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She claims she saw Hitler’s ashes and danced with Goering. But is any of it true?
Hitler and My Mother-in-Law
By Terese Svoboda
O/R Books, 416 pages, $23.00
Patricia Hartwell had many stories from her time as a correspondent for the US Office of War Information. Once, she said, she took a picture with Adolf Hitler’s ashes so American citizens would see that the war was over. It’s a thrilling tale, but nobody knows if it’s true.
The mystery surrounding this photo — where it is, if the ashes were actually Hitler’s, whether there even was a picture — takes center stage in Hitler and My Mother-in-Law, a lengthy memoir by author Terese Svoboda.
As a correspondent for the US Office of War Information during World War II, Hartwell was the first female reporter to arrive at Dachau and Hitler’s Eagle’s Nest. She also pocketed several of Hermann Goering’s medals. Well-researched, engaging, and occasionally cringe-inducing in its depiction of awkward interactions between Svoboda and Hartwell, the book paints Hartwell as a woman who was both morally dubious and undeniably impressive.
Svoboda, author of the novels Cannibal and Dog on Fire, has plenty of reasons not to believe her mother-in-law, who died in 1998 at age 82. She lied in an oral history of Hawaii’s State Foundation on Culture and the Arts about being accepted into Harvard Law School in 1936, even though women weren’t admitted there until 1950. She claimed several times to have been close friends with Eleanor Roosevelt and that she was invited to stay in the White House on occasion. No records of such a relationship with the former-First Lady exist.
While Svoboda doesn’t hold back her criticisms of her mother-in-law — and she has plenty — the memoir does not demonize her. Instead, Svoboda attempts to understand her mother-in-law’s penchant for embellishment in the context of the patriarchal society in which she lived, one that forced impressive women to be quiet about their achievements. Maybe struggling so long for recognition led Hartwell to feel the need to exaggerate her life story.
The book does not just explore the lies Hartwell told others but also the ones she told herself, such as refusing to believe that her second husband, Dickson Hartwell, a World War II veteran and fellow journalist, beat her children.
And yet among all the falsehoods, there are known facts about Hartwell’s life that seem stranger than the ones she invented. During the Allied occupation of Germany, Hartwell served briefly as the mayor of Berchtesgaden, a resort town where Hitler and other Nazi leaders vacationed. She got to see a collection of looted art recovered from Goering — and picked out a painting to take home. Apparently it wasn’t unusual for members of the American press and military to take souvenirs, no matter how heinous their origin story.
The piece, one of Lucas Cranach’s many versions of “Cupid Complaining to Venus,” was one of Hitler’s favorites. Nearly two decades after Hartwell brought it back to New York, Dickson sold the painting, apparently without her permission, to E. A. Silberman Galleries in order to purchase a small newspaper in Arizona. The Jewish-owned art firm then sold the painting to the National Gallery of London for over a hundred times more than what they bought it for.
Hartwell also claimed to have danced with Goering at a party that the American soldiers held the night of his arrest. According to some reports, rather than punishing Goering, the military fraternized with him. Based on her own archival research, Svoboda determines this claim to be plausible.
Why, Svoboda wonders, would Hartwell “want to boast of not only meeting the second most evil Nazi, but dancing with him?” If it’s a lie, it’s one that seems to work against its teller. If it’s the truth, it’s one most people would probably like to keep hidden. To some, whether it’s fiction or not may not be important. But Svoboda contends that to those who want to understand the type of person Hartwell was, the truth behind this story is crucial.
Although Svoboda remembers seeing the photo of Hartwell with Hitler’s ashes, it never resurfaced after the woman’s death. According to Svoboda’s husband, Hartwell’s oldest son, the ashes were not Hitler’s, just a random pile picked for a posed photo to mark the end of the war. No matter who — or what — the ashes belonged to, it’s the power behind the story, one of a fallen dictatorship, that mattered. And Hartwell clearly understood the power of stories.
The post She claims she saw Hitler’s ashes and danced with Goering. But is any of it true? appeared first on The Forward.
