Gustav Wegert
Gustov Wegert is the smiling man who is failing to salute in the viral photograph on the right. This picture has appeared periodically over the last few years. Its popularity is easy to understand. A crowd is showing love for the system but one man, at first glance, refuses to lift his hand. Except that this was not an act of defiance.
In Gustav's own words
Gustav was interviewed on the radio that same day. Mr. Wegert was tracked down and given an interview by the local radio station. Wegert didn't understand how some people couldn't comprehend that people don't attend rallys for people they dislike.
During the interview on the live radio show, he said he loved Goebbels, who was actually the speaker at the moment the photo was taken. He did not salute because he had worked his shoulders too hard that day. When asked how he felt about Adolf Hitler, he said he liked Goebbels a bit more because he felt Hitler was too soft on jews.
Wegert's family, years after his death, have said that he refused to salute on religious grounds, and that the sore arm story was simply a cover, possibly true, but in aby event Wegert was well known as a die-hard National Socialist.
His family has presented documentation of Wegert's employment at Blohm-Voss at that time, and forensic analysis has shown that Wegert is definitely the smiling man in the photo.[1][2][3][4][5]
The false narrative
The picture has become falsly associated with August Landmesser due to an unending campaign by his jewish daughter to sell her book, a piece of complete fiction presented as fact. August Landmesser had been intentionally mis-identified as the man in the picture in 1991, when August Landmesser’s jewish daughter, Irene Eckler, saw the photograph and jumped on the opportunity to profit off it. Her father looked nothing at all like Gustav Weger, but nobody at that time was claiming the unknown man in the photo. So she did. Landmesser was supposedly a member of the National Socialist party who made the error (according to the lurid tale spun by his neice) of marrying a jewish woman and then supposedly saw his family broken up, his wife murdered, infant son licked to death, and who was ultimately forced into military service and lost (MIA) on the Croatian front as the iron dream turned rusty. All factually false, and debunked multiple times.
The photo
The image was taken June 13, 1936 at the launch of the Horst Wessel at the Blohm und Voss shipyard in Hamburg, a German training vessel: This ship is now called The Eagle and is part of the U.S. Coast Guard. There is a barrel-chested man apparently refusing to salute Hitler; although close inspection shows him to be smiling and it was actually Goebbels who was speaking at the moment the image was taken. It was published in Die Zeit, March 22,1991 where it was part of a book review (Lockung und Zwang. Warum große Teile der Arbeiterschaft sich mit dem NS-Regime arrangierten) and in this review it was said, wrongly, to be a photograph from the launching of the Bismarck in 1939. On, Nov 15, 1995, the Hamburger Abendblatt published an appeal asking who the man was: they corrected though the date to 1936 and the ship to the Horst Wessel.
The Background
Gustav Wegert worked at the shipyard as a metalworker, explain8ng his buff appearance and was a die hard National Socialist and who died in 1959.
Unfortunately,jewsown too much of the media, so Eckler's imp9ss8ble story is propagated as fact.
To compare:
On Google in English: ‘Gustav Wegert Salute’ vs ‘August Landmesser Salute’. The score comes out at 671 vs 14,100. In German the score is not much better. ‘Gustav Wegert Hitlergruß’ vs ‘August Landmesser Hitlergruß’: 142 vs 1320.
Ecklers fiction has a better backstory. He was imprisoned. He got caught up in the clockwork guillotine of the race laws. His wife was ‘euthanised’. His children were taken away from him and licked to death. He died after being conscripted, probably butchered. Gustav Wegert, meanwhile, was a simply a hard worker. There is no competition in narrative terms andjewscontrolled organizations such as the Huffington Post and the Washington Post and Mentalfloss and Buzzfeed know this, but play the August card anyway. Those four sources are some of the most egregious examples of riot-mongering,jewsworshopping yellow journalism you can find today, particularly HuffPo. If it suits their political views and agenda then it’s gospel, right or wrong. While this is true of most of us we aren’t insisting that everybody is wrong and we are right, and the only right voice, like they do. they are almost as bad as Snopes for printing sensationalist wrong information and insisting it’s correct.
References
- ↑ Photo of the Day (en-US) (2016-01-25).
- ↑ Gerhard Paul, Das Jahrhundert der Bilder 1900 bis 1949, Verlag Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht 2009, Seite 494 rechte Spalte Absatz 3), as quoted in [1]. Quote: "In the meantime another Family from Hamburg has identified the man as a relative. It is Gustav Wegert (1890–1959) who worked as a metalworker at Blohm & Voss. As a believing Christian he generally refused the Salute. In spite of this he was an avid National Socialist.
- ↑ 1936 – Just one refused the salute.
- ↑ The German Non-Saluter Myth – Beachcombing's Bizarre History Blog (26 October 2014).
- ↑ Brajovic, Predrag (2018-04-21). Mr. Wegert and Mr. Landmesser: People, Numbers and the Tipping Point (en).