About 200 firefighters deployed to tackle blaze at former Nazi mountain retreat in remote part of southern Germany

Police have arrested a 33-year-old German citizen after a fire ripped through Adolf Hitler’s former mountain retreat in Bavaria, leaving the historic Nazi meeting place – known as the Eagle’s Nest – largely destroyed.

About 200 firefighters were deployed on Friday night to tackle the blaze at the Nazi dictator’s remote, purpose-built Kehlsteinhaus residence, a protected building on the peak of Obersalzberg in southern Germany.

Heidenau council has halted the laying of Stolpersteine installed to remember individual victims of the Nazis

The town hall of Heidenau, Germany has a freshly restored cream-coloured facade, tidy flower boxes on the windowsills and a charming shingled clocktower.

At the entrance, closer inspection reveals a single brass plaque embedded in the pavement honouring the former mayor Paul Gröger, whom the Nazis hounded into killing himself.

In a new book, German artist and writer Philipp Ruch argues that viewing the ascent of Hitler’s NSDAP through the prism of the Third Reich has distorted our understanding of fascism’s electoral breakthrough

With your art collective Centre for Political Beauty you famously built a replica of the Holocaust memorial on a property next to the home of an AfD politician. Now you’ve written a history book about the Nazis’ rise to power. Don’t we already know everything there is to know about the 1932 elections, the Reichstag fire and the Enabling Act of 1933?

About three years ago I became interested in how Hitler’s National Socialist German Workers’ party (NSDAP) rose to prominence when Germany was still a democracy, because I hoped it could tell us something about the success of rightwing extremist movements today. From looking at historical sources, I realised that the Reichstag elections of 14 September 1930 were in many ways more important than what happened in 1932 and 1933. And I expected it to be an open-and-shut case. But the more I looked into it, the more I realised that most of the theories we have to explain the rise of the Nazis don’t make sense – the data tells a completely different, far darker story.

Man accused of being accessory to murders at Stalag 326 VI K amid race to prosecute suspects before they die

A 105-year-old man is under investigation on suspicion of being an accessory to multiple murders at a Nazi prisoner of war camp, German prosecutors have said.

The case, which is being handled by the public prosecutor’s office in Dortmund, centres on the Stalag 326 VI K camp in western Germany, in what is now the state of North Rhine-Westphalia.

A new production of Clifford Odets’ agitprop work Till the Day I Die is being remounted on the back of a truck in a Melbourne car park – rekindling its activist intent

It might be difficult to imagine these days, but there was a time when theatre in Australia was so politically incendiary it could cause an international diplomatic scandal. A year after it premiered on Broadway in 1935, US playwright Clifford Odets’ Till the Day I Die found itself at the centre of controversy in Australia when it was banned by the federal government at the request of the Nazi party’s consul general, on the grounds it was offensive to a “friendly foreign nation”.

Odets’ play, about a communist Berliner arrested by the Nazis for producing leftwing political pamphlets, was a companion piece to his more famous Waiting for Lefty, which was staged the year before by Sydney’s New Theatre – one of a branch of theatre companies that sprang up around the globe in the 1930s that was heavily affiliated with communism. The ban was counterproductive, leading to a massive public outcry and a cobbled, surreptitious production performed on the back of a truck at Collingwood town hall in Melbourne.

That truck is a galvanising symbol of rebellion and resistance for theatre-makers Mark Wilson and Katie Sfetkidis, who have been inspired to revisit the play as an act of leftist solidarity with the past and a spur for future activism. They’re staging a new production of it for this year’s Melbourne fringe festival in the car park of the Trades Hall building on the back of their own truck. “We got excited by these artists refusing to be banned, about the idea of a necessary theatre,” Wilson says.

Pasadena’s Norton Simon Museum holds 16th-century paintings stolen by the Nazis during the second world war

Jewish heirs of Holocaust victims and their representatives have filed two lawsuits in California staking their claims to Nazi-looted paintings that still hang on the walls of prominent museums in Los Angeles and Auschwitz.

This pair of lawsuits are the first to be filed after the recent passage of laws by California and the US Congress, which strengthen US-based claims to artwork that were forcibly taken from Jewish families during the second world war.

Sunday’s election could bring in Germany’s first far-right state government since the Nazi era

Germany is embarking on a crucial election period this month, with three key state polls that could markedly change the political terrain and make life decidedly harder for the federal government under the chancellor, Friedrich Merz.

All eyes are on Saxony-Anhalt on Sunday, where about 1.7 million people are eligible to vote, followed by Mecklenburg-Vorpommern and Berlin on 20 September. In all three contests, the far-right, anti-immigrant Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) is expected to make strong gains.

Portrait of a Lady had been missing since 1940 before being photographed in 2025 in Argentinian home of Nazi officer’s daughter

Argentina must return to the rightful owner’s heir an 18th-century painting stolen by Nazis from a Dutch Jewish art collector, a judge has ruled.

