title: Dietrich Eckart

text: Motivated by his temporary annoyance at Eckart, and by Eckart's impracticality in operational matters, Hitler began attempting to run the party without Eckart's assistance, and when forced to use Eckart again as a political operative, the results were disappointing. Hitler began to see Eckart as a political liability due to his disorganization and his increased drinking. Hitler, however, did not discard or sideline him, as he had with other early comrades who had stood in his way. He stayed close to Eckart intellectually and emotionally, and continued to visit him in the mountains. The relationship between the two men was not simply a political one.


title: Dietrich Eckart

text: On 9 November 1923, Eckart participated in the failed Beer Hall Putsch. He was arrested and placed in Landsberg Prison along with Hitler and other party officials, but was released shortly thereafter due to illness. He then went to Berchtesgaden to recuperate.


title: Dietrich Eckart

text: Eckart promoted Hitler as Germany's coming savior. Eckart's hero, Otto Weininger, had formulated a dichotomy in which genius and Jews were opposed. Genius, in Weininger's view, was the epitome of masculinity and non-materialism, while Jews were femininity in its purest form. Eckart took upon himself this philosophy, and considered that the role of genius was to rid the world of the baleful influence of Jews. Many parts of German society held similar views, and were looking for a savior, a "German Messiah", a genius to lead them out of the economic and political morass the country had fallen into as a result of the Great Depression and the economic effects of the Treaty of Versailles that ended World War I.


title: Dietrich Eckart

text: Under Eckart's tutelage Hitler first began to think of himself as that person, a superior being. Because it was generally believed that geniuses were born and not made, he could not present himself as having been mentored by Eckart and others. Thus in "Mein Kampf", Hitler did not mention Eckart or Karl Mayr, or the others who had been instrumental in creating what the world was now meant to see as the natural genius, Adolf Hitler, the German Messiah.


title: Dietrich Eckart

text: Shortly after the Party purchase of the "Völkischer Beobachter" in December 1920, and Eckart's installation as editor, with Rosenberg as his assistant, the two men had begun to use the newspaper as a vehicle to disseminate this "Hitler Myth", the notion that Hitler was a superior being, a genius who would be the divine German Messiah –the chosen one. The paper did not refer to Hitler as merely the leader of the Nazi Party; instead, he was "Germany's leader". Other newspapers in Bavaria began to call Hitler "the Bavarian Mussolini." This idea of Hitler's specialness began to spread, so that two years later, in November 1922, the "" newspaper would look ahead to when "the masses of the people will raise [Hitler] up as their leader, and give him their allegiance through thick and thin."


title: Dietrich Eckart

text: Eckart died in Berchtesgaden on 26 December 1923 of a heart attack. He was buried in Berchtesgaden's old cemetery, not far from the eventual graves of Nazi Party official Hans Lammers and his wife and daughter.


title: Dietrich Eckart

text: Although Hitler did not mention Eckart in the first volume of "Mein Kampf", after Eckart's death he dedicated the second volume to him, writing that Eckart was "one of the best, who devoted his life to the awakening of our people, in his writings and his thoughts and finally in his deeds." In private, he would admit Eckart's role as his mentor and teacher, and said of him in 1942: "We have all moved forward since then, that's why we don't see what [Eckart] used to be back then: a polar star. The writings of all others were filled with platitudes, but if he told you off: such wit! I was a mere infant then in terms of style." Hitler later told one of his secretaries that his friendship with Eckart was "one of the best things he experienced in the 1920s" and that he never again had a friend with whom he felt such "a harmony of thinking and feeling."


title: Dietrich Eckart

text: During the Nazi period, several monuments and memorials were created to Eckart. Hitler named the arena near the Olympic Stadium in Berlin, now known as the Waldbühne (Forest Stage), the "Dietrich-Eckart-Bühne" when it was opened for the 1936 Summer Olympics. The 5th "Standarte" (regiment) of the "SS-Totenkopfverbände" was given the honour-title "Dietrich Eckart". In 1937 the "Realprogymnasium" in Emmendingen was expanded and renamed the "Dietrich-Eckart secondary school for boys". Several new roads were named after Eckart. All of these have since been renamed.


title: Dietrich Eckart

text: Eckart's birthplace in Neumarkt in der Oberpfalz was officially renamed with the added suffix "Dietrich-Eckart-Stadt". In 1934, Adolf Hitler inaugurated a monument in his honour in the city park. It has since been rededicated to Christopher of Bavaria (1416–1448), King of Denmark, who was probably born in the town.


title: Dietrich Eckart

text: In March 1938, when Passau commemorated Eckart's 70th birthday at Oberhaus Castle, the Lord Mayor announced not only the creation of a Dietrich-Eckart-Foundation but also the restoration of the room where Eckart had been imprisoned. In addition, a street was dedicated to Eckart.


title: Dietrich Eckart

text: Eckart has been called the spiritual father of Nazism, and indeed Hitler acknowledged him as being its spiritual co-founder.


title: Dietrich Eckart

text: Eckart viewed World War I not as a holy war between Germans and non-Germans, as it was sometime interpreted toward the end of the conflict, but as a holy war between Aryans and Jews, who, according to him, plotted the fall of the Russian and German empires. To describe this apocalyptic struggle, Eckart adopted extensive imagery from the legends of Ragnarok and from the Book of Revelation.


title: Dietrich Eckart

text: In 1925, Eckart's unfinished essay "Der Bolschewismus von Moses bis Lenin: Zwiegespräch zwischen Hitler und mir" ("Bolshevism from Moses to Lenin: Dialogue Between Hitler and Me") was published posthumously. Margarete Plewnia considered the dialogue between Eckart and Hitler to be an invention by Eckart himself, but Ernst Nolte, Friedrich Heer and Klaus Scholder think that the book – which was completed and published posthumously by Rosenberg, allegedly using Eckart's notes – reflects Hitler's own words. Thus historian Richard Steigmann-Gall believed that "[the] book still remains a reliable indicator of [Eckart's] own views."


title: Dietrich Eckart

text: In Christ, the embodiment of all manliness, we find all that we need. And if we occasionally speak of Baldur (a god in Norse mythology), our words always contain some joy, some satisfaction, that our pagan ancestors were already so Christian as to have an indication of Christ in this ideal figure.


title: Dietrich Eckart

text: Steigmann-Gall concluded that, "far from advocating a paganism or anti-Christian religion, Eckart held that, in Germany's postwar tailspin, Christ was a leader to be emulated." But historian Ernst Piper dismissed Steigmann-Gall's views about a relationship between the admiration of Christ by early members of the NSDAP and a positive relationship with Christianity; Eckart fervently opposed the political Catholicism of the Bavarian People's Party and its national ally the Centre Party, supporting instead a vaguely defined "positive Christianity". From the pages of "Vőlkischer Beobachter", Eckart tried to win over Bavarian Catholics to the Nazi's cause, but that attempt ended with the Beer Hall Putsch, which put Nazis at odds with Bavarian Catholics.


title: Dietrich Eckart

text: Joseph Howard Tyson writes that Eckart's anti-Old Testament views show a strong resemblance to the early Christian heresy Marcionism.


title: Dietrich Eckart

text: In 1935 Alfred Rosenberg published the book "Dietrich Eckart. Ein Vermächtnis" ("Dietrich Eckart. A Legacy") with collected writings by Eckart, including this passage:


title: Dietrich Eckart

text: To be a genius means to use the soul, to strive for the divine, to escape from the mean; and even if this cannot be totally achieved, there will be no space for the opposite of good. It does not prevent the genius to portray also the wretchedness of being in all shapes and colors, being the great artist that he is; but he does this as an observer, not taking part, sine ira et studio, his heart remains pure. ... The ideal in this, just like in every respect whatsoever is Christ; his words "You judge by human standards; I pass judgment on no one" show the completely divine freedom from the influence of the senses, the overcoming of the earthly world even without art as an intermediary. At the other end you find Heine and his race ... all they do culminates in ... the motive, in subjugating the world, and the less this works, the more hate-filled their work becomes that is to satisfy their motive, the more deceitful and fallacious every try to reach the goal. No trace of true genius, the very opposite of the manliness of genius ...


title: Dietrich Eckart

text: Early Nazi adherent Ernst Hanfstaengl remembered Eckart as "a perfect example of an old-fashioned Bavarian with the appearance of a walrus." Eckart was described by journalist Edgar Ansel Mowrer as "a strange drunken genius". His antisemitism supposedly arose from various esoteric schools of mysticism, and he spent hours with Hitler discussing art and the place of the Jews in world history. Samuel W. Mitcham calls Eckart an "eccentric intellectual" and "extreme antisemite" who was also a "man of the world" who liked "wine, women, and pleasures of the flesh." Alan Bullock describes Eckart as having "violent nationalist, anti-democratic, and anti-clerical opinions, a racist with an enthusiasm for Nordic folklore and a taste for Jew-baiting" who "talked well even when he was drunk" and "knew everyone in Munich." According to Richard J. Evans, Eckart, the "failed racist poet and dramatist" blamed his career's failure on Jewish domination of German culture, and defined as "Jewish" anything that was subversive or materialistic. Joachim C. Fest describes Eckart as a "roughhewn and comical figure, with [a] thick round head, [and a] partiality for good wine and crude talk" with a "bluff and uncomplicated manner". His revolutionary goals were to promote "true socialism" and rid the country of "interest slavery". According to Thomas Weber, Eckart had a "jovial but moody nature", while John Toland describes him as "an original raffish man with a touch of genius", and "a tall, bald, burly eccentric who spent much of his time in cafes and beer halls giving equal attention to drink and talk." He was "a born romantic revolutionary ... a master of coffeehouse polemics. A sentimental cynic, a sincere charlatan, constantly on stage, lecturing brilliantly if given the slightest opportunity be it at his own apartment, on the street or in a café."


title: The Libertine (2004 film)

text: The Libertine is a 2004 period drama film, the first film directed by Laurence Dunmore. It was adapted by Stephen Jeffreys from his play of the same name, and stars Johnny Depp and Samantha Morton as John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester and Elizabeth Barry, with John Malkovich, Rosamund Pike, Rupert Friend and Kelly Reilly in supporting roles. Set in 1675 England, the film chronicles the life of John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester, who is asked by King Charles II to write a play celebrating his reign, while simultaneously training Elizabeth Barry to improve her acting.


