Today in Holocaust History

The Jews of Chernivtsi (Czernowitz; Cernăuţi) in the Holocaust

2010-09-16T10:45:00.012+02:00

When Austria-Hungary dissolved in 1918, the city and its surrounding area became a part of the Kingdom of Romania. In 1930, the city reached a population of 112,400 among them 26.8% Jews, the largest demographic group.

In 1940, the Red Army occupied the area and Chernivtsi was allotted to the Ukrainian SSR by the Soviet Union. This prompted Romania to switch from an ally of France and Britain to one of the Nazi Germany; in July 1941, Romanian Army re-took the city as part of the Axis attack on the Soviet Union during World War II.

In August 1941, Romanian military dictator Ion Antonescu ordered the creation of a ghetto in the lowland part of the city, where 50,000 Bukovina Jews were crammed; two thirds of which would be deported to Transnistria (WWII) in October 1941 and partly in early 1942, where the majority perished.

Chernivtsi once had a Jewish community of over 50,000, less than a third of whom survived World War II.

Romanian lawyer and reserve officer Theodor Criveanu, as well as the then city mayor Traian Popovici, supported by General Vasile Ionescu saved 19,689 Jewish people. Initially, Governor of Bukovina Calotescu allowed only 190 Jewish people to stay, but Traian Popovici, after an incredible effort, obtained from the then dictator of Romania Marshall Ion Antonescu an allowance of 20,000.

After World War II, the city was a key node in the Berihah net (Hebrew: Escape), which helped Jews to emigrate to the then Palestine from the difficult conditions after the War. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the majority of the remaining Jewish population emigrated to Israel and the United States.

Traian Popovici and Theodor Criveanu were honored by Israel's Yad Vashem memorial as one of the Righteous Among the Nations, an honour given to non-Jews who behaved with heroism in trying to save Jewish persons from the genocide of the Holocaust.

Source: Wikipedia (All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License and Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License.)

What is Antisemitism?

2010-06-17T16:08:00.004+03:00

Yellow badge Star of David called "Judenstern". Part of the exhibition in the Jewish Museum Westphalia, Dorsten, Germany. The wording is the German word for Jew (Jude), written in mock-Hebrew script.

Antisemitism is prejudice against or hostility towards Jews, often rooted in hatred of their ethnic background, culture, and/or religion. In its extreme form, it attributes to the Jews an exceptional position among all other civilizations, defames them as an inferior group and denies their being part of the nations in which they reside. A person who practices antisemitism is called an antisemite.

Antisemitism may be manifested in many ways, ranging from individual expressions of hatred and discrimination against individual Jews to organized violent attacks by mobs or even state police or military attacks on entire Jewish communities. Extreme instances of persecution include the:

- first Crusade of 1096,

- the expulsion from England in 1290,

- the Spanish Inquisition,

- the expulsion from Spain in 1492,

- the expulsion from Portugal in 1497,

- various pogroms,

- the Dreyfus Affair, and perhaps the most infamous,

- the Holocaust under Adolf Hitler's Nazi Germany.

While the term's etymology might suggest that antisemitism is directed against all Semitic peoples, the term was coined in the late 19th century in Germany as a more scientific-sounding term for Judenhass ("Jew-hatred"), and that has been its normal use since then.

Source: Wikipedia (All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License and Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License.)

Yom HaShoah

2010-04-11T08:38:00.002+03:00

Sirens blare at 10 AM as motorists exit their cars and stand in silence front of the Prime Minister's House in Jerusalem and throughout Israel on Yom HaShoah

Yom HaZikaron laShoah ve-laGvura, known colloquially in Israel and abroad as Yom HaShoah and in English as Holocaust Remembrance Day, or Holocaust Day, is observed as Israel's day of commemoration for the approximately six million Jews who perished in the Holocaust, as a result of the actions carried out by Nazi Germany and its accessories, and for the Jewish resistance in that period. In Israel, it is a national memorial day and public holiday. It is held on the 27 Nisan (April/May). In other countries there are different commemorative days.

Yom HaShoah was inaugurated in 1951, anchored in a law signed by the Prime Minister of Israel David Ben-Gurion and the President of Israel Yitzhak Ben-Zvi.

The original proposal was to hold Yom HaShoah on the 14th of Nisan, the anniversary of the Warsaw ghetto uprising (April 19, 1943), but this was problematic because the 14th of Nisan is the day immediately before Pesach (Passover). The date was moved to the 27th of Nisan, which is eight days before Yom Ha'atzma'ut, or Israeli Independence Day.

While there are Orthodox Jews who commemorate the Holocaust on Yom HaShoah, others in the Orthodox community—especially Haredim, including Hasidim—remember the victims of the Holocaust on days of mourning declared by the rabbis before the Holocaust, such as Tisha b'Av in the summer, and the Tenth of Tevet, in the winter. Ismar Schorsch, former Chancellor of Conservative Judaism's Jewish Theological Seminary of America held that Holocaust commemoration should take place on Tisha b'Av.

Most Jewish communities hold a solemn ceremony on this day, but there is no institutionalized ritual accepted by all Jews. Lighting memorial candles and reciting the Kaddish—the prayer for the departed—are common. The Masorti (Conservative Judaism) movement in Israel has created Megillat HaShoah, a scroll and liturgical reading for Yom HaShoah, a joint project of Jewish leaders in Israel, the United States and Canada. The booklet was subsequently converted into a kosher scroll by sofer Marc Michaels for reading in the community and then into a tikkun—copyist guide for scribes—'Tikkun megillat hashoah'. In 1984, Conservative Rabbi David Golinkin wrote an article in Conservative Judaism journal suggesting a program of observance for the holiday, including fasting.

Yom HaShoah opens in Israel at sundown in a state ceremony held at the Warsaw Ghetto Plaza at Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes Authority, in Jerusalem. During the ceremony the national flag is lowered to half staff, the President and the Prime Minister deliver speeches, Holocaust survivors light six torches symbolizing the approximately six million Jews who perished in the Holocaust and the Chief Rabbis recite prayers.

At 10:00 am on Yom HaShoah, sirens are sounded throughout Israel for two minutes. During this time, people cease from action and stand at attention; cars stop, even on the highways; and the whole country comes to a standstill as people pay silent tribute to the dead.

On Yom HaShoah ceremonies and services are held at schools, military bases and in other public and community organizations.

On the eve of Yom HaShoah and the day itself, places of public entertainment are closed by law. Israeli television airs Holocaust documentaries and Holocaust-related talk shows, and low-key songs are played on the radio. Flags on public buildings are flown at half mast.

Observance of the day is moved back to the Thursday before, if 27 Nisan falls on a Friday (as in 2008), or forward a day, if 27 Nisan falls on a Sunday (to avoid adjacency with the Jewish Sabbath). The fixed Jewish calendar insures 27 Nisan does not fall on Saturday.

Those Jews in the Diaspora who observe Yom HaShoah may observe it within the synagogue, as well as in the broader Jewish community. Commemorations range from synagogue services to communal vigils and educational programs. Many Yom HaShoah programs feature a talk by a Holocaust survivor or a direct descendant, recitation of appropriate psalms, songs and readings, or viewing of a Holocaust-themed film. Some communities choose to emphasize the depth of loss that Jews experienced in the Holocaust by reading the names of Holocaust victims one after another—dramatizing the unfathomable notion of six million deaths. Many Jewish schools also hold Holocaust-related educational programs on, or around, Yom HaShoah.

Also during this day, tens of thousands of Israeli high-school students, and thousands of Jews and non-Jews from around the world, hold a memorial service in Auschwitz, in what has become known as "The March of the Living," in defiance of the Holocaust Death Marches. This event is endorsed and subsidized by the Israeli Ministry of Education and the Holocaust Claims Conference, and is considered an important part of the school curriculum – a culmination of several months of studies on World War II and the Holocaust.

Source: Wikipedia (All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License and Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License.)

German Reichstag passes Enabling Act giving Hitler dictatorial powers - March 23, 1933

2010-03-23T22:14:00.003+02:00

Hitler's Reichstag speech promoting the Enabling Act bill

The Reichstag Fire Decree is the common name of the Order of the Reich President for the Protection of People and State issued by German President Paul von Hindenburg on February 28 1933 in direct response to the Reichstag fire of 27 February 1933. The decree nullified many of the key civil liberties of German citizens. With Nazis in powerful positions in the German government, the decree was used as the legal basis of imprisonment of anyone considered to be opponents of the Nazis, and to suppress publications not considered "friendly" to the Nazi cause. The decree is considered by historians to be one of the key steps in the establishment of a one-party Nazi state in Germany.

The decree was not accompanied by any written guidelines from the Reich government; this omission gave wide latitude in interpreting the decree to Nazis like Göring, who as Prussian interior minister was in authority over the police forces in Germany's largest province.

Just over three weeks after the passage of the Reichstag Fire Decree, Hitler's National Socialists further tightened their grasp on Germany by the passage of the Enabling Act. This act gave Hitler's cabinet the legal power to decree laws without being passed by the Reichstag - effectively making Hitler a dictator.

The Enabling Act was passed by Germany's Reichstag and signed by President Paul von Hindenburg on March 23, 1933. It was the second major step, after the Reichstag Fire Decree, through which Chancellor Adolf Hitler legally obtained plenary powers and established his dictatorship. It received its name from its legal status as an enabling act granting the Cabinet the authority to enact laws without the participation of the Reichstag for four years.

Under the Act, the government had acquired the authority to pass laws without either parliamentary consent or control. Unprecedentedly, these laws could even deviate from the Constitution. The Act effectively eliminated the Reichstag as active players in German politics, though the existence of the body, alongside that of the Reichsrat and of the office of President were protected under the Act. Together with the Reichstag Fire Decree, it transformed Hitler's government into a legal dictatorship.

Source: Wikipedia (All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License)

Josef Schmidt, Jewish Tenor and Actor, Was born

2010-03-04T11:06:00.002+02:00

Josef Schmidt on a German stamp from 2004

Josef Schmidt (1904 - 1942) was a Jewish tenor and actor. He was born in Davideny, a small town in the Bukovina province of Austria-Hungary, later Romania and now part of Ukraine.

As a child of musical parents, young Josef was influenced by many cultures. In addition to his native Yiddish, he learned Hebrew and became fluent in Romanian, German, French and English. His first vocal training was as an alto boy in the Czernowitz Synagogue. His talents were quickly recognised and by 1924 he was featured in his first solo recital in Czernowitz singing traditional Jewish songs and arias by Verdi, Puccini, Rossini and Bizet. Soon he moved to Berlin and took piano and singing lessons from Professor Hermann Weissenborn. He returned to Romania for his military service and became cantor of the Czernowitz synagogue.

In 1929 he went back to Berlin, where Cornelis Bronsgeest, a famous Dutch baritone, engaged him for a radio broadcast as Vasco da Gama in Meyerbeer's L'Africaine. This was the beginning of a successful international career. Owing to his diminutive stature (he was just over 1.5 m) a stage career was impossible, however his voice was extremely well suited for radio. He made many records, first for Ultraphone, then for Odeon/Parlophone, was featured in many radio broadcasts and acted in several movies in both German and English.

Ironically, Josef Schmidt enjoyed his greatest successes during the rise of the German Nazis, who subsequently prohibited Jewish artists and writers from working. In 1937, he toured the United States and performed in the Carnegie Hall together with other prominent singers such as Grace Moore. The Nazis banned him from performing in Germany and Austria, but he was still very much welcome in The Netherlands and Belgium, where he was immensely popular.

In 1939, he visited his mother in Czernowitz for the last time. When the war broke out that year he was caught in France by the German invasion. He attempted to escape to the United States but, unfortunately, this failed. Making a dash for the Swiss border, he was interned in a Swiss refugee camp in Gyrenbad near Zurich in October 1942. He had been already in frail health. Harsh camp life and lack of medical care brought about a fatal heart attack on November 16, 1942. He was only 38 years old.

He had a sweet lyric tenor voice with an easy high register, sailing up even to a high D. His warm timbre was perfectly suited for the melodies of Schubert and Lehár. His popular song recordings were the best-sellers of that age.

Source: Wikipedia (All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License and Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License.)

Waffen-SS

2010-03-04T10:46:00.004+02:00

Men and Horses of the SS Cavalry Brigade September 1941

The Waffen-SS (German for "Armed SS") was the combat arm of the Schutzstaffel ("Protective Squadron") or SS, an organ of the Nazi Party. The Waffen-SS saw action throughout World War II and grew from three regiments to over 38 divisions, and served alongside the Wehrmacht Heer regular army, but was never formally part of it. It was Adolf Hitler's will that the Waffen-SS never be integrated into the army, it was to remain the armed wing of the Party and to become an elite police force once the war was over. Operational control of units on the front line was given to the Army's High Command, but in all other respects it remained under the control of Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler's SS organization, through the SS Führungshauptamt (SS operational command office).

At first membership was open to "Aryans" only in accordance with the racial policies of the Nazi state, but in 1940 Hitler authorized the formation of units composed largely or solely of foreign volunteers and conscripts, and by the end of the war ethnic non-Germans made up approximately 60% of the Waffen-SS.

After the war at the Nuremberg Trials, the Waffen-SS was condemned as a criminal organization due to its essential connection to the Nazi Party and its involvement in war crimes. Waffen-SS veterans were denied many of the rights afforded to veterans who had served in the Heer (army), Luftwaffe (air force) or Kriegsmarine (navy). The exception made was for Waffen-SS conscripts sworn in after 1943, who were exempted due to their involuntary servitude. In the 1950s and 1960s, Waffen-SS veteran groups successfully fought numerous legal battles in West Germany to overturn the Nuremberg ruling and win pension rights for their members.

Source: Wikipedia (All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License)

The Ship Struma Was Sunk Killing 768 Men, Women and Children, With Only One Survivor

2010-02-24T09:45:00.000+02:00

Struma Memorial in Holon, Israel

Struma was a ship chartered to carry Jewish refugees from Axis-allied Romania to British-controlled Palestine during World War II. On 23 February 1942, with its engine inoperable, the ship was towed from Istanbul through the Bosporus out to the Black Sea by Turkish authorities with its refugee passengers aboard, where it was left adrift. Within hours, it was torpedoed and sunk by a Soviet submarine on 24 February, killing 768 men, women and children, with only one survivor. It has been called "largest naval civilian disaster of the war".

Struma was commissioned by the Revisionist Zionist organizations in Romania, especially Betar, to carry Romanian Jews as immigrants to the Promised Land of Eretz Israel. Apart from the crew, there were approximately 790 passengers. They included some Betar members but were mostly wealthy Romanian Jews who could afford to pay the high price of a ticket. The voyage had the approval of the Ion Antonescu government.

Most of the passengers were not permitted to see the vessel before the day of the voyage. When they finally saw it they were shocked to discover it was far worse than they had imagined. Sleeping quarters were extremely cramped without enough space to sit up, and the ship had only two lifeboats. Passengers were not told that the engine was in even worse condition: it had been recovered from a wreck on the bottom of the Danube River.

The engine gave out several times after the Struma set sail from Constanţa, on the Black Sea on 12 December 1941. After three days, the ship was towed to Istanbul where it remained at anchor while secret negotiations were conducted over the fate of the passengers. In the wake of violent unrest within Palestine, the British government was determined to uphold its policy of restricting mass Jewish immigration and urged the Turkish government of Refik Saydam to prevent the ship from sailing onwards. Turkey refused to allow the passengers off the ship. After weeks of negotiation, the British agreed to honour the expired Palestinian visas possessed by a few passengers, who were allowed to continue overland. With the help of friends in high places, a few also managed to escape. One woman was admitted to an Istanbul hospital following a miscarriage.

On 12 February the British agreed that the children aged 11 to 16 on the ship would be given Palestinian visas, but then a dispute broke out over the means of their transport to Palestine. The United Kingdom refused to send a ship, while Turkey refused to allow them to travel overland.

While negotiations were still in progress and without notifying Britain in advance, Turkey towed the Struma back into the Black Sea and abandoned it on 23 February. As the ship was towed along the Bosporus, many passengers hung signs over the sides that read "SAVE US" in English and Hebrew, visible to those who lived on the banks of the strait. Despite weeks of work by Turkish engineers, the engine would not start, and the ship drifted helplessly.

On 24 February there was a huge explosion and the ship sank. Only one person survived, a man named David Stoliar who was found clinging to the wreckage, by crew of a rowboat sent out from one of the watchtowers along the Turkish coast. Stoliar was imprisoned in Turkey for six weeks, then released and admitted to Palestine. Later, he moved to Japan and then the United States.

For many years there were competing theories about the explosion that sank the Struma. In 1964 a German historian discovered by that a Soviet submarine (SC-213) had fired a torpedo that sank the ship. Later this was confirmed from several other Soviet sources. The submarine had been acting under secret orders to sink all neutral and enemy shipping entering the Black Sea to reduce the flow of strategic materials to Nazi Germany.

In July 2000, a Turkish diving team found a wreck on the sea floor at approximately the right place, and announced that they had discovered the Struma. A team led by UK technical diver and a grandson of one of the victims, Greg Buxton, later studied this and several other wrecks in the area but could not positively identify any as the Struma; the wreck found by the Turks was far too large.

On 3 September 2000 a ceremony was held at the site to commemorate the tragedy. It was attended by 60 relatives of Struma victims, representatives of the Jewish community of Turkey, the Israeli ambassador and prime minister's envoy, as well as British and American delegates. There were no delegates from the former Soviet Union.

Source: Wikipedia (All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License)

Ghettos in Nazi-occupied Europe

2010-02-06T12:07:00.002+02:00

During World War II ghettos were established by the German Nazis to confine Jews and sometimes Gypsies into tightly packed areas of the cities of Eastern Europe turning them into de-facto concentration camps.

