Normally, I wouldn't be interested in what rabid old sons of Fascists get up to behind closed doors, but Max Mosley's alleged indiscretions have produced another one of those jaw-dropping moments of Mail hypocrisy. Maybe he was invited to a 'Nuremburg Rally' party and thought this was just Bernie Ecclestone organising a Le Mans-type event at the Nurburgring.

Formula One boss Max Mosley 'exposed as sadomasochist in Nazi orgy with five prostitutes' bellowed this guardian of our morals. The headline was altered slightly a couple of days later as it emerged the Formula 1 'boss' had instructed lawyers against The News of the World for the original expose as reported in The Times.

The Mail, of course, makes much of the fact that Max is the son of Oswald Mosley, leader of the British Union of Fascists. Strangely, no mention is made of the Mail's infamous support for the man and its headline, 'Hurrah for the Blackshirts'. Nor is there any report of the Mail's owner in 1930s sympathetic treatment of the Nazis and support for appeasement.

Given the obsession of the Mail and others on immigration, gypsies and lefties, little appears to have changed. The worry is that the constant scapegoating of these groups will lead to consequences we hoped had been confined to European history.

The Daily Heil!

This was a post I never got round to publishing. It was done on 8th October but remained in draft. The Mail's flirtation with Nazism is well documented so I found it interesting to note the following story:

Hitler's correspondence revealed: Love letters to a dictator

He received more fan letters than Mick Jagger, Madonna and the Beatles combined.
Many were from women wanting to marry him, others from men wanting to be like him, still more from people wanting him to repair their drains or visit their clubs.
What Adolf Hitler thought of this mass hysteria died with him in the flames of Berlin in 1945.

But thousands of the letters survived and have now been compiled into a fascinating book called "Letters to Hitler: A People Writes to its Fuehrer."

The letters were found by the conquering Russian at his destroyed chancellery in Berlin, at his mountain home – the Berghof – in Bavaria and in his residence in Munich.

They are testament to the spell Hitler wove over a people he led to destruction and death in the bloodiest war in history. The letters go back to 1925, eight years before his Nazi party was to achieve power, and go right up to April 1945 when just 100 die-hard fanatics sent him wishes for his 56th – and last- birthday in the bunker in Berlin. Some were tortured tomes about the greatness to which the writer believed Hitler was leading Germany, others were more prosaic.

Fritz Vogel from Erfurt thought that the Bavarians were not as grateful to his idol as they should be. In a letter to "Dear Mr Hitler" he wrote: "One is generally surprised that you insist on going to unwelcoming and ungrateful Bavaria so often.
"It would be better if you held your meetings outside of Bavaria in order to make the movement large and strong.

"I advise you, above all, to acquire German nationality."

He went on to enquire if Hitler would be "able to do something about the drains in our town" but Austrian-born Hitler, who did not take kindly to being offered advice, did not answer the letter.
In 1926 lawyer Dr Reinhardt Niedermeyer wrote to Hitler: "I am charged with disposing of the estate of Frau Margarete Meindl in Munich.

"She greatly venerated your political efforts and shortly before her death asked me if you would accept her giant palm tree that she kept in her apartment."
Rudolf Hess again wrote back: "Herr Hitler would be delighted to accept the palm. Please arrange to have it collected."

Frau Troeltzsch of Berlin sent Hitler three silk handkerchiefs with pictures of Hitler sewn into them which Hess sent back saying "you do not have permission to send handkerchiefs with pictures of Herr Hitler."

Such women were later put under the monitoring of the Gestapo as Hitler feared that his cult of personality could lead to a destabilisation of home life in the Reich. As he climbed further up the ladder of power so the tempo of the letters increased.

A special department was created in the postal services in both Munich and Berlin to deal with tsunami of paper wending its way to him every day. On April 25 1932, one day after elections made the party an unstoppable force in national politics, a Peter Beck from Silesia – now part of Poland – wrote:

"We don't want to know about the government any more – we only want Adolf Hitler as leader, as dictator. "We National Socialists want to see a ban on all newspapers that inject poison into our Fuehrer, to see Jews classified as what they are, a reckoning with all local government chiefs who have cheated their citizens. "We will give our blood to Adolf Hitler! Take an iron hand and fulfill you programme with a dictatorial will. Do not negotiate but act!

"We trust our Fuehrer and donate to him our hearts with every pulse!"

There are postcards from Nazi party members holidaying in Majorca, letters from lovelorn women - "I would like to make you my little puppy my dear, my eternal, my lovely Adolf" – and from party bigwigs who crept shamelessly in print to their boss. "My desire! It is swelling across all the German countryside – a cry! A single, powerful, longing cry! Heil Hitler, you who sees off all enemy gangs, Heil Hitler and make us free again!" said Karl Leiff, leader of a Nazi party regional office in eastern Germany in December 1931.

