Heimrich Himmler inside the Cheka (communist torture and execution installation) Vallmajor, Barcelona 1940.
Why is there some kind of pattern on the wall?
These were cells inspired by the Bauhaus and Surrealist art movements. Let's see who built them and how they worked
1/17🧵
This Cheka was designed by the Austro-Hungarian Slovenian Alfons Laurencic, also the designer of the Zaragoza Cheka. His main inspirations were the paintings of surrealist Salvador Dalí and the color theories of Wassily Kandinsky.
It was located inside the Convent of Les Magdalenes Agustines, built using forced labor by prisoners such as painter Víctor Ripaux, accused of aiding priests hiding from the red terror. He and other Conservatives were forced to destroy all of the sacred elements of the church.
Within these chekas, administratively known as "preventorium D", members of the Republican factions introduced their prisoners into a world of pain.
The cells featured beds at a 20-degree angle that were almost impossible to sleep on.
They also had irregularly shaped bricks on the floor that prevented prisoners from walking. The walls in the 2 m x 1 m cells were covered in surrealist patterns designed to make prisoners distressed, and lighting effects were used to make the artwork even more dizzying.
Some of them had a stone seat designed to make occupants instantly slide to the floor, while other cells were painted in tar and became tremendously hot in the summer.
Circles and a board were painted and some greenish crystals were installed that filtered a diffused light, bringing out a strange aspect to the drawings. Laurencic chose the color green, he said, to produce in the prisoner “the effect of a sad, rainy and hopeless day”
At night a red light was turned on, making the shapes vary considerably. The spirals and dice forms implied points of suggestion for the prisoners while the circles and lines produced an irritation on the nervous system.
A clock was also placed in these cells, arranged in such…
…a way that during a whole day it would not mark more than four or five hours, with the aim of causing disorientation in the prisoner.
Laurencic and his closest collaborators designed a firing squad wall in the courtyard of the Cheka…
…in which a kind of big grave had also been erected. There, a large number of mock executions were carried out on almost all the prisoners. The objective was to create a climate of permanent panic among the inmates.
For the more resistant prisoners "La Campana", or “The Bell”, was used. Its diameter was about fifteen feet and the walls were deep black, with a layer of tar. In the center of the ceiling, a very powerful spotlight had been installed, covered with a metal frame…
…to prevent the prisoners from breaking the lamp. Laurencic built this cell with a double wall, which contributed to increasing the resonance of the stimuli. There was no ventilation of any kind.
The inmates only ate twice a day and their menu consisted of a ladle of some kind of broth with a few beans or chickpeas, a piece of black bread and a daily glass of water. This diet would soon cause diseases among the inmates that would end the lives of many of them.
Before being executed, Laurencic publicly acknowledged that he had designed this Cheka at the request of the Popular Front government, the order came from the 23-year-old PSOE member Santiago Garcés, head of the SIM (Military Information Service) at the time.
Historian Stanley G. Payne has suggested that Garcés, who was one of the men involved in the assassination of opposition leader Calvo Sotelo, might be an agent of the Soviet NKVD. He was, therefore, one of the people directly responsible for the instigation of the war.
The night before his execution, Laurencic stated: "Although I know I'm going to die, long live Generalissimo Franco." After confessing and receiving Communion, he was transferred to Campo de la Bota at 4 in the morning of July 9, 1939.
In front of the firing squad, he refused…
…to have his eyes covered and just before receiving the shots, he raised his arm and performed the Fascist salute.
Himmler also visited the Montserrat monastery, were 23 monks were killed by anarchists, some burned alive…The rumour is that he asked them about the Holy Grail.
@FeanorSSS Also, foreign historians also call them Cheka.
@FeanorSSS This topic is universally known. The soviets were paid in Gold.
Just read Stanley G. Payne or Bolloten who was a communist and was there. Everybody knows that the Soviet police and intelligence was working for the Republic.
@FeanorSSS Here Burnett Bolloten explains in his book The Spanish Civil War why they were called Checas or Chekas.
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
1999 Austrian election. Jörg Haider's FPÖ became the largest party on the right. A coalition government was formed, but it collapsed due to the foreign sanctions and hysteria provoked by his persona, which persisted until his death.