Starting in 1939, the German Nazis began to systematically move Polish Jews into designated areas of large Polish cities. The first ghetto at Piotrków Trybunalski was established in October 1939, the one in Tuliszkow was established in December 1939 or January 1940, followed by the first large scale ghetto, the Łódź Ghetto in April 1940 and the Warsaw Ghetto in October with many other ghettos established throughout 1940 and 1941. Many Ghettos were walled off or enclosed with barbed wire. In the case of sealed ghettos, any Jew found leaving them was shot. The Warsaw Ghetto was the largest ghetto in Nazi occupied Europe, with 380,000 people and the Łódź Ghetto, the second largest, holding about 160,000.

The situation in the ghettos was brutal. In Warsaw, 30 percent of the population was forced to live in 2.4 percent of the city's area, a density of 9.2 people per room. In the ghetto of Odrzywół, 700 people lived in an area previously occupied by five families, between 12 and 30 to each small room. The Jews were not allowed out of the ghetto, so they had to rely on food supplied by the Nazis: in Warsaw this was 253 calories (1,060 kJ) per Jew, compared to 669 calories (2,800 kJ) per Pole and 2,613 calories (10,940 kJ) per German. With crowded living conditions, starvation diets, and little sanitation (in the Łódź Ghetto 95 percent of apartments had no sanitation, piped water or sewers) hundreds of thousands of Jews died of disease and starvation. In 1942, the Germans began Operation Reinhard, the systematic deportation to extermination camps during the Holocaust. The authorities deported Jews from everywhere in Europe to the ghettos of the East, or directly to the extermination camps — almost 300,000 people were deported from the Warsaw Ghetto alone to Treblinka over the course of 52 days.

Ghetto uprisings were armed revolts by Jews and other groups incarcerated in German ghettos during World War II against the plans to deport the inhabitants to concentration and extermination camps.

Some of these uprisings were more massive and organized, while others were small and spontaneous. The best known and the biggest of such uprisings took place in Warsaw in April 1943 (Warsaw Ghetto Uprising), but there were also other such struggles in other ghettos. None were successful, and the Jewish populations of the ghettos were almost entirely killed.

Judenräte (singular Judenrat; German for "Jewish council") were administrative bodies that the Germans required Jews to form in the German occupied territory of Poland, and later in the occupied territories of the Soviet Union.

The Judenrat served as a liaison between the German occupying authorities and the Jewish communities under occupation. The Judenrat operated pre-existing Jewish communal properties such as hospitals, soup kitchens, day care centers, and vocational schools.

In a number of cases, such as the Minsk ghetto and the Łachwa ghetto, Judenrats cooperated with the resistance movement. In other cases, Judenrats collaborated with the Nazis, on the basis that cooperation might save the lives of the ghetto inhabitants.

Jewish Ghetto Police also known as the Jewish Order Service and referred to by the Jews as the Jewish Police, were the auxiliary police units organized in the Jewish ghettos of Europe by local Judenrat councils under orders of occupying German Nazis.

The Polish-Jewish historian and the Warsaw Ghetto archivist Emanuel Ringelblum has described the cruelty of the ghetto police as "at times greater than that of the Germans, the Ukrainians and the Latvians."

Source: Wikipedia (All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License)

International Holocaust Remembrance Day 2010

2010-01-27T03:02:00.000+02:00

The Holocaust

The International Holocaust Remembrance Day, which occurs on January 27, is the first universal commemoration in memory of the victims of The Holocaust. It was designated by the United Nations General Assembly Resolution 60/7 on 1 November 2005 during the 42nd plenary session. On 24 January 2005, during a special session, the United Nations General Assembly had previously marked the 60th anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps and the end of the Holocaust which resulted in the annihilation of 6 million European Jews and millions of others by the Nazi German regime.

January 27 is the date, in 1945, when the largest Nazi death camp in Auschwitz-Birkenau (Poland) was liberated by Soviet troops.

The Resolution 60/7 establishing 27 January as an International Holocaust Remembrance Day urges every member nation of the U.N. to honor the memory of Holocaust victims, and encourages the development of educational programs about Holocaust history to help prevent future acts of genocide. It rejects any denial of the Holocaust as a historical event and condemns all manifestations of religious intolerance, incitement, harassment or violence against persons or communities based on ethnic origin or religious belief. It also calls for actively preserving the Holocaust sites that served as Nazi death camps, concentration camps, forced labor camps and prisons, as well as for establishing a U.N. programme of outreach and mobilization of civil society for Holocaust remembrance and education.

Source: Wikipedia (All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License)

ARBEIT MACHT FREI Auschwitz sign was stolen - December 18, 2009

2009-12-18T08:51:00.004+02:00

The entry gate to Auschwitz concentration camp, taken in July 2006. The infamous "ARBEIT MACHT FREI" message is visible.

The Auschwitz sign was stolen in the early morning of December 18, 2009. It is the first time the sign (made by Polish prisoners) has been stolen since it was erected in the early 1940s. The sign was orginally erected by the Nazis after the Auschwitz barracks were converted into a labour camp to house Polish resistance fighters in 1940. A police spokeswoman said the 5-metre (16 ft), 41-kilogram (90 lb) wrought iron sign was unscrewed on one side and torn off on the other. The missing sign was replaced by a replica, which had been created some years earlier as a temporary replacement while the original was being restored.

Such was the concern about its theft that Poland declared a state of emergency. It was found by the police, cut into three parts, in northern Poland two days later in the home of one of five men who were arrested. An unnamed overseas buyer is believed to have been involved.

The Aftonbladet newspaper (a Swedish tabloid) reported that the sign had been stolen by Polish thieves paid by and working on behalf of a Swedish right-wing extremist group hoping to use proceeds from the proposed sale of the sign to a collector of Nazi memorabilia, to finance a series of terror attacks aimed at influencing voters in upcoming Swedish Parliamentary elections.

The original sign will be welded back together and put back up after an improved security system is put in place.

"Arbeit macht frei" is a German phrase with the word-for-word meaning of "work makes free", which can be translated as "work liberates". The slogan is well-known for being placed at the entrances to a number of Nazi concentration camps.

The slogan can still be seen at several sites, including over the entrance to Auschwitz I. The sign was placed there by commandant Rudolf Höss (First commandant of Auschwitz concentration camp). Höss believed that doing menial work during his own imprisonment under the Weimar Republic helped him through the experience.

It was said by The Ethical Spectacle about Höss:

He seems not to have intended it as a mockery, nor even to have intended it literally, as a false promise that those who worked to exhaustion would eventually be released, but rather as a kind of mystical declaration that self-sacrifice in the form of endless labor does in itself bring a kind of spiritual freedom.

Source: Wikipedia (All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License)

John Demjanjuk Trial Begins in Munich, Germany - 30 November, 2009

2009-11-30T14:22:00.000+02:00

Demjanjuk hearing his death sentence on April 25, 1988 in Jerusalem, Israel.

John Demjanjuk (born Ivan Mykolayovych Demyanyuk, 1920, Ukraine) is a retired auto worker and former United States citizen, who gained notoriety after being accused of war crimes.

Demjanjuk migrated to the United States in 1951. He was deported to Israel in 1986 and later sentenced to death there in 1988 for war crimes, based on his identification by Israeli Holocaust survivors as "Ivan the Terrible," a notorious SS guard at the Treblinka and Sobibor extermination camps during the period 1942–1943 who committed murder and acts of extraordinarily savage violence against camp prisoners. His conviction for crimes against humanity was later overturned by the Israeli Supreme Court in 1993 due to a finding of reasonable doubt based on evidence suggesting that Demjanjuk was not "Ivan the Terrible" and had, in fact, been a guard at camps besides the one at Treblinka. After the trial he returned to Cleveland, Ohio.

Demjanjuk was put on trial again in 2001 (Cleveland ) on charges that he had served as a guard at the Sobibór and Majdanek camps in occupied Poland and at the Flossenbürg camp in Germany. His deportation was again ordered in 2005, but he remained in the United States as no country would agree to accept him. On April 2, 2009, it was announced that Demjanjuk would be deported to Germany and would face trial there on charges of accessory to 29,000 counts of murder. On April 3, 2009, a judge ordered that Demjanjuk, 89 years old, be given a temporary stay, pending a judicial decision on his newly filed (April 2) motion to reopen his deportation order, on the ground that deporting him would amount to torture under the applicable international convention. The stay was overturned on April 6.

On April 14, 2009, immigration agents began Demjanjuk's deportation, removing him from his home in a wheelchair. He was scheduled to fly to Munich from Burke Lakefront Airport in Cleveland, but the legal order was again reversed and another stay granted by the court. On May 7, 2009, the U.S. Supreme Court rejected Demjanjuk's appeal and on May 8, 2009, he was ordered to surrender to U.S. Immigration agents for deportation to Germany. On May 11, Demjanjuk left his Cleveland home by ambulance, and was taken to the airport, where he was deported by plane to Germany. He arrived there the next morning on May 12. On July 13, 2009, Demjanjuk was formally charged with 27,900 counts of acting as an accessory to murder, one for each person who died at Sobibor during the time he is accused of serving as a guard at the Nazi death camp. On 30 November 2009 Demjanjuk's trial, expected to last for several months, began in Munich.

Source: Wikipedia (All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License)

Nuremberg Trials Begin - 20 November, 1946.

2009-11-20T15:01:00.002+02:00

Nuremberg Trials. Defendants in their dock. The main target of the prosecution was Hermann Göring (at the left edge on the first row of benches), considered to be the most important surviving official in the Third Reich after Hitler's death.

The Nuremberg trials were a series of military trials, or military tribunals, most notable for the prosecution of prominent members of the political, military, and economic leadership of Nazi Germany after its defeat in World War II. The trials were held in the city of Nuremberg, Germany, from 1945 to 1946, at the Palace of Justice. The first and best known of these trials was the Trial of the Major War Criminals before the International Military Tribunal (IMT), which tried 22 of the most important captured leaders of Nazi Germany. It was held from November 21, 1945 to October 1, 1946. The second set of trials of lesser war criminals was conducted under Control Council Law No. 10 at the US Nuremberg Military Tribunals (NMT); among them included the Doctors' Trial and the Judges' Trial.

The indictments were for:

- Participation in a common plan or conspiracy for the accomplishment of crime against peace.
- Planning, initiating and waging wars of aggression and other crimes against peace.
- War crimes.
- Crimes against humanity.

Most of the defendants were found guilty and the death sentences were carried out on 16 October 1946 by hanging. Others were sentenced to long jail periods and a few were acquitted.

The Nuremberg trials had a great influence on the development of international criminal law. The Conclusions of the Nuremberg trials served as models for:

- The Genocide Convention, 1948.
- The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 1948.
- The Nuremberg Principles, 1950.
-The Convention on the Abolition of the Statute of Limitations on War Crimes and Crimes against Humanity, 1968.
- The Geneva Convention on the Laws and Customs of War, 1949; its supplementary protocols, 1977.

The Nuremberg trials initiated a movement for the prompt establishment of a permanent international criminal court, eventually leading over fifty years later to the adoption of the Statute of the International Criminal Court.

Source: Wikipedia (All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License)

Armenian Genocide: The Hamidian Massacres of 1894–1896

2009-11-12T11:36:00.004+02:00

Contemporary political cartoon portraying Hamid as a butcher of the Armenians

The Hamidian massacres, also referred to as the Armenian Massacres of 1894–1896, refers to the massacring of Armenians by the Ottoman Empire, with estimates of the dead ranging from 80,000 to 300,000, and at least 50,000 orphans as a result. The massacres are named for Abdul Hamid II, whose efforts to reinforce the territorial integrity of the embattled Ottoman Empire reasserted Pan-Islamism as a state ideology.

Abdul Hamid believed that the woes of the Ottoman Empire stemmed from the endless persecutions and hostilities of the Christian world. He perceived the Ottoman Armenians to be an extension of foreign hostility in the hands of the European powers.

One of the most serious incidents occurred in Armenian-populated parts of Anatolia. Although the Ottomans had prevented other revolts in the past, the harshest measures were directed against the Armenian community. They observed no distinction between the nationalist dissidents and the Armenian population at large, and massacred them with brutal force. However, this occurred in the 1890s, at a time when the telegraph could spread news around the world and when the European powers were vastly more powerful than the weakening Ottoman state.

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Kristallnacht - November 9-10, 1938

2009-11-09T18:14:00.000+02:00

Kristallnacht, example of physical damage

Kristallnacht was an anti-Jewish pogrom in Nazi Germany and Austria on 9 to 10 November 1938.

In German, Kristallnacht means crystal night or the night of broken glass, alluding to the enormous number of shop windows of Jewish-owned stores that were broken that night.

Kristallnacht was triggered by the assassination (November 7, 1938) of German diplomat Ernst vom Rath, in Paris, by Herschel Grynszpan (17), a German-born Polish Jew, as revenge for the expulsion of 12,000 Polish-born Jews back to Poland, among them was Grynszpan's family.

As a result, in a coordinated attack on Jewish people and their property, 99 Jews were murdered and 25,000 to 30,000 were arrested and placed in concentration camps. 267 synagogues were destroyed and thousands of homes and businesses were ransacked. This was done by the Hitler Youth, Gestapo, SS and SA. Kristallnacht also served as a pretext and a means for the wholesale confiscation of firearms from German Jews.

Herschel Grynszpan was transferred from Paris to Berlin, in 1940, by the Nazis and probably was murdered by the Gestapo by the end of the war.

While the assassination of Rath served as a pretext for the attacks, Kristallnacht was part of a broader Nazi policy of antisemitism and persecution of the Jews. Kristallnacht was followed by further economic and political persecutions and is viewed by many historians as the beginning of the Final Solution, leading towards the genocide of the Holocaust.

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"Euthanasia" Program Begins in Nazi Germany - October 1939

2009-10-29T14:24:00.003+02:00

Nazi euthanasia propaganda poster reads: "60,000 Reichsmarks is what this person suffering from hereditary defects costs the People's community during his lifetime. Comrade, that is your money too. Read 'New People', the monthly magazine of the Bureau for Race Politics of the NSDAP." (about 1938)

Action T4 was a program, also called Euthanasia Program, in Nazi Germany spanning October 1939 until August 1941, during which physicians killed 70,273 people specified as suffering patients - judged incurably sick by critical medical examination, and long-term inmates of mental asylums who may appear incurable.

The Nuremberg Trials found evidence that German physicians continued the extermination of patients after October 1941 and evidence that, in total, about 275,000 people were killed under T4.

The killing methods employed lethal injections, gas chambers and cremation or simple starvation.

The codename T4 was an abbreviation of "Tiergartenstraße 4", the address of a villa in the Berlin borough of Tiergarten which was the headquarters of the General Foundation for Welfare and Institutional Care. This villa no longer exists, but a plaque set in the pavement on Tiergartenstraße marks its location.

It is argued by some scholars that the T4 program developed from the Nazi Party's policy of "racial hygiene", the belief that the German people needed to be "cleansed" of "racially unsound" elements, which included people with disabilities. According to this view, the euthanasia program represents an evolution in policy toward the later Holocaust of the Jews of Europe: the historian Ian Kershaw has called it "a vital step in the descent into modern barbarism"

It may be noted however that racial hygienist ideas were far from unique to the Nazi movement. The ideas of social Darwinism were widespread in all western countries in the early 20th century, and the eugenics movement had many followers among educated people, being particularly strong in the United States. The idea of sterilising those carrying hereditary defects or exhibiting what was thought to be hereditary anti-social behaviour was widely accepted, and was put into law in the United States, Sweden, Switzerland and other countries. Between 1935 and 1975, for example, 63,000 people were sterilised on eugenic grounds in Sweden.

long before Action T4, the Nazi regime began to implement "racial hygienist" policies as soon as it came to power. The July 1933 "Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring" prescribed compulsory sterilisation for people with a range of conditions thought to be hereditary such as schizophrenia, epilepsy, Huntington's chorea and "imbecility". Sterilisation was also mandated for chronic alcoholism and other forms of social deviance. This law was administered by the Interior Ministry under Wilhelm Frick through special Hereditary Health Courts (Erbgesundheitsgerichte), which examined the inmates of nursing homes, asylums, prisons, aged care homes and special schools to select those to be sterilised.

It is estimated that 360,000 people were sterilised under this law between 1933 and 1939. After 1937 the acute shortage of labour in Germany arising from the crash rearmament program meant that anyone capable of work was deemed to be "useful" and was exempted from the law, and the rate of sterilisation declined.

Hitler and his helpers were aware from the start that a program of killing large numbers of Germans with disabilities would be unpopular with the German public.

It was impossible to keep the T4 program secret, given that thousands of doctors, nurses (including Catholic nuns) and administrators were involved in it, and given that the majority of those killed had families who were actively concerned about their welfare. Despite the strictest orders to maintain secrecy, some of the staff at the killing centres talked about what was going on there. In some cases families could tell that the causes of death notified were false, e.g. when a patient was claimed to have died of appendicitis, even though his appendix had been surgically removed some years earlier. In other cases several families in the same town would receive death certificates on the same day. In the towns where the killing centres were located, many people saw the inmates arrive in buses, saw the smoke from the crematoria chimneys, noticed that no bus-loads of inmates ever left the killing centres, and drew the correct conclusion.

The Catholic Church, which since 1933 had pursued a policy of avoiding confrontation with the Nazi regime in the hope of preserving its core institutions intact, became increasingly unable to keep silent in the face of mounting evidence about the killing of inmates of hospitals and asylums. Leading Catholic churchmen, led by Michael Cardinal von Faulhaber of Munich, wrote privately to the government protesting against the policy. In July 1941 the Church broke its silence when a pastoral letter from the bishops was read out in all churches, declaring that it was wrong to kill (except in self-defence or in a morally justified war). This emboldened Catholics to make more outspoken protests.

