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The Washington State Library and the Washington Talking Book & Braille Library in Seattle are facing layoffs and severe cuts to services after lawmakers declined to include a $6.7 million lifeline in the state budget this session.
The libraries delivered notices to 47 employees, with plans to lay off those positions by June 30, the secretary of state’s office said in a news release Monday. That could lead to full closure to the public at the Braille library, which provides resources for seeing-impaired individuals, and the state library in Tumwater, Thurston County, a vital resource for researchers and historians.
Washington State Librarian Sara Jones said that the notices have already led to highly trained staff members looking to leave and find new jobs.
“We haven’t shut any doors yet, but I think that’s coming pretty soon,” Jones said.
Jones added that the state library will try “every avenue,” such as finding funding from donors, to fill the hole, but that she doesn’t expect to raise enough to cover the shortfall.
“Libraries are cornerstones of civic life and education,” Jones said. “Without stable funding, we risk denying communities access to the information, literacy tools and resources they depend on.”
The state library is one of many agencies to see cuts to services and programs as the result of a projected multibillion-dollar deficit over the next four years that state budget writers spent months trying to balance.
The decision to not include the library’s funding request “was intentional in the sense that we had a lot of needs that we weren’t able to fund,” said House Majority Leader Joe Fitzgibbon, D-West Seattle, who sits on the House Appropriations Committee. He acknowledged there were many requests not fulfilled in the budget this time around.
Fitzgibbon added that local libraries that rely on the resources from the state library will also be at risk, and said he is also concerned about those impacts.
Sen. Derek Stanford, D-Bothell, vice chair of the Senate Ways and Means Committee, said in an email that the budget assumes the signing of House Bill 1207 by Gov. Bob Ferguson, which Stanford said would cover a majority of the secretary of state’s budget request for state library services.
The bill adds a filing fee for legal documents. It is unclear whether Ferguson will sign the bill into law.
The state library has existed in some form since 1855, decades before statehood. Secretary of State Steve Hobbs said in a news release that it was “heartbreaking and distressing to witness the near elimination” of the library, and noted that the state library hosts a collection of research materials such as a “one-of-a-kind literary collection dedicated to our region and history,” a collection of Washington newspapers, and a collection of state and federal publications.
The library also provides subscriptions to genealogy and newspaper databases, but those would be discontinued with the cuts. The acquisition of new materials would be limited.
Jones also said that resources like books and newspapers are at the risk of deteriorating without human intervention.
The Braille library in Seattle, which is the state’s only accessible library for those who are seeing-impaired, is at risk without funding too, which could result in fewer Braille and audio materials being produced, in addition to closure of the facility.
In addition to the cut in state funding, there is uncertainty around federal dollars supporting the state library.
Services and positions at the Braille library are funded through state and federal dollars, while positions and services at the state’s central library are funded through the general fund as well as through document recording fees collected when people sell or buy a house or refinance their home.
The Washington State Library manages the federal dollars.
Services at the state library and the Braille library were threatened earlier this year after Jones was notified that federal funds from the Institute of Museum and Library Services’ “Grants to States” program had been eliminated by the Trump administration. Those funds have since been restored, but federally- and state-funded library employees are still potentially facing layoffs at the end of September because of state cuts."
Journalists accurately reported that the führer was a “Little Man” whom the whole world was laughing at. It didn’t matter.
The author of this piece as presented in the Atlantic Magazine 11 May 2025
Timothy W. Ryback is a historian and director of the Institute for Historical Justice and Reconciliation in The Hague. He is the author of several books on Hitler’s Germany, most recently Takeover: Hitler’s Final Rise to Power. (Author photo by Anne de Henning)
"One of the greatest journalistic misapprehensions of all time was made by one of the greatest journalists of all time. In December 1931, the legendary American reporter Dorothy Thompson secured an interview with Adolf Hitler, whose National Socialist party had recently surged in the polls, bringing him from the fringe of German politics to the cusp of political power.
“When I walked into Adolf Hitler’s room, I was convinced that I was meeting the future dictator of Germany,” Thompson recalled afterward. “In something like 50 seconds, I was quite sure he was not. It took just about that time to measure the startling insignificance of this man who has set the world agog.” Within a year, Hitler was chancellor.
We have come to view Hitler’s path to the chancellorship, and ultimately to dictatorship, as inexorable, and Hitler himself as a demonic force of human nature who defied every law of political gravity—not as the man of “startling insignificance” Thompson encountered in the second-floor corner office of the Brown House, the Nazi Party headquarters in Munich, that day. But Thompson was hardly alone in her assessment. Much of the German press, most international correspondents, and many political observers—along with a majority of ordinary Germans—drew similar conclusions about the Nazi leader. Which brings up the question: How did so many reporters and other contemporary observers get Hitler so wrong?