How have things changed in Europe?
Thread🧵:
His father had been a SA member and Wehrmacht lieutenant who had joined the DNSAP (Austrian NSDAP) in 1929 as a 15-year-old, and his mother was a leader of the League of German Girls. His time as Governor of Carinthia ended after he commended the Third Reich's employment policy:
What caused more anger in the media, academia and foreign nations was the FPÖ's "revisionistic" takes. The thesis of the preventive war against Stalin and communism was common among their ranks, and Haider regularly attended commemorations of veterans of the Waffen-SS.
Wernher von Braun's vision of World War III: An atomic blitzkrieg unleashed from a space station that destroys the Eastern Bloc's manufacturing centers and leaves the "Asiatic mass" in ruins.
From his science fiction novel 'Project Mars: A Technical Tale.’
🧵 1/4
His plan to reach Mars: sending an armada of spaceships that would make the journey in 8 months. They would total 10 giant spaceships, each of which would weigh about 4,000 tonnes and would be assembled in orbit. 950 three-stage rockets will get everything into orbit.
Then use huge winged gliders to aerobrake into the atmosphere and land safely on Mars. This can't be done: the atmosphere on Mars is 1% as thick as Earth’s. A powered landing using modern rockets would be necessary.
The explorers would spend 400 days investigating there.
Both founder L. Ron Hubbard and his successor David Miscavage "disappeared" their wives. Miscavage's wife is confined in the Twin Peaks HQ of CST, the organisation that stores Hubbard's writings in titanium capsules underground…
This will ensure that Hubbard's writings would survive an apocalyptic event.
The vaults are marked with the CST logo, making it easy for future survivors and aliens to find them.
The police can't do anything about their wives, it is their right as adults to be in a cult.
Hubbard’s third wife, Mary Sue, took the fall for the organisation in the aftermath of “Operation Snow White,” an effort that succeeded in infiltrating up to 5,000 scientologists into the IRS and other agencies. Hubbard was scared of going to prison and scapegoated his wife.
1930s Germany was a time of political factionalism. How did Adolf Hitler become Chancellor, and how did he get the Enabling Act that gave him total power passed?
This thread chronicles the most important moments of the "transfer of power":
Antecedents: after being imprisoned for the 1923 Putsch, Hitler decided to pursue power through legal means. The NSDAP had few seats in the Reichstag before the great depression caused an increase from 12 in 1928 to 107 in '32.
This graph shows the relevant people in this story:
Despite the lack of breakthrough, Hitler never quit. The clashes between the SA and the communists militias took many casualties, including that of Horst Wessel. This and the 1929 German referendum calling for a revision of the Treaty of Versailles made Hitler a national figure.
The 'Night of the Amazons' was an event that took place in Munich during the Third Reich. The performance celebrated Germany history and the future of the National Socialist regime, and it included nude women and bronze-painted men to evoke classical antiquity.
Thread🧵:
It took place in the context of the "International Riem Racing Week," an event that included 14 major equestrian competitions, including horse breeding and racing. The "Brown Ribbon of Germany" was at the time the race with Europe's highest trophy price: 100,000 Reichsmarks.
These events were organised by Christian Weber, a former bouncer and one of Hitler's earliest associates. The event was propagandistic, but also had the purpose of attracting tourists to Germany. He famously said: "Our naked German girls are better looking than the French women."
The Thule Society is seen as the secret society that led to the NSDAP. However, it was only a front of the real secret society: the Germanic Order, which dedicated its paramilitary and spying divisions to counter-revolutionary operations against the Bavarian Soviets.
They were influenced by the ariosophic beliefs of Guido von List and Lanz von Liebenfels and the works of Gobineau (1853) and Darwin (1859). The "Gobineau Association" was founded by Dr. Ludwig Schemann in 1894 and enjoyed support from the Pan-German League, another precursor.
The Pan-German League, an organization founded by Colonial administrator Carl Peters and the CEO of Krupp Steel, Alfred Hugenberg (future member of Hitler's cabinet), took inspiration from social Darwinist ideas for their Wilhelmine aspirations. They introduced the term völkisch.