By August the protests had spread to Bavaria and Hitler himself was jeered by an angry crowd at Hof – the only time he was opposed in public during his 12 years of rule. Despite his private fury, Hitler knew that he could not afford a confrontation with the Church at a time when Germany was engaged in a life-and-death war, a belief which was reinforced by the advice of Goebbels, Martin Bormann, head of the Party Chancellery, and Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS.

On 24 August 1941 Hitler ordered the cancellation of the T4 program, and also issued strict instructions to the Gauleiters that there were to be no further provocations of the churches for the duration of the war.

The invasion of the Soviet Union in June had opened up new opportunities for the T4 personnel, who were soon transferred to the east to begin work on a vastly greater program of killing: the "final solution of the Jewish question". But the winding up of the T4 program did not bring the killing of people with disabilities to an end, although from the end of 1941 the killing became less systematic. But the methods reverted to those employed before the gas chambers were employed: lethal injection, or simple starvation

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What is the Armenian Holocaust.

2009-10-16T09:44:00.008+02:00

Armenian civilians are marched to a nearby prison in Mezireh by armed Turkish soldiers. Kharpert, Armenia, Ottoman Empire in April 1915. Published by the American red cross.

The Armenian Holocaust, also known as the Armenian Genocide, the Armenian Massacres and, by Armenians, as the Great Calamity, was the deliberate and systematic destruction (genocide) of the Armenian population of the Ottoman Empire during and just after World War I. It was characterised by the use of massacres, and the use of deportations involving forced marches under conditions designed to lead to the death of the deportees, with the total number of Armenian deaths generally held to have been between 1,000,000-1,500,000. Other ethnic groups were similarly attacked by the Empire during this period, including Assyrians and Greeks, and some scholars consider those events to be part of the same policy of extermination.

It is widely acknowledged to have been one of the first modern genocides, as many Western sources point to the systematic, organized manner the killings were carried out to eliminate the Armenians.

The date of the onset of the genocide is conventionally held to be April 24, 1915, the day that Ottoman authorities arrested some 250 Armenian intellectuals and community leaders in Constantinople. Thereafter, the Ottoman military uprooted Armenians from their homes and forced them to march for hundreds of miles, depriving them of food and water, to the desert of what is now Syria. Massacres were indiscriminate of age or gender, with rape and other sexual abuse commonplace. The Armenian Genocide is the second most-studied case of genocide after the Holocaust (Jewish).

The Republic of Turkey, the successor state of the Ottoman Empire, denies the word genocide is an accurate description of the events. In recent years, it has faced repeated calls to accept the events as genocide. To date, twenty countries have officially recognized the events of the period as genocide, and most genocide scholars and historians accept this view. The majority of Armenian diaspora communities were founded as a result of the Armenian genocide.

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The National Day of Commemorating the Holocaust in Romania

2009-10-09T10:00:00.001+02:00

The National Day of Commemorating the Holocaust is a national event held on October 9 in Romania. It is dedicated to the remembrance of the victims of the Holocaust (around 300,000 Jews and Roma victims) and particularly to reflecting on Romania's role in the Holocaust. Various commemoration events and ceremonies take place throughout Romania in order to remember the Jews and Roma who died in the Holocaust.

The establishment of the commemoration day was among the recommendations made in the Wiesel Commission report which was established by former President Ion Iliescu in October 2003 to research and create a report on the actual history of the Holocaust in Romania and make specific recommendations for educating the public on the issue.

The first National Day of Commemorating the Holocaust was held in 2004. October 9 was chosen as a date for this event because it marks the beginning of Romanian deportations of Jews to Transnistria, in 1942.

On October 9, 2005, the Romanian Minister for Foreign Affairs, Mihai Răzvan Ungureanu, participated in the laying of a wreath at the Holocaust Memorial in Iaşi. The Centre for Hebrew Studies, part of the Alexandru Ioan Cuza University, was also inaugurated on the same day by Ungureanu. During the inaugural National Day of Commemorating the Holocaust, the National Institute for Studying the Holocaust in Romania was also opened.

On October 9, 2006, a ceremony took place for setting the keystone of the National Holocaust Memorial in Bucharest. The ceremony was attended by President Traian Băsescu, Foreign Minister Affairs Minister Mihai Răzvan Ungureanu, Culture Minister Adrian Iorgulescu, as well as representatives of the Romanian and international Jewish community. A commemoration march also took place through Bucharest in order to remember the Roma victims of the Holocaust and to demand greater recognition by the government of Roma Holocaust victims.

The 5 million Euro marble and concrete memorial monument was unveiled on October 9, 2009.

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Marek Edelman (1922 – 2009), Last Leader of Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, Has Died

2009-10-02T20:39:00.004+02:00

Marek Edelman, Warsaw University, 2005. Photographer: Mariusz Kubik

During World War II he was one of the founders of the Jewish Combat Organization (resistance movement, which was instrumental in engineering the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising). He took part in the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and became its leader following the death of Mordechaj Anielewicz. He also took part in the Warsaw Uprising of 1944.

After the war he remained in Poland and became a noted cardiologist. From the 1970s he collaborated with the Workers' Defence Committee and other political groups opposing the communist regime of Poland. A member of Solidarity, he took part in the Polish Round Table Talks of 1989. Following the peaceful transformations of 1989, he was a member of various centrist parties. He also authored books documenting the history of wartime resistance against the German occupation.

On 17 April 1998, Edelman was awarded Poland's highest decoration, the Order of the White Eagle.

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Rescue of the Danish Jews - October 1-2, 1943

2009-10-01T11:26:00.001+02:00

The rescue of the Danish Jews occurred during Nazi Germany's occupation of Denmark during World War II. When Hitler ordered that Danish Jews be arrested and deported on 1–2 October 1943, many Danes took part in a collective effort to evacuate the roughly 8,000 Jews of Denmark by sea to nearby neutral Sweden. The rescue allowed the vast majority of Denmark's Jewish population to avoid capture by the Nazis and is considered to be one of the largest actions of collective resistance to repression in the countries occupied by Nazi Germany. As a result of the rescue and Danish intercession on behalf of the 5% of Danish Jews who were deported to Theresienstadt transit camp in Bohemia, over 99% of Denmark's Jewish population survived the Holocaust.

The Jews were smuggled out of Denmark by transporting them by sea over the Øresund (the strait that separates the Danish island Zealand from the southern Swedish province of Scania) from Zealand to Sweden — a passage of varying time depending on the specific route and the weather, but averaging under an hour on the choppy winter sea. Some were transported in large fishing boats of up to 20 tons, but others were carried to freedom in rowboats or kayaks. The ketch Albatros was one of the ships used to smuggle Jews to Sweden. Some refugees were smuggled inside freight cars on the regular ferries between Denmark and Sweden, this route being suited for the very young or old who were too weak to endure a rough sea passage. The underground had broken into empty freight cars sealed by the Germans after inspection, helped refugees onto the cars, and then resealed the cars with forged or stolen German seals to forestall further inspection.

Some of the refugees never made it to Sweden; a few chose to commit suicide, some were captured by the Gestapo en route to their point of embarkation, others were lost at sea when vessels of poor seaworthiness capsized, and still others were intercepted at sea by German patrol boats. However, the Danish harbour police and civil police generally cooperated with the rescue operations. During the early stages, the Gestapo was undermanned and the German army and navy were called in to reinforce the Gestapo in its effort to prevent transportation taking place; but by and large they proved less than enthusiastic in the operation and frequently turned a blind eye to escapees.

The Danish resistance movement as a collective, rather than as individuals, have been honoured at Yad Vashem (Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Authority) in Israel as being part of the "Righteous Among the Nations." Also honored are a handful of Danes who were not members of the official resistance movement, and Georg Ferdinand Duckwitz - a German attache who warned the Danish Jews about their intended deportation in 1943. It is estimated that he prevented the deportation of 95% of Denmark's Jews in the resulting rescue of the Danish Jews.

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Nuremberg Laws Announced in Nazi Germany - September 15, 1935

2009-09-15T11:12:00.004+03:00

1935 chart from Nazi Germany used to explain the Nuremberg Laws

The Nuremberg Laws of 1935 were anti-Semitic laws in Nazi Germany which were introduced at the annual Nazi Party rally in Nuremberg. The laws classified people as German if four of their grandparents were of "German or kindred blood", while people were classified as Jews if they descended from three or four Jewish grandparents. A person with one or two Jewish grandparents was a Mischling, a crossbreed, of "mixed blood". The Nuremberg Laws deprived Jews of citizenship and prohibited marriage between Jews and other Germans.

During the spring and summer of 1933, the disenchantment with how the Third Reich had developed in practice as opposed to what had been promised had led to many in the Nazi Party, especially the (Old Fighters (those who joined the Party before 1930, and who tended to be the most ardent anti-Semites in the Party), and the SA into lashing out against Germany's Jewish minority as a way of expressing their frustrations against a group that the authorities would not generally protect. A Gestapo report from the spring of 1935 stated that the rank and file of the Nazi Party would "set in motion by us from below" a solution to the "Jewish problem", "that the government would then have to follow". As a result, Nazi Party activists and SA members started a major wave of assaults, vandalism and boycotts against German Jews. A conference of ministers was held on August 20, 1935 to discuss the negative economic effects of Party actions against Jews. Adolf Hitler, the Party representative at the conference, argued that such effects would cease, once the government decided on a firm policy against the Jews.

From Hitler's perspective, it was imperative to bring in harsh new anti-Semitic laws as a consolation prize for those Party members who were disappointed with Hitler's halt order (to stop vandalism against the Jews) of August 8, especially because Hitler had only reluctantly given the halt order for pragmatic reasons, and his sympathies were with the Party radicals.

On the evening of September 15, two measures were announced to the Reichstag at the annual Party Rally in Nuremberg, becoming known as the Nuremberg Laws.

The first law, The Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honour, prohibited marriages and extramarital intercourse between Jews and Germans and also the employment of German females under forty-five in Jewish households.

The second law, The Reich Citizenship Law, stripped persons not considered of German blood of their German citizenship.

The measures were unanimously adopted by the Reichstag. In twelve years of Nazi rule, the Reichstag only passed four laws: the Nuremberg laws were two of them.

The Nuremberg Laws by their general nature formalized the unofficial and particular measures taken against Jews up to 1935.

As a result, Jews were barred from employment as lawyers, doctors or journalists, prohibited from using state hospitals and could not be educated by the state past the age of 14. Public parks, libraries and beaches were closed to Jews. War memorials were to have Jewish names expunged. Even the lottery could not award winnings to Jews.

From September 1941 all Jewish people living within the Nazi empire, including Germany, were required to wear a yellow badge, which had been required in Poland beginning in 1939.

The claim has been made that the Nuremberg Laws were inspired partly by the anti-miscegenation laws of the United States of America, however the principal inspiration for Nazi racial thinking was the British-German author, Houston Stewart Chamberlain who was inspired in turn by the eugenics theories of Sir Francis Galton, which were then widely practised in the British Empire.

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German Jews were ordered to wear yellow stars - September 1, 1941

2009-09-01T10:46:00.000+03:00

Yellow badge Star of David called Judenstern (yellow star) in German. Part of the exhibition in the Jewish Museum Westphalia, Dorsten, Germany. The wording is the German word for Jew (Jude), written in mock-Hebrew script.

The yellow badge (or yellow patch), also referred to as a Jewish badge, was a cloth patch that Jews were ordered to sew on their outer garments in order to mark them as Jews in public. It is intended to be a badge of shame associated with antisemitism.

The yellow badge that was compulsory in the Middle Ages was revived by the German Nazis.

After the German invasion of Poland in 1939 there were initially different local decrees forcing Jews to wear a distinctive sign, during the General Government (a part of the territories of Poland under German military occupation during World War II).

The requirement to wear the Star of David with the word Jude (German for Jew) inscribed was practiced for all Jews over the age of six in the Reich and the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia (by a decree issued on September 1, 1941 signed by Reinhard Heydrich) and was gradually introduced in other German-occupied areas, where local words were used (e.g. Juif in French, Jood in Dutch).

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Atomic Bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki - August 6 and August 9, 1945

2009-08-06T09:18:00.002+03:00

The atomic energy released was powerful enough to burn through clothing. The dark portions of the garments this victim wore at the time of the blast were emblazoned on to the flesh as scars.

The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were nuclear attacks near the end of World War II against the Empire of Japan by the United States at the executive order of U.S. President Harry S. Truman on August 6 and August 9, 1945, respectively. After six months of intense fire-bombing of 67 other Japanese cities, followed by an ultimatum which was ignored by the Shōwa regime, the nuclear weapon "Little Boy" was dropped on the city of Hiroshima on Monday, August 6, 1945, followed on August 9 by the detonation of the "Fat Man" nuclear bomb over Nagasaki. These are to date the only attacks with nuclear weapons in the history of warfare.

The bombs killed as many as 140,000 people in Hiroshima and 80,000 in Nagasaki by the end of 1945, roughly half on the days of the bombings. Amongst these, 15–20% died from injuries or the combined effects of flash burns, trauma, and radiation burns, compounded by illness, malnutrition and radiation sickness. Since then, more have died from leukemia (231 observed) and solid cancers (334 observed) attributed to exposure to radiation released by the bombs. In both cities, most of the dead were civilians.

Six days after the detonation over Nagasaki, on August 15, Japan announced its surrender to the Allied Powers, signing the Instrument of Surrender on September 2, officially ending the Pacific War and therefore World War II. (Germany had signed its unavoidable Instrument of Surrender on May 7, ending the war in Europe.) The bombings led, in part, to post-war Japan adopting Three Non-Nuclear Principles, forbidding that nation from nuclear armament.

The debate over the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki concerns the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which took place on August 6, 1945 and three days later on August 9, precipitating the end of World War II. The role of the bombings in Japan's surrender and the United States' ethical justification for them has been the subject of scholarly and popular debate for decades. J. Samuel Walker wrote in an April 2005 overview of recent historiography on the issue, "the controversy over the use of the bomb seems certain to continue." Walker noted that "The fundamental issue that has divided scholars over a period of nearly four decades is whether the use of the bomb was necessary to achieve victory in the war in the Pacific on terms satisfactory to the United States." (Diplomatic History 29 (2): 334)

Support arguments: Preferable to invasion of Japan; speedy end of war saved lives; part of "total war"; Japan's leaders refused to surrender.

Opposition arguments: Fundamentally immoral; the bombings are war crimes; state terrorism; militarily unnecessary; Nagasaki bombing unnecessary after the Hiroshima bombing; racism and dehumanization.

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Buchenwald Concentration Camp Opens - July 16, 1937

2009-07-18T11:19:00.006+03:00

Forced laborers in Buchenwald after liberation (Elie Wiesel is 2nd row from the bottom, 7th from left); April 16, 1945

Buchenwald concentration camp was a Nazi concentration camp established near Weimar, Thuringia, Germany in July 1937, and is one of the largest and first camps on German soil.

Camp prisoners worked primarily as forced labour in local armament factories. Inmates were Jews, Poles, political prisoners, Roma and Sinti, Jehovah's Witnesses, religious prisoners, criminals, homosexuals, and prisoners of war (POWs). Up to 1942 the majority of the political prisoners consisted of communists and Anarchists; later the proportion of other political prisoners increased considerably. Among the prisoners were also writers, doctors, artists, former nobility, and princesses. They came from countries as varied as Russia, Poland, France, Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia, the Netherlands, Belgium, Norway, Denmark, Latvia, Italy, Romania and Spain. Most of the political prisoners from the occupied countries were members of the resistance.

Between July 1938 and April 1945, some 250,000 people were incarcerated in Buchenwald by the Nazi regime, including 350 Western Allied POWs. One estimate places the number of deaths in Buchenwald at 56,000 among them 11000 Jews.

Although Buchenwald technically was not an extermination camp, it was a site of an extraordinary number of deaths.

A primary cause of the deaths was illness due to harsh camp conditions, with starvation, malnutrition and its consequent illnesses. Many were literally "worked to death", as inmates had only the choice between slave labour or inevitable execution. Many inmates died as a result of human experimentations or fell victim to arbitrary acts perpetrated by the SS guards. Other prisoners were simply murdered—the two primary methods of execution were shooting and hanging. At one point, the ashes of dead prisoners would be returned to their families in a sheet metal box — postage due, to be paid by the family. This practice was eventually stopped as more and more prisoners died.

The camp was also a site of large-scale trials for vaccines against epidemic typhus in 1942 and 1943. In all 729 inmates were used as test subjects, with 280 of them dying as a result.

Although it was highly unusual for German authorities to send Western Allied prisoners of war (POWs) to concentration camps, Buchenwald held a group of 168 aviators for about six months. These POWs were from the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. They all arrived at Buchenwald on April 20, 1944.

They were subjected to the same treatment and abuse as other Buchenwald prisoners until October 1944, when a change in policy saw the aviators dispatched to Stalag Luft III, a regular prisoner-of-war camp (POW) camp; nevertheless, two airmen died at Buchenwald.

On April 4, 1945, the U.S. 89th Infantry Division overran Ohrdruf, a subcamp of the Buchenwald. It was the first Nazi camp liberated by U.S. troops.

Buchenwald was partially evacuated by the Germans on April 8, 1945. In the days before the arrival of the American army, thousands of the prisoners were forced to join the evacuation marches.

The U.S. 80th Infantry Division took control of the camp on the morning of Thursday, April 12, 1945.

