Birkenau’s function was murder, genocide at industrial scale. A very similar looking and sounding facility called “Cato” in Scotland claims it will be for computation for an end user who remains unidentified, under an application whose statement of intent permits modification once one is found.
The uncertainty of use makes the appearance and description of the design the only evidence on the table. The perimeter architecture is Holocaust camp scale. The design vocabulary is the classical canon, deployed here exactly as the Hitler regime deployed it, as legitimation for an enclosure. The landscaping is explained as screening, and whatever the motive, the effect is a facility removed from daily sight. The community benefit is a promised fund announced before any tenant, any figure, or any terms, a pledge with nothing behind it that anyone can verify.
The lesson from Nazi Germany is that the aesthetics, the classical framing and the screening methods are what enable the unthinkable, the mechanism Jonathan Glazer put on screen in The Zone of Interest (2023): a family garden flourishing against the camp wall, the hedge doing the moral work.
The movie you see observes the mundane day-to-day lives of a well-off German family. Over and over, the father, Rudolf (played by Christian Friedel), goes to and from work; the mother, Hedwig (Anatomy of a Fall’s Sandra Hüller), tends to her garden; and their children, a rambunctious bunch, play with their toys. In the movie you hear, however, there’s intermittent gunfire, bursts of screams, and an ever-present industrial cacophony. Along with snatches of dialogue and glimpses of details—the costuming, the barbed wire, the smoke—the film makes clear what’s going on: Rudolf is Rudolf Höss, the real-life longest-serving commandant of Auschwitz, and this is a portrait of how he and his Nazi family actually lived, going about their days adjacent to the death camp he ran.
Let me put it like this. A 69-hectare double-fenced compound is apparently being named for a Stoic, dressed by Polykleitos, hidden by “bunds”, built for a tenant nobody will name.
The Cato architects cite the ancient Greek stoa and the proportional ideas found in Polykleitos’s Canon, describing proportion, order and harmony as expressions of a deeper philosophical worldview. Polykleitos’s Canon was precisely the proportional system the Third Reich claimed as its aesthetic lineage. Riefenstahl’s Olympia opens with Myron’s Discobolus dissolving into the body of a living German athlete, the explicit visual argument that the Greek ideal survives in the Aryan body. Hitler personally purchased the Discobolus Palombara in 1938 and installed it in the Munich Glyptothek as ancestral property. Breker’s state sculpture carried the classical canon into the New Reich Chancellery, his bronzes flanking the court of honour. Günther and Rosenberg wrote the Greeks into Nordic race history as a formal doctrine.
It’s impossible to make this stuff up. Nazis invoke antiquity as proportion, order, and harmony to confer civilizational legitimacy to an atrocity. To be clear, the canon itself belongs to everyone. Edinburgh calls itself the Athens of the North and keeps an unfinished Parthenon on Calton Hill. A colonnade proves nothing. The tell is the combination: classical dress, camp-scale perimeter, screening vegetation, and a function nobody will state. Any one element on its own is innocent, as you find all over the world. All four together fits a very narrow and specific pattern with a documented history.
Rudolf Höss stated that good train connections and the possibility of camouflaging the extermination process dictated the choice of Birkenau as the site. The SS planted a green belt of trees and hedges around Crematoria II through V, landscaping deployed as sightline management. Cato’s plan calls them landscape bunds, with new woodland, wetland, hedgerow, scrub, and wildflower meadow habitats wrapped around the security perimeter. Theresienstadt got its Verschönerung for the June 1944 Red Cross visit: fresh paint, gardens, a staged film, the enclosure marketed as a gift to its inhabitants.
One Cato data hall is about the size of fifty Birkenau barracks, due to modern engineering. Birkenau contained approximately 300 barracks and buildings within about 140 hectares, single-story horse-stable barracks of roughly 400 m² each, giving a total built footprint somewhere around 120,000 m². Cato puts 160,000 m² of footprint into seven halls at 35 metres tall. Seven buildings, phased over several years, will exceed the combined footprint of three hundred.
The New Yorker recently ran a book review that garnered a sharp letter from Dominique Haensell in Berlin. She presented the Koeppen curriculum debate to a US magazine audience. Germany conducted a national debate over whether 17-year-olds in Abitur preparation, the oldest and best-equipped students in the system, should encounter a novel written to indict postwar racism and amnesia unless it came with stronger critical framing.
Becca Rothfeld’s insightful review of Wolfgang Koeppen’s “trilogy of failure” deftly navigates the nuances of how the books were received in postwar Germany (Books, May 4th). A new chapter has been added to the story of their reception: Jasmin Blunt, a Black German teacher, recently initiated a petition to stop the first book in the series, “Pigeons on the Grass,” from being part of the final qualification exam in German secondary schooling.