Few public figures have provided as easy a target for ridicule and disparagement as Adolf Hitler. He was a high-school dropout, a failed artist, and a frontline soldier who never made it beyond the rank of corporal. He was a rabid anti-Semite who did not himself possess the Aryan credentials he demanded of his followers. His father had changed the family name from Schickelgruber. “Heil Schickelgruber!” was a running joke in the Weimar years. But even the name Hitler was cause for ridicule. Hitler can be translated as “man from the hut” and appears in various iterations: Hiedler, Hietler, Hüttler, Hittler, all of which convey a sense of quaint southern rusticism, especially to the north-German ear. “Hüttler? Hüttler?” the left-wing newspaper Vorwärts wrote in December 1932, spoofing Hitler’s name. “It sounds so funny.”
Even in Bavaria, where Hitler had launched his political career, he was more disdained than feared. In March 1922, when Hitler was circulating on the right-wing fringe of Munich’s beer-hall political scene, Bavaria’s state interior minister considered deporting him to his native Austria, only to be allegedly told by a Social Democratic colleague that the National Socialist leader was a “comical figure” who would soon “be hurtled back into the insignificance from which he originally came.”
To run for political office in Germany, Hitler needed to obtain German citizenship. His repeated attempts to do this were subjected to public ridicule. In 1930, after the Bavarians refused Hitler citizenship because of his felony conviction for his failed Beer Hall Putsch of 1923, Wilhelm Frick, the first National Socialist to secure a senior post in government, arranged for Hitler to be appointed to a position that automatically conferred German citizenship—police commissioner in the little Thuringian village of Hildburghausen. Hitler traveled to this hinterland village, swore an oath, and signed an affidavit before recognizing, belatedly, the paltry nature of the position. Returning to Munich, Hitler burned his appointment papers and instructed Frick to do the same. But by then it was too late—journalists had gotten wind of this.
he opposition press had a field day. Hitler was hailed as the “Gendarme of Hildburghausen.” “We do not wish to disparage the honorable position of a gendarmerie commissioner,” the Berlin newspaper Vossische Zeitung editorialized, “but the absurdity lies in the outspoken peacock vanity of the ruler of the Brown House, as if he really wanted to command seven gendarmes and three police officers.” It got worse: “As of yesterday, all of Europe is laughing about Adolf Hitler,” reported Tempo,another Berlin paper. And the laughter wasn’t coming just from Europe: “The whole world is laughing about Gendarme Hitler,” the Social Democratic newspaper Das Volk reported. As The New York Times summed things up, Hitler’s fumbling attempt at this backwoods path to German citizenship and political power had generated “more merriment than indignation in political circles.”
Hitler’s second attempt at securing German citizenship was also facilitated by Wilhelm Frick. This effort—being appointed a mid-level civil servant in the state of Braunschweig—was successfully consummated, but it turned farcical nonetheless. As Hitler entered the room in Braunschweig where he was to take his oath of office, he reportedly tripped on the carpet, leaving his entourage frozen awkwardly in stiff-armed Nazi salutes while he stumbled headlong into the room. One observer compared it to “Napoleon appearing on the world stage in his underwear.” The newspaper Germania saw the scene as a “constitutional comedy” ready-made for the theater.
“Hitler Appointed Civil Servant,” declared the headline of a Vorwärts article,which noted that if Hitler failed in his electoral bid for the presidency, he could safely withdraw to Braunschweig, with his annual salary of 5,238 reichsmarks (about $27,350 today), and serve out his time as a “diligent” public servant until his mandatory retirement, at age 65, in 1954.
Hitler acquired German citizenship on Friday, February 26, 1932. The following day he announced his candidacy for president, setting the stage for a battle with Paul von Hindenburg, the 84-year-old field marshal and incumbent German president. One campaign poster showed Hindenburg as Atlas bearing the world on his shoulders alongside a diminutive caricature of Hitler jumping up and down in his brown shirt and screaming, “Ich bin noch viel starker!”—“I am so much stronger!” In April, Hindenburg crushed Hitler by 6 million votes. Hitler had his chief legal counsel, Hans Frank, go to court to have the election results overturned, claiming that there had been irregularities by state officials and that Hitler had been unfairly disadvantaged by not being permitted to speak on the radio. The presiding judge chided Frank for wasting the court’s time and dismissed the case, observing that 6 million votes was too large a margin for any of Hitler’s claims to have made a difference.
Undeterred, Hitler made a bid for the chancellorship in August of that year, after Reichstag elections the preceding month in which the National Socialists won 37 percent of the vote. Arguing that this gave his party the largest share of a potential conservative coalition, Hitler demanded absolute power. Hindenburg rejected the idea out of hand, telling Hitler that he would never entrust the chancellorship to a man who was so divisive, hate-filled, and unwilling to compromise. Konrad Heiden, a regular contributor to Frankfurter Zeitung, was one of the most astute political observers of the day. “The entire German nation watched as Hitler ascended the stairs to power,” Heiden later wrote. “The entire nation watched as Hitler went flying back down those same stairs.”
