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History > WW2 > 1939-1945

 

Axis powers, Germany, Europe >

Antisemitism, Adolf Hitler, Nazi era,

Holocaust / Shoah, Samudaripen

 

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Please exercise caution

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Nazi Germany

Used Honorary Consuls

to Advance Agenda Globally,

Records Show

 

In 1942,

as Nazi Germany began to send

hundreds of thousands of Jews

to killing centers, Brazilian police

swooped into a port city

in the South American country

and arrested a wealthy landowner.

 

To locals,

he was Otto Uebele,

a Brazilian manager

of a prominent coffee

trading company.

 

He also served

as honorary consul for Germany

— and was an accused Nazi spy.

 

“One of the leaders

of German espionage

in South America,”

Allied intelligence agents

wrote in a secret document,

later released by the CIA.

 

A local newspaper at the time

called Uebele

a man of “respectable appearance,

who enjoyed

the greatest prestige and influence

in social and commercial circles.”

 

“Nobody,” the paper wrote,

“could imagine him a spy.

 

The fact went off like a bomb,

such was the surprise.”

 

Historians have long chronicled

the clandestine use of ambassadors

and other professional diplomats

by Nazi intelligence services.

 

Far less attention has focused

on the activities of honorary consuls,

who for centuries have worked

from their home countries

to represent the interests

of foreign governments.

 

ProPublica

and the International Consortium

of Investigative Journalists

used declassified intelligence documents,

media accounts and other reports

to identify about 20 honorary consuls

who were suspected

of supporting the Third Reich

through espionage

and other illicit activities.

 

The consuls included

a social hall vice president,

a fertilizer merchant and a chemist.

 

They largely lived and worked

in neutral countries

in Latin America,

Europe and Africa,

where Nazi Germany sought

to cultivate allies

or gain an advantage

at critical ports

and other strategic locations.

 

A majority of the honorary consuls

were appointed directly by Germany;

 

some were named

by other countries.

https://www.propublica.org/article/
shadow-diplomats-nazi-germany-spies-honorary-consuls - December 30, 2022

 

 

https://www.propublica.org/article/
shadow-diplomats-nazi-germany-spies-honorary-consuls - December 30, 2022

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Холокост. Последние свидетели

Документальный фильм Би-би-си

27 January 2020    BBC News

 

 

 

 

Холокост. Последние свидетели | Документальный фильм Би-би-си

Video        27 January 2020        BBC News - Русская служба

 

Эти женщины

— одни из последних свидетелей ужасов Холокоста.

 

Уцелеть в концлагерях и гетто

было невероятной удачей.

 

Истории выживших завораживают.

 

Но для них конец войны

стал лишь началом чего-то большего.

 

До сегодняшнего дня выжившие пытаются понять,

как забыть пережитый ужас

и одновременно сохранить память о Холокосте.

 

YouTube

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IQxvgwMFG_c

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

how the Nazis used

the German language to obscure

the mechanics of mass murder

and make genocide

more palatable to themselves

 

 

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/24/
books/holocaust-nazi-archive.html

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Path to Nazi Genocide

USHMM    13 January 2014

 

 

 

 

The Path to Nazi Genocide

Video        United States Holocaust Memorial Museum        13 January 2014

 

Using rare footage, the film examines the Nazis'

rise and consolidation of power in Germany

as well as their racist ideology, propaganda,

and persecution of Jews and other innocent civilians.

 

It also outlines the path by which the Nazis

led a state to war, and with their collaborators,

killed millions -- including systematically

murdering 6 million Jewish people.

 

This 38-minute resource is intended

to provoke reflection and discussion

about the role of ordinary people, institutions,

and nations between 1918 and 1945.

 

 YouTube

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sRcNq4OYTyE

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Schindler's List

Trailer    Steven Spielberg    1993

 

 

 

 

Schindler's List (1993)

Official Trailer        Video        Liam Neeson, Steven Spielberg Movie HD

 

In Poland during World War II,

Oskar Schindler

gradually becomes concerned for his Jewish workforce

after witnessing their persecution by the Nazis.