Portrait of a Lady by Italian baroque painter Giuseppe Ghislandi was missing for eight decades before being photographed in 2025 hanging in the home of the daughter of a senior Nazi officer who had fled to Argentina after the second world war.

North Shields’ Gabriele Keenaghan was 12 when she was evacuated from Nazi Austria in 1939. She remembers the shock of leaving her family at Westbahnhof station

Gabriele Keenaghan still remembers the day in April 1939 when she said goodbye to her grandmother at a Vienna railway station for a Kindertransport to Britain – tears were strictly forbidden.

“I was apprehensive and I was worried because Nazis in black uniforms were on the platform,” she said. “I was only 12 years old so I think they were frightening … terrifying.

Polish war hero Kazimierz Moczarski spent 255 days sharing a cell with an SS general. Nearly 50 years after it was published, an uncensored version of his account is appearing in English for the first time

In 1949, Kazimierz Moczarski, a leading member of the Polish resistance, was in his fourth year of incarceration when he was moved into a cell with two Nazis at Warsaw’s Mokotów prison. One of them was Jürgen Stroop – a war criminal and SS general who had led the infamous destruction of the Warsaw ghetto and was responsible for the murder or capture of more than 56,000 Jews. They shared the same four walls for 255 consecutive days.

A celebrated figure in modern-day Poland, Moczarski was regarded as a threat to the power of the postwar communist regime in the country. Like other resistance members, he was accused of collaboration and arrested. But Moczarski, who spoke German, used his imprisonment with Stroop as an opportunity to investigate a question: what turned some Germans into mass murderers, seeking to impose their “Ordnung”, order, across the world? His book about the experience, Conversations with an Executioner, was published in 1977. An instant bestseller, it was performed as a play the same year, directed by Andrzej Wajda. It is finally being published in the UK this month, in its first uncensored translation into English by Sean Gasper Bye.

One seller says second world war memorabilia containing banned Nazi symbols is legal under exemptions to the laws

• Get our breaking news email, free app or daily news podcast

Nazi artefacts bearing prohibited symbols are being openly sold in Australia three years after the federal government made it illegal to do so, with vendors saying they are doing so for “educational” reasons.

The government in 2023 outlawed the display and trade of items bearing the Nazi Hakenkreuz (swastika) and double-sig rune that was the logo of the Schutzstaffel (SS), after multiple states passed similar laws that banned the display of Nazi symbols and the performance of the Nazi salute.

Published for the first time this month, the Irish writer’s record of his months in pre-war Germany is a fascinating insight into his understanding of, and unease with, Nazism

War was not yet on the immediate horizon when Samuel Beckett visited the German city of Hamburg in October 1936, but after watching the apoplexy that Adolf Hitler’s braying induced in ordinary Germans, the Irish playwright was certain that peace could not last. “They’ll need to fight soon (or burst),” he noted in his diary on 6 October.

The six notebooks that Beckett compiled during his six-month journey across Germany between late September 1936 and April 1937, published for the first time by German publisher Suhrkamp on 20 August this year, put paid to a commonly held view of the author of Waiting for Godot as a poet of pure pessimism, interested in despair and stasis but unconcerned by real-life politics.

Traverse theatre, Edinburgh
An encounter in a police cell with a Nazi officer could have been the end of the political theorist, but Jenny Lyn Bader’s play has little feel for the dramatic

The Mrs Stern of the title is the married name of Hannah Arendt, the political theorist much remembered for her “banality of evil” insight. Jenny Lyn Bader sets her play not, as you might expect, in the Prussian state library, but in a police cell where Arendt has been hauled in for questioning not long after the Reichstag fire.

The Nazi apparatus has extended its remit to political crimes and she, what with her bookish ways, errant husband and associations with Jewish intellectuals, has come under scrutiny.

Felix Kersten, the personal therapist of Hitler’s principal enforcer, claimed to have saved countless lives from the Holocaust. A new feature film exposes him as a narcissist prone to myth-making

Five years ago, German writer-director Felix Randau was approached by French producers who wanted him to make a miniseries about Felix Kersten, the former massage therapist to Nazi SS head Heinrich Himmler.

When the producers first pitched the project, there was one sentence which leapt out. “They said that if Steven Spielberg had known about Felix Kersten, he would have shot a film about him, not about Oskar Schindler.” Who was this intriguing, largely overlooked figure, who claimed to have saved countless Jews and other concentration camp prisoners from certain death?

Mike Collins’ son-in-law, David Alan Scheer II, has shared antisemitic conspiracies and Nazi imagery online

• US politics live – latest updates

The Republican Senate nominee in Georgia, Mike Collins, who has been plagued by a string of controversies in his time in public office, has close ties with a white nationalist influencer – his son-in-law, David Alan Scheer II – it has transpired.

A trucking executive and one-time “Freedom caucus” conservative endorsed by Donald Trump, Collins has been the GOP representative for Georgia’s 10th congressional district since 2023. In that time, the anti-abortion hardliner has drawn scrutiny over his associations with far-right and extremist figures, incendiary social media activity and accusations of antisemitism, which he has denied. He has also denied the legitimacy of the 2020 election and defended January 6 rioters, who he has said deserved pardons.