He added: "If only all Germans could be as pure of heart and as noble of purpose as you." Hitler was said to despise this kind of blatant crawling.

But Elsa Walter was the kind of woman who epitomised his misty-eyed view of German womanhood.

She penned to him at Christmas 1930: “What ails our dear Fatherland? Above all else it is the women, and a woman means the soul of a home and a country.
"Therefore the soul of our people is sick. The biggest part of German womanhood has lost the place that God intended for it... man at his work and woman at the stove and motherhood revered once more as holy! Heil!"

Hitler had her declared the woman of the year in 1940 and made her a Nazi party functionary. The letters were discovered in the State Military Archives of Moscow by historian Dr Henrik Eberle.

He said: "The letters are a fascinating glimpse into how a people were mesmerised by Hitler and how they reacted to him."

In April of last year, new letters from Lord Rothermere to Hitler came to light. The late Anita Roddick, founder of Body Shop, refers to them here. Funny how the article in the Mail conveniently forgets to remember them.

Net Effect of Immigration

The Guardian have published the latest study on the effect of immigration on the economy. It seems to fly in the face of the propaganda spat out by Migrationwatch and The Daily Mail. It has not arrived in the DM yet (no doubt it is undergoing the sort of stringent checks all their other statistic based stories go through at the DM border control) but I await the usual disbelief from the usual suspects who will dismiss this as Government propaganda. The delicious irony is of course that they write into a newspaper that would make Goebbels very happy. He probably would have had his own Melanie Phillips type column.


I'm not saying that the figures should be accepted wholesale but it does show that there is another side to the story. There are issues as to whether (in some industries) the availability of so-called flexible workers is forcing down wages. The trade unions have also looked into this and the prevailing view is that there has been no discernible large scale detriment to wages. Indeed there is a concern that there is exploitation of some foreign workers through agency and accommodation fees.

The report also delves into local issues which have been rehashed on an almost daily basis by our friends at the Mail. The story of one Police chief mentioning there may be a problem when calling for extra funds (for other matters too) was regurgitated into every immigration story in the DM's online site. At the moment it is more concerned with squirrel pancakes, loos for the Queen and the sale of Hitler's globe.

Interestingly, David Davis who can usually be relied upon to provide a quote in tandem with Andrew Green of Migrationwatch does not appear to dispute the accuracy of the figures. Of course, it is likely that the same people responsible for carrying out the survey would have conducted any made by the Tories if they were in power.

There does need to be a debate on how to tackle any difficulties but let's move the debate into the adult world, and out of the xenophobic playground.


The article is worth publishing in full: there is also a pdf file of the report.

• Migrants are more highly skilled and often more reliable and hardworking than British workers and are fuelling the country's economic growth to the tune of £6bn a year, according to the first official study of their impact published today.
  The report for the government's migration impact forum - which is considering the current restrictions on entry by Romanian and Bulgarian workers to the UK - also concluded that migrants on average earned more and so paid more tax than UK workers.
  
  The joint Treasury, Home Office and Department for Work and Pensions study found that the arrival of hundreds of thousands of Poles and other east European workers had had "no discernible" impact on unemployment and had led to only a "modest dampening of wage growth" for British workers at the bottom end of the earnings league.
• The report said 574,000 migrants came to live in Britain on a long-term basis in the 12 months to June 2006, and 385,000 left, giving a net incoming figure of 189,000 - down 28% compared with the previous year's net inflow of 262,000.The first regional soundings by the government, also published today, showed that in seven out of eight regions in England migration had put pressure on housing, and five out of eight regions reported difficulties on crime and education.
• The overwhelmingly positive official verdict on the economic and fiscal impact of the largest wave of migration to Britain in recent years is likely to prove highly controversial.
  The shadow home secretary, David Davis, accused Labour ministers of ignoring the fact that relying on immigration to boost the economy was only a short-term answer.
  But the immigration minister, Liam Byrne, insisted the report demonstrated that Britain was better off with immigration rather than without it.
• He admitted, however, that the pace of change, particularly in communities that did not have a history of absorbing migrants, had been unsettling and had created challenges for public services.
• Mr Byrne said it was time for a "new balance" in immigration policy.
  The migration impact forum meets tomorrow to discuss whether the restrictions on Romanian and Bulgarian workers coming to Britain should be lifted. A decision is to be announced before the end of the year.

As a post script to this, I know that readers from Poland sometimes come to the site through google etc. I am due to visit Poland next month so would welcome tips on where to visit etc. I intend to go to Wroclaw (Breslau) and go to Auschwitz for one day.