Buchenwald’s first commandant was Karl Otto Koch, who ran the camp from 1937 to 1941. His second wife, Ilse Koch, became notorious as "the witch of Buchenwald" for her cruelty and brutality. Koch had a zoo built by the prisoners in the camp for the amusement of his children, with a bear pit facing the Appellplatz, the dreaded assembly square where prisoners were forced to stand motionless and silent for many hours (three times each day) while the meticulous "roll-calls" were conducted.

Koch was eventually himself imprisoned at Buchenwald by the Nazi authorities for corruption, embezzlement, black market dealings, and his exploitation of camp workers for personal gain. He was tried and executed by the Nazis at Buchenwald in April 1945, while Ilse was sentenced to four years after the war. Her sentence was reduced to two years and she was set free. Later, she was arrested again and sentenced to life imprisonment by the post-war German authorities; she committed suicide in a Bavarian prison cell in September 1967.

The second and last commandant of the camp was Hermann Pister (1942-1945). He was trialed in 1947 (Dachau Trials), sentenced to death and hanged in 1948.

In October 1950, it was decreed that the camp would be demolished. The main gate, the crematorium, the hospital block, and two guard towers escaped demolition. All prisoner barracks and other buildings were razed. Foundations of some still exist and many others have been rebuilt. According to the Buchenwald Memorial website, "the combination of obliteration and preservation was dictated by a specific concept for interpreting the history of Buchenwald Concentration Camp."

The first monument to victims was erected days after the initial liberation. Intended to be completely temporary, it was built by prisoners and was made of wood. A second monument to commemorate the dead was erected in 1958 by the GDR near the mass graves. Inside the camp, there is a living monument in the place of the first monument that is kept at skin temperature year round.

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Burning of the Riga Great Choral Synagogue - July 4, 1941

2009-07-04T18:58:00.000+03:00

The burning of the Riga synagogues occurred in the first days of the German occupation of the city of Riga, the capital and largest city in the country of Latvia. A significant, although disputed number of Jews were killed, and many other anti-Semitic measures were launched at the same time, which ultimately lead to the murder of the vast majority of the Jews of Latvia.

The Great Choral Synagogue, on Gogol street, was burned on July 4, 1941, with 300 Jews locked in the basement.

Perkonkrusts (a Latvian fascist political party) and "other Latvian hangers-on" surrounded the building, trapped the people inside, and set it on fire.

The burning of the synagogue was filmed by the Germans and later became part of a Wehrmacht newsreel, with the following narration: "The synagogue in Riga, which had been spared by the GPU (the Soviet secret police) commissars in their work of destruction, went up in flames a few hours later."

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The Iaşi Pogrom - June 27, 1941

2009-06-27T10:31:00.004+03:00

The Jews of Iaşi being rounded up and arrested, during the pogrom

The Iaşi pogrom of June 27, 1941 was one of the most violent pogroms in Jewish history, launched by governmental forces in the Romanian city of Iaşi against its Jewish population, resulting in the murder of at least 13,266 Jews, according to Romanian authorities.

During World War II, from 1939 to 1944, Romania was an ally of Nazi Germany, and echoed its anti-Semitic policies. During 1941 and 1942, thirty-two laws, thirty-one decree-laws, and seventeen government resolutions, all sharply anti-Semitic, were published in the Official Gazette.

On June 27, 1941, Romanian dictator Ion Antonescu telephoned Col. Constantin Lupu, commander of the Iaşi garrison, telling him formally to "cleanse Iaşi of its Jewish population", though plans for the pogrom had been laid even earlier.

Before the pogrom, rumors backed up by the state-run press, that stated that Soviet parachutists had landed outside of Iaşi, and that the Jews were working with them. In the week before the pogrom, the signs grew more ominous: houses were marked with crosses if the residents were Christian, Jewish men were forced to dig large ditches in the Jewish cemetery, and soldiers started to break into Jewish homes "searching for evidence." On June 27, the authorities officially accused the Jewish community of sabotage, and assembled the soldiers and police who would spearhead the pogrom, where they were falsely told that Jews had attacked soldiers in the streets.

Soon, Romanian soldiers, police, and mobs started massacring Jews, at least 8,000 were killed in the initial pogrom. The Romanian authorities also arrested more than 5,000 Jews, forcing them to the train station, and shooting those who did not move quickly, and robbing them of all of their possessions. Over 100 people were stuffed into each car, and many Jews died of thirst, starvation, and suffocation aboard two trains that for eight days travelled back and forth across the countryside.

In the midst of brutality, there were also notable exceptions. In the town of Roman, there was Viorica Agarici, chairman of the local Red Cross during World War II and one of the 54 Romanian Righteous Among the Nations commemorated by the Israeli people at Yad Vashem. On the night of 2 July 1941, after caring for the Romanian Army wounded coming from the Russian front, she overheard people moaning from a train transporting Jewish survivors of the Iaşi pogrom. Taking advantage of her position, she asked and received permission to give food and water to those unfortunate passengers. Her actions were strongly condemned by the community of Roman and she had to move to Bucharest.

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Death Toll of the Holocaust

2009-06-25T09:30:00.005+03:00

General Victims and Death Toll of the Holocaust

Victims	Killed
Jews	5.9 million
Soviet POWs	2–3 million
Ethnic Poles	1.8–2 million
Romani	220,000–1,500,000
Disabled	200,000–250,000
Homosexuals	5,000–15,000
Jehovah's Witnesses	2,500–5,000

The Annihilation of the Jewish Population of Europe by Country

Country	Estimated Pre-War Jewish population	Estimated Jewish population annihilated	Percent killed
Poland	3,300,000	3,000,000	90
Baltic countries	253,000	228,000	90
Germany & Austria	240,000	210,000	90
Bohemia & Moravia	90,000	80,000	89
Slovakia	90,000	75,000	83
Greece	70,000	54,000	77
Netherlands	140,000	105,000	75
Hungary	650,000	450,000	70
Byelorussian SSR	375,000	245,000	65
Ukrainian SSR	1,500,000	900,000	60
Belgium	65,000	40,000	60
Yugoslavia	43,000	26,000	60
Romania	600,000	300,000	50
Norway	2,173	890	41
France	350,000	90,000	26
Bulgaria	64,000	14,000	22
Italy	40,000	8,000	20
Luxembourg	5,000	1,000	20
Russian SFSR	975,000	107,000	11
Denmark	8,000	52	<1
Finland	2,000	22	<1
Total	8,861,800	5,933,900	67

Source: Wikipedia (All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License)

Nazis liquidate Lidice (a Czech village) in retaliation for Heydrich's death - June 10, 1942

2009-06-10T18:39:00.004+03:00

Memorial to the murdered children of Lidice

Lidice is a village in the Czech Republic north-west of Prague. As part of Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, it was completely destroyed by German forces in reprisal for the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich during World War II. On June 10, 1942, all 192 men over 16 years of age from the village were murdered on the spot by the Germans in a much publicised atrocity. The rest of the population were sent to Nazi concentration camps where many women and nearly all the children were killed.

Source: Wikipedia (All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License)

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Shooting - June 10, 2009

2009-06-10T10:37:00.000+03:00

President Barack Obama places a flower at a memorial at Buchenwald Nazi concentration camp, June 5, 2009. With the President are German chancellor Angela Merkel, Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel, and camp survivor Bertrand Herz.

On June 10, 2009, a lone gunman shot a museum security guard, Stephen Tyrone Johns who later died of his injuries at the hospital. The alleged shooter, having been shot by security staff, was identified as 88-year old James von Brunn, a white supremacist with a well-known criminal history.

Several news agencies have noted the timing of the June 10 shooting at the museum that came shortly after Obama's June 5 visit to and speech at the Buchenwald concentration camp, Germay, and that may have set off the shooter.

Von Brunn, a white supremacist and Holocaust denier, has written many antisemitic essays, created an antisemitic website called The Holy Western Empire, and is the author of a 1999 self published book, Kill the Best Gentiles, which praises Adolf Hitler and denies the Holocaust.

Von Brunn was born on July 11, 1920 in St. Louis, Missouri. He served in the United States Navy for 14 years, and was a commanding officer of PT boat 159 during World War II in the Pacific Theater, receiving a commendation and three battle stars. He enrolled in Washington University in St. Louis in 1938 and received his Bachelor of Science in journalism in 1943.

During his time at the university, von Brunn was said to have been president of the Sigma Alpha Epsilon chapter and a varsity football player. Von Brunn had worked as an advertising executive and producer in New York City for 20 years. In the late 1960s he moved to the Eastern Shore of Maryland where he continued to do advertising work and began painting.

Von Brunn's arrest history dates back at least as far as the 1960s. In 1968, he received a six-month jail sentence in Maryland for fighting with a sheriff during an incident at the county jail. He had earlier been arrested for driving under the influence following an altercation at a local restaurant.

Von Brunn was arrested in 1981 for attempted kidnapping and hostage-taking, of members of the Federal Reserve Board, after approaching the Federal Reserve's Eccles Building armed with a revolver, knife, and sawed-off shotgun. He reportedly complained of "high interest rates" during the incident and was disarmed without any shots being fired, after threatening a security guard with a .38 caliber pistol. He reportedly claimed he had a bomb, which was found to be only a device designed to look like a bomb. He was convicted in 1983 for burglary, assault, weapons charges, and attempted kidnapping. Von Brunn's sentence was completed by September 15, 1989, having served six and a half years in prison.

Von Brunn was a member of the now-defunct American Friends of the British National Party, a group that raised funds in the United States for the far right and whites-only British National Party (BNP).

In a statement, von Brunn's son, Erik, expressed sorrow and horror about the shooting, and said his father's "beliefs have been a constant source of verbal and mental abuse my family has had to suffer with for many years. His views consumed him, and in doing so, not only destroyed his life, but destroyed our family and ruined our lives as well." The younger von Brunn, who is 32, said that he did not know his father until he was nearly 11 years old, after he completed his prison term for the Federal Reserve incident.

Source: Wikipedia (All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License)

Death Camps

2009-06-04T17:43:00.005+03:00

Majdanek crematorium

Death camps, or extermination camps, were built by Nazi Germany during World War II for the systematic killing of millions of people in what has become known as The Holocaust. During World War II, under the orders of Heinrich Himmler, extermination camps were built during a later phase of the program of annihilation. Victims’ corpses were usually cremated or buried in mass graves. The groups the Nazis sought to exterminate in these camps were primarily the Jews of Europe, Eastern Europeans, as well as Roma (Gypsies). The majority of prisoners brought to extermination camps were not expected to survive more than a few hours beyond arrival.

Nazi-German extermination camps are different than concentration camps such as Dachau and Belsen, which were mostly intended as places of incarceration and forced labor for a variety of “enemies of the state”—the Nazi label for people they deemed undesirable. In the early years of the Holocaust, the Jews were primarily sent to concentration camps, but from 1942 onward they were mostly deported to the extermination camps.

Most accounts of the Holocaust recognize six German Nazi extermination camps, all located in occupied Poland:

Auschwitz II (Auschwitz-Birkenau) (1,100,000 killed)
Treblinka (700,000 killed)
Bełżec (434,500 killes)
Sobibór (167,000 killed)
Chełmno (152,000 killed)
Majdanek (78,000)

Source: Wikipedia (All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License)

The Final Solution and the Wannsee Conference

2009-06-03T19:42:00.004+03:00

In a February 26, 1942, letter to German diplomat Martin Luther, Reinhard Heydrich follows up on the Wannsee Conference by asking Luther for administrative assistance in the implementation of the Final Solution of the Jewish Question.

The Final Solution was Nazi Germany's plan and execution of its systematic genocide against European Jewry during World War II, resulting in the final, most deadly phase of the Holocaust (Shoah). Heinrich Himmler was the chief architect of the plan, and the German Nazi leader Adolf Hitler termed it: "the final solution of the Jewish question".

Mass killings of about one million Jews occurred before the plans of the Final Solution were fully implemented in 1942, but it was only with the decision to eradicate the entire Jewish population that the extermination camps were built and industrialized mass slaughter of Jews began in earnest. This decision to systematically kill the Jews of Europe was made by the time of, or at the Wannsee conference, which took place in Berlin, in the Wannsee Villa on January 20, 1942. The conference was chaired by Reinhard Heydrich. He was acting under the authority given to him by Reichsmarshall Goring in a letter dated July 31, 1941. Goring instructed Heydrich to settle "...the solution of the Jewish problem..." During the conference, there was a discussion held by the group of German Nazi officials how best to handle the "Final Solution of the Jewish Question". A surviving copy of the minutes of this meeting was found by the Allies in 1947, too late to serve as evidence during the first Nuremberg Trials.

By the summer of 1942, Operation Reinhard (the code name given to the Nazi plan to murder Polish Jews, and marked the beginning of the most deadly phase of the Holocaust, the use of extermination camps.) began the systematic extermination of the Jews, although hundreds of thousands already had been killed by death squads and in mass pogroms.

The Wannsee Conference, mentioned above, was a meeting of senior officials of the Nazi German regime, held in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee on 20 January 1942. The purpose of the conference was to inform administrative leaders of Departments responsible for various policies relating to Jews, that Reinhard Heydrich had been appointed as the chief executor of the "Final solution to the Jewish question", and to obtain their full support. In the course of the meeting, Heydrich presented a plan, presumably approved by Adolf Hitler, for the deportation of the Jewish population of Europe to German-occupied areas in eastern Europe, and the use of the Jews fit for labour on road-building projects, in the course of which they would eventually die, the surviving remnant to be annihilated after completion of the projects. The plan was never carried out as conceived, as it was predicated on the continued occupation of Polish and Soviet lands then under German control. Instead, as Soviet forces gradually pushed back the German lines, most of the Jews of German-occupied Europe were sent to extermination or concentration camps, or killed where they lived. As a result of the efforts of historian Joseph Wulf, the Wannsee House, where the conference was held, is now a Holocaust Memorial.

Source: Wikipedia (All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License)

The Nazi Party

2009-05-31T11:06:00.007+03:00

The National Socialist German Workers' Party (abbreviated NSDAP from German), commonly known in English, in short, as the Nazi Party, It was a political party in Germany between 1919 and 1945. It was known as the German Workers' Party (DAP) before the name was changed in 1920. Hitler joined the DAP in September 1919.

The party's last leader, Adolf Hitler, was appointed Chancellor of Germany by president Paul von Hindenburg in 1933. Hitler rapidly established a totalitarian regime known as the Third Reich.

Nazi ideology stressed the failure of democracy, failure of capitalism, racial purity of the German people, and persecuted those it perceived either as race enemies or those defined as "life unworthy of living". This included Jews, Slavs, and Roma along with homosexuals, the mentally disabled, communists and others. To carry out these beliefs, the party and the German state which it controlled organized the systematic murder of approximately six million Jews and five million other people from the aforementioned and other groups, in what has become known as the Holocaust.

The Nazis' strongest appeal was to the lower middle-class – farmers, public servants, teachers, small businessmen – who had suffered most from the inflation of the 1920s and who feared Bolshevism more than anything else. The small business class were receptive to Hitler's anti-Semitism, since they blamed Jewish big business for their economic problems.

The Nazi Party might never have come to power had it not been for the Great Depression and its effects on Germany. By 1930 the German economy was beset with mass unemployment and widespread business failures. The SPD and the KPD parties were bitterly divided and unable to formulate an effective solution; this gave the Nazis their opportunity, and Hitler's message, blaming the crisis on the Jewish financiers and the Bolsheviks resonated with wide sections of the electorate. At the September 1930 Reichstag elections the Nazis won 18.3% of the vote and became the second-largest party in the Reichstag after the SPD. After two more successful election campaigns, in which the Nazi party scored 37.4% and 33.1% respectively, Hitler was nominated as Chancellor on 30 January 1933.

1933–39 saw the gradual fusion of the Nazi Party and the German state, as the party arrogated more and more power to itself at the expense of professional civil servants. This led to increasing inefficiency and confusion in administration, which was compounded by Hitler’s deliberate policy of preventing any of his underlings accumulating too much power, and of dividing responsibility among a plethora of state and party bureaucracies, many of which had overlapping functions. This administrative muddle later had severe consequences. Many party officials also lapsed rapidly into corruption, taking their lead from Göring, who looted and plundered both state property and wealth appropriated from the Jews. By the mid-1930s the party as an institution was increasingly unpopular with the German public, although this did not affect the personal standing of Hitler, who maintained a powerful hold over the great majority of the German people until at least 1943.

In June 1934, Hitler, using the SS and Gestapo under Himmler's command, staged a coup against the SA (a paramilitary organization of the Nazi Party), having Röhm, its leader, and about 700 others killed.

The effect of the purge of the SA was to redirect the energies of the Nazi Party away from social issues and towards racial enemies, namely the Jews, whose civil, economic and political rights were steadily restricted, culminating in the passage of the Nuremberg Laws of September 1935, which stripped them of their citizenship and banned marriage and sexual relations between Jews and "Aryans". After a lull in anti-Semitic agitation during 1936 and 1937 (partly because of the 1936 Olympic Games), the Nazis returned to the attack in November 1938, launching the pogrom known as Kristallnacht ("Night of Broken Glass"), in which at least 100 Jews were killed and 30,000 arrested and sent to concentration camps, and thousands of Jewish homes, businesses, synagogues and community facilities were attacked and burned. This satisfied the party radicals for a while, but the regional party bosses remained a persistent lobby for more radical action against the Jews, until they were finally deported to their deaths in 1942, 1943, 1944, and most poignantly in Spring of 1945—days before Liberation.