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German Antisemitism Commissioner Targeted With Death Threat Letter After Arson Attack on Home
Andreas Büttner (Die Linke), photographed during the state parliament session. The politician was nominated for the position of Brandenburg’s anti-Semitism commissioner. Photo: Soeren Stache/dpa via Reuters Connect
Andreas Büttner, the commissioner for antisemitism in the state of Brandenburg in northeastern Germany, has been targeted the second attack in under a week after receiving a death threat, sparking outrage and prompting local authorities to launch a full investigation.
According to the German newspaper Potsdamer Neueste Nachrichten (PNN), the Brandenburg state parliament received a letter on Monday threatening Büttner’s life, with the words “We will kill you” and an inverted red triangle, the symbol of support for the Islamist terrorist group Hamas.
State security police have examined the anonymous letter under strict safety measures, determining that a gray substance inside was harmless. Authorities are now probing the incident as part of an ongoing investigation into threats against the German official.
Ulrike Liedtke, president of the Brandenburg state parliament, condemned the latest attack on Büttner, describing the death threats and harassment as “completely unacceptable.”
“Threats and violence are not a form of political discourse, but crimes against humanity,” Liedtke said. “Andreas Büttner has our complete support and solidarity.”
A former police officer and member of the Left Party, Büttner took office as commissioner for antisemitism in 2024 and has faced repeated attacks since.
On Sunday night, Büttner’s private property in Templin — a town located approximately 43 miles north of Berlin — was targeted in an arson attack, and a red Hamas triangle was spray-painted on his house.
The home of Germany’s antisemitism commissioner, Andreas Büttner, was set on fire overnight in a targeted attack.
His family was inside the house at the time.
This is the second attack against Büttner in the past 16 months. His car was previously vandalized with swastikas. This… pic.twitter.com/cAbFnMIwQ7
— Combat Antisemitism Movement (@CombatASemitism) January 5, 2026
According to Büttner, his family was inside the house at the time of the attack, marking the latest assault against him in the past 16 months.
“The symbol sends a clear message. The red Hamas triangle is widely recognized as a sign of jihadist violence and antisemitic incitement,” Büttner said in a statement after the incident.
“Anyone who uses such a thing wants to intimidate and glorify terror. This is not a protest, it is a threat,” he continued.
Hamas uses inverted red triangles in its propaganda videos to indicate Israeli targets about to be attacked. The symbol, a common staple at pro-Hamas rallies, has come to represent the Palestinian terrorist group and glorify its use of violence.
In August 2024, swastikas and other symbols and threats were also spray-painted on Büttner’s personal car.
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Harvard President Blasts Scholar Activism, Calls for ‘Restoring Balance’ in Higher Ed
Harvard University President Alan Garber speaks during the 374th Commencement exercises at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, US, May 29, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Brian Snyder
Harvard University president Alan Garber, fresh off a resounding endorsement in which the Harvard Corporation elected to keep him on the job “indefinitely,” criticized progressive faculty in a recent podcast interview for turning the university classroom into a pulpit for the airing of their personal views on contentious political issues.
Garber made the comments last week on the “Identity/Crisis Podcast,” a production of the Shalom Hartman Institute, a Jewish think tank which specializes in education research.
“I think that’s where we went wrong,” Garber said, speaking to Yehuda Kurtzer. “Because think about it, if a professor in a classroom says, ‘This is what I believe about this issue,’ how many students — some of you probably would be prepared to deal with this, but most people wouldn’t — how many students would actually be willing to go toe to toe against a professor who’s expressed a firm view about a controversial issue?”
Garber continued, saying he believes higher education, facing a popular backlash against what critics have described as political indoctrination, is now seeing a “movement to restore balance in teaching and to bring back the idea that you really need to be objective in the classroom.”
He added, “What we need to arm our students with is a set of facts and a set of analytic tools and cultivation of rigor in analyzing these issues.”
Coming during winter recess and the Jewish and Christian holidays, Garber’s interview fell under the radar after it was first aired but has been noticed this week, with some observers pointing to it as evidence that Harvard is leading an effort to restore trust in the university even as it resists conceding to the Trump administration everything it has demanded regarding DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion), viewpoint diversity, and expressive activity such as protests.
As previously reported by The Algemeiner, Garber has spent the past two years fighting factions from within and without the university that have demanded to steer its policies and culture — from organizers of an illegal anti-Israel encampment to US President Donald Trump, who earlier this year canceled $2.26 billion in public money for Harvard after it refused to grant his wishlist of reforms for which the conservative movement has clamored for decades.
