Art by Daniel Campos #Ghostbusters

20k likes, gentlemen

Josh Homme of Kyuss, Queens of the Stone Age, Them Crooked Vultures, etc, walked for Ann Demeulemeester yesterday. That is all.

BREAKING NEWS The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the 2026 #NobelPrize in Physics to Francis Halzen “for decisive contributions to the IceCube Neutrino Observatory and the discovery of high-energy neutrinos of astrophysical origin.”

Nobody in the West is interested in Kaliningrad & we certainly don’t want to risk a war over it. It’s not in the public debate here and it never was.

Take me somewhere expensive…

Volgens burgemeester Thomas Dermine (PS) bevindt Charleroi zich op de rand van een financiële crisis. Hij dringt aan op structurele hervormingen en sterkere regionale steun. tijd.be/politiek-economie/be…

Mood… youtu.be/tI0CmOtrHag?is=th9j…

So many #silo questions. What bugs me… apparently Peter Gabriel was in Silo 17, did they have to listen to his songs for decades and is that the reason they decided to make a run for it?

3 September 1941 | Following the information from the Gestapo about the transfer to Auschwitz of a large transport of Soviet prisoners of war—officers and political commissars previously selected in POW camps by special Gestapo units—the SS camp authorities decided to kill them using Zyklon B gas in the basement of Block 11. This became the first large-scale execution using this pesticide in this German Nazi camp. It was also decided to take this opportunity to kill bedridden prisoners, patients of the camp hospital. SS-Hauptsturmführer Dr. Siegfried Schwela ordered a selection in the hospital, during which about 250 Polish prisoners were chosen. After some time, orderlies were told to lead them—or carry some on stretchers—into the basement of Block 11. There they were crammed into several cells. About 600 Soviet POWs were then also driven into the cells. The SS men threw Zyklon B into the cells, then closed and sealed the doors. The basement windows were covered with earth. The action took place late in the evening, after the camp command had announced a ban on prisoners leaving the blocks and moving around the camp (the so-called Lagersperre). The following afternoon, after confirming that all the people were dead, all doors were opened and the window seals removed in order to ventilate the rooms from the remaining gas. After the evening roll call, another Lagersperre was declared. At night, Rapportführer Gerhard Palitzsch summoned 20 prisoners from the penal company, all the orderlies from the hospital blocks, and two prisoners—Eugeniusz Obojski and Teofil Banasiuk—who worked as corpse carriers to the mortuary and transporters of corpses to the crematorium. They were brought to the courtyard of Block 11. They had previously been told they were being assigned to “special work” and were forbidden under penalty of death from speaking to anyone about what they would see. At the same time, they were promised an increased food ration after completing the task. The prisoners were divided into four groups. One group, wearing gas masks, carried the bodies to the ground floor; the second stripped them; the third carried them to the courtyard of Block 11; and the fourth loaded them onto handcarts. The bodies of the prisoners selected in the camp hospital were dressed in underwear, while the bodies of the POWs were in uniforms, in the pockets of which were found documents, family photographs, money, cigarettes, and various small items. Camp dentists, under SS supervision, extracted dental gold from the mouths of the dead. The handcarts loaded with corpses were then pulled to the crematorium by prisoners harnessed to them. This took two consecutive nights. Watch a short video about Block 11 where this execution took place: youtu.be/3hjDCsqgGY0 After this mass execution, the SS decided to create the first permanent gas chamber of Auschwitz in the morgue by the crematorium of the camp. Learn about this building: youtu.be/wZmBSRVYLoE

2 September 1879 | Italian Jewish woman, Silvia Usigli, was born in Rovigo. She was deported to #Auschwitz from Milan on 30 January 1944. She was murdered in a gas chamber after arrival selection. --- ▶ Gas chambers and crematoria of the Auschwitz camp: youtu.be/-A05i25j9Ck

Mathieu Marting. As. Gehuwd. Bediende. 2 Kinderen. Verzetsgroep Gewapende Partizanen bataljonscommandant.Sabotage en gewapende verzetsacties. Arrestatie, na verraad, op 12 januari 1944 en overgebracht naar Breendonk. Gefusilleerd 11 april 1945. 29 jaar. #heldenvanhetverzet