YouTube

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gG22XNhtnoY

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Nazis

and their collaborators

killed 6 million Jews

during the second world war.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/feb/20/
samuel-willenberg-survivor-of-nazi-death-camp-treblinka-dies-aged-93

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

500,000 Gypsies died

in Hitler's death camps

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2004/nov/29/
secondworldwar.biography

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Map of the Holocaust in Europe

during World War II, 1939-1945.

 

This map shows

all extermination camps (or death camps),

most major concentration camps,

labor camps, prison camps, ghettos,

major deportation routes

and major massacre sites.

 

Wikipedia

20 December 2007(2007-12-20)

Source Self-made by User: Dna-Dennis,

using information from USHMM & Wikipedia.

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:WW2-Holocaust-Europe.png

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


 

 

Map of Eastern Europe,

indicating locations of major Nazi concentration and death camps.

 

Cartography by Jen Rosenberg.

 

Map copyright 1998, 1999, and 2000 Jen Rosenberg.

Base map courtesy the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency.

http://history1900s.about.com/library/holocaust/blmap.htm

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Concentration and Extermination Camps and Major "Euthanasia" Centers

 

Cartography by Mapping Solutions, Alaska.

Source:

"Concentration and Extermination Camps

and Major 'Euthanasia' Centers,"

in Jeremy Noakes, ed., Nazism, 1919-1945,

Vol. 3: Foreign Policy, War, and Racial Extermination.

Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1998, p. 645.

 

German History in Documents and Images (GHDI)

http://germanhistorydocs.ghi-dc.org/pdf/eng/concentration_ext_camps%20eng%20large-BH_final.pdf

http://germanhistorydocs.ghi-dc.org/map.cfm?map_id=3432

http://germanhistorydocs.ghi-dc.org/index.cfm

http://germanhistorydocs.ghi-dc.org/section.cfm?section_id=13

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

German Concentration Camps Factual Survey

 

Holocaust documentary

deemed too horrific reaches cinemas – after 70 years

2015

 

 

 

 

Documentary | UK (72 mins)        Video

 

A time capsule as much as a direct historical document,

showing not only what the Allied Forces found

when they first arrived at the Nazi concentration camps

but also how the British government of the time thought

it was appropriate to communicate the Nazi atrocities."

-- Hollywood Reporter

 

In 1945, cameramen with the Allied troops

documented the horrors they found in Germany.

 

The footage was assembled

for a documentary by a brilliant team

that included Alfred Hitchcock

and Australian writer Colin Wills.

 

But the film was difficult,

progress slow and it missed its moment.

 

By the autumn, British priorities for Germany

had evolved from de-Nazification to reconstruction,

and so the film was shelved, unfinished.

 

Nearly seven decades on,

the documentary has been completed,

the pictures restored

and the narration recorded exactly

as it was written in 1945,

its factual inaccuracies and political biases intact.

 

German Concentration Camps Factual Survey

is an extraordinary cultural artifact

depicting the Holocaust through a 1945 lens.

 

YouTube > MIFF

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a8ViLt5Xjgk

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In 1945, Alfred Hitchcock

advised on a film

that would catalogue

the horrors uncovered

in concentration camps

by Allied troops.

 

Now

the Imperial War Museum

has completed the film

with previously unseen footage

http://www.theguardian.com/film/2015/apr/20/holocaust-film-restored-imperial-war-museum

 

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/05/
movies/german-concentration-camps-factual-survey-review.html

 

 

 

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/22/
opinion/roger-cohen-buried-truths-about-nazi-mass-murder-
and-the-allied-victory.html

 

http://www.theguardian.com/film/2015/apr/20/
holocaust-film-restored-imperial-war-museum

 

http://www.theguardian.com/film/2015/jan/09/
holocaust-film-too-shocking-to-show-night-will-fall-alfred-hitchcock
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A vanished world:

Roman Vishniac's

street photography of Jewish life

from the 1920s to 1950s – in pictures

 

 

http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/gallery/2014/sep/17/
roman-vishniac-street-photography-jewish-life

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Netherlands

 

The Netherlands has the worst record

in western Europe for the murder

of three-quarters of its Jewish population

during the second world war

 

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/mar/29/
amsterdam-mark-role-tram-system-transportation-jews-death-camps

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Netherlands

 

Curt Bloch

 

“The Underwater Cabaret” magazine

 

(Bloch) made a magazine, 95 Issues,

while hiding from the Nazis in an attic

 

For more than two years,

home for Curt Bloch

was a tiny crawl space

below the rafters

of a modest brick home in Enschede,

a Dutch city near the German border.