The petition proves German institutions know how to hold this debate when they choose to, which makes Carl Orff presented to Grundschule children with no framing at all a choice, not an oversight.
An author who confronted the NS past was put under public scrutiny by a single teacher, while the composer who took the Mendelssohn replacement after Egk, Strauss, and even the antisemite Pfitzner had refused to touch it is still being handed to small German children through a false sole-authorship claim that intentionally erases his own collaborators and the Jewish pedagogues who built the field.
The obvious objection is that Koeppen has been mandated exam material while Orff is spread by teachers claiming him as “ordinary classroom culture”, so the cases differ. They do not. Paragraph 1 of the Berlin Schulgesetz binds every level of the school system, Grundschule included, to educate students to oppose NS ideology, and Berlin primary schools already teach this history from Klasse 1. Both texts sit under a mandate. Baden-Württemberg debated the one it assigned to its most prepared students.
Berlin ignores the same statutory duty where it owes it to its least prepared.
The letter from Haensell to the New Yorker explains how the Blunt petition asked for optionality and framing, not removal.
It is important to stress that the petition was not about banning or redacting an undeniably important novel. Rather, it sought to make reading it non-mandatory, allowing people—particularly Black students and teachers—the option to forgo a days-long discussion of a novel that features the German equivalent of the N-word about a hundred times, and that culminates in a pogrom-like attack on a Black jazz bar. More broadly, it was an attempt to acknowledge that German classrooms are diverse, that Black German perspectives exist within them, and that students should not be forced to engage with racist material presented without sufficient critical framing. This is arguably the most prevalent discourse surrounding Wolfgang Koeppen in Germany today.
The letter also calls Koeppen “despite good intentions, likely a product of his time,” a phrase that shows the apologia is a reflex formula rather than analysis, since it gets applied even to an author it cannot describe.
As for the reception of Koeppen, who was, despite good intentions, likely a product of his time…
Koeppen was writing in 1951 against the amnesia of his time, which is the exact opposite of being its product; the phrase is not just weak, it is backwards for this particular author. The reflex is cultural: German criticism is afraid of landing directly, and cushions its subjects so they can accept the judgment. Haensell pads Koeppen with unnecessary good intentions; the same padding around Orff has been protecting a record that does not survive without it. The apology is the German equivalent of an indictment, where other cultures would take anti-racism without so much sugar coating.
The Blunt petition modeled an obvious remedy of allowing context to appear instead of disappear, and it is the same one echtorff.org documents: a restoration of those being erased, a proper framing. Name Keetman on the cover she co-wrote. Name Mendelssohn in the lesson built on his banned score. Germany has run a debate for an author who told the truth, but it allows the composer whose success depended on erasure of Jews and lies after the war to be presented as a hero to young school children.
The “even though” construction is a big give away. It frames the Germans harboring ongoing Nazi sympathy as a sincere complicating nuance, rather than the exact problem that the occupation existed to resolve. Was there a better form of liberation the genocidal Nazis preferred?
They could have surrendered after Stalingrad, when their wars were obviously lost, instead of accelerating the Holocaust through 1943, 1944, and into 1945. No surrender, just genocide? What’s to complain about when their terror campaign is ended?
DW begging sympathy for those expressing loyalty to Hitler, especially after genocide was completely and undeniably exposed as the plan, begs which Germans DW is promoting here as victims and why.
As many people ask me about safe VPN solutions, such as my suggestion to try eisengarn, they also seem to express frustration with Swedish “tech entrepreneurs”.
I hear things like “how can they turn out to be such horrible people?” It’s understandable. Sweden has falsely propagated a myth for decades that they believed in liberty and freedom, while the whole time being horribly cruel and racist. This might cause surprise for some.
Mullvad is the Swedish word for “MOLE”, which in English means the opposite of privacy. A mole company advertising privacy, is like a termite company advertising shelter.
Disinformation historian protip: the Swedish company chose to call itself the mole, the animal most heavily associated with double-agents and leaks that secretly violate privacy. The company name and logo appear as subtle, yet direct, negation of their privacy messaging. Expect a mole to be caught for hypocrisy. A liberal politician suddenly pushing an extreme right forced deportation platform, funded by a privacy tech executive suddenly pushing an extreme right forced loss of privacy … are on brand for moles.
To understand how the Nazis of Sweden have been hiding in plain sight, tunneling under society, you just have to look at the country’s history and ask who has produced evidence of anti-racism.
