Thousands join far-right rally in Budapest as anti-fascists protest
Thousands of people took part in an annual WWII-linked commemoration held by far-right groups in Budapest Saturday, as anti-fascist activists gathered nearby to protest the rise of the far right around the world.
Each year, far-right groups from across Europe meet in Budapest for what they call a "Day of Honour" to mark a failed attempt by Nazi and Hungarian troops in 1945 to break out of the city during the Soviet Army's siege.
While some events have been banned, including neo-Nazi concerts — that will still take place at undisclosed locations — an annual "memorial hike" is being held.
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Japan Times
2 days ago
- Japan Times
A Nazi document trove raises questions for Argentina
The Supreme Court official had a secret to share when he called Eliahu Hamra, the rabbi of Argentina's main Jewish community center, one night around the turn of the year. The court had found a dozen boxes of Nazi documents in its basement archive containing photos of Hitler as well as thousands of red Nazi labor organization membership booklets stamped with the swastika of the Third Reich. Silvio Robles, chief of staff to the court's president, wanted the rabbi's advice about how to handle the discovery, Hamra recalled. It was an uncomfortable subject for Argentina, home to Latin America's largest Jewish community, but also notorious for giving refuge to dozens of Nazi war criminals after World War II. Hamra said he told Robles the court could face awkward questions about how the Nazi material came to be in its basement. "I warned him to take into account that this could leave a stain on them," Hamra said in an interview. The conversation with the rabbi was an important early step in a coordinated effort between the Supreme Court and Jewish community leaders to bring the trove of documents to light. The find surfaced at a time when Argentina is demonstrating new readiness to look back at its complicated history with Nazis in the war era. President Javier Milei, who has shown a personal interest in Judaism and strong support for Israel, in April opened up access to Nazi documents, uploading hundreds of declassified documents online. "The Argentine government is committed to bringing these issues to light," said Emiliano Díaz, a spokesperson for Milei's government. Argentina remained neutral during the conflict until March 1945 when it declared war on Germany. After the Allied victory, many Holocaust survivors emigrated to Argentina. So did Nazi war criminals Adolf Eichmann, the chief organizer of the massacre of Jews during the Holocaust, and Josef Mengele, an Auschwitz death camp doctor who performed experiments on prisoners, granted entry by the Juan Perón government. Even decades later, this history made the Supreme Court tread carefully around the discovery. It declined to answer written questions on the finding or to allow the news agency to see the booklets. The court has said it discovered the boxes during preparations for a new Supreme Court museum. But the Nazi documents had been seen sporadically in the court's archives since the 1970s, according to interviews with three judiciary employees and a private attorney with direct knowledge of the matter. Reporters could not determine why the trove of documents was not made public until now. "Nazis in Argentina set in motion many feelings," said Argentine historian Germán Friedmann. 'Don't touch' The basement archives housed in the large stone building of Argentina's Supreme Court contain hundreds of thousands of legal case files. It's easy to imagine that something could get lost. The Nazi materials were rediscovered in a room storing broken furniture, according to two judiciary officials. Robles, alerted to the find, then reached out to Hamra, the rabbi. And on May 9, Hamra, Jonathan Karszenbaum, the director of the local Holocaust museum and himself the grandson of survivors, and Horacio Rosatti, the president of the court, gathered in a judge's chamber to watch workers pry open the wooden crates. "I couldn't register even my own sensations because of the strangeness of the moment," said Karszenbaum. The court announced the find two days later. Crates containing Nazi-related material are displayed after they were rediscovered at the Supreme Court in Buenos Aires in this picture released on May 11. | Corte Suprema de Justicia de la Republica Argentina / via REUTERS It later said the discovery included 5,000 membership booklets from the German Labor Front and the German Association of Trade Unions, both Nazi labor organizations. But some people who worked in the archives have long known about the boxes of Nazi material. One archive employee said he saw the boxes in the same storage room about a decade ago, and caught a glimpse of booklets with German names in a partially opened box. In the early 1970s, Alberto Garay, now an attorney and constitutional law expert in Buenos Aires, was visiting a friend who worked at the archives. He spotted a pile of red notebooks, imprinted with swastikas and bundled together with string, on the floor, he said. "I was surprised and said, 'what do you have here?'" Garay recalled. "He said, 'don't touch.'" A ship and a raid According to the Supreme Court, the material arrived in Argentina in 1941 aboard a Japanese vessel, part of a shipment of 83 packages from the German Embassy in Tokyo. The cargo was impounded by customs agents because of concerns it could damage Argentina's war neutrality, the court said. But for local historian Julio Mutti, whose work focuses on Nazis in Argentina, that sounded implausible. In a May 15 article, Mutti suggested the court had conflated two events that occurred a month apart: the arrival of the Japanese ship and a raid on underground Nazi organizations. Argentina was home to about 250,000 German-speakers at the outbreak of World War II. When Hitler annexed Austria in 1938, more than 10,000 people filled a Buenos Aires stadium to celebrate, causing alarm among locals. In 1939, Argentina's president dissolved the local branch of the Nazi party. Two years later, in 1941, Argentina's congress created a commission to investigate Nazi activities in the country. When the Nan A Maru docked in Buenos Aires, the commission asked the foreign ministry to intervene, according to a review of reports in La Prensa, a popular Argentine daily at the time. Inspectors opened five packages, finding propaganda, La Prensa reported. Searches of the remaining 78 packages revealed mostly children's books, magazines and envelopes with war photographs. There was no mention of membership booklets. Reporters were unable to determine what happened to the impounded cargo. Around this time, the commission was also investigating whether the banned Nazi party and the German Labor Front were continuing to operate underground. On July 23 — a month after the arrival of the Japanese ship — the authorities raided the offices of the German Association of Trade Unions and the Federation of German Beneficence and Cultural Clubs, fronts for the banned Nazi labor organization and party, seizing thousands of red membership booklets, according to La Prensa. The booklets were stored in the Supreme Court, La Prensa reported. Mutti, who learned about the raids through archival research in 2016, had searched for the notebooks in the court building, eventually concluding they had been incinerated to make space in the archive. When news broke of the discovery of the red booklets in the basement, "I immediately realized where they came from," he said. In June, the Supreme Court said it was digitizing and cataloguing the materials, and released photos of workers in masks and hairnets poring over the find. For now, it's unclear what the rediscovered booklets will reveal. Four historians said it's unlikely the notebooks will yield information not already uncovered by the wartime commission. Holger Meding, a historian at the University of Cologne, didn't expect the booklets would radically change historians' understanding of Nazi activities in Argentina. But, he said, "for historians, every piece of the mosaic is important."