title: The Libertine (2004 film)

text: The film was shot on location on the Isle of Man and Wales. The setting for Rochester's home of Adderbury house was filmed on location at Montacute House, Montacute, Somerset and Charlecote Park, Warwickshire.


title: The Libertine (2004 film)

text: In 1675, John Wilmot, Second Earl of Rochester, delivers a prologue of themes of his fondness for drink, his sexual proclivities, and his disdain for his audience.


title: The Libertine (2004 film)

text: King Charles II retracts his banishment of the earl as he has need of him in the House of Lords. Back in London, Rochester finds his "Merry Gang" friends, George Etherege and Charles Sackville, in a bawdy house. Rochester encounters on the street the thief Alcock. Impressed by his dishonesty, Rochester hires him as his gentleman. The Merry Gang introduce to Rochester who will be its newest member, 18-year-old Billy Downs. Rochester warns Downs, "Young man, you will die of this company."


title: The Libertine (2004 film)

text: The Merry Gang attend a play where the actress Elizabeth Barry is booed off the stage, refusing to participate in a curtain call, and is fired. Rochester is taken with Barry, secures her re-employment with the theatre company, and undertakes to coach her in acting. Barry's acting improves dramatically and she delivers a brilliant performance in her next production. The King approaches Barry to spy on Rochester as to the progress of the intended tribute to the French Ambassador.


title: The Libertine (2004 film)

text: Charles, in need of money from France, asks Rochester to write a play in honour of the French Ambassador's visit. The king requests it be a "monument" to his reign. Rochester writes "Sodom, or the Quintessence of Debauchery", a scathing satire of the king's reign, which he claims is "a monument to Charles" — just what the king had asked for. The play involves vulgar language, simulated sex acts, and Rochester portraying the king being serviced. At the premiere, the king interrupts the play and on the stage confronts Rochester. Downs is mortally wounded in a sword fight outside the home of a Constable; Rochester backs away from his dying friend, whispering, "I told you."


title: The Libertine (2004 film)

text: Hiding from the king in the English countryside and sick with symptoms of syphilis, Rochester peddles phoney gynaecological "treatments" for women, including the selling of "potions" made from Alcock's urine. Rochester's face has become disfigured by syphilitic gummata, which he hides beneath a mask. Charles eventually tracks down Rochester, but decides that the worst punishment possible is to simply "let you be you." Rochester returns to his estate and wife, Elizabeth, admitting to having been constantly for five years under the influence of "the drink." Elizabeth declares her love for him.


title: The Libertine (2004 film)

text: Charles' choice of heir, his Roman Catholic brother James, Duke of York, leads to a showdown in Parliament over the Exclusion Bill that would deny James the throne. Rochester uses make-up and a silver nose tip to hide the indications of syphilis as he enters the House of Lords hobbling on two canes. His denunciation in the Lords of the bill ingratiates the appreciation of the king when it is defeated. When Rochester reveals his desire to have wanted Barry as his wife she reveals she never had the desire to be the wife of anyone, she had a daughter by him that he was unaware of, and this daughter is called Elizabeth.


title: The Libertine (2004 film)

text: Rochester returns to his estate where he is bedridden in the care of Elizabeth, his mother, a priest summoned to "bring God to him" as she did not want Rochester to die as an atheist, and Alcock. Before he dies, Rochester asks the priest to recite from Book of Isaiah, chapter 53; he also asks his wife to retell the story of how he had abducted her when she was 18 years old and they fell in love. Rochester's death is followed by a scene of Elizabeth Barry playing the role of his wife in "The Man of Mode", the play about him written by his friend Etheridge.


title: The Libertine (2004 film)

text: The epilogue is Rochester slipping into the darkness of an increasingly fading candlelight, asking "Do you like me now?"


title: The Libertine (2004 film)

text: The score to the film was composed by Michael Nyman, and released as "The Libertine: Music for the Film by Laurence Dunmore" in November 2005. The music represents Nyman's last score for a major motion picture to date, and his last soundtrack release.


title: The Libertine (2004 film)

text: The film received mixed to negative reviews from critics. Film review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes reported that of 122 sampled critics gave the film positive reviews and that it got a rating average of . The site's critical consensus reads, "Despite Johnny Depp's zealous performance, muddled direction and murky cinematography hinder The Libertine." Metacritic calculated an average score of 44 out of 100 based on 30 reviews, indicating "mixed or average reviews". Roger Ebert of the "Chicago Sun-Times" gave the film 3 stars out of 4 praising Johnny Depp's performance, stating "Libertines are not built for third acts. No self-respecting libertine lives that long. Johnny Depp finds sadness in the earl's descent, and a desire to be loved even as he makes himself unlovable. What a brave actor Depp is, to take on a role like this. Still, at the screenplay stage, 'The Libertine' might have seemed a safer bet than "", a movie [which] studio executives reportedly thought was unreleasable."


title: The Libertine (2004 film)

text: The film has grossed $4,835,065 in North America and $6,016,999 in other territories, for a total of $10,852,064 worldwide.


title: The Libertine (2004 film)

text: "The Libertine" was nominated in eight categories in the British Independent Film Awards for 2005, and won in one category, gaining a Best Performance by a Supporting Actor or Actress in a British Independent Film award for Rosamund Pike. The other nominations were:


title: The Untouchables (1959 TV series)

text: The Untouchables is an American crime drama produced by Desilu Productions that ran from 1959 to 1963 on the ABC Television Network. Based on the memoir of the same name by Eliot Ness and Oscar Fraley, it fictionalized experiences of Elliot Ness as a Prohibition agent, fighting crime in Chicago in the 1930s with the help of a special team of agents handpicked for their courage, moral character, and incorruptibility, nicknamed the Untouchables. The book was later made into a celebrated film in 1987 by Brian De Palma, with a script by David Mamet, and a second, less-successful TV series in 1993.


title: The Untouchables (1959 TV series)

text: A dynamic, hard-hitting action drama, and a landmark television crime series, "The Untouchables" won series star Robert Stack an Emmy Award for Best Actor in a Dramatic Series in 1960.


title: The Untouchables (1959 TV series)

text: The series originally focused on the efforts of a real-life squad of Prohibition agents employed by the United States Department of Justice and led by Eliot Ness (Stack) that helped bring down the bootleg empire of "Scarface" Al Capone, as described in Ness's bestselling 1957 memoir. This squad was nicknamed "The Untouchables" because of its courage and honesty; squad members could not be bribed or intimidated by the mob. Eliot Ness himself had died suddenly in May 1957, shortly before his memoir and the subsequent TV adaptation were to bring him fame beyond any he experienced in his lifetime.


title: The Untouchables (1959 TV series)

text: The pilot for the series, a two-part episode entitled "The Untouchables," originally aired on CBS's "Westinghouse Desilu Playhouse" on April 20 and 27, 1959. Later re-titled "The Scarface Mob", these episodes, which featured Neville Brand as Al Capone, were the only episodes in the series to be more-or-less directly based on Ness's memoir, and ended with the conviction and imprisonment of Capone. CBS, which had broadcast most of Desilu's television output since 1951 beginning with "I Love Lucy", was offered the new series following the success of the pilot film. Chairman William S. Paley rejected it on the advice of network vice president Hubbell Robinson. ABC agreed to air the series, and "The Untouchables" premiered on October 15, 1959. In the pilot movie, the mobsters generally spoke with unrealistic pseudo-Italian accents, but this idiosyncratic pronunciation was dropped when the series debuted.


title: The Untouchables (1959 TV series)

text: The weekly series first dramatized a power struggle to establish a new boss in Capone's absence (for the purpose of the TV series, the new boss was Frank Nitti, although this was, as usual for the series, contrary to fact). As the series continued, there developed a highly fictionalized portrayal of Ness and his crew as all-purpose, multi-agency crime fighters who went up against an array of 1930s-era gangsters and villains, including Ma Barker, Dutch Schultz, Bugs Moran, Vincent "Mad Dog" Coll, Legs Diamond, Lucky Luciano, and in one episode, Nazi agents. On many occasions during the series run, Ness would blatantly violate suspects' Fourth Amendment rights with no legal ramifications.


title: The Untouchables (1959 TV series)

text: The terse narration by gossip columnist Walter Winchell, in his distinctive New York accent, was a stylistic hallmark of the series, along with its ominous theme music by Nelson Riddle and its shadowy black-and-white photography, which was influenced by film noir.


title: The Untouchables (1959 TV series)

text: The show drew harsh criticism from some Italian-Americans, including Frank Sinatra, who felt it promoted negative stereotypes of them as mobsters and gangsters. The Capone family unsuccessfully sued CBS, Desilu Productions, and Westinghouse Electric Corporation for their depiction of the Capone family. In the first episode of the first season, the character of "Agent (Rico) Rossi", a person of Italian extraction who had witnessed a gangland murder, was added to Ness's team.


title: The Untouchables (1959 TV series)

text: On March 9, 1961, Anthony Anastasio, chief of the Brooklyn waterfront and its International Longshoremen's Association, marched in line with a picket group who identified themselves as "The Federation of Italian-American Democratic Organizations". In protest formation outside the ABC New York headquarters, they had come together to urge the public boycott of Liggett & Myers Tobacco Company (L&M) products, including Chesterfield cigarettes, the lead sponsor of "The Untouchables". They expressed displeasure with the program, which to them vilified Italian-Americans, stereotyping them as the singular criminal element. The boycott and the attendant firestorm of publicity had the effect Anastasio and his confederates wanted. Four days after the picket of ABC, L&M, denying it had bowed to intimidation, announced it would drop its sponsorship of "The Untouchables", maintaining the decision was based on network-scheduling conflicts. The following week, the head of Desilu, Desi Arnaz (who had attended high school with Capone's son Albert), in concert with ABC and the "Italian-American League to Combat Defamation", issued a formal three-point manifesto:


title: The Untouchables (1959 TV series)

text: The series also incurred the displeasure of the powerful director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, J. Edgar Hoover, when the fictionalized scripts depicted Ness and his Treasury agents involved in operations that were actually the province of the FBI. The second episode of the series, for example, depicted Ness and his crew involved in the capture of the Ma Barker gang, an incident in which the real-life Ness played no part. The producers agreed to insert a spoken disclaimer on future broadcasts of the episode stating that the FBI had primary responsibility for the Barker case.


