Joseph Stalin – Analog Artist Digital World

This statue of Winston Churchill by Jean Cardot was inaugurated in the grounds of the Petit Palais on the Avenue Winston Churchill in Paris France. The 10 foot high statue was funded by 3,000 donations totaling the equivalent of £250,000. It is based on a photograph of Churchill marching with De Gaulle down the Champs-Élysées on November 11, 1944. This one of the few statues of a foreigner in Paris.

Winston Churchill made several high-profile visits to the Western Front to witness the final Allied push into Germany. Key events included the Yalta Conference in February 1945, crossing the Rhine River with Montgomery on March 25, 1945, inspecting the Siegfried Line, and touring the ruined city of Berlin Germany in July 1945. He attended the start of the Potsdam Conference in July. He also toured the ruins of Berlin and Hitler’s bunker in July before losing the general election. These visits were designed to sculpt the post war world, boost morale, show defiance, and directly observe the collapse of the Nazi regime.

Churchill led Britain to victory in Europe in May 1945 but was stunningly removed from office months later. Despite high personal popularity, voters favored the Labour Party’s platform for social reform, resulting in his resignation on July 26, 1945, after a landslide election defeat. Churchill called the transition from war time leader to opposition leader an “anticlimax”. After Winston Churchill’s Conservative Party suffered a landslide defeat in the July 1945 general election, King George VI offered him the Order of the Garter, the highest honor of knighthood in the King’s honor’s system. Churchill declined the honor, famously remarking that he could not accept it because the British people had just given him “the order of the boot”.

Winston Churchill, Harry Truman, and Joseph Stalin gathered in Potsdam, near the heavily bombed Berlin, to discuss the end of the war in the Pacific and the fate of the postwar world. After nine meetings over eight days, and with another week of the conference remaining, Churchill had to return to London for the results of the general election. Millions of British servicemen were casting their ballots from overseas. Churchill’s personal physician, left most of Churchill’s baggage behind in anticipation of a swift return. The opposing Labor party won the election in a sweeping victory. To add insult to injury, a large majority of the service vote went for Labour, deserting the man who had led them for five years and sung their praises in historic speeches. Churchill did not return to Potsdam. He had led Britain through its darkest hours and achieved final victory only to be booted from office.

Adolf Hitler made a quick three-hour surprise visit to Nazi-occupied Paris on June 23, 1940, shortly after France signed an armistice. Accompanied by architect Albert Speer, sculptor Arno Breker, and architect Hermann Giesler, he toured landmarks like the Eiffel Tower, Arc de Triomphe, and Napoleon’s tomb, calling it the “greatest and finest moment of my life”.

Arno Breker was a German sculptor who is best known for his public works in Nazi Germany, where he was endorsed by the authorities as the antithesis of degenerate art. He was made official state sculptor and exempted from military service. One of his better known statues is Die Partei, representing the spirit of the Nazi Party, which flanked one side of the carriage entrance to Albert Speer’s new Reich Chancellery. Ninety percent of Breker’s public works were destroyed during the bombings of Germany toward the end of the war.

Arno Breker’s sculpting career flourished after WWII. Breker was offered a commission by Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, but Arno refused, saying “One dictatorship is sufficient for me”. He continued to receive commissions for sculptures, producing a number of works in his familiar classical style, working for businesses and individual patrons. He also produced many portrait busts. Albert Speer was a German architect who served as Minister of Armaments and War Production in Nazi Germany during most of World War II. Hitler commissioned him to design and construct structures, including the Reich Chancellery and the Nazi Party rally grounds in Nuremberg.

In 1937, Hitler appointed Speer as General Building Inspector for Berlin. In this capacity he was responsible for the Central Department for Resettlement that evicted Jewish tenants from their homes in Berlin. Speer became a close friend and ally of Adolf Hitler, he was convicted at the Nuremberg trials and served 20 years in prison.

After the war, Speer was among the 24 major war criminal defendants charged by the International Military Tribunal for Nazi atrocities. He was found guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity, principally for the use of slave labor, narrowly avoiding a death sentence. Having served his full term, Speer was released in 1966. Speer was intimately aware of and involved in the Final Solution, evidence of which has been conclusively shown in the decades following the Nuremberg trials.

Kristallnacht accelerated Speer’s ongoing efforts to dispossess Berlin’s Jews from their homes. From 1939 on, Speer’s Department used the Nuremberg Laws to evict Jewish tenants of non-Jewish landlords in Berlin, to make way for non-Jewish tenants displaced by redevelopment or bombing. Eventually, 75,000 Jews were displaced by these measures. Speer denied he knew they were being put on Holocaust trains and claimed that those displaced were, “Completely free and their families were still in their apartments”. He also said: ” … en route to my ministry on the city highway, I could see … crowds of people on the platform of nearby Nikolassee Railroad Station. I knew that these must be Berlin Jews who were being evacuated. I am sure that an oppressive feeling struck me as I drove past. I presumably had a sense of somber events.” Matthias Schmidt said Speer had personally inspected concentration camps and described his comments as an “outright farce”. Martin Kitchen described Speer’s often repeated line that he knew nothing of the “dreadful things” as hollow—not only was he fully aware of the fate of the Jews, he actively participated in their persecution.

Also with Hitler on this day was architect Hermann Giesler and a few Military officers. Giesler was entrusted by Hitler with the reorganization of the entire city of Linz. Beginning from 1942, he worked on plans and a large model for the Danube Development of the Banks. In August 1943, Giesler was appointed as a deputy to the Reichstag for electoral constituency. Starting from 1944, he also worked on designs for the cultural center, which Hitler regarded with particular interest.

In 1945, Giesler initially was arrested by the U.S. military and interned as a Nazi, and charged in 1946. In 1947, he was indicted by a U.S. military court for war crimes in the concentration camp Mühldorf, a subcamp of Dachau. Giesler was sentenced to life imprisonment, but on May 6, 1948 his sentence was reduced to 25 years imprisonment. On July 7, 1951, it was lowered once again to twelve years. Giesler was freed on October 18, 1952.