By 1945 the Nazi Party and the Nazi state were inseparable. When the German armies surrendered to the Allies in May 1945 and the German state ceased to exist, the Nazi Party, despite its 8.5 million nominal members and its nation-wide organisational structure, also ceased to exist. And it was also clear that a Nazi Party without Hitler had no basis for existence. Its most fanatical members either killed themselves, fled Germany or were arrested. The rank-and-file burned their party cards and sought to blend back into German society. The Nazi Party was banned by the Allied occupation authorities and an extensive process of denazification was carried out to remove former Nazis from the administration, judiciary, universities, schools and press of occupied Germany. There was virtually no resistance or attempt to organize a Nazi underground. By the time normal political life resumed in western Germany in 1949, Nazism was effectively extinct. In eastern Germany, the new Communist authorities took their vengeance on any former high-ranking Nazis that they could find, and the survival of any kind of Nazi movement was out of the question.

Since 1949 there have been attempts to organise ultra-nationalist parties in Germany, but none of these parties was overtly Nazi or tried to use the symbols and slogans of the Nazi Party.

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Reinhard Heydrich is mortally wounded by Czech Assassins - May 27, 1942

2009-05-27T09:49:00.003+03:00

A Nazi stamp memorializing the death of Reinhard Heydrich

Reinhard Heydrich (1904 – 1942) was the chief of the Reich Main Security Office (including the Gestapo, SD and Kripo Nazi police agencies) and Deputy Protector of Bohemia and Moravia. Adolf Hitler considered him a possible successor. Heydrich chaired the 1942 Wannsee Conference, which discussed plans for the deportation and extermination of all Jews in German-occupied territory. He was attacked, by assassins sent by the Czechoslovak government in exile in London and the British SOE, in Prague on 27 May 1942 and died over a week later from complications arising from his injuries.

Heydrich was one of the main architects of the Holocaust during the first years of the war, answering only to, and taking orders only from Hitler and Himmler in all matters that pertained to the deportation, imprisonment, and extermination of Jews.

During Kristallnacht, November 1938, he sent a telegram to various SD and Gestapo offices, helping to coordinate the program with the SS, the SD, the Gestapo, the Order Police, the Nazi party, and even the fire departments. It talks about permitting arson and destruction of Jewish businesses and synagogues, and orders the taking of all "archival material" out of Jewish community centers and synagogues. The telegram also ordered that "as many Jews - particularly affluent Jews -- are to be arrested in all districts as can be accommodated in existing detention facilities. . . . Immediately after the arrests have been carried out, the appropriate concentration camps should be contacted to place the Jews into camps as quickly as possible".

After Kristallnacht, Göring assigned him as head of the Central Office for Jewish Emigration. In this position, he worked tirelessly both to coordinate various initiatives for the Final Solution, and to assert SS dominance over Jewish policy.

He was involved in several mass deportations. On Oct 10, 1941, he was the senior officer at a meeting in Prague that discussed evacuating 50,000 Jewish people from the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia (mostly in the modern day Czech Republic) to ghettos in Minsk and Riga. Also discussed was the taking of 5,000 Jewish people "in the next few weeks" from Prague and handing them over to the Einsatzgruppen commanders Nebe and Rasch. The creation of ghettos in the Protectorate was also discussed, which would eventually result in the construction of Theresienstadt, where 33,000 people would eventually die, and tens of thousands more would pass through on their way to death in the East.

In 1941 Himmler named Heydrich as "responsible for implementing" the forced movement of 60,000 Jewish people from Germany and Czechoslovakia to the Lodz (Litzmannstadt) Ghetto in Poland.

Most famously in this respect, on 20 January 1942, Heydrich chaired the Wannsee Conference, at which he presented to the heads of a number of German Government departments a plan for the deportation and transporting of 11 million Jewish people from every country in Europe to be worked to death or outright killed in the East.

Source: Wikipedia (All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License)

Pope Pius XII and The Holocaust

2009-05-26T10:12:00.003+03:00

The cover of Hitler's Pope, showing Nuncio Pacelli (Pope Pius XII) leaving the residence of President Hindenburg in 1927

The relations between Pope Pius XII and Judaism have long been controversial, with some scholars arguing that he kept silent during the Holocaust, while others have argued that he saved thousands if not tens or hundreds of thousands of Jews.

Much of the controversy surrounding Pius XII derives from an inscription at Yad Vashem stating that his record was controversial because he negotiated a concordat with the Nazis, maintained Vatican neutrality during the war and took no initiatives to save Jews.

In 1999, John Cornwell's Hitler's Pope criticized Pius for not doing enough, or speaking out enough, against the Holocaust. Cornwell argued that Pius's entire career as the nuncio to Germany, cardinal secretary of state, and pope was characterized by a desire to increase and centralize the power of the Papacy, and that he subordinated opposition to the Nazis to that goal. He further argues that Pius was anti-Semitic and that this stance prevented him from caring about the European Jews.

Cornwell traces early anti-Semitic tendencies in Pius XII and points to his collaboration with fascist leaders as starting with the concordat with Mussolini known as the Lateran Treaty and followed by the concordat with Hitler known as the Reichskonkordat.

However, five years after the publication of Hitler's Pope, Cornwell stated: "I would now argue, in the light of the debates and evidence following Hitler's Pope, that Pius XII had so little scope of action that it is impossible to judge the motives for his silence during the war, while Rome was under the heel of Mussolini and later occupied by Germany".

The author has been praised for attempting to bring into the open the debate on the Catholic Church's relationship with the Nazis, but also accused of making unsubstantiated claims and ignoring positive evidence.

Most recently, Rabbi David Dalin's The Myth of Hitler's Pope argues that critics of Pius are liberal Catholics and ex-Catholics who "exploit the tragedy of the Jewish people during the Holocaust to foster their own political agenda of forcing changes on the Catholic Church today" and that Pius XII was actually responsible for saving the lives of many thousands of Jews. And to his opinion, Yad Vashem should honor Pope Pius XII as a "Righteous Gentile", and documents that Pius was praised by all the leading Jews of his day for his role in saving more Jews than Oskar Schindler.

In 1999, in an attempt to address some of this controversy, a group of three Catholic and three Jewish scholars was appointed by the Holy See. Disagreements between members resulted in a discontinuation of the Commission in 2001 on friendly terms.

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Himmler Presents a Memorandum to Hitler on Treatment of Ethnic Groups and Jews in the East - May 25, 1940

2009-05-25T08:58:00.001+03:00

In a top-secret memorandum, "The Treatment of Racial Aliens in the East", dated May 25, 1940, Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS, wrote to Hitler: "We need to divide Poland's many different ethnic groups up into as many parts and splinter groups as possible".

Himmler also called for expelling the entire Jewish population of Europe into Africa and reducing the remainer of the Polish population to a leaderless laboring class.

Hitler called Himmler's memo "good and correct".

Hitler’s remark led to the Himmler-Greiser (Arthur Greiser was responsible for organizing the Holocaust in Poland) viewpoint triumphing as German policy for Poland.

Source: Wikipedia (All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License)

What is Mein Kampf?

2009-05-24T00:00:00.000+03:00

First edition of Adolf Hitler's book Mein Kampf, July 1925. An exhibit of the German Historical Museum in Berlin

Mein Kampf (My Struggle) is a book by Adolf Hitler. It combines elements of autobiography with an exposition of Hitler's political ideology. Volume 1 of Mein Kampf was published in 1925 and Volume 2 in 1926. Mein Kampf is 694 pages long.

Hitler began the dictation of the book while imprisoned after his failed revolution in Munich in November 1923.

In Mein Kampf, Hitler uses the main thesis of "the Jewish peril," which speaks of an alleged Jewish conspiracy to gain world leadership. The narrative describes the process by which he became increasingly anti-Semitic and militaristic, especially during his years in Vienna, Austria. Yet, the deeper origins of his anti-semitism remain a mystery. He speaks of not having met a Jew until he arrived in Vienna, and that at first his attitude was liberal and tolerant. When he first encountered the anti-semitic press, he says, he dismissed it as unworthy of serious consideration. A little later and quite suddenly, it seems, he accepted the same anti-semitic views whole-heartedly, which became crucial in his program of national reconstruction. Becoming acquainted with Zionism, which he calls a "great movement," is what Hitler claims coalesced his view that one cannot be both a German and a Jew.

In Mein Kampf Hitler also announces his hatred of what he believed to be the world's twin evils: Communism and Judaism. The new territory that Germany needed to obtain would properly nurture the "historic destiny" of the German people; this goal explains why Hitler invaded Europe, both East and West, before he launched his attack against Russia. Blaming Germany’s chief woes on the parliament of the Weimar Republic, he announces that he wants to completely destroy the parliamentary system.

Hitler predicts the stages of Germany’s political emergence on the world scene: in the first stage, Germany would, through a program of massive re-armament, overthrow the shackles of the Treaty of Versailles and form alliances with the British Empire and Fascist Italy. The second stage would feature wars against France and her allies in Eastern Europe by the combined forces of Germany, Britain and Italy. The third and final stage would be a war to destroy what Hitler saw as the "Judeo-Bolshevik" regime in the Soviet Union that would give Germany the necessary Lebensraum (living space). Here Hitler outlines his stage-by-stage plan for his new world order.

Mein Kampf was translated into English and other Europoean languages.

Although Hitler originally wrote this book mostly for the followers of national socialism, it grew in popularity. From the royalties, Hitler was able to afford a Mercedes while still imprisoned. Moreover, he accumulated a tax debt of 405,500 Reichsmark (8 million USD today, or £4m UK Pounds Sterling) from the sale of about 240,000 copies by the time he became chancellor in 1933 (at which time his debt was waived).

After Hitler's rise to power, the book gained enormous popularity and for all intents and purposes became the Nazi Bible. Despite rumors to the contrary, new evidence suggests that it was actually in high demand in libraries and often reviewed and quoted in other publications. Hitler had made about 1.2 m Reichsmarks from the income of his book in 1933, when the average annual income of a teacher was about 4,800 Mark. During Hitler's years in power, the book was given free to every newlywed couple and every soldier fighting at the front. By the end of the war, about 10 million copies of the book had been sold or distributed in Germany.

In The Second World War Winston Churchill felt that after Hitler's ascension to power no other book deserved more intensive scrutiny than Mein Kampf, and called the book "the new Koran of faith and war: turgid, verbose, shapeless, but pregnant with its message." (Winston Churchill: The Second World War. Volume 1, Houghton Mifflin Books 1986, S. 50.)

The book's publication is prohibited and restricted in most European countries but in some cases is available for research purposes. Most German libraries carry heavily commented and excerpted versions of Mein Kampf.

After the Natzi party's poor showing in the 1928 elections, Hitler believed the reason for loss was that the public did not fully understand his ideas. He retired to Munich to dictate a sequel to Mein Kampf which focused on foreign policy, expanded on the ideas of Mein Kampf and suggested that around 1980, a final struggle would take place for world domination between the United States and the combined forces of Greater Germany and the British Empire. Only two copies of the 200-page manuscript were originally made, and only one of these has ever been made public.

Some historians argue that the passage stating that "if only 12,000–15,000 Jews were gassed, then the sacrifice of millions of soldiers would not have been in vain," proves quite clearly that Hitler had a master plan for the genocide of the Jewish people all along.

Others deny this assertion, noting that the passage does not call for the destruction of the entire Jewish people and note that although Mein Kampf is suffused with an extreme anti-Semitism, it is the only time in the entire book that Hitler ever explicitly refers to the murder of Jews. Given that Mein Kampf is 694 pages long, is to much too make out of one sentence. Beyond that, some historians have claimed although Hitler was clearly obsessed with anti-Semitism, his degree of anti-Semitic hatred contained in Mein Kampf is no better or worse than that contained in the writings and speeches of earlier volkisch leaders such as Wilhelm Marr, Georg Ritter von Schönerer, Houston Stewart Chamberlain and Karl Lueger, all of whom routinely called Jews a "disease" and "vermin." Nevertheless, Hitler cites all of them as an inspiration in Mein Kampf.

Mein Kampf was significant in 1925 because it was an open source for the presentation of Hitler's ideas about the state of the world. The book is significant in our time because a retrospective review of the text reveals the crystallization of Hitler's decision to completely exterminate the Jewish race. While historians diverge on the exact date Hitler decided to exterminate the Jewish people, few place the decision before the mid 1930s. First published in 1925, Mein Kampf shows the ideas that crafted Hitler's historical grievances and ambitions for creating a new world order.ources, historians such as Professor Gunnar Heinsohn demonstrate that Hitler's plan for the Jews and Aryans alike was not confined to a racial conception but rather an ideological one. It was the propagation of "Jewish ideas" that Hitler targeted for extermination with relation to the destruction of their community and race. (Gunnar Heinsohn, “What Makes the Holocaust a Uniquely Unique Genocide,” Journal of Genocide Research, vol. 2, no. 3 (2000): 413)

Nearing the end of his reign, Hitler made such ideas clear in a correspondence with Martin Bormann on February 3, 1945:

“We use the term Jewish race merely for reasons of linguistic convenience, for in the real sense of the word, and from a genetic point of view, there is no Jewish race. [...] The Jewish race is above all a community of the spirit. Spiritual race is of a more solid and more durable kind than natural race.”

Source: Wikipedia (All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License)

Heinrich Himmler Commits Suicide - May 23, 1945

2009-05-23T09:50:00.006+03:00

Heinrich Himmler in 1907, seven years old

Heinrich Luitpold Himmler (1900 – 1945) was the head of SS and interior minister, from 1943, of the Nazi regime. He was one of the most powerful men in Nazi Germany. He oversaw all police and security forces, including the Gestapo.

As overseer of concentration camps, extermination camps, and Einsatzgruppen (task forces, often used as killing squads), Himmler coordinated the killing of millions of Jews, between 200,000 and 500,000 Roma, many prisoners of war, and possibly another three to four million Poles, communists, or other groups whom the Nazis deemed unworthy to live or simply 'in the way', which included homosexuals, those with physical and mental disabilities and members of the Confessing Church. Shortly before the end of the war, he offered to surrender to the Allies if he were spared from prosecution. After being arrested by British forces, he committed suicide before he could be questioned.

Himmler has been named Greatest Mass Murderer of All Time by German news magazine Der Spiegel.

After the Night of the Long Knives (1934), the SS organized and administered Germany’s regime of concentration camps and, after 1941, the extermination camps in Poland. The SS, through its intelligence arm, the Security Service (SD), dealt with Jews, Gypsies, communists and those persons of any other cultural, racial, political or religious affiliation deemed by the Nazis to be either Untermensch (sub-human) or in opposition to the regime, and placing them in concentration camps. Himmler opened the first of these camps at Dachau on 22 March 1933. He was the main architect of the Holocaust, using elements of mysticism and a fanatical belief in the racist Nazi ideology to justify the murder of millions of victims. Himmler had similar plans for the Poles.

On 4 October 1943, Himmler referred explicitly to the extermination of the Jewish people during a secret SS meeting in the city of Poznań (Posen).

This is something that is easily said: "The Jewish people will be exterminated",
says every Party member, "this is very obvious, it is in our program —
elimination of the Jews, extermination, a small matter."

Himmler was arrested by the Btitish army on 22 May 1945 and in captivity was soon recognized. Himmler was scheduled to stand trial with other German leaders as a war criminal at Nuremberg, but committed suicide in Lüneburg by potassium cyanide capsule before interrogation could begin. Several attempts to revive Himmler were unsuccessful. Shortly afterwards, Himmler’s body was buried in an unmarked grave on the Lüneburg Heath. The precise location of Himmler’s grave remains unknown.

Source: Wikipedia (All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License)

What is Yad Vashem?

2009-05-22T16:12:00.003+03:00

The Hall of Names containing Pages of Testimony commemorating the 6 million Jews who perished in the Holocaust.

Yad Vashem (Hebrew: Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Authority) is Israel's official memorial to the Jewish victims of the Holocaust established in 1953. The origin of the name Yad Vashem is from a Biblical verse: "And to them will I give in my house and within my walls a memorial and a name (memorial=Yad, name=Vashem) that shall not be cut off." (Isaiah, chapter 56, verse 5).

Located at the foot of Mount Herzl on the Mount of Remembrance in Jerusalem, Yad Vashem is a 45-acre (180,000 m2) complex containing the Holocaust History Museum, memorial sites, such as the Children's Memorial and the Hall of Remembrance, The Museum of Holocaust Art, sculptures, outdoor commemorative sites such as the Valley of the Communities, a synagogue, archives, a research institute, library, publishing house and an educational center, The International School for Holocaust Studies. Non-Jews who saved Jews during the Holocaust, at personal risk, are honored by Yad Vashem as "Righteous Among the Nations."

The new Holocaust History Museum, opened in March 2005, was built as a prism-like triangular structure. It is 180 meters long, in the form of a spike, which cuts directly through the mountainside. Its stark walls are made of reinforced concrete, and it covers an area of over 4,200 square meters, most of which is underground. At the uppermost edge of the shaft is a skylight, protruding through the mountain edge.

The new Holocaust History Museum, opened in March 2005, was built as a prism-like triangular structure. It is 180 meters long, in the form of a spike, which cuts directly through the mountainside. Its stark walls are made of reinforced concrete, and it covers an area of over 4,200 square meters, most of which is underground. At the uppermost edge of the shaft is a skylight, protruding through the mountain edge.

There are 10 exhibition halls, each devoted to a different chapter in the history of the Holocaust. Unlike the exhibition in the old museum, which was primarily composed of photographs, the new exhibition is a multi-media presentation that incorporates survivor testimonies as well as personal artifacts donated to Yad Vashem by Holocaust survivors, the families of those who perished, Holocaust museums and memorial sites around the world. The exhibits are set up chronologically, with the testimonies and artifacts accentuating the individual stories used to highlight the historical narrative throughout the museum.