title: The Untouchables (1959 TV series)

text: "The Untouchables" was an unusually violent program for its time and its excessive violence and surprisingly frank depictions of drug abuse and prostitution were described by the National Association for Better Radio and Television as "not fit for the television screen". Several episodes included depictions of violence toward children.


title: The Untouchables (1959 TV series)

text: In an article titled "The New Enemies of 'The Untouchables'" Ayn Rand argued that the persistent, superficial attacks received by "The Untouchables" were due to its appeal and its virtues: its moral conflict and moral purpose.


title: The Untouchables (1959 TV series)

text: The series had 118 episodes which ran 50 minutes each. Though the book chronicled the experiences of Ness and his cohorts against Capone, and in reality the Untouchables disbanded soon after Capone's conviction, the series continued after the pilot and book ended, depicting the fictitious further exploits of the Untouchables against many, often real life, criminals over a span of time ranging from 1929 to 1935. The television episodes were broadcast in no chronological timeline, but were set mostly in the early 1930s (for example, one episode, "You Can't Pick the Number", begins with Winchell's words, "October 1932: the depth of the Depression"), and another episode "Canada Run" begins at Chicago Stadium at the NFL Playoff Game on December 18, 1932. A few episodes were set primarily in a locale other than Chicago (such as the one dealing with the shootout involving Ma Barker and her gang.) Characters and "facts" in the majority of the episodes were more often than not entirely fictitious or loosely based composites of true-life criminals of that era. The gripping theme music was by Nelson Riddle.


title: The Untouchables (1959 TV series)

text: Quinn Martin produced the show's first season, which contained elements that could be found in future TV series produced by Martin.


title: The Untouchables (1959 TV series)

text: Other Untouchables members who were prominent at first, but didn't last past the pilot or the first season, were portrayed by :


title: The Untouchables (1959 TV series)

text: In addition to the Untouchables themselves, there were several recurring allies in more than one episode:


title: The Untouchables (1959 TV series)

text: The show also had several recurrent gangsters, many of them loosely based on real life gangsters of the time period:


title: The Untouchables (1959 TV series)

text: Paul Picerni and Nicholas Georgiade were cast as gangsters in Capone and Nitti's mob in the 1959 pilot before being cast in the series.


title: The Untouchables (1959 TV series)

text: "The Untouchables" (due to Robert Stack's star power as a successful motion picture actor), was notable for the large number of past and future motion picture and television stars who signed and appeared as guest stars on the show during its four-year run. These include: (S#=Season number, E#=Episode number)


title: The Untouchables (1959 TV series)

text: "The Untouchables" originally aired as a segment of the anthology series "Desilu Playhouse" in 1959. It was picked up as a regular series by ABC for the 1959 season and was aired on Thursdays from 9:30 to 10:30pm from 1959 to 1962, switching to Tuesday evenings from 9:30 to 10:30pm for its final season (1962–63).


title: The Untouchables (1959 TV series)

text: Desilu Productions president Desi Arnaz had originally offered the role of Ness to Van Johnson. Johnson's wife and manager rejected the deal, and demanded double the salary offer. Arnaz refused and signed Stack instead. Arnaz had had a long business relationship with CBS, which had aired many Desilu programs, including "I Love Lucy" and "The Lucy-Desi Comedy Hour". When CBS refused to buy the program, Arnaz sold it to ABC.


title: The Untouchables (1959 TV series)

text: Some segments were released to theaters as movies: "The Scarface Mob" (from the two-part pilot), "The Alcatraz Express" (from "The Big Train"), and "The Gun of Zangara" (from "Unhired Assassin").


title: The Untouchables (1959 TV series)

text: On November 10, 1991, NBC ran the two-hour film "The Return of Eliot Ness", with Robert Stack as Ness. It was set in 1947, after Capone's death, and depicted Ness investigating the death of an Untouchables agent named Labine.


title: The Untouchables (1959 TV series)

text: "The Untouchables" was a landmark television series that has spawned numerous imitators over the decades, such as "S.W.A.T.", "The F.B.I.", "Crime Story", the original "Hawaii Five-O" (Five-O's creator and executive producer, Leonard Freeman, served as executive producer on "The Untouchables" final season), Robert Stack's two later series, "Strike Force" and "Most Wanted", "The Hat Squad", and the 1993 "The Untouchables" syndicated TV series.


title: The Untouchables (1959 TV series)

text: It also inspired films such as "Al Capone" starring Rod Steiger, "The Untouchables" (with Kevin Costner), "Gangster Squad", "Mulholland Falls", and others.


title: The Untouchables (1959 TV series)

text: "The Untouchables" is one of two series from 1959, the other being "The Detectives", together credited with the concept of depicting a "group" of crime fighters. Previously, most TV crime dramas had followed one of two formats: either a duo composed of a stalwart police officer or detective and his trusty sidekick/partner ("Dragnet", "The Lineup"), or a lone-wolf private eye or police detective ("Peter Gunn", "Richard Diamond", "M-Squad").


title: The Untouchables (1959 TV series)

text: Warner Bros. Television spoofed the Untouchables series in the 1963 Merrie Melodies cartoon short "The Unmentionables", with Bugs Bunny playing the role of Elegant Mess, a crime fighter assigned to infiltrate a black market ring operated by Rocky and Mugsy. The series was also spoofed on an episode of the 1961-62 ABC-TV/Hanna Barbara cartoon series "Top Cat" entitled "The Unscratchables". NBC's "Saturday Night Live" spoofed "The Untouchables" several times during the 1970s, with Dan Aykroyd playing Eliot Ness.On a 1981 telecast of NBC-TV's The Tonight Show ,the Untouchables was spoofed with a skit entitled: "The Video Untouchables", with host Johnny Carson portraying Agent "Eliot Nielsen" , whose squad appreheaded citizens who unlawfully videotaped T.V. programs . (Video Available on YouTube).


title: The Untouchables (1959 TV series)

text: In their 1988 book, "The Critics' Choice—The Best of Crime and Detective TV", authors Max Allan Collins and John Javna chose "The Untouchables" as one of the "Top 10 Best Police TV Series (Police Procedurals) of All Time".


title: The Untouchables (1959 TV series)

text: The Lebanon (Pa.) "Daily News" said of "The Untouchables": "Between the hard-nosed approach, sharp dialogue, and a commendably crisp pace (something rare in dramatic TV at the time), this series is one of the few that remains fresh and vibrant. Only the monochrome presentation betrays its age. "The Untouchables" is one of the few Golden Age TV shows that deserves being called a classic."


title: The Untouchables (1959 TV series)

text: In 2019, a 60th Anniversary Retrospective titled "The Untouchables Retrospective" was undertaken to celebrate the show's cultural impact and legacy in television and film history through mixed media, including extensive episode reviews, a podcast, and a making-of documentary. To date, the retrospective has interviewed several surviving participants involved with the program, including Pat Crowley and Nehemiah Persoff.


title: The Untouchables (1959 TV series)

text: In 1997, the episode "The Rusty Heller Story" was ranked number 99 on "TV Guide"s 100 Greatest Episodes of All Time".


title: The Untouchables (1959 TV series)

text: CBS DVD (distributed by Paramount Home Entertainment) have released all four seasons of "The Untouchables" on DVD in region 1, all digitally remastered from the original negatives and presented uncut, unedited and in its original broadcast order. The first two seasons have also been released in region 4.


title: The Untouchables (1959 TV series)

text: Paramount Home Entertainment released the first three seasons of "The Untouchables" on DVD in the UK. These releases are full-season sets as opposed to Region 1 and 4, where each season has been split into two volumes. The complete series (all 4 seasons) was released on DVD in the UK on May 29, 2017 by Medium Rare Entertainment.


title: Valeria Bruni Tedeschi

text: Valeria Bruni Tedeschi, also written Bruni-Tedeschi (; born 16 November 1964), is an Italian-French actress, screenwriter and film director. Her 2013 film, "A Castle in Italy," was nominated for the Palme d'Or at the 2013 Cannes Film Festival.


title: Valeria Bruni Tedeschi

text: Bruni Tedeschi was born in Turin, Italy, in the Piedmont region of Italy. Like her younger sister, Carla Bruni, she has settled in France. The girls were raised bilingual, as their family moved to Paris in 1973, fearing kidnappings and, later, the terrorism of the Red Brigades. She holds dual Italian and French citizenship. Her mother is Italian with French ancestry. Her father is Italian. She is second cousin of Alessandra Martines. Tedeschi had a relationship with the French actor Louis Garrel from 2007 to 2012. Together they adopted a girl from Senegal in 2009.


title: Valeria Bruni Tedeschi

text: She was present at the 2005 Berlinale, the Berlin International Film Festival, to promote two films she had acted in: "Tickets" (2005), a three-segment film directed by Ermanno Olmi, Abbas Kiarostami, and Ken Loach, and "Crustacés et Coquillages", a comedy directed by the French duo of Olivier Ducastel and Jacques Martineau.


title: Valeria Bruni Tedeschi

text: She also played a lead role in the short film "Drugstore" (2000), as part of a French anti-drug awareness raising campaign Drug Scenes (Original French title:" Scénarios sur la Drogue"), directed by Marion Vernoux based on a script by Eric Ellena.


title: Valeria Bruni Tedeschi

text: Her debut film as a director, "It's Easier for a Camel...", earned her two awards at the Tribeca Film Festival for Emerging Narrative Filmmaker and Best Actress in 2003. The film also won an award at the Ankara Flying Broom Women's Film Festival in 2004. It was also awarded Louis Delluc Prize for Best First Film. It was also entered into the 25th Moscow International Film Festival. According to Tim Palmer the film is an engaging example of contemporary French pop-art cinema, referring to directors who wittily merge the features of intellectual/arthouse cinema with mass/popular cinema, putting Bruni Tedeschi in the company of other filmmakers such as François Ozon, Maîwenn le Besco, Sophie Fillières, Serge Bozon, etc.


title: Valeria Bruni Tedeschi

text: In 2007, Bruni Tedeschi directed "Actrices", which won the "Prix Spécial du Jury" at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival. Her 2022 film "Les Amandiers (Forever Young)" also premiered in the main competition of the 2022 Cannes Film Festival.


title: Religious syncretism

text: Religious syncretism is the blending of religious belief systems into a new system, or the incorporation of other beliefs into a religious tradition.