In the highly polarized media landscape of the Weimar Republic, Hitler could expect little accommodation in the Social Democratic Vorwärts or the Communist newspaper, Die Rote Fahne, or even in centrist newspapers such as Vossische Zeitung and Frankfurter Zeitung. But the 1,600 conservative newspapers controlled by the right-wing media mogul Alfred Hugenbergprovided at best backhanded support. Although Hugenberg’s papers praised Hitler for his belligerent nationalism and his desire to destroy democracy, they lamented his refusal to enter into a coalition government as politically misguided. Hitler dismissed the critique, saying he did not need the “golden rain” of Hugenberg’s media empire.
Hitler found favorable media coverage restricted to reprints of his speeches in the Volkischer Beobachter, the Nazi Party paper published in Munich, and Der Angriff, the Nazi Party paper published in Berlin. To extend his reach, Hitler leased Lufthansa passenger planes and crisscrossed the country, speaking at as many as five rallies in a single day, covering an estimated 40,000 miles in the course of campaigning in the various national elections of 1932. And to break out of the National Socialist echo chamber, Hitler had earlier tried turning to the foreign press.
For help with this, he relied on Ernst “Putzi” Hanfstaengl, who had attended Harvard in the early 1900s and called on the connections he had made there for help in establishing a presence for the führer in the international press. In December 1931, Hanfstaengl had stage-managed an international press conference for Hitler at the Hotel Kaiserhof, across the street from the chancellery. “Adolf Hitler sat in Berlin giving press interviews as though he were already Chief of State,” Time magazine reported. Hanfstaengl scheduled a second press conference for the following week, expressly for British and American journalists. The event was canceled amid concerns that the government would conduct a police raid to prevent a repeat of the previous week’s presumptuous affront. As a substitute, Hanfstaengl arranged for a live broadcast with CBS radio, during which Hitler would address the American people. But that address, in turn, was scuttled when the German postmaster general denied Hitler access to the necessary state-owned radio cables. Paris-Midi wrote of “les tribulations héroï-comiques” of Hitler’s efforts to reach the broader public. (Hitler’s planned speech finally reached an American audience when William Randolph Hearst’s New York American published it, on December 13, 1931.)
Hanfstaengl also arranged the interview with Dorothy Thompson. During the interview, the chain-smoking Thompson observed Hitler’s rants with bemused detachment. After the interview, Hitler said, “Don’t ever bring me anyone like that again, Hanfstaengl!” Thompson, who would subsequently be banished from Germany—and who incidentally was married to the Nobel laureate Sinclair Lewis, who four years later would publish It Can’t Happen Here, a novel about the rise of a fascist dictator in America—went on to describe that encounter for Cosmopolitan. “He is inconsequent and voluble, ill-poised, insecure,” she wrote. “He is the very prototype of the Little Man.”
Hitler in the state of Braunschweig, where he would be appointed to a position as a mid-level civil servant in order to gain German citizenship. (Ann Ronan Pictures / Print Collector / Getty)
That same month, Harold Callender, a correspondent for The New York Times, also interviewed Hitler in his Brown House office, in Munich. Like Thompson, Callender watched with amusement as Hitler “rose from his chair, walked about the room, sat upon the table, but was never at rest,” making “nervous gestures” and all the time speaking with rhetorical fury, only occasionally “checking his rapid flow of speech to make sure his words were carefully noted.”
In response to Callender’s question about whether the National Socialists would seek power by democratic means or if he planned to “do away with parliamentary government,” Hitler replied that he planned to win power via constitutionally approved means—and then to revise the constitution and the entire structure of government in a way that “suits our purposes and will give us the power to conquer communism and the pest of Marxism. The present State, with its present constitution, is not in a position to do this.” Later in the interview, Hitler said, “Democratic theories and admonitions do not suffice to resist a force which is motivated not by belief in democracy but by bloody brutality.” If America had as many Communists and “Social Democratic Marxists” in its midst as Germany did, he went on, it would surely adopt the militarized approach of the National Socialists toward stamping them out. Though he declined to explicitly admit that anti-Semitism was “a fundamental part of his party’s platform,” he averred that “the attitude of the National Socialist movement to every inhabitant of this country is determined by that inhabitant’s attitude toward Germany.”
(It should be noted that Callender’s reporting has aged better than the Times’ first article on Hitler, which in 1922 had asserted that “several reliable, well-informed sources confirmed the idea that Hitler’s anti-Semitism was not so genuine or violent as it sounded, and that he was merely using anti-Semitic propaganda as a bait to catch masses of followers.”)
On august 7, 1932, Hanfstaengl organized a press gaggle at Hitler’s alpine retreat on the Obersalzberg for the CBS-radio announcer H. V. Kaltenborn (who recalled Hanfstaengl as “one of my best friends” from Harvard; they’d taken a famous course on Goethe’s Faustus theretogether), the Associated Press Berlin bureau chief Louis Lochner, and the Hearst reporter Karl von Wiegand. Hitler subjected them to the usual diatribe and bluster. “That man is hopeless,” Wiegand said afterward. “Ask him a question and you get a speech. This whole trip was a waste of time.”