 

The attic had a single small window.

 

He shared it with two other adults.

 

During that time,

Bloch, a German Jew, survived

in the Nazi-occupied Netherlands

by relying on a network of people

who gave him food and kept his secrets.

 

In that respect,

he was like at least 10,000 Jews

who hid in Holland

and managed to liv

 by pretending not to exist.

 

At least 104,000 others

— many of whom also sought refuge,

but were found —

ended up being sent to their deaths.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/18/
arts/design/dutch-resistance-ww2-magazine-holocaust.html

 

 

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/18/
arts/design/dutch-resistance-ww2-magazine-holocaust.html

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Netherlands

 

Heinrich Boere   1921-2013

 

Heinrich Boere

(...)

murdered Dutch civilians

as part of a

Nazi Waffen SS hit squad

during World War II

 

(...)

 

During his trial,

Mr. Boere admitted

killing three civilians

as a member of the Silbertanne,

or Silver Fir, a unit of largely

Dutch SS volunteers

responsible for assassinating

countrymen considered anti-Nazi.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/03/world/europe/
heinrich-boere-nazi-death-squad-member-dies-at-92.html

 

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/03/world/europe/
heinrich-boere-nazi-death-squad-member-dies-at-92.html

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Andrija Artuković    1899-1988

 

Croatian lawyer, politician,

and senior member

of the ultranationalist and fascist

Ustasha movement,

who served as

the Minister of Internal Affairs

and Minister of Justice

in the Government

of the Independent

State of Croatia (NDH)

during World War II

in Yugoslavia.

 

He signed into law

a number of racial law

against Serbs, Jews, and Roma,

and was responsible

for a string of concentration camps

in which over 100,000 civilians

were tortured and murdered.

 

He escaped to the United States

after the war,

where he lived until extradited

to Yugoslavia in 1986.

 

He was tried and found guilty

of a number of mass killings

in the NDH,

and was sentenced to death,

but the sentence

was not carried out

due to his age and health.

 

He died in custody in 1988.

- Wikipedia, 1 February 2023

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrija_Artukovi%C4%87

 

 

 

Andrija Artukovic had been

the interior minister

in Nazi-occupied Croatia,

where he oversaw the deaths

of hundreds of thousands

of Jews and Serbs.

 

He was deported

to what was then Yugoslavia

in 1986,

and died in prison.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/01/
us/allan-a-ryan-dead.html

 

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
Andrija_Artukovi%C4%87

 

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/01/
us/allan-a-ryan-dead.html

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Valerian Trifa    1914-1987

 

Romanian Orthodox cleric

and fascist political activist,

who served as archbishop

of the Romanian Orthodox Church

in America and Canada.

 

For part of his life,

he was a naturalized citizen

of the United States,

until he was stripped

of his American citizenship

for lying about his involvement

in the murder of hundreds of Jews

during the Holocaust

and World War II.

- Wikipedia, 1 February 2023

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valerian_Trifa

 

 

 

Valerian Trifa

was a Romanian fascist

who had fomented

anti-Semitic pogroms,

but after immigrating

became the archbishop

of the Romanian Orthodox Church

in the United States and Canada.

 

After Mr. Ryan’s office

filed charges,

Mr. Trifa renounced

his citizenship and,

to avoid deportation,

moved to Portugal,

where he died in 1987.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/01/
us/allan-a-ryan-dead.html

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
Valerian_Trifa

 

 

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/01/
us/allan-a-ryan-dead.html

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Antisemitism > Austria >

Franz Josef Huber    1902-1975

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Antisemitism > Holocaust > Germany >

Adolf Eichmann    1906-1962

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Antisemitism > Holocaust > Poland >

Auschwitz

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Antisemitism > Holocaust > Germany >

Buchenwald

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Antisemitism > Holocaust > Germany >

Bergen-Belsen

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Antisemitism > Holocaust > Germany >

Dachau

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Antisemitism > Holocaust > Germany >

Dora-Mittelbau / Dora-Nordhausen / Nordhausen >

Holocaust of Gardelegen

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Holocaust by bullets

 

 

 

 

Photographer:

Unknown author

(Sometimes mistakenly attributed to Jerzy Tomaszewski

who discovered it.)