The museum is designed so the visitor begins above underground, proceeds to the lowest underground point in the center of the museum, and then slowly walks upwards towards the exit. The exit from the main part of the museum is onto a balcony overlooking a stunning view of Jerusalem, the visitor stepping from a dark corridor into direct sunlight.

Main goals and objectives of the Yad Vashem institute are education, documentation, commemoration, research and publications and Righteous Among the Nations.

Yad Vashem is the second most visited tourist site in Israel, after the Western Wall, with over one million visitors during 2007.

Source: Wikipedia (All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License)

First Concentration Camp Prisoners Arrive at Auschwitz-Birkenau - May 20, 1940

2009-05-20T10:32:00.004+03:00

Interior of the crematorium of Auschwitz I. This facility was much smaller than those of Auschwitz II.

Auschwitz-Birkenau was the largest of Nazi Germany's concentration camps and extermination camps, established in Nazi German occupied Poland. The camp took its german name from the nearby Polish town of Oświęcim. Birkenau, the German translation of pol. Brzezinka (birch tree), refers to a small village nearby.

The three main camps were Auschwitz I, II, and III. Auschwitz I, the original concentration camp, served as the administrative center for the whole complex, and was the site of the deaths of roughly 70,000 people, mostly ethnic Poles and Soviet prisoners of war. Auschwitz II (Birkenau) was an extermination camp, and was the site of the deaths of at least 960,000 Jews, 75,000 Poles, and some 19,000 Roma (Gypsies). Birkenau was the largest of all the Nazi extermination camps. Auschwitz III (Monowitz) served as a labor camp for the Buna-Werke factory of the IG Farben concern.

Like all German concentration camps, the Auschwitz camps were operated by the Nazi party's paramilitary arm, the SS. The first commandants of the camp was Rudolf Höß. Höß provided a detailed description of the camp's workings during his interrogations after the war and in his autobiography. He was hanged on April 16, 1947 in front of the entrance to the crematorium of Auschwitz I.

Prisoners were transported from all over German-occupied Europe by rail, arriving at Auschwitz-Birkenau in daily convoys. Arrivals at the complex were separated into two main groups - those marked for immediate extermination, and those to be registered as prisoners. The first group, about three-quarters of the total, went to the gas chambers of Auschwitz-Birkenau within a few hours; they included all children, all women with children, all the elderly, and all those who appeared on brief and superficial inspection by an SS doctor not to be fully fit. SS personnel told the victims that they were to take a shower and undergo delousing. The victims would undress in an outer chamber and walk into the gas chamber, which was disguised as a shower facility, complete with dummy shower heads. After the doors were shut, SS men would dump in the cyanide pellets via holes in the roof or windows on the side. In the Auschwitz Birkenau camp more than 20,000 people could be gassed and cremated each day. At Birkenau, the Nazis used a cyanide gas produced from Zyklon B pellets, which were manufactured by two companies who had acquired licensing rights to the patent held by IG Farben. The two companies were Tesch & Stabenow, of Hamburg, who supplied two tons of the crystals each month, and Degesch, of Dessau, who produced three-quarters of a ton. The bills of lading were produced at Nuremberg.

Those deemed fit to work were used as slave labor at industrial factories for such companies as IG Farben and Krupp. At the Auschwitz complex 405,000 prisoners were recorded as slaves between 1940 and 1945. Of these about 340,000 perished through executions, beatings, starvation, and sickness.

Sonderkommandos yanked gold teeth from the corpses of gas chamber victims; the gold was melted down and sent back to the Third Reich. The belongings of the arrivals, both those gassed and those admitted to the camp, were seized by the SS. They were sorted in an area of the camp called "Canada". Many of the SS at the camp enriched themselves by pilfering the confiscated property of the Jews. The name "Canada" was very cynically chosen. In Poland it was used as an expression used when viewing, for example, a valuable and fine gift. The expression came from the time when Polish emigrants were sending gifts home from Canada.

Nazi doctors at Auschwitz performed a wide variety of "experiments" on helpless prisoners. SS doctors tested the efficacy of X-rays as a sterilization device by administering large doses to female prisoners. Prof. Dr. Carl Clauberg injected chemicals into women's uteruses in an effort to glue them shut. Bayer, then a subsidiary of IG Farben, bought prisoners to use as guinea pigs for testing new drugs.

The most infamous doctor at Auschwitz was Josef Mengele, who was also known as the “Angel of Death”. Particularly interested in "research" on identical twins, Mengele performed cruel experiments on them, such as inducing diseases in one twin of a pair and killing the other when the first died to perform comparative autopsies. He also took a special interest in dwarves, injecting twins, dwarves and other prisoners with gangrene to "study" the effects.

Starting in May 1944, there was a growing campaign to persuade the Allies to bomb Auschwitz or the railway lines leading to it. At one point Winston Churchill ordered that such a plan be prepared, but he was told that bombing the camp would most likely kill prisoners without disrupting the killing operation, and that bombing the railway lines was not technically feasible.sss Later several nearby military targets were bombed. One bomb accidentally fell into the camp and killed some prisoners. The debate over what could have been done, or what should have been attempted even if success was unlikely, has continued heatedly ever since.

The last selection took place on October 30, 1944. The next month, Heinrich Himmler ordered the crematoria destroyed before the Red Army reached the camp. The gas chambers of Birkenau were blown up by the SS in January 1945 in an attempt to hide the German crimes from the advancing Soviet troops. On January 20, the SS command sent orders to murder all the prisoners remaining in the camp, but in the chaos of the Nazi retreat the order was never carried out. On January 17, 1945 Nazi personnel started to evacuate the facility; nearly 60,000 prisoners, most of those remaining, were forced on a death march to the camp toward Wodzisław Śląski (German: Loslau).

On January 27, 1945 Soviet troops enter the Auschwitz camp complex and liberate approximately 7,000 prisoners remaining in the camp.

In 1947, in remembrance of the victims, Poland founded a museum at the site of the first two camps. By 1994, some 22 million visitors—700,000 annually—had passed through the iron gate crowned with the motto "Arbeit macht frei". The anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz by Soviet troops on January 27, 1945 is celebrated on International Holocaust Remembrance Day, Holocaust Memorial Day in the United Kingdom, and other similar memorial days in various countries.

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Nazis Declare Berlin to be Judenfrei (Free of Jews) - May 19, 1943

2009-05-19T08:55:00.009+03:00

Map, included in a report Stahlecker sent to his superiors in October 1941, summarizes murders committed by Einsatzgruppe A under his command. It shows the number of Jews executed in the Baltic States and Belarus in 1941. The legend at the bottom states that "the estimated number of Jews still on hand is 128,000." Estonia is marked as judenfrei.

Judenfrei (German: free of Jews) was a Nazi term to designate an area free of Jewish presence during The Holocaust.

While Judenfrei merely refers to "freeing" an area of all of its Jewish citizens, the term Judenrein (German: clean of Jews) was also used. This had the stronger connotation that any trace of Jewish blood had been removed as an impurity.

Establishments, villages, cities, and regions were declared Judenfrei after they were ethnically cleansed of Jews. For example:

Gelnhausen, Germany – reported Judenfrei on November 1, 1938 by propaganda newspaper Kinzigwacht after its synagogue was closed and remaining local Jews forced to leave the town.
German-occupied Luxembourg – reported Judenfrei by the press on October 17, 1941.
German-occupied Estonia – December 1941. Reported as Judenfrei at the
Wannsee Conference on January 20, 1942.
German-occupied Serbia/Belgrade – August 1942
Vienna – reported Judenfrei by Alois Brunner on October 9, 1942
Berlin, Germany – May 19, 1943

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Ravensbruck Concentration Camp Opens - May, 18 1939

2009-05-18T10:13:00.006+03:00

The Monument "Two Women" by Will Lammert and Fritz Cremer at the crematorium in front of the Wall of Nations, Ravensbrück Concentration Camp Memorial

Ravensbrück was a notorious women's concentration camp during World War II, located in northern Germany, 90 km north of Berlin at a site near the village of Ravensbrück.

Construction of the camp began in November 1938 by SS leader Heinrich Himmler and was unusual in that it was a camp primarily for women. The camp opened in May 18, 1939. In the spring of 1941, the SS authorities established a small men's camp adjacent to the main camp.

Between 1939 and 1945, over 130,000 female prisoners passed through the Ravensbrück camp system; only 40,000 survived. Although the inmates came from every country in German-occupied Europe, the largest single national group incarcerated in the camp consisted of Polish women.

There were children in the camp as well. At first, they arrived with mothers or were born to imprisoned women.

It is estimated that inmates of Ravensbrück ethnic structure was the following: Poles 24.9%, Germans 19.9%, Jews 15.1%, Russians 15.0%, French 7.3%, Gypsies 5.4%, other 12.4%. Gestapo categorized the inmates as follows: political 83.54%, anti-social 12.35%, criminal 2.02%, Jehovah Witnesses 1.11%, racial defilement 0.78%, other 0.20%.

Inmates at Ravensbrück suffered greatly. Living in subhuman conditions, thousands were shot, strangled, gassed, buried alive, or worked to death. Periodically, the SS authorities subjected prisoners in the camp to "selections" in which the Germans isolated those prisoners considered too weak or injured to work and killed them. At first, "selected" prisoners were shot. Beginning in 1942, they were transferred to "euthanasia" killing centers or to the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp. The SS staff also murdered some prisoners in the camp infirmary by lethal injection.

The bodies of those killed in the camp were cremated in the nearby Fürstenberg crematorium until 1943. In that year, SS authorities constructed a crematorium at a site near the camp prison. In the autumn of 1944, the SS constructed a gas chamber near the crematorium. The Germans gassed several thousand prisoners at Ravensbrück before the camp's liberation in April 1945.

Starting in the summer of 1942, medical experiments were conducted without consent. The first type of experiments tested the efficacy of sulfonamide drugs. These experiments involved deliberate cutting into and infecting leg bones and muscles with virulent bacteria, cutting nerves, introducing substances like pieces of wood or glass into tissues, and fracturing bones. The second set of experiments studied bone, muscle and nerve regeneration, and the possibility of transplanting bones from one person to another. Some prisoners died as a result of the experiments, others with unhealed wounds were executed and the rest survived, with permanent physical damage, due to the help of other inmates in the camp. Four of them testified against Nazi doctors at the Doctors' Trial in 1946.

With the Soviet Army's rapid approach in the Spring of 1945, the SS decided to exterminate as many prisoners as they could in order to avoid leaving anyone to testify as to what had happened in the camp. With the Russians only hours away, at the end of March, the SS ordered the women still physically well enough to walk to leave the camp, forcing over 20,000 prisoners on a death march toward northern Mecklenburg. Less than 3,500 malnourished and sickly women and 300 men remained in the camp when it was liberated by the Red Army on April 30, 1945. The survivors of the Death March were liberated in the following hours by a Russian scout unit.

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The MacDonald White Paper is approved by British Parliament - May, 17 1939

2009-05-17T10:35:00.002+03:00

The White Paper of 1939, also known as the MacDonald White Paper after Malcolm MacDonald, the British Colonial Secretary who presided over it, was a policy paper issued by the British government under Neville Chamberlain in which the idea of partitioning the Mandate for Palestine, as recommended in the Peel Commission Report of 1937, was abandoned in favor of creating an independent Palestine governed by Palestinian Arabs and Jews in proportion to their numbers in the population by 1949. A limit of 75,000 Jewish immigrants was set for the five-year period 1940-1944, consisting of a regular yearly quota of 10,000, and a supplementary quota of 25,000, spread out over the same period, to cover refugee emergencies. After this cut-off date, further immigration would depend on the permission of the Arab majority. Restrictions were also placed on the rights of Jews to buy land from Arabs.

The British believed that in the event of war (the paper was approved a few weeks after Britain agreed to Germany annexing the rest of Czechoslavakia), Jewish support was guaranteed or unimportant. However they feared that the Arab world might turn against them. This geopolitical consideration was decisive.

The restrictions on Jewish immigration effectively closed Palestine which had been the only available destination for Jews fleeing the persecution in Europe. The Zionists responded by organizing illegal migration which the British countered by blockading Palestine. This resulted in some famous incidents (Struma (ship), Patria disaster, and Exodus (ship).

During the Parliamentary debate, Lloyd George described the White Paper as an act of perfidy while Winston Churchill voted against the government in which he was a minister. The Manchester Guardian described it as 'a death sentence on tens of thousands of Central European Jews'. The Liberal MP James Rothschild stated during the parliamentary debate that 'for the majority of the Jews who go to Palestine it is a question of migration or physical extinction. (House of Commons Debates, Volume 347 column 1984).

By the autumn of 1943, it was discovered that only 44,000 of the 75,000 promised certificates had been issued, and the British authorities ruled that the remaining 31,000 passes could be used immediately. By the end of the following year, the whole quota had been exhausted.

At the end of World War II, the British Labour Party conference voted to rescind the White Paper and establish a Jewish state in Palestine, however the Labour Foreign Minister, Ernest Bevin persisted with the policy and it remained in effect until the British departed Palestine in May 1948.

After the war, the determination of Holocaust survivors to reach Palestine led to large scale illegal Jewish migration to Palestine. British efforts to block the migration led to violent resistance by the Zionist underground.

Illegal immigrants detained by the British Government were imprisoned in camps on Cyprus. The immigrants had no citizenship and could not be returned to any country. Those imprisoned included a large number of children and orphans.

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What Makes the Holocaust Unique?

2009-05-16T19:13:00.016+03:00

The Holocaust is unique in its unprecedented ideological driving force merge with unprecedented total destruction means used against the Jewish people.

In other genocides, besides the Holocaust, pragmatic considerations such as control of territory and resources were central to the genocide policy. Yehuda Bauer argues that:

"The basic motivation of the Holocaust was purely ideological, rooted in an
illusionary world of Nazi imagination, where an international Jewish conspiracy
to control the world was opposed to a parallel Aryan quest. No genocide to date
had been based so completely on myths, on hallucinations, on abstract,
nonpragmatic ideology – which was then executed by very rational, pragmatic
means."

(Bauer, Yehuda (2002). Rethinking the Holocaust. New Haven, Conn: Yale University Press. pp. p.48.)

Responding to the German philosopher Ernst Nolte who claimed that the Holocaust was not unique, the German historian Eberhard Jäckel wrote in 1986 that the Holocaust was unique because:

"the National Socialist killing of the Jews was unique in that never before had
a state with the authority of its responsible leader decided and announced that
a specific human group, including its aged, its women and its children and
infants, would be killed as quickly as possible, and then carried through this
resolution using every possible means of state power".

(Maier, Charles The Unmasterable Past, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988 page 53)

The slaughter was systematically conducted in virtually all areas of Nazi-occupied territory in what are now 35 separate European countries. It was at its worst in Central and Eastern Europe, which had more than seven million Jews in 1939. About five million Jews were killed there, including three million in occupied Poland and over one million in the Soviet Union. Hundreds of thousands also died in the Netherlands, France, Belgium, Yugoslavia and Greece. The Wannsee Protocol makes clear that the Nazis also intended to carry out their "final solution of the Jewish question" in England and Ireland.

Anyone with three or four Jewish grandparents was to be exterminated without exception. In other genocides, people were able to escape death by converting to another religion or in some other way assimilating. This option was not available to the Jews of occupied Europe. All persons of recent Jewish ancestry were to be exterminated in lands controlled by Germany.

Saul Friedländer writes that: "Not one social group, not one religious community, not one scholarly institution or professional association in Germany and throughout Europe declared its solidarity with the Jews." He writes that some Christian churches declared that converted Jews should be regarded as part of the flock, but even then only up to a point.

Friedländer argues that this makes the Holocaust distinctive because antisemitic policies were able to unfold without the interference of countervailing forces of the kind normally found in advanced societies, such as industry, small businesses, churches, and other vested interests and lobby groups.
(Friedländer, Saul (2007). Nazi Germany and the Jews: The Years of Extermination. London: HarperCollins. pp. p.xxi.)

To the contrary. Every arm of the country's sophisticated bureaucracy was involved in the murder process. Parish churches and the Interior Ministry supplied birth records showing who was Jewish; the Post Office delivered the deportation and denaturalization orders; the Finance Ministry confiscated Jewish property; German firms fired Jewish workers and disenfranchised Jewish stockholders; the universities refused to admit Jews, denied degrees to those already studying, and fired Jewish academics; government transport offices arranged the trains for deportation to the camps; German pharmaceutical companies tested drugs on camp prisoners; companies bid for the contracts to build the crematoria; detailed lists of victims were drawn up using the Dehomag company's punch card machines, producing meticulous records of the killings. As prisoners entered the death camps, they were made to surrender all personal property, which was carefully catalogued and tagged before being sent to Germany to be reused or recycled. The Final Solution of the Jewish question was in the eyes of the perpetrators Germany's greatest achievement.

The unprecedented Holocaust genocide against the Jewish people was enabled by hundreds of years of evil anti-Semitism and racism fed by superstition, popular belief and theology that culminated in Hitler's Mein Kampf to historic proportions.

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Beginning of the Deportation of Jews from Hungary to Auschwitz-Birkenau - May 15, 1944

2009-05-15T21:07:00.009+03:00

Auschwitz "Selection", May / June 1944. To be sent to the right meant slave labor; to the left, the gas chambers. This image shows the arrival of Hungarian Jews. It was taken by the SS. Courtesy of Yad Vashem, The Auschwitz Album."

On March 19, 1944, the German army occupied Hungary.

On April 14, 1944, the quisling government of Hungary and Eichmann decided to deport all the Jews of Hungary to Auschwitz.