Hitler did find some sympathetic journalists. One was Sefton “Tom” Delmer, a reporter for the Daily Express, the British paper owned by the Hitler admirer Lord Beaverbrook. Delmer delivered just the sort of fawning coverage Hitler wanted. Delmer, who had attended President Hindenburg’s 80th birthday celebration and covered the launch of a zeppelin, concluded that “both of these great days faded into nothingness compared with the spontaneous and unprepared demonstration that greeted the smiling, bare-headed Herr Hitler” in early April 1932, when Hitler arrived in central Berlin to find “120,000 fanatical Berliners were waiting to hear him speak.”
Hitler rewarded Delmer for his adulatory journalism, inviting him to dinner and providing him with his direct telephone number (50-1-05-07). He also brought Delmer with him on the campaign trail. “Tomorrow morning at six o’clock I shall be in Herr Hitler’s airplane, the only newspaper representative to accompany the Fascist leader”—Delmer meant Fascist as a compliment—“on the whirlwind with which he is winding up his campaign in the presidential election,” he reported in spring 1932.
Later that year, as Hitler endured another deluge of press ridicule, he turned again to Delmer for a boost. In the November elections, the National Socialists had lost 34 Reichstag seats, and Hindenburg once again rebuffed Hitler in his quest for the chancellorship. “It was most amusing to see old Hindy take Adolf out for a ride” and “put him in a beautiful hole,” Lochner noted for the Associated Press. “Hitler had been knocking on the door to power since 1923,” Konrad Heiden observed, in the Frankfürter Zeitung, but was apparently destined to spend his political career knocking on doors he would never enter.
On the evening of November 27, 1932, Hitler summoned Delmer for an interview in the Hotel Elephant in Weimar. “Not more than four months from now and the Presidential Cabinet will have fallen and our day will have come,” Hitler told Delmer, who passed this assurance on to his Daily Expressreaders. “This was the challenging statement made to me tonight, in an exclusive interview, by Adolf Hitler,” Delmer reported, “whom all the world believes to be in the depths of despair after the defeat of his latest bid for power, but who is in reality radiant with confidence that the hour of his supreme triumph is at hand.”
Hitler’s confident bluster belied the precariousness of his position: He was at that moment in the midst of one of the toughest internal party struggles of his political career, one that led to still more press mockery.
As the party hard-liners Hermann Goering, Joseph Goebbels, and Ernst Röhm pressed for a rule-or-ruin strategy, Hitler’s more moderate lieutenants, including Gregor Strasser and Wilhelm Frick, felt the time had come for compromise and coalition building. When Strasser arranged for Hitler to meet with Kurt von Schleicher, the ultimate power broker in Berlin, to discuss potentially joining a coalition government, Hitler boarded an overnight train in Munich, only to be intercepted en route, in the town of Jena, by Göring, who boarded the train to wake Hitler at 6 o’clock in the morning and escort him off, before driving him to Weimar. Strasser and Frick were left waiting for Hitler on the platform in Berlin.
The opposition press made the most of this episode. A cartoon in Vorwärtsshows a befuddled Hitler in his nightshirt, with tousled hair and spindly legs covered with protruding hairs, being led away by Göring. A newspaper headline in the same publication described “Hitler as You’ve Never Seen Him,” a satirical reference to a recently published book of photographs by his personal photographer, Heinrich Hoffmann. The incident was dubbed Hitler’s Unterhosenszene—his “underwear scene.” A taunting rhyme made the rounds, which can be translated as “Hitler’s chancellorship is now sunk / Frick and Strasser are in a funk.” One commentator observed dryly that Hitler’s lieutenants looked so clueless only because Hitler was so clueless. To read press coverage like this was to conclude that Hitler was politically finished.
ut hitler seemed outwardly not to be bothered by the cacophony of derision and ridicule. “I have endured so much persecution and so many personal attacks during the 13 years of my struggle for Germany,” Hitler explained to then-Chancellor Fritz von Papen, who himself had previously issued scathing condemnations of the Nazi leader, “that I have learned to put the great cause I serve above myself.” The only thing that filled him with bitterness, Hitler told Papen, who was seeking a rapprochement with him, was watching establishment politicians squander the “hope, belief and trust” that the common man had placed in the country’s leadership.
While awaiting trial and execution at Nuremberg for his role in Nazi atrocities, the Hitler attorney Hans Frank observed that it had been this alleged commitment to the common man and a “greater cause” that bonded the führer to his followers. “If one is to be brutally honest, one has to admit,” Frank explained, that Hitler “said aloud what was in the minds of most people and gave clear expression to what everyone was experiencing along with a plan to address the hopes and suffering of the people.”
Frederic Sackett, the U.S. ambassador to Germany from 1930 to 1933, confirmed Frank’s assessment that the bond between Hitler and his political base seemed infrangible, no matter how ridiculous he appeared to the reporters who covered him. “The expectation frequently voiced here that failure of his policies would result in large and immediate losses of following for Hitler,” Shackett reported to the State Department, “does not take into account the blindness of great sections of his adherents.”