title: Religious syncretism

text: This can occur for many reasons, where religious traditions exist in proximity to each other, or when a culture is conquered and the conquerors bring their religious beliefs with them, but do not succeed in eradicating older beliefs and practices.


title: Religious syncretism

text: Many religions have syncretic elements, but adherents often frown upon the application of the label, especially those who belong to "revealed" religions, such as Abrahamic religions, or any system with an exclusivist approach, seeing syncretism as corrupting the original religion. Non-exclusivist systems of belief on the other hand feel freer to incorporate other traditions into their own.


title: Religious syncretism

text: Classical Athens was exclusive in matters of religion. Some sources assert that the Decree of Diopeithes made the introduction of and belief in foreign gods a criminal offence, and allowed only Greeks to worship in Athenian temples and festivals as foreigners were considered impure. Other sources dispute the existence of the decree.


title: Religious syncretism

text: Syncretism functioned as a feature of Hellenistic Ancient Greek religion, although only outside of Greece. Overall, Hellenistic culture in the age that followed Alexander the Great itself showed syncretist features, essentially blending of Mesopotamian, Persian, Anatolian, Egyptian (and eventually Etruscan–Roman) elements within a Hellenic formula. The Egyptian god Amun developed as the Hellenized "Zeus Ammon" after Alexander the Great went into the desert to seek out his oracle at Siwa.


title: Religious syncretism

text: The Romans, identifying themselves as common heirs to a very similar civilization, identified Greek deities with similar figures in the Etruscan-Roman tradition, though without usually copying cult practices. (For details, see Interpretatio graeca.) Syncretic gods of the Hellenistic period also found wide favor in Rome: for example, Serapis, Isis and Mithras. Cybele as worshipped in Rome essentially represented a syncretic East Mediterranean goddess. The Romans imported the Greek god Dionysus into Rome, where he merged with the Latin mead god "Liber", and converted the Anatolian Sabazios into the Roman Sabazius.


title: Religious syncretism

text: The degree of correspondence varied: Jupiter makes perhaps a better match for Zeus than the rural huntress Diana does for the feared Artemis. Ares does not quite match Mars. The Romans physically imported the Anatolian goddess Cybele into Rome from her Anatolian cult-center Pessinos in the form of her original aniconic archaic stone idol; they identified her as "Magna Mater" and gave her a matronly, iconic image developed in Hellenistic Pergamum.


title: Religious syncretism

text: Likewise, when the Romans encountered Celts and Germanic peoples, they mingled these peoples' gods with their own, creating Sulis Minerva, Apollo Sucellos (Apollo the Good Smiter) and Mars Thingsus (Mars of the war-assembly), among many others. In the "Germania", the Roman historian Tacitus speaks of Germanic worshippers of Hercules and Mercury; most modern scholars tentatively identify Hercules as Thor and Mercury as Odin.


title: Religious syncretism

text: Romans were familiar with the concept of syncretism because from their earliest times they had experienced it with, among others, the Greeks. The Romans incorporated the originally Greek Apollo and Hercules into their religion. They did not look at the religious aspects that they adopted from other cultures to be different or less meaningful from religious aspects that were Roman in origin. The early Roman acceptance of other cultures religions into their own made it easy for them to integrate the newly encountered religions they found as a result of their expansion.


title: Religious syncretism

text: Gnosticism is identified as an early form of syncretism that challenged the beliefs of early Christians. Gnostic dualism posited that only spiritual or invisible things were good, and that material or visible things were evil. Orthodox (mainstream) Christians have always insisted that matter is essentially good, since, as they believe, God created all things, both spiritual and material, and said that it was "very good". Simon Magus has been identified as one of the early proponents of Gnosticism.


title: Religious syncretism

text: In the first few centuries after the death of Jesus, there were various competing "Jesus movements". The Roman emperors used syncretism to help unite the expanding empire. Social conversion to Christianity happened all over Europe. It became even more effective when missionaries concurred with established cultural traditions and interlaced them into a fundamentally Christian synthesis. Sometimes old pagan gods—or at least their aspects and roles—were transferred to Christian saints, such as when Demetrius of Thessaloniki inherited the role of patron of agriculture from Demeter and the Eleusinian Mysteries after the latter's demise in the 4th century.


title: Religious syncretism

text: Syncretism is distinguished from assimilation, the latter of which refers to the Church's ability to "incorporate into herself all that is true, good, and beautiful in the world." This idea was present in the early Church; the "Second Apology of Justin Martyr" states: "Whatever things were rightly said among all men, are the property of us Christians". The Church has assimilated many (though not all) of the ideas of Plato and Aristotle. Augustine of Hippo is remembered for assimilating the ideas of Plato, while Thomas Aquinas is known for doing so with the ideas of Aristotle. In his essay on the development of Christian doctrine, John Henry Newman clarified the idea of assimilation.


title: Religious syncretism

text: In "Moses and Monotheism", Sigmund Freud made a case for Judaism arising out of the pre-existing monotheism that was briefly imposed upon Egypt during the rule of Akhenaten. The Code of Hammurabi is also cited as a likely starting point for the Jewish Ten Commandments. Some scholars hold that Judaism refined its concept of monotheism and adopted features such as its eschatology, angelology and demonology through contacts with Zoroastrianism. However, this is highly disputed among scholars


title: Religious syncretism

text: In spite of the Jewish halakhic prohibitions on polytheism, idolatry, and associated practices ("Avodah Zarah"), several combinations of Judaism with other religions have sprung up: Messianic Judaism, Jewish Buddhism, Nazarenism and Judeo-Paganism. Several Jewish Messiah claimants (such as Jacob Frank) and the Sabbateans came to mix Kabbalistic Judaism with Christianity and Islam.


title: Religious syncretism

text: The Islamic mystical tradition known as Sufism appears somewhat syncretic in nature in its origins, but it is rejected by many other modern scholars. A better explanation is that,


title: Religious syncretism

text: Mainstream Tasawwuf does not present itself as a separate set of beliefs from the mainstream Sunni tradition; well-established traditions like Naqshbandi, Qadiri, Shadhili, and most others have always been part and parcel of normative Islamic life. No doubt some groups in the name of Sufism, just like in any religion, do espouse theologically unorthodox positions.


title: Religious syncretism

text: During Sufi presence in Bengal, Muslim–Hindu syncretism was a general trend, and Nabibangsha by Syed Sultan is an example of it. The book tells the lineage of the prophets of Islam. Apart from Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses, and Jesus Christ, the poet also describes Indian deities such as Brahma, Vishnu, Rama and Krishna.


title: Religious syncretism

text: The Barghawata kingdom of Morocco followed a syncretic religion inspired by Islam (perhaps influenced by Judaism) with elements of Sunni, Shi'ite and Kharijite Islam, mixed with astrological and heathen traditions. Supposedly, they had their own Qur'an in the Berber language comprising 80 suras under the leadership of the second ruler of the dynasty Salih ibn Tarif who had taken part in the Maysara uprising. He proclaimed himself a prophet. He also claimed to be the final Mahdi of Islamic tradition, and that Isa (Jesus) would be his companion and pray behind him.


title: Religious syncretism

text: The Druzes integrated elements of Ismaili Islam with Gnosticism and Platonism. Satpanth is considered a syncretism of Ismaili Islam and Hinduism.


title: Religious syncretism

text: Buddhism has syncretized with many traditional beliefs in East Asian societies as it was seen as compatible with local religions. Notable syncretization of Buddhism with local beliefs includes the Three Teachings, or Triple Religion, that harmonizes Mahayana Buddhism with Confucian philosophy and elements of Taoism, and Shinbutsu-shūgō, which is a syncretism of Shinto and Buddhism. The religious beliefs, practices, and identities of East Asians (who comprise the majority of the world's Buddhists by any measure) often blend Buddhism with other traditions including Confucianism, the Chinese folk religion, Taoism, Shinto, Korean shamanism, Vietnamese folk religion. Before and during World War II, a Nichiren Shōshū priest named Jimon Ogasawara proposed the blending of Nichiren Buddhism with Shinto.


title: Religious syncretism

text: Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism and Zoroastrianism in ancient India have made many adaptations over the millennia, assimilating elements of various religious traditions. One example of this is the Yoga Vasistha.


title: Religious syncretism

text: Akram Vigyan Movement established by Dada Bhagwan is considered to be a Jain-Vaishnava Hindu syncretistic movement.


title: Religious syncretism

text: The Mughal emperor Akbar, who wanted to consolidate the diverse religious communities in his empire, propounded Din-i-Ilahi, a syncretic religion intended to merge the best elements of the religions of his empire, Allopanishad is the example there. Satpanth is considered a syncretism of Ismaili Islam and Hinduism.


title: Religious syncretism

text: Meivazhi is a syncretic monotheistic minority religion based in Tamil Nadu, India. Its focus is spiritual enlightenment and the conquering of death, through the teachings. Mevaizhi preaches the Oneness of essence message of all the previous major scriptures – particularly Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, Judaism and Christianity – allowing membership regardless of creed. Meivazhi's disciples are thousands of people belonging once to 69 different castes of different religions being united as one family of Meivazhi Religion.


title: Religious syncretism

text: In China, most of the population follows syncretist religions combining Mahayana Buddhism, Taoism and elements of Confucianism. Out of all Chinese believers, approximately 85.7% adhere to Chinese traditional religion, as many profess to be both Mahayana Buddhist and Taoist at the same time. Many of the pagodas in China are dedicated to both Buddhist and Taoist deities.


title: Religious syncretism

text: Likewise, in Southeast Asia, the local variants of Buddhism have been adapted to accommodate folk beliefs, such as the veneration of nats in Myanmar and phi in Thailand. Tibetan Buddhism is also syncretic in adopting practices from the earlier Bön religion.


title: Religious syncretism

text: The traditional Mun faith of the Lepcha people predates their seventh century conversion to Lamaistic Buddhism. Since that time, the Lepcha have practiced it together with Buddhism. Since the arrival of Christian missionaries in the nineteenth century, Mun traditions have been followed alongside that faith as well. The traditional religion permits the incorporation of Buddha and Jesus Christ as deities, depending on household beliefs.


title: Religious syncretism

text: One can contrast Christian syncretism with contextualization or inculturation, the practice of making Christianity relevant to a culture: "Contextualisation" does not address the doctrine but affects a change in the styles or expression of worship. Although Christians often took their European music and building styles into churches in other parts of the world, in a contextualization approach, they would build churches, sing songs, and pray in a local ethnic style. Some Jesuit missionaries adapted local systems and images to teach Christianity, as did the Portuguese in China, the practice of which was opposed by the Dominicans, leading to the Chinese rites controversy.