Sweden has manufactured polite deniability, meaning they never underwent Germany’s postwar reckoning, and so they avoided all accountability for what they did and continue to do. Neutrality meant no occupation, no Nuremberg, no forced confrontation with their comfortable close Nazi collaboration.
Per Engdahl ran Sweden’s fascist organizations from the 1930s into the 1990s without any significant consequence. The Sweden Democrats, sympathetic to Nazis, were founded in 1988 out of the Bevara Sverige Svenskt and the Nordic Reich Party. Roughly a third of the founders had ties to known fascist and neo-Nazi groups, the first auditor Gustaf Ekström was a Waffen-SS veteran, the first chairman Anders Klarström came from the Nordic Reich Party, and the party used a torch logo derived from the British National Front until 2006.
Some might say the German Nazis had even idolized and borrowed from these racist Swedes, not the other way around, which is why Swedes welcomed Nazism after WWII. The Statens institut för rasbiologi in Uppsala was the world’s first state-funded racial biology institute. It had preceded and influenced Nazi racial science.
On May 13, 1921, the decisive decision was made by a broad political majority to establish a state-run racial biology institute in Sweden. It was cutting-edge research at the time that many hoped would create a healthy and fit Swedish people, but whose ideological traditions and practical work are a dark legacy in Swedish history.
Leave it to the Swedes to call their racism a “dark legacy”. Dark is assigned a negative meaning. Do you know what’s dark? The protective and cool shade necessary for survival on a white hot day.
1930s “measurement” methods of eugenicists. Photo: TT/TT News Agency
Herman Lundborg was the institute’s first director. The institute was established by a parliamentary decision after lobbying led by figures including Nils von Hofsten and the campaign backed by figures across the political spectrum. Lundborg, appointed to head it, corresponded directly with German eugenicists. His classification systems fed into Nordic racial typologies the Nazis adopted.
After Hitler killed himself, the Swedes simply minded the gap, and went on doing what Hitler had borrowed from them, without anyone invading Sweden to stop them. Sweden thus ran an infamously grotesque literal race-based forced sterilization program from 1934 to 1976.
Sterilization based on race until 1976: Any Swede today who is CEO of a tech firm grew up in a racist playground bubble that their state curated, because certain women were forced to never have children.
Around 63,000 people were sterilized, disproportionately Roma, Sami, and people classified as mentally or socially deficient. That’s not a wartime aberration because it was started before and continued uninterrupted for three decades after the war ended, administered by the same Social Democrats building the folkhem.
The folkhem itself is foundational to the apparent Nazis campaigning in Sweden today for forced deportations. The “people’s home” welfare model was built on an implicit assumption of ethnic homogeneity. The “generous” state works because like Hitler said, the “we” only can be a small elite group of same race. That foundation means any perceived disruption to homogeneity registers not as a policy question but as an existential threat to the Swedish social contract. The welfare state and the Swedish ethnonationalism never actually separated.
In Germany there remain similar failures in neglected institutions like the Youth Welfare (Jugendamt), against which hundreds of formal complaints have been registered with the EU for decades, an unaccountable ethnonationalism agency accused of harming “non-German” children. So Sweden is not alone in preservation and then normalization, as evidenced by the rise of a Nazi party in Germany (AfD) and a Jugendamt accused for decades of targeting non-German children with harm. But the German danger is far more legible, despite evasive measures.
Everyone knows to watch Germany and expect the unaccountability and non-compliance moves.
The Swedes are a surprise to those who don’t understand the passive maintenance of historically excessive levels of selfish hate within definitions of success, professionally and politically.
Another way of putting it is that Sweden was so happy about fascist methods and reasons for seizing power, there was little need for a mass fascist party to seize what the state already practiced. Adding a label in Sweden would have meant it wasn’t already the norm, in a country where the government believed then and for decades after the war it would continue to racially control future generations.
I mean, just look more closely at the mechanism of wealthy Swedish elites today funding and enabling Nazism as if consistent with their concept of “freedom”. The history helps explain why two CEOs of Mullvad apparently believe defending Nazism can be normalized. A VPN company gives us a text book example of the problem, because one CEO is overtly promoting Nazism, while the other CEO serves to enable it by laundering him.
Imagine a “MEAT IS MURDER” vegan grocery store where one of the two owners spends the store’s profits on trophy hunts, illegally killing endangered animals. The brand sells one promise while the money does the opposite of that promise. That’s how this VPN company works. It markets itself as existing to protect privacy, while one co-CEO funds the destruction of privacy to enable forced deportations (the Nazi platform of “remigration“) and the other co-CEO says this:
Hi,
Mullvad has two owners, founders, and CEOs – Daniel Berntsson, and me, Fredrik Strömberg. All posts I’ve seen yesterday and today, including the newspaper articles, talk about Mullvad as if Daniel is the single owner, founder and CEO. It should be obvious that Daniel’s private donation to a political party is not part of Mullvad’s values or mission.