Hans Prinzhorn, a German psychiatrist and art historian, put this in different terms. After attending one of his beer-hall rallies, Prinzhorn observed how Hitler manipulated the crowd by dramatically modulating his voice, first rising to a “demagogic register” before falling silent, then continuing to speak in a subdued tone, “as if nothing had happened.” Prinzhorn also noted that Hitler limited himself to a small number of tropes that he repeated incessantly: the “treason of Versailles,” the danger of “Jewish influences,” his vow that “heads will roll” once he was in power.
According to Prinzhorn, Hitler’s calculated and mesmerizing combination of volume, rhythm, modulation, and repetition induced the suspension of logic and reason in rally attendees, generating an emotional response in his followers that rendered him nearly impervious to rational attack by political opponents and probing reporters. “They keep thinking they’ve hit on a crucial point when they say that Hitler’s speeches are meaningless and empty,” Prinzhorn observed of reporters. “But intellectual judgments of the Hitler experience miss the point entirely.” Ambassador Sackett called Hitler “one of the biggest showmen since P. T. Barnum,” an “indefatigable spellbinder” with an uncanny capacity for “twisting events” to suit his “fancies and purposes.”
“The country is getting tired of the Nazis,” The New York Times’ Pulitzer Prize–winning correspondent Fred Birchall reported in November 1932. Hitler’s “high water mark,” Birchall declared, had been the July Reichstag election when the National Socialists had won 37 percent of the seats. The German ambassador to Washington, D.C., affirmed this. Hitler, he told the U.S. State Department, had reached “the high point of his career,” and had damaged himself “irreparably” through continuous personal attacks on the revered President Hindenburg, his refusal to join a coalition government, and his public support for storm troopers who had savagely kicked to death a Polish immigrant in front of his mother. Hitler “had disgusted people with his defense of the murderers,” the ambassador said. Die Weltbühne, a weekly magazine, wrote, “Adolphus is the man of missed opportunities: 1932 opened a path to tremendous things. He stumbled. He fell.”
On January 24, 1933, Vorwärts published a cartoon, captioned “The New Hamlet,” which reflected the widely held view that Hitler’s political demise was at hand. Hitler stands in the graveyard of his political movement, surrounded by broken swastika headstones, pondering an effigy of his own head.
Less than a week later, Hitler was chancellor.
Hitler greets President Paul von Hindenburg on the day he was named chancellor, January 30, 1933. (Classicstock / Getty)
To return to the question: How could Dorothy Thompson and so many other experienced journalists and political observers have gotten Hitler and their assessment of the historical moment so wrong? If they did, they weren’t any more off the mark than Hitler himself. In December 1932, Hitler’s movement was bankrupt financially, politically, ideologically. The party coffers were drained, the National Socialist movement tens of millions of reichsmarks in debt. Even the loyalist ranks were plagued with infighting. Word among Hitler’s closest associates was that he had badly misplayed his cards. Hitler told Goebbels that he was contemplating suicide. Only an unlikely series of backroom deals and a frantic weekend of subterfuge in January 1933 rescued Hitler from the political brink and vaulted him to power.
The ridiculous “Little Man” that Thompson and many others had dismissed in previous years was the same person who became chancellor in 1933. The man hadn’t changed. The circumstances had. What remained consistent throughout was the demagogic emotional hold on his followers that Hans Prinzhorn had described.
From the vantage point of the present, Hitler’s rise seems overdetermined, and in some ways it was. But to have imagined in advance the series of events that brought such an unlikely figure to power would have required unusual powers of clairvoyance. As it happens, one of the few people to foresee Hitler’s ascendance was a self-proclaimed clairvoyant. Born to Jewish parents in Vienna, Herschel-Chaim Steinschneider ran a wildly popular Berlin venue called Palace of the Occult, and he held séances for Berlin’s fashionable set. Writing under the pseudonym Erik Jan Hanussen, Steinschneider published a March 1932 front-page story in the Berliner Wochenschau called “Hitler’s Future,” which predicted that Hitler would be chancellor within the year. Hitler met Steinschneider several times in the course of 1932 and reportedly invited him to his suite at the Hotel Kaiserhof in January 1933 to hold a séance. “I see victory for you,” Steinschneider told Hitler. “It cannot be stopped.” That a Jewish showman and occultist was providing spiritual guidance to the leader of the National Socialist movement was more fodder for mockery by the opposition press. “Hitler’s lucky star appears to be fading, but the cautious astrologists continue to wave the swastika banner, because one never knows,” Vorwärts reported on December 28, 1932. Vorwärts also wondered about Steinschneider’s Jewish parents, “who could never have dreamed that their son would become the promoter of an anti-Semitic Führer.”
