appreciated greatly!
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