If you have any questions, comments or concerns you’re welcome to comment on this thread, or email our customer support.
See below for the response you’ll get from support:
—–
Mullvad is a political company. We fight for freedom of speech, freedom of information and the right to privacy. These are firmly held values of the founders of Mullvad.
Mullvad protects the right for people to express things we don’t agree with. We protect the right of everyone to access views we don’t agree with.
We also live these values by being tolerant in our daily work. Everyone is welcome to collaborate with Mullvad if they share these narrow core values. As employees, contractors, customers, suppliers, lobbyists, campaign partners or whatever it might be. No matter what their other opinions are and no matter whether the founders or anyone else in Mullvad dislike them. The founders themselves fundamentally disagree on several important issues.
This is what allows us to advance our common causes. Being in a tolerant and intellectually open environment is also liberating and promotes truth seeking.
The more people do this, the better a place the world will be.
It should be obvious that Daniel’s private donation to a political party is not part of Mullvad’s values or mission, in the same way that someone’s opinions on animal rights, taxes or public healthcare policy isn’t.
That said, if you no longer want to be a Mullvad customer for philosophical reasons, we think it’s important to honor that. In that case, reach out to support.
Wow.
That is bad.
Expected. Still, so bad.
Let’s dig in.
His defense of Nazism tries to frame a political donation to the party that calls immigrants “parasites” as equivalent to opinions on animal rights or tax policy. That’s a false equivalence that kills people. Poison is not milk, just because both are liquid.
Think about how racist the co-CEO must be to frame dehumanization and forced deportations of humans as his mental equivalent to… animal rights. A political party gets funded by his co-CEO to call people “parasites” and his defense is to say it’s like “opinions on animal rights”.
Oof.
But wait, the worst part is the claim that Daniel supports “open borders” as an “ideal” but funds a party diametrically opposed to that position.
Forced deportations are illegal by definition. Crime isn’t just an opinion. It crosses a clear line. And forced deportations depend on the destruction of privacy. Again not just an opinion, crossing a clear line. Remigration is the ethnic mass expulsion of legal residents and citizens. Their rights are violated. And this VPN company acts like crimes are just opinions to disagree with:
Forced sex = rape
Forced entry = burglary
Forced deportation = remigration
The forced deportation requires destruction of privacy in the same way a stalker attempts rape and a thief cases a property to attempt burglary. A VPN provider financially supporting remigration political platforms is paying into known fringe far-right beliefs that violate of the rights of citizens, starting with privacy violations.
Fredrik is either being credulous about his co-founder’s stated beliefs or knowingly laundering them for his own political belief purposes because the effect either way is to enable privacy-destroying crime of remigration.
Consider the simple logic pattern, if you are paying attention to rights:
Forced
+
Action against a person
=
Illegal
Forced sex, forced entry, forced labor, forced marriage, forced confession, forced sterilization, forced disappearance. Every one of those is a crime. The legal system uses different words when the action is lawful: compulsory, mandatory, ordered, directed.
The commenters on his ridiculously bad post calling him disingenuous are therefore exactly right. The co-CEO claim “we protect speech we disagree with” framing is complete bullshit.
First, nobody who supports a forced deportation party, or declines to oppose someone who funds one, can claim to protect speech. Remigration, like rape and burglary, proceeds only by overriding the victim’s “no.” The crime exists because the perpetrator refuses to accept that refusal. Anyone saying “we protect speech we disagree with by funding the rape of women” would be seen exactly for what it is, suppression of speech. Remigration should invoke the same reaction.
Second, logic 101 time, nobody is questioning anyone’s legal right to donate. Customers finding out their VPN company is run by two CEOs who both support forced deportations (one active, one passive) are exercising actual freedom by withdrawing financial support. A company whose profits flow to politics (let alone pure hypocrisy) that their customers rightfully find repugnant, can not force payments from those customers. Freedom to leave means the mechanism works as intended, the opposite of a threat.
Perhaps to put it simply, one co-CEO funds a party that wants people illegally forced out of the country, and the other co-CEO calls your loss of freedom his gain of freedom. That’s as selfish and tone-deaf as you get. That’s why they should go out of business, the faster the better. Their cultural appreciation of privacy is “what’s best for me, and me alone”, diametrically opposite to what is needed for actual privacy protection.
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