Adolf Eichmann, whose duties included supervising the extermination of Jews, set up his staff in the Majestic Hotel and proceeded rapidly in rounding up Jews from the Hungarian provinces outside of Budapest and its suburbs. The Yellow Star and Ghettoization laws, and Deportation were accomplished in less than 8 weeks with the enthusiastic help of the Hungarian authorities, particularly the gendarmerie (csendőrség). The first transports to Auschwitz began on May 15, 1944. Even as Soviet troops were rapidly approaching the Hungarian border, and Eichmann and his staff knew that Germany had by then lost the war, the trains continued to roll to Auschwitz.

By July 8, 437,402 Jews had been deported in 151 trains, according to official German reports. One hundred and thirty six trains were sent to Auschwitz, where 90% of the people were exterminated on arrival. Because the crematoria couldn't cope with the number of corpses, special pits were dug near them, where bodies were simply burned. It has been estimated that one third of the murdered victims at Auschwitz were Hungarian. For most of this time period, 12,000 Jews were delivered to Auschwitz in a typical day, among them the future writer and Nobel Prize-winner Elie Wiesel, at age 15. The devotion to the cause of the "final solution" of the Hungarian gendarmes surprised even Eichmann himself, who supervised the operation with only twenty officers and a staff of 100, which included drivers, cooks, etc.

According to Winston Churchill, in a letter to his Foreign Secretary dated July 11, 1944, "There is no doubt that this persecution of Jews in Hungary and their expulsion from enemy territory is probably the greatest and most horrible crime ever committed in the whole history of the world...." (Winston S. Churchill, The Second World War: Volume VI, Triumph and Tragedy, Appendix C, page 597).

The deportation of the Jews of Budapest was halted on July 8 after international pressure, and as a result almost 100,000 Jews of Budapest survived. Most of them were, however, concentrated under inhuman conditions in the Budapest ghetto. Some other areas were also designated as "houses with stars" and some were under the protecion of neutral powers. The names of some diplomats, Raoul Wallenberg, Carl Lutz, Giorgio Perlasca deserve mentioning, as well as some members of the army and police who saved people (Fewnczy, Pál Szalai, Károly Szabó, and other officers who took Jews out from camps with fake papers) and some church institutions and personalities.

Soviet troops liberated the Budapest ghetto on January 18, 1945.

By the end of the war in Hungary on April 4, 1945, from an original population of almost 900,000 people considered Jewish inside the borders of 1941-44 Hingary, only about 255,000 survived.

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What is Holocaust Denial?

2009-05-14T13:59:00.015+03:00

April 12, 1945: Generals Eisenhower, Omar Bradley and George S. Patton inspect, at Ohrdruf forced labor camp, an improvised crematory pyre.

Holocaust denial is the claim that the genocide of Jews during World War II—usually referred to as the Holocaust—did not occur at all, or in the manner or to the extent as historically recognized.

Key elements of this claim are the rejection of any of the following: that the Nazi government had a policy of deliberately targeting Jews and people of Jewish ancestry for extermination as a people; that over five million Jews were systematically killed by the Nazis and their allies; and that genocide was carried out at extermination camps using tools of mass murder, such as gas chambers.

Holocaust deniers do not accept the term "denial" as an appropriate description of their point of view, and use the term Holocaust revisionism instead. Scholars, however, prefer the term "denial" to differentiate Holocaust deniers from historical revisionists, who use established historical methodologies.

Most Holocaust denial claims imply, or openly state, that the Holocaust is a hoax arising out of a deliberate Jewish conspiracy to advance the interest of Jews at the expense of other peoples. For this reason, Holocaust denial is generally considered to be an antisemitic conspiracy theory. The methodologies of Holocaust deniers are criticized as based on a predetermined conclusion that ignores extensive historical evidence to the contrary.

There is a "convergence of evidence" that proves that the Holocaust happened. This evidence includes:

Written documents—hundreds of thousands of letters, memos, blueprints, orders, bills, speeches, articles, memoirs, and confessions.

Eyewitness testimony—accounts from survivors, Jewish Sonderkommandos (who were forced to help load bodies from the gas chambers into the crematoria in exchange for the promise of survival), SS guards, commandants, local townspeople, and even high-ranking Nazis who spoke openly about the mass murder of the Jews.

Photographs—including official military and press photographs, civilian photographs, secret photographs taken by survivors, aerial photographs, German and Allied film footage, unofficial photographs taken by the German military.

The camps themselves—concentration camps, work camps, and extermination camps that still exist in varying degrees of originality and reconstruction.

Inferential evidence—population demographics, reconstructed from the pre-World War II era; if six million Jews were not killed, what happened to them all?

The first Holocaust deniers were the Nazis themselves. Historians have documented evidence that Heinrich Himmler instructed his camp commandants to destroy records, crematoria, and other signs of mass extermination, as Germany's defeat became imminent and the Nazi leaders realized they would most likely be captured and brought to trial. As one of many examples, the bodies of the 25,000 mostly Latvian Jews whom Friedrich Jeckeln and his gang of killers had shot at Rumbula (near Riga) in late 1941 were dug up and burned in 1943. Similar operations were undertaken at Belzec, Treblinka and other death camps. In the infamous Posen speech on October 4, 1943, Himmler explicitly referred to the murder of the Jews of Europe and further stated that the murder must be permanently kept secret

Eisenhower, upon finding the victims of the death camps, he ordered all possible photographs to be taken, and for the German people from surrounding villages to be ushered through the camps and even made to bury the dead. He wrote the following to General Marshall after visiting a German internment camp near Gotha, Germany:

The visual evidence and the verbal testimony of starvation, cruelty and
bestiality were so overpowering as to leave me a bit sick. In one room, where
they [there] were piled up twenty or thirty naked men, killed by starvation,
George Patton would not even enter. He said that he would get sick if he did so.
I made the visit [to Gotha] deliberately, in order to be in a position to give
first-hand evidence of these things if ever, in the future, there develops a
tendency to charge these allegations merely to “propaganda.”
- Dear General: Eisenhower’s Wartime Letters to Marshall, page 223

After World War II, many of the former leaders of the SS left Germany and began using their propaganda skills to defend their actions Denial materials began to appear shortly after the war going on till this day.

A few nototious examples:

Ernst Zündel operated a small-press publishing house which published and distributed Holocaust-denial material such as Did Six Million Really Die? by Richard Harwood (a British neo-Nazi leader). In 1985, Zündel was tried and convicted under a "false news" law and sentenced to 15 months imprisonment by an Ontario court for "disseminating and publishing material denying the Holocaust." Zündel gained considerable notoriety after this conviction, and a number of free-speech activists stepped forward to defend his right to publish his opinion. His conviction was overturned in 1992 when the Supreme Court of Canada declared the "false news" law unconstitutional. On February 15, 2007, Zündel was convicted on 14 counts of incitement under Germany's Volksverhetzung law, which bans the incitement of hatred against a portion of the population, and given the maximum sentence of five years in prison.

In 1998, the British author David Irving filed suit against American author Deborah Lipstadt and her publisher Penguin Books, claiming that Lipstadt had libeled him in her book Denying the Holocaust. The statements made by Lipstadt included the accusation that Irving deliberately misrepresented evidence to conform to his ideological viewpoint. Lipstadt and Penguin hired British lawyer Anthony Julius and Cambridge historian Richard J. Evans to present her case. Evans spent two years examining Irving's work, and presented evidence of Irving's misrepresentations, including evidence that Irving had knowingly used forged documents as source material. The judge in the case, Mr Justice Gray, was ultimately persuaded by the evidence presented by Evans and others, and delivered a long and decisive verdict in favor of Lipstadt that referred to Irving as a "Holocaust denier" and "right-wing pro-Nazi polemicist," and confirmed the accusations of Lipstadt and Evans.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad frequently denies the Holocaust. In a December 2005 speech, Ahmadinejad said that a legend was fabricated and had been promoted to protect Israel. He said:

"They have fabricated a legend, under the name Massacre of the Jews, and they hold it higher than God himself, religion itself and the prophets themselves...If somebody in their country questions God, nobody says anything, but if somebody denies the myth of the massacre of Jews, the Zionist loudspeakers and the governments in the pay of Zionism will start to scream."

Bishop Richard Williamson is an English traditionalist Catholic that was declared to have incurred excommunication from the Roman Catholic Church in 1988. The Holy See lifted the excommunication in January 2009. However, after his controversial views on the Holocaust attracted widespread media coverage, the Vatican declared that "in order to be admitted to episcopal functions within the Church, he will have to take his distance, in an absolutely unequivocal and public fashion, from his position on the Shoah."

Since the late 1980s, Williamson has been charged with anti-semitism and Holocaust denial. Williamson has denied the existence of gas chambers or that millions of Jews were murdered by the Nazis, and praised Holocaust denier Ernst Zündel. During an interview on Swedish television recorded in November 2008, he stated "I believe that the historical evidence is strongly against, is hugely against six million Jews having been deliberately gassed in gas chambers as a deliberate policy of Adolf Hitler" and "I think that 200,000 to 300,000 Jews perished in Nazi concentration camps, but none of them in gas chambers."

Other acts of genocide have met similar attempts to deny and minimize, most notably the Armenian Genocide and the Greek genocide, which is denied by the Turkish Government, but also the Rwanda genocide, Ustasha genocide, Srebrenica Genocide, and the Ukrainian famine.

Gregory H. Stanton, formerly of the US State Department and the founder of Genocide Watch, lists denial as the final stage of a genocide development: "Denial is the eighth stage that always follows a genocide. It is among the surest indicators of further genocidal massacres. The perpetrators of genocide dig up the mass graves, burn the bodies, try to cover up the evidence and intimidate the witnesses. They deny that they committed any crimes, and often blame what happened on the victims."

Source: Wikipedia (All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License)

Adolf Eichmann is captured in Argentina by Israeli MOSSAD - May 11, 1960

2009-05-11T08:54:00.003+03:00

Adolf Eichmann on trial

Karl Adolf Eichmann (1906–1962), sometimes referred to as "the architect of the Holocaust", was a Nazi and SS-Obersturmbannführer (equivalent to Lieutenant Colonel). Because of his organizational talents and ideological reliability, he was charged by Reinhard Heydrich (chief of the Reich Main Security Office) with the task of facilitating and managing the logistics of mass deportation of Jews to ghettos and extermination camps in Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe. After the war, he travelled to Argentina using a fraudulently obtained laissez-passer issued by the International Red Cross and lived there under a false identity working for Mercedes-Benz until 1960. He was captured by Israeli Mossad operatives in Argentina and tried in an Israeli court on 15 criminal charges, including crimes against humanity and war crimes. He was convicted and hanged in 1962.

Heydrich disclosed to Eichmann in autumn 1941 that all the Jews in German-controlled Europe were to be exterminated. In 1942, Heydrich ordered Eichmann to attend the Wannsee Conference as recording secretary, where Germany's anti-Semitic measures were set down into an official policy of genocide. Eichmann was given the position of Transportation Administrator of the "Final Solution to the Jewish Question", which put him in charge of all the trains which would carry Jews to the death camps in the territory of occupied Poland.

In 1944, he was sent to Hungary after Germany had occupied that country in fear of a Soviet invasion. Eichmann at once went to work deporting Jews, sending 430,000 Hungarians to their deaths in the gas chambers.

By 1945, Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler (head of the SS) had ordered Jewish extermination to be halted and evidence of the Final Solution to be destroyed. Eichmann was appalled by Himmler's turnabout, and continued his work in Hungary against official orders.

At the end of World War II, Eichmann was captured by the U.S. Army, who did not know that this man who presented himself as "Otto Eckmann" was in fact a much bigger catch. Early in 1946, he escaped from U.S. custody and hid in various parts of Germany for a few years. In 1950 he obtained an International Committee of the Red Cross humanitarian passport in Geneva and an Argentine visa, both issued to "Riccardo Klement, technician." He boarded a ship heading for Argentina on July 14, 1950. For the next 10 years, he worked in several odd jobs in the Buenos Aires area (from factory foreman, to junior water engineer and professional rabbit farmer). Eichmann also brought his family to Argentina.

In 1959, Mossad (the national intelligence agency of Israel) was informed that Eichmann was in Buenos Aires under the name Ricardo Klement (Clement) and began an effort to locate his exact whereabouts. Through relentless surveillance, it was concluded that Ricardo Klement was, in fact, Adolf Eichmann. The Israeli government then approved an operation to capture Eichmann and bring him to Jerusalem for trial as a war criminal. The Mossad agents continued their surveillance of Eichmann through the first months of 1960 until it was judged safe to take him down, even watching as he delivered flowers to his wife on their 25th wedding anniversary on March 21.

Eichmann was kidnapped by a team of Mossad and Shabak (Israel Security Agency) agents in a suburb of Buenos Aires on May 11, 1960, as part of a covert operation.

In June 1960, after unsuccessful secret negotiations with Israel, Argentina requested an urgent meeting of the United Nations Security Council, to protest what Argentina regarded as the "violation of the sovereign rights of the Argentine Republic".

The legal basis of the charges against Eichmann was the 1950 "Nazi and Nazi Collaborators (Punishment) Law".

Eichmann's trial before an Israeli court in Jerusalem began on April 11, 1961. He was indicted on 15 criminal charges, including crimes against humanity, crimes against the Jewish people and membership in an outlawed organization.

After 14 weeks of testimony with more than 1,500 documents, 100 prosecution witnesses (90 of whom were Nazi concentration camp survivors) and dozens of defense depositions delivered by diplomatic couriers from 16 different countries, the Eichmann trial ended on August 14. At that point, the judges began deliberations in seclusion. On December 11, the three judges announced their verdict: Eichmann was convicted on all counts. Eichmann had said to the court that he expected the death penalty. On December 15, the court imposed a death sentence. Eichmann appealed the verdict, mostly relying on legal arguments about Israel's jurisdiction and the legality of the laws under which he was charged. He also claimed that he was protected by the principle of "Acts of State" and repeated his "superior orders" defense. On May 29, 1962 Israel's Supreme Court, sitting as a Court of Criminal Appeal, rejected the appeal and upheld the District Court's judgment on all counts. In rejecting his appeal again claiming that he was only "following orders", the court stated that, "Eichmann received no superior orders at all. He was his own superior and he gave all orders in matters that concerned Jewish affairs.

Eichmann was hanged a few minutes before midnight on May 31, 1962, at a prison in Ramla, Israel. This remains the only civil execution ever carried out in Israel, which has a general policy of not using the death penalty. Eichmann allegedly refused a last meal, preferring instead a bottle of Carmel, a dry red Israeli wine. He consumed about half of the bottle. He also refused to don the traditional black hood for his execution.

Shortly after the execution, Eichmann's body was cremated in a specially designed oven. The next morning, on June 1, his ashes were scattered at sea over the Mediterranean, in international waters. This was to ensure that there could be no future memorial and that no nation would serve as his final resting place.

Since Eichmann's death, historians have speculated on some questions about his life. The critical question is how responsible Eichmann was for the implementation of the Holocaust. Some argue that Eichmann knew exactly what he was doing, while others state that he was unfairly judged and that he was doing only his duty as an administrator. Eichmann's son, Ricardo, condemned his father's actions, and said he harboured no resentment toward Israel for executing his father. Eichmann himself said he joined the SS not because he agreed or disagreed with its ethos, but because he needed to build a career.

Source: Wikipedia (All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License)

Burning of books in Berlin and throughout Germany - May 10, 1933

2009-05-10T00:01:00.007+03:00

Where they have burned books, they will in the end burn people.

— Heinrich Heine , Almansor (1821)

Examples of books burned by the Nazis on display at Yad Vashem.

The Nazi book burnings were a campaign conducted by the authorities of Nazi Germany to ceremonially burn all books in Germany which did not correspond with Nazi ideology.

On April 6, 1933, the Main Office for Press and Propaganda of the German Student Association (Deutsche Studentenschaft) proclaimed a nationwide "Action against the Un-German Spirit", to climax in a literary purge or "cleansing" ("Säuberung") by fire. Local chapters were to supply the press with releases and commissioned articles, sponsor well-known Nazi figures to speak at public gatherings, and negotiate for radio broadcast time. On April 8 the students association also drafted its Twelve Theses, deliberately evoking Martin Luther; the theses declared and outlined a "pure" national language and culture. Placards publicized the theses, which attacked "Jewish intellectualism", asserted the need to "purify" German language and literature, and demanded that universities be centers of German nationalism. The students described the "action" as a response to a worldwide Jewish "smear campaign" against Germany and an affirmation of traditional German values.

In a symbolic act of ominous significance, on May 10, 1933 the students burned upwards of 25,000 volumes of "un-German" books, presaging an era of state censorship and control of culture. On the night of May 10, in most university towns, nationalist students marched in torchlight parades "against the un-German spirit." The scripted rituals called for high Nazi officials, professors, rectors, and student leaders to address the participants and spectators. At the meeting places, students threw the pillaged and unwanted books into the bonfires with great joyous ceremony, band-playing, songs, "fire oaths," and incantations.

Not all book burnings took place on May 10, as the German Student Association had planned. Some were postponed a few days because of rain. Others, based on local chapter preference, took place on June 21, the summer solstice, a traditional date of celebration. Nonetheless, in 34 university towns across Germany the "Action against the Un-German Spirit" was a success, enlisting widespread newspaper coverage. And in some places, notably Berlin, radio broadcasts brought the speeches, songs, and ceremonial incantations "live" to countless German listeners.

In 1946 the Allied occupation authorities drew up a list of over 30,000 titles, ranging from school books to poetry and including works by such authors as von Clausewitz. Millions of copies of these books were confiscated and destroyed. The representative of the Military Directorate admitted that the order in principle was no different from the Nazi book burnings.

