‘The end of the world.’ In April, 1945, Adolf Hitler cowered in his Berlin bunker, as the Russians pounded the city with rockets and mortars.  The cold springtime sun, was a pale yellow orb, barely visible through the smoke. It mattered little to Adolf. He had been awake for days and was sweating, paranoid and trembling in fear of his end. His Generals, soldiers and staff were jumping ship and abandoning him at every turn. The ‘Thousand Year Reich’ was lurching to a bloody halt. Germany was burning to cinders around him. He still held out hope that SS General Steiner could turn his Panzers around at the Danube, throw the Russians back and  liberate Berlin… rescuing ‘Der Fuehrer’ to rebuild the shattered city again. Alas- it was not to be. The Russian people had suffered tremendously under the heel of the Nazi black boot. It was time for retribution. As the Russian- Third Shock Army, ravaged, looted, raped and butchered anything that moved, Heinrich Himmler of the SS, had already seen the writing on the wall. Behind Adolf Hitlers back, he made overtures through Count Bernadotte of Sweden, for peace with the allies. When Hitler heard the news through his teletype operator, he broke. Spit sprayed from his mouth as he stammered and swore.  Wildly, he flew into a paroxysm of rage, denouncing his soldiers & staff as “defeatists and traitors”. Falling back into his chair–abandoned– in the dank, moldy bowels of his bunker, Adolf knew that the end had come. His next actions could have come 12 years earlier…if you ask me. He married his mistress, wrote out a ‘testament’ –for posterity–which was a vehement diatribe against the ‘Jews’, and then shot himself in the mouth. He did everyone a favor. It was the end of the world, for him and his like-minded goons. Darkness no longer held sway over Europe. Tyranny and hatred has no place in our world.

In the 1970s, I saw photographs of Jay Adams with Swastikas on his skateboards and wondered if he was simply being ‘punk’. He was asked and said that it had nothing to do with Nazism. It was just to be gnarly…skate punk.  Jay was really radical. I don’t think Jay Adams ever really gave things that much thought and I doubt he was a believer in Nazi ideology. I think that Jay was just being…Jay.  However, I think that the resurgence in National Socialist thinking throughout the world, is a bad idea, in a long sad history of bad ideas.

The world is too diverse and convoluted to have that type of mentality governing people. We need a whole bunch of tolerance and we need it now. Remember your history. People don’t like to think about such things, but genocidal activity is occurring all over our modern world today! Sixty-five years ago, Hitler killed himself and Nazi  barbarity was uncovered, for the world to learn from. Pay attention or we will be repeating history and that will not be cool.  Skate-Ozzie

“When history looks back, I want people to know that the Nazis could not kill millions of people with impunity.” Simon Weisenthal