 

Title:

Ivanhorod Einsatzgruppen photograph (Q55424114)

 

Description:

Executions of Jews

by German army mobile killing units (Einsatzgruppen)

near Ivangorod Ukraine.

 

The photo was mailed from the Eastern Front to Germany

and intercepted at a Warsaw post office

by a member of the Polish resistance

collecting documentation on Nazi war crimes.

 

The original print was owned

by Tadeusz Mazur and Jerzy Tomaszewski

and now resides in Historical Archives in Warsaw.

 

The original German inscription

on the back of the photograph reads,

"Ukraine 1942, Jewish Action [operation], Ivangorod."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:
Einsatzgruppen_murder_Jews_in_Ivanhorod,_Ukraine,_1942.jpg

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

German guards and Ukrainian militia shooting a Jewish family

in Miropol, Ukraine, in 1941.

 

In “The Ravine,”

Wendy Lower investigates the figures in this photo,

hoping to discover who, exactly,

the Jewish victims were and to expose their killers.

 

Photograph: Security Services Archive

 

When Genocide Is Caught on Film

NYT

Feb. 16, 2021

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/16/
books/review/the-ravine-holocaust-photo-wendy-lower.html

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Ukraine

 

a third or more

of the almost six million Jews

killed in the Holocaust

perished not in the industrial-scale

murder of the camps,

but in executions

at what historians call

killing sites:

 

thousands of villages,

quarries, forests, wells,

streets and homes

that dot the map

of Eastern Europe.

 

The vast numbers killed

in what some have termed

a “Holocaust by bullets”

have slowly garnered

greater attention in recent years

as historians sift through

often sketchy

and incomplete records

that became available

after the collapse

of the Soviet Union.

 

(...)

 

As the number

of Holocaust survivors

gradually declines,

these documents

or witness accounts

— from Belarus, Ukraine,

parts of Russia

and the Baltic States —

have illuminated

a new picture

of the Nazis’ methods.

 

Most of this slaughter

occurred in Eastern Europe

after the Nazis invaded

the Soviet Union in June 1941,

and it mixed

with the increasing

chaos of the war

once the Germans failed

to realize their ambition

of subduing the Soviets

in just eight to 12 weeks

and faced

he prospect of defeat.

 

“The further east

the Wehrmacht went,

the greater the killing,”

Dieter Pohl,

a professor of history

at Klagenfurt University

in Austria,

said at a conference

on the subject this month

in Krakow, Poland.

 

The executions

and unmarked mass graves

became “an element

of German rule

in Eastern Europe.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/28/
world/europe/a-light-on-a-vast-toll-of-jews-killed-away-from-the-death-camps.html 

 

 

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/25/
books/review/babi-yar-anatoly-kuznetsov.html

 

https://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/28/
world/europe/a-light-on-a-vast-toll-of-jews-killed-
away-from-the-death-camps.html

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

1941

 

Germany

 

photographs of Jewish families

being forced to leave their homes

in Breslau, then a German city,

now Wrocław in Poland,

during the second world war

https://www.theguardian.com/world/gallery/2024/jan/28/
newly-discovered-clandestine-photos-of-the-holocausts-upheaval-and-terror

 

 

 

On the instructions of the Gestapo,

preparations for the first deportation

started in Breslau early in November 1941.

Prior to that,

Gestapo official Alfred Hampel

had travelled to Berlin

tasked with closely observing the course

and implementation of deportations there

and applying the same procedure

in Breslau.

 

Together with his colleague

Hermann Fey,

he was primarily responsible

for the implementation

of the deportations in Breslau.

In the early hours of 21.11.1941,

police officers began to pick up

about 1,000 people from their homes

and take them

to the “Schießwerder” restaurant

and event venue with beer garden.

 

After spending four days

in appalling conditions,

the deportees were led

to Odertor station on November 25,

from where the special train “Da 30”

took them to Kaunas.

