MANHATTAN: SKYSCRAPERS AS HUGE BURNING TORCHES

Adolph Hitler's evil genius included a vision of the end of New York City. Pamela at Atlas Shrugs reports:

Jew-Hatred and Jihad
The Nazi roots of the 9/11 attack.
by Matthias
Küntzel, Weekly Standard hat tip the shadow


The idea of using
suicide pilots to obliterate the skyscrapers of Manhattan originated in 1940s
Berlin. "In the latter stages of the war, I never saw Hitler so beside himself
as when, as if in a delirium, he was picturing to himself and to us the downfall
of New York in towers of flame," wrote Albert Speer in his diary. "He described
the skyscrapers turning into huge burning torches and falling hither and
thither, and the reflection of the disintegrating city in the dark sky."

Not only Hitler's fantasy but also his plan of action foreshadowed
September 11: He envisioned having kamikaze pilots fly light aircraft packed
with explosives and with no landing gear into Manhattan skyscrapers. The
drawings for the Daimler-Benz Amerikabomber from the spring of 1944 show giant
four-engine planes with raised undercarriages for transporting small bombers.
The bombers would be released shortly before the planes reached the East Coast,
after which the mother plane would return to Europe.

Hitler's rapture at
the thought of Manhattan in flames indicates his underlying motive: not merely
to fight a military adversary, but to kill all Jews everywhere. Possessed of the
notion that the whole of the Second World War was a struggle against an
imaginary Jewish enemy, he deemed "the USA a Jewish state" and New York the
center of world Jewry. "Wall Street," as a popular book published in Munich in
1919 put it, "is, so to speak, the Military Headquarters of Judas. From there
his threads radiate out across the entire world." From 1941 on, Hitler pushed to
get the bombers into production, in order to "be able to teach the Jews a lesson
in the form of terror attacks on American metropolises." Towards the end of the
war this idea became an obsession.

Sixty years later, it so happens, the
assault on the World Trade Center was coordinated from Germany. Mohamed Atta,
the Egyptian who piloted the plane that struck the North Tower of the World
Trade Center; Marwan al--Shehhi, from the United Arab Emirates, who steered the
plane into the South Tower; Ziad Jarrah, from Lebanon, who crashed United
Airlines Flight 93 near Shanksville, Pennsylvania; and their friends Ramzi
Binalshibh, a Yemeni, and the Moroccan student Mounir al-Motassedeq had formed
an al Qaeda cell in Hamburg, where they held regular "Koran circle" meetings
with sympathizers.

What ideas propelled Atta and the others to act?
Witnesses provided part of the answer at the world's first 9/11-related trial,
the prosecution of al-Motassedeq, which took place in Hamburg between October
2002 and February 2003. One participant in the Koran circle meetings, Shahid
Nickels, said Atta's Weltanschauung was based on a "National Socialist way of
thinking." Atta was convinced that the Jews were striving for world domination
and considered New York City the center of world Jewry, which was, in his
opinion, Enemy No. 1. Fellow students who lived in Motassedeq's dormitory
testified that he shared these views and waxed enthusiastic about a forthcoming
"big action." One student quoted Motassedeq as saying, "The Jews will burn and
in the end we will dance on their graves."