Although Hitler’s political struggles, and the general perception of him as a figure of ridicule, almost led him to suicide in late 1932, he was well accustomed to overcoming mockery. It fueled his ambition. Not long ago, while researching my most recent book, I listened to an audio recording Hitler had produced in the summer of 1932, in advance of the Reichstag elections, part of his effort to reach beyond the audience who read the critical mainstream press. The two-disc set is titled “Hitler’s Appeal to the Nation” and is emblazoned with a swastika that spins at 78 rpm. The recording was intended to be played at rallies across the country, and sold in bookstores, music shops, and newspaper kiosks for 1.6 reichsmarks (about $8 today). Hitler speaks in a notably measured tone—no ranting, no raving, no “Sieg heil!” choruses in the background. Still, despite the moderated tone, his seething, grievance-laden political message and his simmering mendacity penetrate through the hissing and crackling recording of the eight-and-a-half-minute address.
“Thirteen years ago we National Socialists were derided and disdained by our opponents,” Hitler says. “No one is laughing now.”
"Listen, Listen to My Heart’s Song is a heartwarming compilation of stories that will touch your soul and make you reflect on your own experiences. The author's ability to convey the essence of each person's story with simplicity and care is truly remarkable. From individuals fighting challenges to survivors who inspire, this book celebrates the resilience, kindness, and hope of the human spirit. I highly recommend this book to anyone looking for a dose of inspiration in their lives."
On May 8, 2025, Luxembourg's Prime Minister Luc Frieden delivered a speech commemorating the 80th Anniversary of the End of the Second World War in Europe
8 May 1945. At last. Finally over.
"The war is over. The terrible, brutal war is over. The toll is devastating. The suffering, immense.
No one has been left unscathed. Thousands are dead. Hundreds are missing. Entire villages lie in ruins. Everything is in short supply: food, medicine, infrastructure.
And yet – relief. Bells are ringing. Flags are flying from balconies. Spontaneous parades are filling the streets. We are free again. Our country is ours again!
Five years of tears – tears of grief and fear – are giving way to tears of joy and relief.
Perseverance. Resistance. Hope. The last five years were not endured in vain. The sacrifice of all those who fell victim to the war was not in vain. At last – finally over. And the Allies have prevailed.
Today, we commemorate all the victims – here at this ceremony and with wreaths laid at memorials across the city. Today, we gather to remember three things: gratitude, cohesion, and hope.
Gratitude. Many – far too many – Luxembourgers and soldiers from our Allied friends lost their lives in the Second World War. They fought so that we might live in peace and freedom today. Without them, our country would be fundamentally different.
If today we can vote freely and help shape the politics of our nation,
If today we can speak our minds freely – with respect for one another,
If today we are free to decide whether, and in what, we believe,
Then all this, and more, is thanks to 8 May 1945.
Thank you to all those who stood up for a free Luxembourg. Our nation owes them an everlasting debt of gratitude. But the greatest tribute is to uphold and live by their values; to defend them, to keep them alive: democracy, freedom, respect.
I am therefore delighted that students from the Lycée Ermesinde and young musicians from the Conservatoire are taking part in this ceremony. Thank you for being here today.
The day we stop standing up for peace, freedom, democracy, and equality is the day these values begin to fade. That is why, today, we mark this day of commemoration here at Neumünster Abbey.
The Nazi regime did not merely punish people here – it punished ideas. It did not only imprison 4,000 individuals here – it sought to imprison free thought and crush the will and spirit of an entire society.
Secondly: Cohesion. What helped people survive the horrors of the Second World War, beyond their convictions and values, was the cohesion they showed in the face of the Nazi regime.
It was important to the resistance fighter who secretly distributed leaflets. It was important to the persecuted who hid from the Nazis. It was important to the prisoners held in this very building, who could catch a glimpse of their loved ones on the Corniche – a sight that gave them strength and courage.
And it was important for all those who stood united in the referendum against the attempt to repress Luxembourg's identity. It is the strength of this cohesion — of standing together and helping one another – that the memory of the Second World War brings to light.
Thirdly: Hope. If today stands for anything, it is hope — on many levels. Today reminds us that even the darkest times come to an end. At the beginning of the war, the situation seemed hopeless, the goal distant, and the outcome uncertain. But hope never completely vanished. Because the cause — the cause of freedom and independence — was just. And that is how hope carries us through even the most difficult moments.
But 8 May also represents a second kind of hope: the hope for a better future. Although everything was lacking, and so much had to be rebuilt, 80 years ago people were full of hope. Full of anticipation and optimism for what tomorrow might bring. No one embodied that hope more fully than Grand Duchess Charlotte. These are the three lessons of the Second World War that we should remember every day.
Gratitude provides the conviction to stand up for our values. Cohesion shows the path by which we can do so. Hope leads to the motivation to take on this task anew, every single day.
These lessons do not only apply to Luxembourg, but to Europe as a whole. A Europe founded on values and cohesion — it is no coincidence that the European project was born in the aftermath of the Second World War.
What holds true for individuals holds true for nations: much can be achieved alone, but far more can be accomplished together.
