Welcome to this special edition of The Halli Casser-Jayne Show Podcast Ukraine at War. My guest this week is Franz Sedelmayer, once a close friend and business partner of Vladimir Putin, until the friendship and business relationship met with the reality of the economic jiu jitsu of the newly-elected President Boris Yeltsin and the political and economic ambitions of Putin. Sedelmayer’s considerable assets were soon expropriated by the new government. Sedelmayer went to war with Putin to retrieve what was his and won, waging a 20-year campaign against the Kremlin and Putin, ultimately winning more than 100 court cases and foreclosing on Russian state property in Western Europe, becoming, for the record,  the only individual ever to collect money from Vladimir Putin’s Russia.

Franz knows Putin and understands Russia in ways others don’t. The discussion you are about to hear is brutally frank and in parts disturbing, as reality often is. President Biden, President Zelenskyy, Vladimir Putin, NATO, we scrutinize the performance of all the players. What have they done right? What have they done wrong? Where do we go from here. Let’s talk with Franz Sedelmayer.

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), QAnon believer is not an outlier in the Republican Party. She is the Republican Party and all it stands for and that’s where we begin this week on The Halli Casser-Jayne Podcast with Matthew Cooper. How did the Republican Party go from being the party of small government, fiscal responsibility, and the protector of individual freedom to the home of Fascism, MAGAs, White Supremacists and kooks? Part of the answer to that question can be found in the powerful story of World War II told by David King in his book THE TRIAL OF ADOLF HITLER: THE BEER HALL PUTSCH AND THE RISE OF NAZI GERMANY, Halli’s conversation with Mr. King, the subject of our second half-hour.

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, sadly, is no anomaly in the Republican Party, now the home of Christian Nationalists, conspiracy believers, White Supremacists, anti-Semitic

s, and liars. It’s easy and fair to blame former President Donald Trump for the demise of the once Grand Old Party, but he merely took advantage of the what has long been brewing in the party. While characters like Taylor Greene were once the few, they are now the many. How did this happen? Is the press doing a good job on reporting the reality? The U.S.A. is on dangerous footing when storming the Capitol, likened to Hitler’s Beer Hall Putsch, an attempted coup by GOP believers, ginned up by then sitting President Donald Trump and the likes of Taylor Greene, Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz is acceptable by half of the members of Congress.

Answers lie in New York Times bestselling author David King’s historical account, THE TRIAL OF ADOLF HITLER, THE BEER HALL PUTSCH AND THE RISE OF NAZI GERMANY. The story begins February 26, 1924 when ten defendants are gathered in a packed Munich courtroom to begin their trial for high treason. All ten were members or allies of the Nazi Party. Four months prior, they had attempted a coup at a rowdy meeting in a local beer hall, an event quickly dubbed “the Beer Hall Putsch” by the press. The coup failed, ending in a massacre of Nazis at the hands of the state police. The trial was widely expected to sound the death knell for the Nazi Party. Instead Hitler and the party emerged more driven, popular, and powerful than before, launching the Nazi Party on its way to national and international importance, solidifying the power and popularity of the trial’s unlikely star defendant: the ‘everyman’ hero, Adolf Hitler. Does January 6, 2021 come to mind? Sound familiar?

Marjorie Taylor Greene, the GOP, Fascism, QAnon, Donald Trump, Adolf Hitler, The Beer Hall Putsch, history, Nazi Germany, Washington D.C., coups…is history repeating itself? Two important conversations this week on The Halli Casser-Jayne Show Podcast always available at Halli Casser-Jayne dot com, on all your favorite apps, and on your Alexa device, too. Let’s talk politics!

I recently interviewed author of  The Monuments Men, Rescuing d Vinci and Saving Italy, Robert M. Edsel. The interview was part of a show, “World War II, The Untold Stories.”

Not only is Robert Edsel the author of these three fine works, but also the co-producer of the award-winning documentary film The Rape of Europa. Robert Edsel is also the founder and president of the Monuments Men Foundation for the Preservation of Art, a recipient of the National Humanities Medal, and a trustee at the National WW II Museum.