title: Religious syncretism

text: Syncretism did not play a role when Christianity split into eastern and western rites during the Great Schism. It became involved, however, with the rifts of the Protestant Reformation, with Desiderius Erasmus's readings of Plutarch. Even earlier, syncretism was a fundamental aspect of the efforts of Neoplatonists such as Marsilio Ficino to reform the teachings of the Roman Catholic Church. In 1615, David Pareus of Heidelberg urged Christians to a "pious syncretism" in opposing the Antichrist, but few 17th-century Protestants discussed the compromises that might effect a reconciliation with the Catholic Church: Johann Hülsemann, Johann Georg Dorsche, and Abraham Calovius (1612–85) opposed the Lutheran Georg Calisen "Calixtus" (1586–1656) of the University of Helmstedt for his "syncretism". (See: Syncretistic controversy.)


title: Religious syncretism

text: Catholicism in Central and South America has been integrated with a number of elements derived from indigenous and slave cultures in those areas (see the Caribbean and modern sections); while many African Initiated Churches demonstrate an integration of Protestant and traditional African beliefs. The Catholic Church allows some symbols and traditions to be carried over from older belief systems, so long as they are remade to conform (rather than conflict) with a Christian worldview; syncretism of other religions with the Catholic faith, such as Voudun or Santería, is expressly condemned by the Roman Catholic Church. The image of Our Lady of Guadalupe and the subsequent devotion to her are seen as assimilating some elements of native Mexican culture into Christianity. Santa Muerte, a female deity of death, has also emerged as the combination of the indigenous goddess Mictecacihuatl and the Lady of Guadalupe. As of 2012, Santa Muerte is worshipped by approximately 5% of the Mexican population, and also has a following in the United States and parts of Central America.


title: Religious syncretism

text: Some Andean areas, such as in Peru, have a strong influence of Inca-originated Quechua culture into Catholicism. This often results in Catholic holy days and festivities featuring Quechua dances or figures, such as the Assumption of Mary celebration in Chinchaypujio, or the fertility celebrations for Pachamama in the mostly Catholic Callalli.


title: Religious syncretism

text: The Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod experienced controversy for disciplining pastors for unionism and syncretism when they participated in multi-faith services in response to the 9/11 attacks and to the shootings at Newtown, Connecticut, on the grounds that joint worship with other Christian denominations or other religious faiths implied that differences between religions are not important.


title: Religious syncretism

text: In the Latter Day Saint movement, doctrine from previous dispensations as recorded in the LDS canon are considered official, though it is accepted that ancient teachings can be warped, misunderstood, or lost as a result of apostasy. While it does not officially recognize doctrine from other religions, it is believed that truth in other sources can be identified via personal revelation.


title: Religious syncretism

text: The Lacandon people of Central America acknowledge Äkyantho', the god of foreigners. He has a son named Hesuklistos (Jesus Christ) who is supposed to be the god of the foreigners. They recognize that Hesuklistos is a god but do not feel he is worthy of worship as he is a minor god.


title: Religious syncretism

text: Catholicism in South Korea has been syncretized with traditional Mahayana Buddhist and Confucian customs that form an integral part of traditional Korean culture. As a result, South Korean Catholics continue to practice a modified form of ancestral rites and observe many Buddhist and Confucian customs and philosophies. In Asia the revolutionary movements of Taiping (19th-century China) and God's Army (Karen in the 1990s) blended Christianity with traditional beliefs.


title: Religious syncretism

text: Khotons follow a syncretic form of Islam that incorporates Buddhist and traditional elements (like Tengrism).


title: Religious syncretism

text: In Italy, especially within the Mezzogiorno, there is a syncretic Folk Catholic tradition known as Benedicaria. The origins of Benedicaria are not well known however, it could have potentially risen from the mixture between the forms of Roman Catholicism practiced by the common people and ancient Italian folk practices. Despite it being separated from mainstream Catholicism, followers still consider themselves to be devout Catholics.


title: Religious syncretism

text: Census reports taken in Punjab Province during the colonial era (British India) noted and documented various practices highlighting religious syncretism among Punjabi Muslims, Punjabi Hindus, and Meo Muslims.


title: Religious syncretism

text: Similar to that of Punjab, census reports conducted in British India highlighted syncretic practices among Bengali Hindus and Muslims.


title: Religious syncretism

text: In the Sundarbans (spread across Indian state of West Bengal and Bangladesh), it is noted that Bonbibi, a guardian spirit of the forests is venerated by Hindus and Muslim residents alike. In most of the shrines of Banbibi in the Sundarbans, Banbibi is most commonly worshipped along with her brother Shah Jangali and Dakkhin Rai.


title: Religious syncretism

text: Bauls are a group of mynstric minstrels who put emphasis on their mystical elements with the tradition of music. Baul tradition is essentially an amalgamation of Vaishnavism and Sufism. Baul has had a considerable effect on Bengali culture. Baul traditions are included in the list of Masterpieces of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity.


title: Religious syncretism

text: The Baháʼís follow Bahá'u'lláh, a prophet whom they consider a successor to Muhammad, Jesus, Moses, Buddha, Zoroaster, Krishna and Abraham. This acceptance of other religious founders has encouraged some to regard the Baháʼí religion as a syncretic faith. However, Baháʼís and the Baháʼí literature explicitly reject this view. Baháʼís consider Bahá'u'lláh's revelation an independent, though related, revelation from God. Its relationship to previous dispensations is seen as analogous to the relationship of Christianity to Judaism. They regard beliefs held in common as evidence of truth, progressively revealed by God throughout human history, and culminating in (at present) the Baháʼí revelation. Baháʼís have their own sacred scripture, interpretations, laws and practices that, for Baháʼís, supersede those of other faiths.


title: Religious syncretism

text: The process of syncretism in the Caribbean region often forms a part of cultural creolization. (The technical term "Creole" may apply to anyone born and raised in the region, regardless of race.) The shared histories of the Caribbean islands include long periods of European Imperialism (mainly by Spain, France, and Great Britain) and the importation of African slaves (primarily from Central and Western Africa). The influences of each of the above interacted in varying degrees on the islands, producing the fabric of society that exists today in the Caribbean.


title: Religious syncretism

text: The Rastafari movement, founded in Jamaica, syncretizes vigorously, mixing elements from the Bible, Marcus Garvey's Pan-Africanism movement, a text from the European grimoire tradition, the Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses, Hinduism, and Caribbean culture.


title: Religious syncretism

text: Another highly syncretic religion of the area, vodou, combines elements of Western African, native Caribbean, and Christian (especially Roman Catholic) beliefs.


title: Religious syncretism

text: Recently developed religious systems that exhibit marked syncretism include the African diasporic religions Candomblé, Vodou and Santería, which analogize various Yorùbá and other African deities to the Roman Catholic saints. Some sects of Candomblé have also incorporated Native American deities, and Umbanda combined African deities with Kardecist spiritualism.


title: Religious syncretism

text: Hoodoo is a similarly derived form of folk magic practiced by some African American communities in the Southern United States. Other traditions of syncretic folk religion in North America include Louisiana Voodoo as well as Pennsylvania Dutch Pow-wow, in which practitioners invoke power through the Christian God.


title: Religious syncretism

text: Many historical Native American religious movements have incorporated Christian European influence, like the Native American Church, that teaches a combination of traditional Native American beliefs and Christianity, with sacramental use of the entheogen peyote. Further examples in North America are the Ghost Dance, and the religion of Handsome Lake.


title: Religious syncretism

text: Santo Daime is a syncretic religion founded in Brazil that incorporates elements of several religious or spiritual traditions including Folk Catholicism, Kardecist Spiritism, African animism and indigenous South American shamanism, including "vegetalismo".


title: Religious syncretism

text: Unitarian Universalism also provides an example of a modern syncretic religion. It traces its roots to Universalist and Unitarian Christian congregations. However, modern Unitarian Universalism freely incorporates elements from other religious and non-religious traditions, so that it no longer identifies as "Christian."


title: Religious syncretism

text: The Theosophical Society professes to go beyond being a syncretic movement that combines deities into an elaborate Spiritual Hierarchy, and assembles evidence that points to an underlying (or occult) reality of Being that is universal and interconnected, common to all spirit-matter dualities. It is maintained that this is the source of religious belief, each religion simply casting that one reality through the prism of that particular time and in a way that is meaningful to their circumstances.


title: Religious syncretism

text: Universal Sufism seeks the unity of all people and religions. Universal Sufis strive to "realize and spread the knowledge of Unity, the religion of Love, and Wisdom, so that the biases and prejudices of faiths and beliefs may, of themselves, fall away, the human heart overflow with love, and all hatred caused by distinctions and differences be rooted out."


title: Religious syncretism

text: In West-Central Africa, modern Bwiti incorporates animism, ancestor worship, ritual use of iboga, and Christianity into a syncretistic belief system.


title: Religious syncretism

text: Thelema is a mixture of many different schools of belief and practice, including Hermeticism, Eastern Mysticism, Yoga, 19th century libertarian philosophies (i.e. Nietzsche), occultism, and the Kabbalah, as well as ancient Egyptian and Greek religion.


title: Religious syncretism

text: Examples of strongly syncretist Romantic and modern movements with some religious elements include mysticism, occultism, Theosophical Society, modern astrology, Neopaganism, and the New Age movement.


title: Religious syncretism

text: The Unification Church, founded by religious leader Sun Myung Moon in South Korea in 1954. Its teachings are based on the Bible, but include new interpretations not found in mainstream Judaism and Christianity and incorporates East Asian traditions.


title: Malayan tapir

text: The Malayan tapir (Tapirus indicus), also called Asian tapir, Asiatic tapir and Indian tapir, is the only tapir species native to Southeast Asia from the Malay Peninsula to Sumatra. It has been listed as Endangered on the IUCN Red List since 2008, as the population is estimated to comprise fewer than 2,500 mature individuals.


title: Malayan tapir

text: The scientific name "Tapirus indicus" was proposed by Anselme Gaëtan Desmarest in 1819 who referred to a tapir described by Pierre-Médard Diard.