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Hermann Göring captured by U.S. 7th Army - May 9, 1945

2009-05-09T11:44:00.006+03:00

Göring (first row, far left) at the Nuremberg Trials.

Göring surrendered on 9 May 1945 in Bavaria. He was the third-highest-ranking Nazi official tried at Nuremberg, behind Reich President (former Admiral) Karl Dönitz and former Deputy Führer Hess. Göring's last days were spent with Captain Gustave Gilbert, a German-speaking American intelligence officer and psychologist (and a Jew), who had access to all the prisoners held in the Nuremberg jail. Gilbert classified Göring as having an I.Q. of 138, the same as Dönitz. Gilbert kept a journal which he later published as Nuremberg Diary. Here he describes Göring on the evening of 18 April 1946, as the trials were halted for a three-day Easter recess.

"Sweating in his cell in the evening, Göring was defensive and deflated and not very happy over the turn the trial was taking. He said that he had no control over the actions or the defence of the others, and that he had never been anti-Semitic himself, had not believed these atrocities, and that several Jews had offered to testify on his behalf."

Despite claims that he was not anti-Semitic, while in the prison yard at Nuremberg, after hearing a remark about Jewish survivors in Hungary, Albert Speer reported overhearing Göring say, "So, there are still some there? I thought we had knocked off all of them. Somebody slipped up again." Despite his claims of non-involvement, he was confronted with orders he had signed for the murder of Jews and prisoners of war.

Göring dressed for display, along with the other war criminals, after committing suicide by cyanide.Though he defended himself vigorously, and actually appeared to be winning the trial early on (partly by building popularity with the audience by making jokes and finding holes in the prosecution's case) he was sentenced to death by hanging. The judgment stated that:

There is nothing to be said in mitigation. For Goering was often, indeed almost always, the moving force, second only to his leader. He was the leading war aggressor, both as political and as military leader; he was the director of the slave labour programme and the creator of the oppressive programme against the Jews and other races, at home and abroad. All of these crimes he has frankly admitted. On some specific cases there may be conflict of testimony, but in terms of the broad outline, his own admissions are more than sufficiently wide to be conclusive of his guilt. His guilt is unique in its enormity. The record discloses no excuses for this man.

Göring made an appeal, offering to accept the court's death sentence if he were shot as a soldier instead of hanged as a common criminal, but the court refused.

Defying the sentence imposed by his captors, he committed suicide with a potassium cyanide capsule the night before he was to be hanged (15 October 1946). Göring obtained the cyanide from his skin cream jars (he had interigo) and he had hidden two cyanide capsules in his opaque skin cream that no one found until after his death because he had written a note to Colonel Andrus mocking him and his inability to find Goering's cyanide capsules.. It has been claimed that Göring befriended U.S. Army Lieutenant Jack G. Wheelis, who was stationed at the Nuremberg Trials and helped Göring obtain cyanide which had been hidden among Göring's personal effects when they were confiscated by the Army. In 2005, former U.S. Army Private Herbert Lee Stivers claimed he gave Göring "medicine" hidden inside a gift fountain pen from a German woman the private had met and flirted with. Stivers served in the 1st Infantry Division's 26th Regiment, who formed the honor guard for the Nuremberg Trials. Stivers claims to have been unaware of what the "medicine" he delivered actually was until after Göring's death. Because he committed suicide, his dead body was displayed by the gallows for the witnesses of the executions.

After his death, the bodies of Göring and the other executed Nazi leaders were cremated in the East Cemetery, Munich Ostfriedhof (München). His ashes were scattered in the Conwentzbach in Munich, which runs into the Isar river.

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Unconditional German Surrender to the Allies - May 7, 1945

2009-05-07T11:39:00.003+03:00

General Alfred Jodl signing the capitulation papers in Rheims.

One half hour after the fall of the city of Breslau in Lower Silesia, Germany, General Alfred Jodl (Chief-of-Staff of the German Armed Forces High Command) arrived in Rheims and, following Dönitz's (Hitler's successor) instructions, offered to surrender only all forces fighting the Western Allies. This was exactly the same negotiating position that von Friedeburg had initially made to Montgomery, and like Montgomery the Supreme Allied Commander, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, threatened to break off all negotiations unless the Germans agreed to a complete unconditional surrender. Eisenhower explicitly told Jodl that he would order western lines closed to German soldiers, thus forcing them to surrender to the Soviets. Jodl sent a signal to Dönitz, who was in Flensburg, informing him of Eisenhower's position. Shortly after midnight Dönitz, accepting the inevitable, sent a signal to Jodl authorizing the complete and total surrender of all German forces.

On the morning of, May 7, 1945, at the SHAEF (Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force) headquarters in Rheims, France, General Alfred Jodl, signed the unconditional surrender documents for all German forces to the Allies. General Franz Böhme announced the unconditional surrender of German troops in Norway on May 7, the same day as Jodl signed the unconditional surrender document. It included the phrase "All forces under German control to cease active operations at 23:01 hours Central European Time on May 8, 1945." The next day, General Wilhelm Keitel (head of the High Command of the German Armed Forces) and other German army senior representatives traveled to Berlin, and shortly before midnight signed a similar document, explicitly surrendering to Soviet forces, in the presence of General Georgi Zhukov. The signing ceremony took place in a former German Army Engineering School in the Berlin district of Karlshorst.

World War II in Europe comes to an end (Japan surrendered in August 1945).

Source: Wikipedia (All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License)

Mauthausen-Gusen Concentration Camp Liberated - May 3, 1945

2009-05-05T11:06:00.004+03:00

Prisoners of Ebensee, one of the sub-camps of Mauthausen-Gusen, after liberation by the US 80th Infantry Division

Mauthausen Concentration Camp, established in 1938, grew to become a large group of Nazi labour concentration camps that was built around the villages of Mauthausen and Gusen in Upper Austria, 20 kilometres east of the city of Linz.

The camp served the needs of the German war machine and also carried out exterminations through labour. The conditions within the camp were considered exceptionally hard to bear, even by concentration camp standards. The inmates suffered not only from malnutrition, overcrowded huts and constant abuse and beatings by the guards and kapos, but also from exceptionally hard labour.

By December of 1941, a permanent gas chamber that could kill about 120 prisoners at a time was completed.

Although the Mauthausen-Gusen camp complex was mostly a labour camp for men, a women's camp was opened in Mauthausen, in September 1944, with the first transport of female prisoners from Auschwitz. Eventually, more women and children came to Mauthausen from Ravensbrück, Bergen Belsen, Gross Rosen, and Buchenwald.

Until early 1940, the largest group of inmates consisted of German, Austrian and Czechoslovak socialists, communists, anarchists, homosexuals, and people of Roma origin. Later arrived to the camp Jews, Poles, Spanish Republicans, Soviet POWs and others.

In 1944, a large group of Hungarian and Dutch Jews was also transferred to the camp. Much like all the other large groups of prisoners that were transferred to Mauthausen-Gusen, most of them either died as a result of the hard labour and poor conditions, or were deliberately killed by throwing them down the sides of the Mauthausen quarry, nicknamed the Parachutists' Wall by the SS guards and Kapos. The nickname was a cruel joke which mocked the doomed prisoners by calling them "Parachutists without a parachute".

The exact death toll of the entire Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp system varies considerably from source to source. A sound estimation is 200,000 (40,000 Jews).

The camps of Mauthausen-Gusen, the last to be liberated during the World War II, were liberated on 5 May 1945 by the US 11th Armored Division, 3rd US Army.

It was not until 1949 that Mauthausen-Gusen was declared a national memorial site and finally, 30 years after camp's liberation, on 3 May 1975, Chancellor Bruno Kreisky officially opened the Mauthausen Museum.

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Theresienstadt Handed over to the Red Cross by the Nazis - May 3, 1945

2009-05-03T06:42:00.006+03:00

Gate Work Makes Freedom in the Small Fortress in Theresienstadt

Theresienstadt concentration camp (often referred to as Terezín) was a Nazi German concentration camp during World War II. It was established by the Gestapo in the fortress and garrison city of Terezín (German name Theresienstadt), located in what is now the Czech Republic.

On June 10, 1940, the Gestapo took control of Terezín and set there up a prison. By November 24 194, the town of Theresienstadt was turned into a walled ghetto. To the outside it was presented by the Nazis as a model Jewish settlement, but in reality it was a concentration camp. Theresienstadt was also used as a transit camp for European Jews en route to Auschwitz.

It soon became the "home" for a great number of Jews from occupied Czechoslovakia. The 7,000 non-Jewish Czechs living in Terezín were expelled by the Nazis in the spring 1942. As a consequence, the Jewish community became a closed environment.

On May 3, 1945, control of the camp was transferred from the Germans to the Red Cross. A week later, on May 8, 1945, Terezín was liberated by Soviet troops.

Many of the 80,000 Czech Jews who died in the Holocaust were killed in Theresienstadt, where the conditions were extremely difficult. In a space previously inhabited by 7,000 Czechs, now over 50,000 Jews were gathered. Food was scarce and in 1942 almost 16,000 people died.

Theresienstadt supplied the German war effort with a source of Jewish slave labor.

456 Jews from Denmark were sent to Theresienstadt in 1943. These were Jews who had not escaped to Sweden before the arrival of the Nazis. Included also in the transports were some of the European Jewish children whom Danish organizations had been attempting to conceal in foster homes. The arrival of the Danes is of great significance as the Danes insisted on the Red Cross having access to the ghetto. This was a rare move, given that most European governments did not insist on their fellow Jewish citizens being treated according to some fundamental principles. The Danish king, Christian X, later secured the release of the Danish internees on April 15, 1945. The White Buses, in cooperation with the Danish Red Cross, collected the 413 who had survived.

Many educated Jews were inmates of Theresienstadt, and the camp was publicized by the Nazis for its rich cultural life - this was simply a masque to conceal the horror of the place. At least four concert orchestras were forced to operate in the camp, as well as chamber groups and jazz ensembles. Several stage performances were produced and attended by camp inmates compelled to do so in order that an acceptable face of the holocaust could be presented to the world.

Artist and art teacher Friedl Dicker-Brandeis created drawing classes for children in the ghetto. This activity resulted in the production of over four thousands children's drawings, which Dicker-Brandeis hid in two suitcases before being sent to Auschwitz. This collection was thus preserved from destruction by the Nazis and was not discovered until a decade later. Most of these drawings can now be seen at The Jewish Museum in Prague, whose Archive of Holocaust section is responsible for the administration of the Terezin Archive Collection. The children of the camp also wrote stories and poems, some of which were preserved and later published in a collection called I Never Saw Another Butterfly.

On June 23, 1944, the Nazis permitted the visit by the Red Cross in order to dispel rumors about the extermination camps. Dr. Paul Eppstein was instructed by the SS to appear in the role of the mayor of Theresienstadt. To minimize the appearance of overcrowding in Theresienstadt, the Nazis deported many Jews to Auschwitz.

The hoax against the Red Cross was so successful for the Nazis that they went on to make a propaganda film at Theresienstadt. Production of the film began on February 26, 1944. Directed by Jewish prisoner Kurt Gerron (a director, cabaret performer, and actor who appeared with Marlene Dietrich in The Blue Angel), it was meant to show how well the Jews lived under the "benevolent" protection of the Third Reich. After the shooting of the film, most of the cast and even the filmmaker himself, were deported to Auschwitz. Gerron and his wife were executed in the gas chambers on October 28, 1944. The film was not released at the time, but was edited into pieces that served their purpose, and only segments of it have remained.

Approximately 144,000 Jews were sent to Theresienstadt. About a quarter of the inmates (33,000) died in Theresienstadt, mostly because of the deadly conditions (hunger, stress, and disease, especially the typhus epidemic at the very end of war). About 88,000 were deported to Auschwitz and other extermination camps. When the war finished, there were a mere 17,247 survivors. There were 15,000 children living in the children's home inside the camp; only 93 of those children survived.

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Hitler Commits Suicide in his Berlin Bunker - April 30, 1945

2009-04-30T12:50:00.008+03:00

Cover of US armed forces newspaper The Stars and Stripes, 2 May 1945, announcing that Hitler is dead.

The generally accepted cause of the death of Adolf Hitler on 30 April 1945 is suicide by gunshot and cyanide poisoning. The dual method and other circumstances surrounding the event encouraged rumours that Hitler may have survived the end of World War II along with speculation about what happened to his remains. The 1993 opening of records kept by the Soviet KGB and Russian FSB confirmed the widely accepted version of Hitler's death.

Hitler took up residence in the Führerbunker on 16 January 1945 where he presided over a rapidly disintegrating Third Reich as the Allies advanced from both east and west. By late April Soviet forces had entered Berlin and were battling their way to the centre of the city where the Chancellery was located.

On 22 April Hitler had what some historians later described as a nervous breakdown during one of his military situation conferences, admitting defeat was imminent and Germany would lose the war. He expressed his intent to kill himself and later asked physician Werner Haase (professor of medicine and one of Adolf Hitler's personal physicians) to recommend a reliable method of suicide. Haase suggested combining a dose of cyanide with a gunshot to the head.

Hitler had a supply of cyanide capsules which he had obtained through the SS. Meanwhile, on 28 April Hitler learned of Heinrich Himmler's attempt to independently negotiate a peace treaty. Hitler considered this treason and began to show signs of paranoia, expressing worries the cyanide capsules he had received through Himmler's SS were fake. He also learned of the execution of his ally Benito Mussolini and vowed not to share a similar fate. To verify the capsules' potency he ordered Dr. Haase to try them on his dog Blondi and the animal died as a result.

After midnight on 29 April, Hitler married Eva Braun in a small civil ceremony in a map room within the bunker complex. Antony Beevor (a British historian) states that after hosting a modest wedding breakfast with his new wife Hitler took secretary Traudl Junge to another room and dictated his last will and testament. He signed these documents at 04:00 and then retired to bed.

Hitler and Braun lived together as husband and wife in the bunker for less than 40 hours. Late in the morning of 30 April, with the Soviets less than 500 metres from the bunker, Hitler had a meeting with General Helmuth Weidling, commander of the Berlin Defence Area, who informed Hitler the Berlin garrison would probably run out of ammunition that night. Weidling asked Hitler for permission to break out, a request he had made unsuccessfully before. Hitler did not answer at first and Weidling went back to his headquarters in the Bendlerblock where at about 13:00 he got Hitler's permission to try a breakout that night. Hitler, two secretaries and his personal cook then had a light lunch consisting of spaghetti with light sauce, after which Hitler and Eva Braun said their personal farewells to members of the Führerbunker staff and fellow occupants, including the Goebbels family, Bormann, the secretaries and several military officers. At around 14:30 Adolf and Eva Hitler went into Hitler's personal study.

Some witnesses later reported hearing a loud gunshot at around 15:30. After waiting a few minutes, Hitler's valet Heinz Linge, with Bormann at his side, opened the door to the small study. Linge later stated he immediately noted a scent of burnt almonds, a common observation made in the presence of prussic acid, the gaseous form of cyanide. Hitler's personal bodyguard, Otto Günsche, entered the study to inspect the bodies. The Hitlers were both sitting on a small sofa, Eva on the left, Adolf to her right. Eva's body slumped away from Adolf's. Hitler appeared to have shot himself in the right temple (there was an exit wound towards the top, left side of his head) with a Walther PPK 7.65 mm pistol which lay at his feet. Blood dripping from Adolf's temple and chin had made a large stain on the right arm of the sofa and was pooling on the floor/carpet. Eva had no visible physical wounds and Linge assumed she had poisoned herself.

Günsche exited the study and announced that the Führer was dead. Immediately afterwards, several people in the bunker began smoking cigarettes. Several witnesses said the two bodies were carried up to ground level and through the bunker's emergency exit to a small, bombed-out garden behind the Chancellery where they were doused with petrol and set alight by Linge and members of Hitler's personal SS bodyguard. The SS guards and Linge later noted the fire did not completely destroy the corpses but Soviet shelling of the bunker compound made further cremation attempts impossible and the remains were later covered up in a shallow bomb crater after 18:00.

In 1993 the KGB/FSB publicly released the autopsy records and other statements by former KGB members. Drawing from these, historians reached a consensus about what happened to the bodies of Hitler and Braun.

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U.S. 7th Army Liberates Dachau - April 29, 1945

2009-04-29T21:58:00.013+03:00

Liberated Dachau camp prisoners cheer U.S. troops

Dachau was a Nazi German concentration camp, and the first one opened in Germany (March 1933), located near the medieval town of Dachau, about 16 km of Munich, Germany.

In total, over 200,000 prisoners from more than 30 countries were housed in Dachau of whom two-thirds were political and Christian religious prisoners and nearly one-third were Jews. 25,613 prisoners are believed to have died in the camp, among them at least 5000 Jews, and almost another 10,000 in its subcamps, primarily from disease, malnutrition and suicide. In early 1945, there was a typhus epidemic in the camp followed by an evacuation, in which large numbers of the weaker prisoners died.

Together with the much larger Auschwitz, Dachau has come to symbolize the Nazi concentration camps to many people. Konzentrationslager (KZ) Dachau holds a significant place in public memory because it was the second camp to be liberated by British or American forces. Therefore, it was one of the first places where the West was exposed to the reality of Nazi brutality through firsthand journalist accounts and through newsreels.

Late in the afternoon of 29 April 1945 KZ Dachau was surrendered to the American Army by SS-Sturmscharführer Heinrich Wicker.

The American troops were so horrified by conditions at the camp that a few murdered some of the camp guards after they had surrendered in what is called the Dachau massacre.

The memorial site includes two of the prisoner barracks that have been rebuilt and one shows a cross-section of the entire history of the camp. The memorial includes also four chapels for the various religions represented among the prisoners.

Source: Wikipedia (All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License)