Now Edsel’s The Monuments Men has been turned into a film of the same name produced, directed and starring George Clooney. Based on the true story of the greatest treasure hunt in history, the film is an action drama focusing on an unlikely World War II platoon, tasked by FDR with going into Nazi-controlled Germany, and rescuing artistic masterpieces from Nazi thieves, and returning them to their rightful owners. It would be an impossible mission: with the art trapped behind enemy lines, and with the German army under orders to destroy everything as the Reich fell, how could these guys – seven museum directors, curators, and art historians, all more familiar with Michelangelo than the M-1 – possibly hope to succeed? But as the Monuments Men, as they were called, found themselves in a race against time to avoid the destruction of 1000 years of culture, they would risk their lives to protect and defend mankind’s greatest achievements.

Who is Robert M. Edsel and how did he come upon this little known story of World War II? Listen to my interview with Robert M. Edsel on The Halli Casser-Jayne Show Podcast. Edsel, you’ll discover, is as fascinating a man as the tale he tells.

Young Marione Ingram holding her mother’s hands before the bombings began

Yesterday I interviewed Holocaust survivor Marione Ingram.  In my time I have met more than my share of Holocaust survivors, read books, including Marione’s own new account of her life in Nazi Germany, The Hands of War, A Tale of Endurance and Hope, from a Survivor of the Holocaust, a book, which by the way, that I highly recommend.

I loved her book. Yes, the story that she tells is truly horrific, aren’t all survivor stories so? Yet this story touched me more deeply than most. I finished the book last week, but Marione’s story continued to haunt me.

Thanks to Comcast, a truly awful company, our internet service went down just prior to airtime. So that when I was finally able to begin the interview, I hadn’t had a chance to conduct a preliminary conversation with Mrs. Ingram to get a “feel” for my subject.

FYI: Just a few minutes of idle chit-chat is enough for this interviewer to gain an understanding of her interviewee. Without that, as you can tell when you listen to the beginning of  my interview with Marione Ingram, timing is off. By the way, we all do that when we engage in conversation: establish a rhythm with one another. When we can’t find it that’s when we tend to say that a person is not our cup of tea, but I digress.

The interview began. Marione and I quickly established our rhythm; we knew instinctively that we were like-minded souls. Marione began the interview speaking to my audience but a few minutes into the hour she was speaking to me, and I to her. If you listen you will be privy to our private conversation.

Marione asked to read from her book. She did and I listened with rapt attention.  Speaking with her still prominent German accent, her own voice, made the lyric of her work that much more meaningful.

My heart began doing strange things. By the end of the interview I will admit to you that I could barely speak. There were tears glistening in my eyes, in truth they bubble up even as I write. Yes, I was horrified by Marione’s telling of the unspeakable things that happened to her, the horrors inflicted by the Nazi regime, not to mention her fellow Germans, when she was a mere child. The atrocities are difficult to fathom for those of us of healthy minds. Of course I was shaken to the core by her story.

Hours after the interview had ended I found myself still shaken, my emotions as raw as they had been earlier. I thought to myself that I must be missing something. I was so disturbed  that I couldn’t fall asleep. I sat up in bed, and I thought. And then finding no relief I turned on the TV and what was I met with? On PBS a show Seeds of Resiliency that chronicled the journey of 12 people who have overcome physical or emotional hardships. There, on my TV screen were three more Holocaust survivors! They were riveting. Oh, I thought to myself, what a day. What is going on? Even this week’s The Halli Casser-Jayne Show fit into the theme of the day. The subject: Israel.

And then, finally, I grabbed the seed of awareness that had been generating within my psyche.  I smiled as I thought to myself: Evil lost, Hitler lost! Goodness won!  Not because the allies won the war and beat Hitler and his cronies. That was merely an ending to something that should never have begun. No, what I realized then was something far more profound. For it was then that I realized that I had met with the mysterious ways that are Gd’s, the Gd that chose — hand-picked — Marione Ingram and the other survivors of the evil onslaught as his earth angels. 

What is an angel? Is an angel not someone who has seen the worst and seeks only to make things better? Is an angel not someone who deplores hate in all its form and worships only love? Surely an angel is someone who in the face of evil will not remain silent, or cower to the enemy. An angel is Marione Ingram who despite being the recipient of the very worst that is in mankind, can bare her soul in a guileless manner because the evil-mongers might strip a nine year old girl of everything, but an angel clings to dignity. What is left? Only the the purest of heart…and isn’t that by its very definition an angel?

Marione Ingram, a gift from Gd.

Thanks, Marione.

Marione’s Interview can be found on the player on this page. Simply press on the interview.

Listen to the related show: NY TIMES BEST SELLING AUTHOR JENNA BLUM | THOSE WHO SAVE US