Luxembourg had its successes even before the Second World War. But what we have today — 80 years of peace, freedom, and prosperity — has only been possible thanks to Europe.
We are proud of our Luxembourg — proud that, even after 80 years, we continue to stand up for these values, both at home and in Europe. A country that lives in peace, freedom, and prosperity. A country firmly rooted in the European project. A country that honours its international responsibilities and stands up for peace, democracy, and the rule of law.
From war came peace. Adversaries became partners. From destruction rose prosperity."
It wasn’t until the 1990s that Zofia and Andrzej Pilecki found out their father was a hero. As teens in postwar Poland, they had been told he was a traitor and an enemy of the state, and they listened to news reports about his 1948 trial and execution on the school radio.
Article from the BBC & Time Magazine
In fact, Witold Pilecki was a Polish resistance fighter who voluntarily went to Auschwitz to start a resistance, and he sent secret messages to the Allies, becoming the first to sound the alarm about the true nature of Nazi Germany’s largest concentration and extermination camp.
Pilecki (pronounced peh-LET-skee) was born into an aristocratic Polish farming family in 1901. As a young man, he fought against the Soviets in the Polish-Soviet War, earning citations for gallantry. Upon inheriting the family land, he took up the life of a country gentleman, married and had two children.
When the Nazis invaded Poland in 1939 at the start of World War II, Pilecki was called back to military service. But Poland fell in less than a month, split by the Nazis and the Soviets. Pilecki went into hiding and joined the burgeoning Polish resistance.
Witold Pilecki with his wife, Maria, and children, Zofia and Andrzej, circa 1935. (Jack Fairweather)
“The French resistance is so famous, but in actual fact, over half of all the intelligence from continental Europe to reach London came from the Polish underground,” Fairweather said in an interview with The Washington Post. “It was the biggest operation in Europe, and they provided the highest-quality intelligence — much prized by the Allies — about German capacity and war production.”
As the Nazi occupation’s grip tightened on Polish Jews, some Poles turned against Jews, too, while many others secretly helped their Jewish neighbors. The leader of Pilecki’s resistance cell pushed to make the group Catholic-only. Pilecki was a Catholic, but he argued against the change and pushed successfully to unite the group with a mainstream resistance cell that believed in equal rights for Jews.
“When [the Nazis] are doing their best to try and atomize society and break down the bonds between Poles, Pilecki doesn’t turn inwards, he doesn’t retreat into his ethnicity or his class,” Fairweather said. “He actually does the complete opposite, and begins to reach out to those around him.”
Then Pilecki got his first big mission: get arrested and sent to Auschwitz. At the time, the site run by Germany in occupied Poland was known to be a Nazi work camp for Polish prisoners of war. Pilecki was to gather information about conditions inside and organize a resistance cell, perhaps even an uprising.
The dangerous mission was voluntary; he could have refused. On Sept. 18, 1940, he placed himself in the middle of a Gestapo sweep and was sent to Auschwitz.
Nothing could have prepared him for the brutality he found. As he leaped out of a train car with hundreds of other men, he was beaten with clubs. Ten men were randomly pulled from the group and shot. Another man was asked his profession; when he said he was a doctor, he was beaten to death. Anyone who was educated or Jewish was beaten. Those remaining were robbed of their valuables, stripped, shaved, assigned a number and prison stripes, and then marched out to stand in the first of many roll calls.
“Let none of you imagine that he will ever leave this place alive,” an SS guard announced. “The rations have been calculated so that you will only survive six weeks.”
The mass gassings that came to define the Holocaust had yet to begin, but the crematorium was up and running. The only way out of Auschwitz, another guard said, was through the chimney.
Thus began 2½ years of misery. As Pilecki and other prisoners starved, lice and bedbugs feasted on them. Typhus outbreaks regularly ranged through the camp. Work assignments were exhausting. Guards delighted in punishing them. Prisoners, in desperation, stole from and betrayed one another for scraps. Many killed themselves by leaping into the electrified fence.
But slowly, Pilecki organized his underground. At first it was just a few men he knew from before. In the end, there were nearly a thousand. They formed a network to steal and distribute food and extra clothing, sabotage Nazi plans, hide injured and sick prisoners, and improve morale with a sense of brotherhood and regular news from the outside world.
“With almost a thousand men by 1942, and — barring for one incident with a Gestapo spy — not one of Pilecki’s men betrayed each other, in extraordinary circumstances of starvation and violence,” Fairweather said. “He built something really powerful in that camp.”
The railway tracks from where hundreds of thousands of people were directed to the gas chambers inside the former Nazi death camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau in Poland, seen on Dec. 7. (Markus Schreiber/AP)
‘Bomb Auschwitz’
Starting in October 1940, the underground worked together to smuggle messages to the resistance outside. The first was sent via prisoner Aleksander Wielopolski. In Auschwitz’s early days, a few prisoners were able to secure their release if their families paid big enough bribes. Wielopolski was one of those few. Rather than risk smuggling out a paper report, Pilecki had him memorize it.