title: Malayan tapir

text: "Tapirus indicus brevetianus" was coined by a Dutch zoologist in 1926 who described a black Malayan tapir from Sumatra that had been sent to Rotterdam Zoo in the early 1920s.


title: Malayan tapir

text: It was placed in the genus "Acrocodia" by Colin Groves and Peter Grubb in 2011. However, a comparison of mitochondrial DNA of 16 perissodactyl species revealed that the Malayan tapir forms a sister group together with the "Tapirus" species native to the Americas. It was the first "Tapirus" species that genetically diverged from the group, estimated about in the Late Oligocene.


title: Malayan tapir

text: The Malayan tapir is easily identified by its markings, most notably the light-colored patch that extends from its shoulders to its hindquarters. It is covered in black hair, except for the tips of its ears, which, as with other tapirs, are rimmed with white. The pattern is for camouflage; the disrupted coloration breaks up its outline and makes it more difficult to recognize; other animals may mistake it for a large rock, rather than prey, when it is lying down to sleep.


title: Malayan tapir

text: The Malayan tapir grows to between in length, not counting a stubby tail of only in length, and stands tall. It typically weighs between , although some adults can weigh up to . The females are usually larger than the males. Like other tapir species, it has a small, stubby tail and a long, flexible proboscis. It has four toes on each front foot and three toes on each back foot. The Malayan tapir has rather poor eyesight, but excellent hearing and sense of smell.


title: Malayan tapir

text: It has a large sagittal crest, a bone running along the middle of the skull that is necessary for muscle attachment. It also possesses unusually positioned orbits, an unusually shaped cranium with the frontal bones elevated, and a retracted nasal incision. These adaptations evolved to support the proboscis. This proboscis caused a retraction of bones and cartilage in the face during the evolution of the tapir, and even caused the loss of some cartilages, facial muscles, and the bony wall of the nasal chamber.


title: Malayan tapir

text: Malayan tapirs have very poor eyesight, instead relying on excellent senses of smell and hearing. The eyes are small with brown irises, positioned on the sides of the face. Their eyes are often covered in a blue haze, which is corneal cloudiness thought to be caused by repetitive exposure to light. Corneal cloudiness is a condition in which the cornea starts to lose its transparency. The cornea is necessary for the transmitting and focusing of outside light as it enters the eye, and cloudiness can cause vision loss. This causes the Malayan tapir to have very inadequate vision, both on land and in water, where they spend the majority of their time. Also, as these tapirs are most active at night and since they have poor eyesight, it is harder for them to search for food and avoid predators in the dark.


title: Malayan tapir

text: Two melanistic Malayan tapirs were observed in Jerangau Forest Reserve in Malaysia in 2000. A black Malayan tapir was also recorded in Tekai Tembeling Forest Reserve in Pahang state in 2016.


title: Malayan tapir

text: The Malayan tapir is distributed throughout the tropical lowland rainforests of Southeast Asia, including Sumatra in Indonesia, Peninsular Malaysia, Myanmar, and Thailand. Populations in Sabah in Borneo may have persisted until recently but are now considered extinct.


title: Malayan tapir

text: Malayan tapirs are primarily solitary, marking out large tracts of land as their territory, though these areas usually overlap with those of other individuals. Tapirs mark out their territories by spraying urine on plants, and they often follow distinct paths, which they have bulldozed through the undergrowth.


title: Malayan tapir

text: Exclusively herbivorous, the animal forages for the tender shoots and leaves of more than 115 species of plants (around 30 are particularly preferred), moving slowly through the forest and pausing often to eat and note the scents left behind by other tapirs in the area. However, when threatened or frightened, the tapir can run quickly, despite its considerable bulk, and can also defend itself with its strong jaws and sharp teeth. Malayan tapirs communicate with high-pitched squeaks and whistles. They usually prefer to live near water and often bathe and swim, and they are also able to climb steep slopes. Tapirs are mainly active at night, though they are not exclusively nocturnal. They tend to eat soon after sunset or before sunrise, and they will often nap in the middle of the night. This behaviour characterizes them as crepuscular animals.


title: Malayan tapir

text: The gestation period of the Malayan tapir is about 390–395 days, after which a single calf is born that weighs around . Malayan tapirs are the largest of the four tapir species at birth and in general grow more quickly than their relatives. Young tapirs of all species have brown hair with white stripes and spots, a pattern that enables them to hide effectively in the dappled light of the forest. This baby coat fades into adult coloration between four and seven months after birth. Weaning occurs between six and eight months of age, at which time the babies are nearly full-grown, and the animals reach sexual maturity around age three. Breeding typically occurs in April, May or June, and females generally produce one calf every two years. Malayan tapirs can live up to 30 years, both in the wild and in captivity.


title: Malayan tapir

text: Because of its size, the Malayan tapir has few natural predators, and even reports of killings by tigers ("Panthera tigris"), leopards ("Panthera pardus"), or dholes ("Cuon alpinus") are scarce.


title: Malayan tapir

text: The main threat to the Malayan tapir is loss and destruction of habitat through deforestation. Large tracts of forests in Thailand and Malaysia have been converted for planting oil palms. Habitat fragmentation in peninsular Malaysia caused displacement of 142 Malayan tapirs between 2006 and 2010; some were rescued and relocated, 15 of them were roadkills.


title: Deep operation

text: Deep operation (, "glubokaya operatsiya"), also known as Soviet Deep Battle, was a military theory developed by the Soviet Union for its armed forces during the 1920s and 1930s. It was a tenet that emphasized destroying, suppressing or disorganizing enemy forces not only at the line of contact but also throughout the depth of the battlefield.


title: Deep operation

text: The term comes from Vladimir Triandafillov, an influential military writer, who worked with others to create a military strategy with its own specialized operational art and tactics. The concept of deep operations was a national strategy, tailored to the economic, cultural and geopolitical position of the Soviet Union. In the aftermath of several failures or defeats in the Russo-Japanese War, First World War and Polish–Soviet War, the Soviet High Command ("Stavka") focused on developing new methods for the conduct of war. This new approach considered military strategy and tactics, but also introduced a new intermediate level of military art: operations. The Soviet Union was the first country to officially distinguish the third level of military thinking which occupied the position between strategy and tactics.


title: Deep operation

text: Using these templates, the Soviets developed the concept of deep battle, and by 1936, it had become part of the Red Army Field Regulations. Deep operations had two phases: the tactical deep battle, followed by the exploitation of tactical success, known as the conduct of deep battle operations. Deep battle envisaged the breaking of the enemy's forward defenses, or tactical zones, through combined arms assaults, which would be followed up by fresh uncommitted mobile operational reserves sent to exploit the strategic depth of an enemy front. The goal of a deep operation was to inflict a decisive strategic defeat on the enemy's logistical abilities and render the defence of their front more difficult, impossible or irrelevant. Unlike most other doctrines, deep battle stressed combined arms cooperation at all levels: strategic, operational, and tactical.


title: Deep operation

text: Russian military thinking had changed little over the course of three centuries prior to the 1920s. The Russian Empire had kept pace with its enemies and allies and performed well in its major conflicts in the run-up to the 19th century. However, despite some notable victories in the Napoleonic Wars (1803–1815) and in various Russo-Turkish Wars, Russian defeats in the Crimean War (1853–1856), Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905) and First World War (1914–1918), together with a series of Soviet defeats at the hands of Poland in the Polish–Soviet War (1919–1921), highlighted the inferiority of Russian methodology in organisation and training.


title: Deep operation

text: After the Russian Revolution of 1917, the new Bolshevik regime sought to establish an entirely new military system that reflected the Bolshevik revolutionary spirit. The new Red Army (founded in 1918) combined the old and new methods. It still relied on the country's enormous manpower reserves; however, the Soviet program to develop heavy industry, which began in 1929, also raised the technical standards of Soviet arms industries to the level of other European nations. Once that had been achieved, the Soviets turned their attention to solving the problem of military operational mobility.


title: Deep operation

text: Primary advocates of the development included Alexander Svechin (1878–1938), Mikhail Frunze (1885–1925), and Mikhail Tukhachevsky (1893–1937). They promoted the development of military scientific societies and identified groups of talented officers. Many of these officers entered the Soviet Military Academy during Tukhachevsky's tenure as its commandant in 1921–1922. Others came later, particularly Nikolai Varfolomeev (1890–1939) and Vladimir Triandafillov (1894–1931), who made significant contributions to the use of technology in deep offensive operations.


title: Deep operation

text: In the aftermath of the wars with Japan and Poland several senior Soviet Commanders called for a unified military doctrine. The most prominent was Mikhail Frunze. The call prompted opposition by Leon Trotsky. Frunze's position eventually found favour with the officer elements that had experienced the poor command and control of Soviet forces in the conflict with Poland during the Polish–Soviet War. That turn of events prompted Trotsky's replacement by Frunze in January 1925.


title: Deep operation

text: The nature of this new doctrine was to be political. The Soviets were to fuse the military with the Bolshevik ideal, which would define the nature of war for the Soviet Union. The Soviets believed their most likely enemy would be the capitalist states of the west they had to defend themselves against before and that such a conflict was unavoidable. The nature of the war raised four major questions:


title: Deep operation

text: The discussion evolved into debate between those, like Alexander Svechin, who advocated a strategy of attrition, and others, like Tukhachevsky, who thought that a strategy of decisive destruction of the enemy forces was needed. The latter opinion was motivated in part by the condition of the Soviet Union's economy: the country was still not industrialized and thus was economically too weak to fight a long war of attrition. By 1928 Tukhachevsky's ideas had changed: he considered that given the nature and lessons of World War I, the next major war would almost certainly be one of attrition. He determined, however, that the vast size of the Soviet Union ensured that some mobility was still possible. Svechin accepted that and allowed for the first offensives to be fast and fluid; but ultimately he decided that it would come down to a war of position and attrition. That would require a strong economy and a loyal and politically-motivated population to outlast the enemy.


title: Deep operation

text: The doctrine pursued by the Soviets was offensively oriented. Tukhachevsky's neglect of defense pushed the Red Army toward the decisive battle and cult of the offensive mentality, which along with other events, caused enormous problems in 1941.


