Word: waffen
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...ller was born in 1953 in the village of Nitzkydorf, Romania. Europe's agonizing political history was already in her DNA: her father had served in the Waffen SS, the crack combat troops of the Nazi Party, and after the war her mother spent five years in a Soviet work camp. Müller was a member of Romania's German-speaking minority - almost no one in Nitzkydorf spoke anything else. This paradoxical sense that even in her homeland, she was in exile, would have a profound effect on her work...
...fact, the current round of attention could work in the far right's favor, says Hofer. Haider was a divisive figure who once referred to the members of Nazi Germany's Waffen SS as deserving of as much honor as any German soldier, and who praised Hitler's employment policies. But the emotion and media frenzy around his death, which Hofer compares to England's trauma over the passing of Princess Diana, has distracted people from Haider's far-right legacy. Haider's party will contest elections in the province of Carinthia next spring. Few observers doubt that the party...
...attempted (unsuccessfully) to prevent Austria from joining the European Union in the 1990s. In a country reluctant to acknowledge its role in Nazi atrocities carried out during the Second World War, he also repeatedly hinted that Hitler was not all bad: at one point he said that the Waffen S.S., the unit implicated in some of the worst crimes of the Holocaust, was "part of the Wehrmacht (German Army) and thus deserves all the honor and respect of the army in public life." In interviews, including with TIME, the blue-eyed lawyer adamantly denied any sympathy with Hitler's ideas...
...when Grass confessed that, as a teenager in the closing months of World War II, he had joined the Waffen SS, Walesa was a prominent critic, demanding that the German writer be stripped of his honorary citizenship of the city. Now, a year later, Grass is being welcomed back to Gdansk with a series of performances, readings and panel discussions to mark his 80th birthday - and Walesa is among those welcoming...
...thin air. I, just like him, could do no more than dream of delectable chewables, constrained as I was to mush for weeks. And there we bonded. Sure, he was a Nazi soldier, a job he had volunteered for. And yeah, he was a member of the Waffen SS. But after sharing my hunger, he was so human to me that, if he were before me, I would have readily forgiven him. This intensely self-critical, self-reflective stranger who is so beleaguered by shame, this art stamp collector, stonemason, fledgling artist, eventual writer, master dancer, lover, husband...