Japan Today
2 days ago
- Japan Today
Russia, Iran and China intensifying life-threatening operations in UK, police say
By Michael Holden Russia, Iran and China are behind a growing number of life-threatening operations in Britain including attacks and kidnappings, often deploying criminals and sometimes children as proxies, two senior British police officers said on Tuesday. The British authorities in recent years have repeatedly voiced concern at what they said was malign activity by the three states in Britain, ranging from traditional espionage and actions to undermine the state, to sabotage and assassinations. Those accusations have been rejected by Moscow, Beijing and Tehran, which say they are politically motivated. On Tuesday, the two British officers said told reporters there had been a fivefold increase in hostile state activity since the Novichok nerve agent poisoning of Russian double agent Sergei Skripal in Salisbury in 2017, which London says was carried out by Russian spies. Dominic Murphy, who heads up London's Counter Terrorism Command, said the breadth, complexity and volume of hostile operations from Russia, Iran and China had grown at a rate neither they nor their international partners nor any intelligence community had predicted. "We are increasingly seeing these three states ... undertaking threat-to-life operations in the United Kingdom," he told reporters. In most instances, proxies, usually criminals acting quite often for small amounts of cash, were carrying out the states' work for them, said Vicki Evans, the Senior National Coordinator for UK Counter Terrorism Policing. The proxies also included vulnerable people or those who felt disenfranchised, with those aged in their mid teens among those arrested or under investigation. "We are concerned that they might find themselves in an online environment where they're encouraged or egged on to do something and don't understand what they're being asked to do," said Evans, adding they were less concerned that the children were ideologically motivated. Earlier this month, three men were convicted over an arson attack on Ukraine-linked businesses in London, which police said had been ordered by Russia's Wagner mercenary group. Their ringleader had earlier admitted plotting to kidnap a critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin. Last year, the head of Britain's domestic spy agency MI5 said that, since January 2022, there had been 20 Iran-backed plots to kidnap or kill British nationals or individuals based in Britain who Tehran regarded as a threat. "We know that they are continuing to try and sow violence on the streets of the United Kingdom, they too are to some extent relying on criminal proxies to do that," Murphy said of Iran. © Thomson Reuters 2025.
Japan Times
7 days ago
- Japan Times
Japan's crown prince and his family visit Hiroshima atomic bombing exhibition
Japan's Crown Prince Akishino and his family on Friday visited a photo exhibition on the U.S. atomic bombing of the city of Hiroshima 80 years ago. The event, hosted by five media organizations including the Chugoku Shimbun, a newspaper publisher in Hiroshima Prefecture, is being held at the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum in the capital's Meguro Ward. Two videos and some 160 pictures taken by photographers of the media companies and residents of the city of Hiroshima are on display, showing the devastation from the nuclear attack, which took place on Aug. 6, 1945, in the closing days of World War II. Crown Prince Akishino, Crown Princess Kiko, their second daughter, Princess Kako, and their son, Prince Hisahito, viewed the exhibits attentively while receiving explanations from a Chugoku Shimbun staff personnel. "The blast must have been big," the crown prince said as he looked at a photo taken at a point 2.2 kilometers from ground zero. Nuclear weapons must be abolished, he said, noting the harmful effects of radiation on humans. Crown Princess Kiko offered a prayer in front of a photo that shows the bodies of people killed by the atomic bombing. Prince Hisahito said he was struck by the power of, and abundant information from, the photos and videos. The exhibition is set to run until Aug. 17. The crown prince and the crown princess are scheduled to visit Hiroshima Prefecture on July 23 and 24 and pay tribute to the atomic bomb victims.