Once free, Wielopolski passed the message on to Pilecki’s friends in the resistance. Pilecki never knew whether his reports reached the Allies, but Fairweather and his researchers were able to track down how they were smuggled across Europe to the highest levels in London.
His first message was blunt: Bomb Auschwitz. Even if it meant killing everyone inside, himself included, it would be merciful. Conditions were horrifying, and the Nazis had to be stopped, he implored.
The British considered Pilecki’s request in early 1941, Fairweather found, but ultimately decided against it. The United States had not yet entered the war, and the British Royal Air Force was down to fewer than 200 planes, all of which lacked radar. It would have stretched the limits of their fuel capacity. And the British had no precedent to take action for humanitarian reasons.
Over the next two years, Pilecki continued to send messages to London via risky escapes by his men and notes passed to Polish farmers neighboring the camp.
Each message was more dire: The Nazis were conducting disgusting medical experiments on patients in the camp hospital. The Nazis killed thousands of Soviet POWs in a mass execution. The Nazis were testing a way to gas prisoners en masse. The camp was expanding. Huge trainloads of Jews were being gassed and cremated. Hundreds of thousands of men, women and children were being murdered.
“Pilecki, by recording every step of the camp’s evolution towards the Holocaust, he was in some ways grappling with the very essence of the Nazi’s evil before anyone else,” Fairweather said.
Pilecki kept asking: Couldn’t the Allies at least bomb the train lines leading to the gas chambers? Or create a distraction so the prisoners could try to rise up and escape?
Fairweather said he gained a lot of sympathy for the British from their initial decision not to bomb the camp. But later, when the United States joined the war, bringing a far superior air force, continuing that decision “becomes untenable,” he said. The Allies fell back on the original decision without considering that both the necessity and their capabilities had changed.
Not bombing Auschwitz is “one of history’s great might-have-beens,” Fairweather said.
Witold Pilecki at his show trial in Warsaw on March 3, 1948. He was executed two months later. (Polish Press Agency)
An enemy of the state
By spring 1943, it was clear the Allies weren’t going to help the prisoners of Auschwitz. Without any outside help, an uprising would never succeed. Increasingly frail and in danger of being found out, Pilecki decided it was time for him to leave.
It took months to plan, but he and two friends pulled off an incredible escape through the camp bakery in the early hours of April 27. From there, he sneaked into Warsaw, where he was briefly reunited with his wife and children.
Pilecki began working for the resistance again, but the symptoms of what we might now call post-traumatic stress disorder dragged him down. He “struggled to connect” with his friends and family, according to Fairweather, and wrote day and night about the horrors he had witnessed. He even returned to Auschwitz after the war, where he found other former prisoners living in their old barracks and giving tours to the curious.
In the summer of 1944, the Soviets were advancing on the German army, pushing them westward and out of Poland. The Polish resistance hoped to kick the Germans out of Warsaw ahead of the Soviets’ arrival to reestablish a sovereign state. Pilecki was one of thousands who fought in the Warsaw Uprising, the largest action taken by a European resistance group in World War II. In the end, the Soviets held back their advance so the Nazis could crush the Poles. Then they swooped in and took over.
The Soviets liberated Auschwitz on Jan. 27, 1945. By then, 1.1 million people had been killed there, most of them Jews.
“For a lot of us in the West, we think of May 1945 as the end of the Second World War in Europe, and parades and so on,” Fairweather said. “Pilecki’s story is a powerful reminder that what happened in Eastern Europe was the Allies gave [Soviet leader Joseph] Stalin a free hand to occupy and subjugate half of continental Europe. And the war didn’t end for so many people.”
Poland would spend the next four decades as a communist puppet state behind the Iron Curtain. But Pilecki didn’t see much of it. He remained loyal to the idea of a free Polish republic and continued sending messages to British intelligence. He was arrested by communist authorities in 1947, tortured repeatedly and executed as an enemy of the state the next year.
According to a Polish newspaper, as he was led to his death, he said, “I’ve been trying to live my life so that in the hour of my death I would rather feel joy than fear.”
Pilecki’s reports remained hidden away in Polish archives until the 1990s. Now he has been showered with posthumous awards and hailed as the hero he was. A documentary about him is scheduled for release this year.
He is also a symbol of the way many Poles were forced to bury their war experiences for decades, Fairweather said, comparing it to if the American heroes of D-Day had been treated as traitors and pariahs.
That reckoning continued as leaders from all over the world gathered in Israel on Thursday to commemorate the liberation of Auschwitz. In attendance was Russian President Vladimir Putin, who has recently spread misinformation about the Poles during World War II. He was given a top speaking role at the ceremony, prompting Polish President Andrzej Duda to boycott the event.
Duda is expected to attend a commemoration ceremony at Auschwitz on Monday. Zofia and Andrzej, now 86 and 88, will not be there, Fairweather said — they prefer to honor their father on the day of his execution. For years under communism, Zofia would light a candle alone outside the prison walls where her father was killed. Last year, hundreds of people joined her."