Memoir tells how the Jewish and Catholic parents of actor Isabelle and Caroline Huppert fell in love amid the rise of the Nazis. She explains why she wanted her ‘children’s children’ to know the story

Families have a way of appointing their own historians, even if the recruitment process remains obscure. In the late 1990s, Caroline Huppert – the fourth of five siblings, of whom the youngest is actor Isabelle – found herself alone with her father and a tape recorder. Over five days, he opened up about his life before and during the second world war. “I think I had that privileged position with him, because he had a taste for history, too,” she says. “But we didn’t have the same vision. I like the approach of what is called the nouvelle histoire, things like details of daily life in the past. With him, it was more emperors, kings, dates.”

More than 25 years later, their exchanges have led to her memoir, Une Histoire Cachée (A Hidden Story), a work that bundles up quotidian intimacy and big-ticket history in telling the story of how her parents, Raymond and Annick, fell in love. Their relationship so easily might never have happened: he was Jewish, she Catholic, and after they met in 1934 at Paris’s HEC business school, her haute-bourgeois family were opposed to them marrying. A big enough obstacle even before the Nazis invade France, and the young lovers are forced to flee the capital for the Free Zone near Lake Annecy. “I wasn’t aware of any of it in the least,” says the 75-year-old on a phone call from her home in Paris. “My parents weren’t people who talked about the past. They were always absorbed in the present, in action.”

Cannes film festival: The Son of Saul director’s dramatisation of Jean Moulin’s torture by Klaus Barbie both benefits and suffers from its mainstream approach

László Nemes made his Cannes debut 11 years ago with the terrifying, Oscar-winning Holocaust drama Son of Saul, and followed that up with Sunset, his elegant, mysterious drama of pre-first world war Budapest. His next film, Orphan, released in the UK last week, was a comparably enigmatic film set in post-second world war Hungary. But his new film in the Cannes competition is a basically pretty conventionally acted, conventionally directed, conventionally conceived wartime movie shot in the sepia-subdued colours of an old photograph, all about French resistance heroism and French resistance leader Jean Moulin, who went down in history for refusing to talk under torture.

The overall effect isn’t really like Jean-Pierre Melville’s film Army of Shadows; maybe closer to the 70s BBC TV show Secret Army. Nemes’s final scene is even rather sentimentally stirring, though the director then tries to cancel this sugary moment with a final premonition of the death camps. At all events, he undoubtedly brings impeccable craftsmanship, and the performances and production design are strong.

For years, I polished the brass plaques in front of my apartment dedicated to a Jewish mother and daughter who were murdered by the Nazis. Then a message out of the blue connected me to a surviving child …

At the grand, biblical age of 102, Sonja Ibermann Cowan has zero interest in wasting her time. There are delicious great-grandbabies to be serenaded, uproarious meals to share with her three beloved daughters, and meaningful celebrations of the high holidays to mark with her Melbourne rabbi, who makes house calls. Five years ago, she decided to invest some of that precious time in what became a friendship with me, across the world in Berlin, her birthplace.

The boredom of the pandemic certainly played a part. Cooped up at home under much stricter Covid-19 restrictions than we had in Germany – Sonja joked about being “eingesperrt” (locked up) – she and her extended close-knit family started turning their attention to the past. Her grandson Benjamin Preiss, a journalist at the Australian newspaper The Age, embarked on an  ambitious research project to uncover the mysteries of Sonja’s life and her mother’s and sister’s murders in the Holocaust.

It was the birthplace of the liberal tradition, but also the incubator for Nazism – what can this historic city tell us about democracy?

‘Weimar is Germany in a nutshell,” 1990s president Roman Herzog once quipped: “a town in which not only culture and thought were at home but also philistinism and barbarism.” The small city (population 65,000) sits at the heart of the nation and acts as a shrine to its sons Goethe, Schiller and Nietzsche. In 1919 the country’s first democratic constitution was promulgated in its national theatre. It was chosen as the site of Germany’s rebirth precisely because its aura of refined culture contrasted so sharply with the “Prussian militarism” of Berlin. From 1919-1925 it hosted the Bauhaus School, led by Walter Gropius, placing it at the forefront of art and design.

Yet, starting in the mid-1920s, Weimar, which was also then the state capital of Thuringia, became pivotal in the rise of the Nazi party and its first, regional, experiments in government. After 1933 it competed with Bayreuth for recognition as the “spiritual home of Nazism”.

Albrecht Weinberg spent years teaching students about Nazi atrocities after being imprisoned at Auschwitz and Belsen

• Three Auschwitz survivors tell their stories

Albrecht Weinberg, who survived a series of Nazi concentration and death camps and lost most of his family in the Holocaust before returning to Germany in his 80s, has died.

Weinberg died in Leer, north-western Germany, weeks after his 101st birthday and the premiere of a film about his life, Es Ist Immer in Meinem Kopf (It Is Always in My Head).