title: Deep operation

text: Unlike Tukhachevsky, Svechin determined the next war could be won only by attrition, not by a single or several decisive battles. Svechin also argued that a theory of alternating defensive and offensive action was needed. Within that framework, Svechin also recognised the theoretical distinction of operational art that lay between tactics and strategy. In his opinion the role of the operation was to group and direct tactical battles toward a series of simultaneous operational objectives along a wide frontage, either directly or indirectly, in order to achieve the "stavka's" ultimate strategic target(s). This became the blueprint for Soviet deep battle.


title: Deep operation

text: In 1929, Vladimir Triandafillov and Tukhachevsky formed a partnership to create a coherent system of principles from the concept formed by Svechin. Tukhachevsky was to elaborate the principles of the tactical and operational phases of deep battle. In response to his efforts and in acceptance of the methodology, the Red Army produced the "Provisional Instructions for Organizing the Deep Battle" manual in 1933. This was the first time that "deep battle" was mentioned in official Red Army literature.


title: Deep operation

text: Deep battle encompassed manoeuvre by multiple Soviet Army front-size formations simultaneously. It was not meant to deliver a victory in a single operation; instead, multiple operations, which might be conducted in parallel or successively, would induce a catastrophic failure in the enemy's defensive system.


title: Deep operation

text: Each operation served to divert enemy attention and keep the defender guessing about where the main effort and the main objective lay. In doing so, it prevented the enemy from dispatching powerful mobile reserves to the area. The army could then overrun vast regions before the defender could recover. The diversion operations also frustrated an opponent trying to conduct an elastic defence. The supporting operations had significant strategic objectives themselves and supporting units were to continue their offensive actions until they were unable to progress any further. However, they were still subordinated to the main/decisive strategic objective determined by the "Stavka".


title: Deep operation

text: Each of the operations along the front would have secondary strategic goals, and one of those operations would usually be aimed towards the primary objective.


title: Deep operation

text: The strategic objective, or mission, was to secure the primary strategic target. The primary target usually consisted of a geographical objective and the destruction of a proportion of the enemy armed forces. Usually the strategic missions of each operation were carried out by a Soviet front. The front itself usually had several shock armies attached to it, which were to converge on the target and encircle or assault it. The means of securing it was the job of the division and its tactical components, which Soviet deep battle termed the tactical mission.


title: Deep operation

text: The concept of deep battle was not just offensive. The theory took into account all forms of warfare and decided both the offensive and defensive should be studied and incorporated into deep battle. The defensive phase of deep battle involved identifying crucial strategic targets and securing them against attack from all directions. As with the offensive methods of deep battle, the target area would be identified and dissected into operational and tactical zones. In defence, the tactical zones, forward of the objective would be fortified with artillery and infantry forces. The outer and forwardmost defences would be heavily mined, making a very strong static defence position. The tactical zones would have several defence lines, one after the other, usually 12 kilometres from the main objective. In the zone 1–3 km from the main objective, shock forces, which contained the bulk of the Soviet combat formations, would be positioned.


title: Deep operation

text: The goal of the defence in depth concept was to blunt the elite enemy forces, which would be first to breach the Soviet lines, several times, causing them to exhaust themselves. Once the enemy had become bogged down in Soviet defences, the operational reserves came into play. Being positioned behind the tactical zones, the fresh mobile forces consisting of mechanized infantry, foot infantry, armored forces, and powerful tactical air support would engage the worn down enemy in a counter-offensive and either destroy it by attacking its flank or drive it out of the Soviet tactical zone and into enemyheld territory as far as possible.


title: Deep operation

text: There are three standard doctrines about the military that help understand Deep Battle, as adopted by the US Army and the US Marine Corps:


title: Deep operation

text: The highest level, an aspect of theater operation and the leadership of organization and of a government.


title: Deep operation

text: According to Colonel McPadden (US Army), the most precious legacy of Tukhachevsky is his concepts about all operations theory including the "operational art". Tukhachevsky is the first who used 'operational' as a systematic concept. According to McPadden, the main skill of a military commander is dependent on Tukhachevsky's Theory, which is the ability to integrate tactics and strategy. This involves the capability of a commander on "the use of military forces to achieve strategic goals through the design, organization, integration and conduct of theater strategies, campaigns, major operations and battles."


title: Deep operation

text: Georgii Samoilovich Isserson (1898–1976) was a prolific writer on military tactics and operations. Among his most important works on operational art were "The Evolution of Operational Art" (1932 and 1937) and "Fundamentals of the Deep Operation" (1933). The latter work remains classified to this day.


title: Deep operation

text: Isserson concentrated on depth and the role it played in operations and strategy. According to his view, strategy had moved on from Napoleonic times and the strategy of a single point (the decisive battle) and the Moltke era of linear strategy. The continuous front that developed in the First World War would not allow the flanking moves of the pre-1914 period. Isserson argued that the front had become devoid of open flanks and military art faced a challenge to develop new methods to break through a deeply echeloned defence. To this end he wrote that "we are at the dawn of a new epoch in military art, and must move from a linear strategy to a deep strategy."


title: Deep operation

text: Isserson calculated that the Red Army's attack echelon must be 100 to 120 km long. He estimated that enemy tactical defences, in about two lines, would be shallow in the first and stretch back 56 km. The second line would be formed behind and have 12–15 km of depth. Beyond that lay the operational depth, which would be larger and more densely-occupied than the first by embracing the railheads and supply stations to a depth of 50–60 km. There, the main enemy forces were concentrated. The third zone, beyond the operational depth was known as the strategic depth and served as the vital link between the country's manpower reservoirs and industrial power-supply sites and the area of military operations. In this zone lay the headquarters of the strategic forces, which included the army group level.


title: Deep operation

text: Isserson much like Varfolomeev divided his shock armies, one for the task of breaking the enemy forward (or frontline defences) and the other to exploit the breakthrough and occupy the operational zone, while destroying enemy reserve concentrations as they attempted to counter the assault. The exploitation phase would be carried out by combined arms teams of mechanized airborne infantry and motorised forces.


title: Deep operation

text: The breadth of the attack zone was an important factor in Soviet calculations. Isserson asserted an attack over a frontage of 70–80 km would be best. Three or four rifle corps would make a breakthrough along a front of 30 km. The breakthrough zone (only under favourable conditions) might be expanded to 48–50 km with another rifle corps. Under these conditions, a rifle corps would attack along a 10–12 km front, with each division in the corps' first echelon allocated a 6 kilometre frontage. A fifth supporting rifle corps would make diversionary attacks along the flanks of the main thrust to tie down counterresponses, confuse the enemy as to the area of the main thrust and delay its reserves from arriving.


title: Deep operation

text: Once the strategic objectives had been determined and operational preparation completed the Red Army would be tasked with assaulting the tactical zones of the enemy front in order to break through into its rear, allowing operationally mobile forces to invade the undefended enemy-held area to the rear.


title: Deep operation

text: The Soviet rifle corps was essential to the tactical method. As the largest tactical unit it formed the central component of the tactical deep battle. The rifle corps usually formed part of a larger operational effort and would be reinforced with tanks, artillery and other weapons. Several corps would take part in the attack, some with defensive missions and others with offensive assignments. They were known as holding and shock groups, respectively.


title: Deep operation

text: The order of battle was to encompass three echelons. The first echelon, acting as the first layer of forces, would come into immediate contact with opposing forces to break the tactical zones. The follow on echelons would support the breakthrough and the reserve would exploit it operationally. The holding group would be positioned on either flank of the combat zone to tie down enemy reinforcements via means of diversion attacks or blocking defence.


title: Deep operation

text: Nevertheless, despite the diversion being a primary mission, the limited forces conducting holding actions would be assigned geographical objectives. Once the main thrust had defeated the enemy's main defence, the tactical holding forces were to merge with the main body of forces conducting the operations.


title: Deep operation

text: In defence, the same principles would apply. The holding group would be positioned forward of the main defensive lines. The job of the holding echelons in that event was to weaken or halt the main enemy forces. If that was achieved, the enemy would be weakened sufficiently to be caught and impaled on the main defence lines. If that failed, and the enemy succeeded in sweeping aside the holding forces and breaching several of the main defence lines, mobile operational reserves, including tanks and assault aviation, would be committed. These forces would be allocated to holding and shock groups alike and were often positioned behind the main defences to engage the battle worn enemy thrust.


title: Deep operation

text: The forces used to carry out the tactical assignments varied from 1933 to 1943. The number of shock armies, rifle corps, and divisions (mechanized and infantry) given to a strategic front constantly changed. By 1943, the year that the Red Army began to practice deep battle properly, the order of battle for each tactical unit under the command of a front were:


title: Deep operation

text: These forces numbered some 80,000–130,000 men, 1,500–2,000 guns and mortars, 48-497 rocket launchers, and 30-226 self-propelled guns.


title: Deep operation

text: The division numbered some 9,380 men (10,670 in a guards rifle division), 44 field guns, 160 mortars and 48 anti-tank guns.


title: Deep operation

text: Soviet analysts recognised that it was not enough to break through the enemy tactical zone. Although that was the crucial first step, tactical deep battle offered no solution about how a force could sustain an advance beyond it and into the operational and strategic depths of an enemy front. The success of tactical action counted for little in an operational defensive zone that extended dozens of kilometres and in which the enemy held large reserves. Such enemy concentrations could prevent the exploitation of a tactical breakthrough and threaten the operational advance.


title: Deep operation

text: That was demonstrated during the First World War, when initial breakthroughs were rendered useless by the exhaustion during the tactical effort, limited mobility, and a slow-paced advance and enemy reinforcements. The attacker was further unable to influence the fighting beyond the immediate battlefield because of the limited range, speed and reliability in the existing weapons. The attacker was often unable to exploit tactical success in even the most favourable circumstances, as his infantry could not push into the breach rapidly enough. Enemy reinforcements could then seal off the break in their lines.


title: Deep operation

text: By the early 1930s, however, new weapons had come into circulation. Improvements in the speed and range of offensive weaponry matched those of its defensive counterparts. New tanks, aircraft and motorised vehicles were entering service in large numbers to form divisions and corps of air fleets, motorised and mechanized divisions. Those trends prompted the Red Army strategists to attempt to solve the problem of maintaining operational tempo with new technology.


title: Deep operation

text: The concept was termed "deep operations" ("glubokaya operatsiya"), which emerged in 1936 and was placed within the context of deep battle in the 1936 Field Regulations. The deep operation was geared toward operations at the Army and or Front level and was larger, in terms of the forces engaged, than deep battle's tactical component, which used units not larger than corps size.