Even as Harvard tells Trump “no,” it has enacted several policies as a direct response to criticisms that the institution is too permissive of antisemitism for having allowed anti-Zionist extremism to reach the point of antisemitic harassment and discrimination. In 2025, the school agreed to incorporate into its policies a definition of antisemitism supported by most of the Jewish community, established new rules governing campus protests, and announced new partnerships with Israeli academic institutions. Harvard even shuttered a DEI office and transferred its staff to what will become, according to a previous report by The Harvard Crimson, a “new Office of Culture and Community.” The paper added that Harvard has even “worked to strip all references to DEI from its website.”
Appointed in January 2024 as interim president, Garber — who previously served in roles as Harvard’s provost and chief academic officer — rose to the top position at America’s oldest and, arguably, most prestigious institution at a time when the job was least desirable. At the time, Harvard was being pilloried over some of its students cheering Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel and even forming gangs which mobbed Jewish students wending their way through campus; the university had suffered the embarrassment of its first Black president being outed as a serial plagiarist, a stunning disclosure which called into question its vetting procedures as well as its embrace of affirmative action; and anti-Israel activists on campus were disrupting classes and calling for others to “globalize the intifada.”
Garber has since won over the Harvard Corporation, which has refused to replace him during a moment that has been described as the most challenging in its history.
“Alan’s humble, resilient, and effective leadership has shown itself to be not just a vital source of calm in turbulent times, but also a generative force for sustaining Harvard’s commitment to academic excellence and to free inquiry and expression,” Harvard Corporation senior fellow Penny Pritzker said in a statement issued on behalf of the body, which is the equivalent of a board of trustees. “From restoring a sense of community during a period of intense scrutiny and division to launching vital new programs on viewpoint diversity and civil discourses and instituting new actions to fight antisemitism and anti-Arab bias, Alan has not only stabilized the university but brought us together in support of our shared mission.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
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Holocaust Survivors Sent Care Packages to Oct. 7 Hostages for Hanukkah
The Menorah for Hanukkah on the Square 2025 in Trafalgar Square, London, United Kingdom, Dec. 14, 2025. Photo: Matthew Chattle/Cover Images via Reuters Connect
Survivors of the Holocaust spread holiday cheer this Hanukkah by delivering care packages to a group of 20 hostages whom the terrorist group Hamas recently released from captivity to fulfill the requirements of a ceasefire which suspended hostilities with Israel.
The gifts, dropped off at the Israeli consulate office in New York City, was made possible by The Blue Card, the only US-based charity organization which provides financial assistance and other services to survivors of the Holocaust. Originally founded in 1934 to assist Jews who had fled Germany to escape Hitler’s persecution of the country’s Jews, it has operated ceaselessly for nearly a century.
Over the past two years, the world has seen a revival of antisemitism unlike any since the period in which The Blue Card was founded, sparked by the Hamas-led Oct. 7, 2023, massacre that claimed the lives over of 1,200 Israelis and stole years and even more lives from 251 more who were kidnapped and held hostage in Gaza.
Some of the hostages who survived captivity have been released in stages since Israel and Hamas agreed on a ceasefire in October, and on Monday, Blue Card executive director Masha Pearl said the organization felt it necessary to reach out to them due to their having experienced a plight that is painfully familiar to what its clients endured in Europe during the Holocaust. Pearl also discussed the Bondi Beach mass shooting, in which a father and son inspired by Islamism opened fire on Jews celebrating the start of Hanukkah, murdering 15 people and injuring 40 others.
“Holocaust survivors and former hostages share a uniquely painful bond shaped by survival and resilience,” Pearl said. “After witnessing a mass shooting at a Chanukah event in Sydney, it felt even more urgent for our survivors to deliver these care packages now, spreading light at a moment that feels dark for the entire Jewish world. The resilience of the Holocaust survivors we assist, the former hostages, and now the survivors of the attack in Australia remind us that even in the face of hatred and violence, the Jewish people remain united.”
In a press release Blue Card said the care packages “carried profound meaning,” being filled to the brim with goods of all sorts, from blankets and water bottles to chap stick and even handwritten notes from the Holocaust survivors who sent them.
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.