29 August 1922 | A Slovak Jewish woman, Rozalia Reiss, was born. She was deported to #Auschwitz. She did not survive.

On This Day — August 26–28, 1941 23,600 Jews were murdered in three days in Nazi-occupied Ukraine. At Kamenets-Podolsk, SS-Obergruppenführer Friedrich Jeckeln turned mass murder into an industrial process. Most of the victims were Hungarian Jews — men, women, and children — expelled into German-held territory. Local Ukrainian Jews were added to the pits. They were forced to undress, then ordered to lie face-down in tight rows on top of the bodies already there. Jeckeln refined what became known as the “sardine method.” Pack the living so densely that no space is wasted. Then shoot them in the back of the head. On August 28, he radioed his superiors the final tally: 23,600. Until that week, most killing actions had targeted Jewish men. Here entire families were wiped out without distinction. The body count jumped into five figures in a single operation. The earth over the pits moved for days afterward. It was organized. It was reported. It was improved upon. At Kamenets-Podolsk the Holocaust by bullets reached a new level of efficiency, and a new depth of horror.

August 26, 1938. #OTD Nina Ivanovna Koroleva, a Kharkiv-born student at Moscow State University, was executed at Kommunarka. She was 24 years old. Koroleva was sentenced for participation in a counter-revolutionary terrorist organization by the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR. She was rehabilitated on September 15, 1956 by that same body due to lack of evidence of a crime. (There is inaccurate information out there that she was the wife of of the legendary head of the the Soviet space program, Sergei Korolev, and arrested due to his 1938 repression. In fact, his wife was Nina Ivanovna *Kotenkova* who married him a decade after Nina Ivanovna *Koroleva* was killed.) Nina Ivanovna Koroleva is no. 7 on the execution list shown. On the cover sheet it can be seen that the list was initialed by Stalin himself in his distinctive blue pencil.

RIP Tim

25 August 1923 | A German Jewish woman, Bertha Katz, was born in Schlitz. On 3 March 1943 she was deported from Berlin to #Auschwitz. She did not survive.

Tim Declercq and Maxime Chevalier after the stage, wow. 😳😬 That looks so painful, poor guys...Cycling is the new golf, just that you get hit by golf ball hailstones. #Dauphine

A fantastic guest post from our friend @Stern_66 August 25, 1937. #OTD Tamara Vsevolodovna Lizinskaya, a student from Moscow, was executed. Tamara spent much of her youth in Berlin and Paris, where her mother Alexandra Lizinskaya worked until 1931; this foreign experience may have been what put her under scrutiny. Another possible reason for her arrest was her relationship with Abel Yenukidze, a prominent Old Bolshevik, former Secretary of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee, and godfather of Stalin's second wife, Nadezhda Alliluyeva. Yenukidze had been expelled from the party in 1935 and was executed in 1937. On February 8, 1937, Tamara was arrested in Moscow. She spent more than 6 months in custody at Lubyanka before being put on trial on August 25. Her name was already on an "Execution List" signed by Stalin when she went on trial. She was sentenced to death for “membership in an anti-Soviet terrorist organization.” Judge Vasily Ulrich noted in her file: “Execute immediately.” She was shot 3 days after her mother, who had also been arrested on February 8, 1937, and had been executed on similar charges on August 22, 1937. We will do an entry on her. Tamara Vsevolodovna’s son, Pyotr, was 7 at the time. He lived with relatives and adopted their name to avoid the label of “Child of a Traitor to the Fatherland.” Pyotr later researched his mother's story and published it. Lizinskaya is today one of the more well-known cases of an ordinary person executed during the Terror. Her face has been used in anti-Stalinist protests. She was rehabilitated on March 1, 1958.

Majid, I am sorry that I knew nothing about you before they hanged you. Forgive us. Majid, you have a family. You are someone’s son. Someone’s brother. Someone loved you, waited for you, worried about you. And yet we know almost nothing about you. This is Majid Adineh, a protester from the January uprising whom the Islamic Republic hanged on Sunday morning. There was not even a single photograph of him publicly available before his execution. This image is taken from a forced-confession video released by Mizan, the judiciary’s own media outlet. That is how brutally the regime silenced your family. They made you disappear while you were still alive, and then they took you to the gallows. I don’t know what happened to you when they came to your cell and said, “Get ready. You are going to be hanged.” I don’t know what went through your mind in those final moments, when they put the rope around your neck and kicked the chair from beneath your feet. Did you think you had been forgotten by the rest of the world? The unbearable truth is that almost nobody knew your name until the regime announced that you were gone. They silenced your family. They hid your face. They kept your name from us. And then they ended your life.