title: Deep operation

text: The forces used in the operational phase were much larger. The Red Army proposed to use the efforts of air forces, airborne forces and ground forces to launch a "simultaneous blow throughout the entire depth of the enemy's operational defense" to delay its strongest forces positioned in the area of operations by defeating them in detail; to surround and destroy those units at the front (the tactical zone, by occupying the operational depth to its rear); and to continue the offensive into the defender's operational and strategic depth.


title: Deep operation

text: The central composition of the deep operation was the shock army, which acted either in co-operation with others or independently as part of a strategic front operation. Several shock armies would be subordinated to a strategic front. Triandafilov created this layout of force allocation for deep operations in his "Character of Operations of Modern Armies", which retained its utility throughout the 1930s. Triandafilov assigned the shock army some 12–18 rifle divisions, in four to five corps. These units were supplemented with 16–20 artillery regiments and 8–12 tank battalions. By the time of his death in 1931, Triandafilov had submitted various strength proposals which included the assignment of aviation units to the front unit. This consisted of two or three aviation brigades of bomber aircraft and six to eight squadrons of fighter aircraft.


title: Deep operation

text: Triandafilov's successor, Nikolai Efimovich Varfolomeev, was less concerned with developing the quantitative indices of deep battle but rather with the mechanics of the shock army's mission. Varfolomeev termed this as "launching an uninterrupted, deep and shattering blow" along the main axis of advance. Varfolomeev believed the shock army needed both firepower and mobility to destroy both enemy tactical defences, operational reserves and seize geographical targets or positions in harmony with other operationally independent, but strategically collaborative, offensives.


title: Deep operation

text: Varfolomeev noted that deep and echeloned tactical and operational defences should call for equal or similar counter responses from the attacker. That allowed the attacker to deliver a deep blow at the concentrating point. The new technological advances would allow the echelon forces to advance the penetration of the enemy tactical zones quickly, denying the enemy defender the time to establish a new defensive line and bring up reinforcements to seal the breach.


title: Deep operation

text: Varfolomeev sought to organise the shock armies into two echelon formations. The first was to be the tactical breakthrough echelon, composed of several rifle corps. These would be backed up by a series of second line divisions from the reserves to sustain the tempo of advance and to maintain momentum pressure upon the enemy. These forces would strike 15–20 km into enemy tactical defences to engage his forward and reserve "tactical forces". Once they had been defeated, the Red Army Front was ready to release its fresh, and uncommitted operational forces to pass through the conquered tactical zone and exploit the enemy operational zones.


title: Deep operation

text: The first echelon used raw firepower and mass to break the layered enemy defences, but the second echelon operational reserves combined firepower and mobility, which was lacking in the former. Operational units were heavily formed from mechanized, motorised and Cavalry forces. The forces would now seek to envelope the enemy tactical forces as yet-unengaged along the flanks of the breakthrough point. Other units would press on to occupy the operational zones and meet the enemy operational reserves as they moved through his rear to establish a new defence's line. While in the operational rear of the enemy, communications, and supply depots were prime targets for the Soviet forces. With his tactical zones isolated from reinforcements, reinforcements blocked from relieving them, the front would be indefensible. Such a method would instigate operational paralysis for the defender.


title: Deep operation

text: In official literature Varfolomeev stated that the forces pursuing the enemy operational depth must advance between 20–25 km a day. Forces operating against the flanks of enemy tactical forces must advance as much as 40–45 km a day to prevent the enemy from escaping.


title: Deep operation

text: According to a report by the Staff of the Urals Military district in 1936, a shock army would number 12 rifle divisions; a mechanized corps (from its "Stavka" operational reserve) and an independent mechanized brigade; three Cavalry divisions; a light-bomber brigade, two brigades of assault aviation, two squadrons of fighter and reconnaissance aircraft; six tank battalions; five artillery regiments; plus two heavy artillery battalions; two battalions of Chemical troops. The shock army would number some 300,000 men, 100,000 horses, 1,668 smaller-calibre and 1,550 medium and heavy calibre guns, 722 aircraft and 2,853 tanks.


title: Deep operation

text: Having organized the operational forces and secured a tactical breakthrough into the operational rear of the enemy front, several issues took shape about how the Red Army would engage the main operational enemy forces. Attacking in echelon formation denied the Soviet forces the chance to bring all their units to bear. That might lead to the defeat of a shock army against a superior enemy force.


title: Deep operation

text: To avoid such a situation, echelon forces were to strike at the flanks of enemy concentrations for the first few days of the assault, while the main mobile forces caught up. The aim of this was to avoid a head-on clash and tie down enemy forces from reaching the tactical zones. The expected scope of the operation could be 150–200 km.


title: Deep operation

text: If the attack proved successful at pinning the enemy in place and defeating its forces in battle, mechanized forces would break the flank and surround the enemy with infantry to consolidate the success. As the defender withdrew, mechanized cavalry and motorised forces would harass, cut off, and destroy his retreating columns which would also be assaulted by powerful aviation forces.


title: Deep operation

text: The pursuit would be pushed as far into the enemy depth as possible until exhaustion set in. With the tactical zones defeated, and the enemy operational forces either destroyed or incapable of further defence, the Soviet forces could push into the strategic depth.


title: Deep operation

text: The development of Soviet operational logistics, the complex of rear service roles, missions, procedures, and resources intended to sustain military operations by army and front groupings) clearly occupied a prominent place within overall Soviet efforts to formulate or adapt warfighting approaches to new conditions. As Soviet military theorists and planners have long emphasised, logistic theory and practice are shaped by the same historical and technological developments that influence Soviet warfighting approaches at every level. In turn, they play a major role in defining directions and parameters for Soviet methods.


title: Deep operation

text: Soviet theory recognised the need for logistic theory and practice that were consistent with other components of strategy, operational art, and tactics. Despite the many changes in the political, economic, and military environment and the quickening pace of technological change, logistical doctrine was an important feature of Soviet thinking.


title: Deep operation

text: During the 1930s, the resurgence of the German military in the era of the Third Reich saw German innovations in the tactical arena. The methodology used by the Germans in the Second World War was named by others "blitzkrieg". There is a common misconception that "blitzkrieg", which is not accepted as a coherent military doctrine, was similar to Soviet deep operations. The only similarities of the two doctrines were an emphasis on mobile warfare and offensive posture.


title: Deep operation

text: Both similarities differentiated the doctrines from French and British doctrine of the time, but they were considerably different. "Blitzkrieg" emphasized the importance of a single strike on a "Schwerpunkt" (focal point) as a means of rapidly defeating an enemy; deep battle emphasized the need for multiple breakthrough points and reserves to exploit the breach quickly. The difference in doctrine can be explained by the strategic circumstances for the Soviet Union and Germany at the time. Germany had a smaller population but a better-trained army, and the Soviet Union had a larger population but a less-trained army. As a result, "Blitzkrieg" emphasized narrow front attacks in which quality could be decisive, but deep battle emphasized wider front attacks in which quantity could be used effectively.


title: Deep operation

text: In principle, the Red Army would seek to destroy the enemy's operational reserves and its operational depth and occupy as much of his strategic depth as possible. Within the Soviet concept of deep operations was the principle of strangulation if the situation demanded it, instead of physically encircling the enemy and destroying him immediately. Triandafillov stated in 1929:


title: Deep operation

text: The outcome in modern war will be attained not through the physical destruction of the opponent but rather through a succession of developing manoeuvres that will aim at inducing him to see his ability to comply further with his operational goals. The effect of this mental state leads to operational shock or system paralysis, and ultimately to the disintegration of his operational system. The success of the operational manoeuvre is attained through all-arms combat (combined arms) at the tactical level, and by combining a frontal holding force with a mobile column to penetrate the opponent's depth at the operational level. The element of depth is a dominant factor in the conduct of deep operations both in the offensive and defensive.


title: Deep operation

text: The theory moved away from the Clausewitzian principle of battlefield destruction and the annihilation of enemy field forces, which obsessed the Germans. Instead deep operations stressed the ability to create conditions whereby the enemy loses the will to mount an operational defence. An example of the theory in practice is Operation Uranus in 1942. The Red Army in Stalingrad was allocated enough forces to hold the German Sixth Army in the city, which caused attrition that would force it to weaken its flanks to secure its centre. Meanwhile, reserves were built up, which then struck at the weak flanks. The Soviets broke through the German flanks, exploited the operational depth, and closed the pocket at Kalach-na-Donu.


title: Deep operation

text: The operation left the German tactical zones largely intact, but by occupying the German operational depth and preventing their retreat the German Army forces were isolated. Instead of reducing the pocket immediately, the Soviets tightened their grip on the enemy forces and preferred to let the enemy weaken and surrender, starve him completely, or a combination of those methods before they delivered a final destructive assault. In that way, the Soviet tactical and operational method opted to besiege the enemy into submission, rather than destroy it physically and immediately.


title: Deep operation

text: In that sense, the Soviet deep battle, in the words of one historian, "was radically different to the nebulous 'blitzkrieg'" method but produced similar, if more strategically-impressive, results.


title: Deep operation

text: Deep operations were first formally expressed as a concept in the Red Army's "Field Regulations" of 1929 and more fully developed in the 1935 "Instructions on Deep Battle". The concept was finally codified by the army in 1936 in the "Provisional Field Regulations" of 1936. By 1937, the Soviet Union had the largest mechanized army in the world and a sophisticated operational system to operate it.


title: Deep operation

text: However, the death of Triandafillov in an airplane crash and the Great Purge of 1937 to 1939 removed many of the leading officers of the Red Army, including Svechin, Varfolomeev and Tukhachevsky. The purge of the Soviet military liquidated the generation of officers that had given the Red Army the deep battle strategy, operations and tactics and who also had rebuilt the Soviet armed forces. Along with those personalities, their ideas were also dispensed with. Some 35,000 personnel, about 50 percent of the officer corps, three out of five marshals; 13 out of 15 army group commanders; 57 out of 85 corps commanders; 110 out of 195 division commanders; 220 out of 406 brigade commanders were executed, imprisoned or discharged. Stalin thus destroyed the cream of the personnel with operational and tactical competence in the Red Army. Other sources state that 60 out of 67 corps commanders, 221 out of 397 brigade commanders, 79 percent of regimental commanders, 88 percent of regimental chiefs of staff, and 87 percent of all battalion commanders were excised from the army by various means.