 

On the very night of their arrival

on 29.11.1941,

they were forced to march

six kilometers to fortress Fort IX,

where they were shot

by Einsatzkommando 3 of Einsatzgruppe A

headed by Karl Jäger.

https://atlas.lastseen.org/en/image/breslau/18

 

https://atlas.lastseen.org/en/image/breslau/18

 

 

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/feb/04/
grandmother-holocaust-photos-deportation-jews-german-city-breslau

 

https://www.theguardian.com/world/gallery/2024/jan/28/
newly-discovered-clandestine-photos-of-the-holocausts-upheaval-
and-terror

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Ukraine

 

On Sept. 29 and 30, 1941,

in a ravine just outside Kyiv

called Babyn Yar

(“Babi Yar” in Russian),

Nazis executed

nearly 34,000 Jews

over the course of 36 hours.

 

It was the deadliest

mass execution

in what came to be known

as the “Holocaust by Bullets.”

 

We were never supposed

to know it happened.

 

In 1943,

as the Nazis fled Kyiv,

they ordered

the bodies in Babyn Yar

to be dug up and burned,

to erase all memory

of what they’d done.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/25/
books/review/babi-yar-anatoly-kuznetsov.html

 

 

 

(in the Holocaust Ground Zero

documentary)

Much use is made of photographs

to bring home

the effects of the decisions made

by the German high command

as the orders came

that all Jewish men of military age

should be disposed of and then,

with appalling predictability,

as the remit was widened to include

women and children.

 

We see a picture of families

walking through

what had been

an ordinary neighbourhood street,

carrying those too old

or enfeebled to walk

towards the woods

where they would all be killed.

 

Explosives were used

to create craters

big enough to hold

all the bodies.

 

By the time

of the Babyn Yar massacre,

in which more than

33,700 Jewish people were murdered,

SS commander Friedrich Jeckeln

had invented “sardine packing;

people would be forced to lie down

in the mass grave head to tail and shot,

layer by layer.”

 

Another photograph shows children

slipping from a woman’s hands,

gun smoke still lingering in the air.

 

Another shows

a kneeling man staring into the camera

as a member of Himmler’s Einsatzgruppen

brings the gun to his head.

 

Behind him,

an assortment of men

– Hitler Youth members,

marching band musicians,

off-duty rank-and-file,

watch with anything

between mild interest and boredom.

https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2023/sep/04/
ukraine-holocaust-ground-zero-review-
it-is-the-unfathomable-suffering-that-stays-with-you

 

 

 

https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2023/sep/04/
ukraine-holocaust-ground-zero-review-
it-is-the-unfathomable-suffering-that-stays-with-you

 

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/25/
books/review/babi-yar-anatoly-kuznetsov.html

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

August 21–22, 1941

 

Ukraine

 

Bila Tserkva massacre

 

 

The Bila Tserkva massacre

was the mass murder of Jews,

committed by

the Nazi German Einsatzgruppe

with the aid of Ukrainian auxiliaries,

in Bila Tserkva, Soviet Ukraine,

on August 21–22, 1941.

 

When the Jewish adult population

of Bila Tserkva was killed,

several functionaries complained

that some 90 Jewish children

were left behind

in an abandoned building,

and had to be executed separately.

 

The soldiers reported the matter

to four chaplains of the Heer,

who passed along their protests

to Field Marshal von Reichenau;

it was the only time during World War I

 that Wehrmacht chaplains tried

to prevent an Einsatzgruppen massacre,

but Paul Blobel's verbal order

was direct and decisive.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
Bila_Tserkva_massacre

 

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
Bila_Tserkva_massacre

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

My Nazi death camp childhood diary

– in pictures

 

Helga Weiss,

a Czech Jewish girl,

was sent with her parents

to the concentration camp

at Terezin, a few days

after her 12th birthday

in 1941.

 

She kept a diary,

in words and pictures,

and when she  and her mother

were sent on to

Auschwitz in 1944,

her uncle hid the diary

in a brick wall for safekeeping.

 https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2013/feb/22/
helga-weiss-diary-nazi-death-camp

 

 

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2013/feb/22/
helga-weiss-diary-nazi-death-camp

 

http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/gallery/2013/feb/22/
helga-weiss-childhood-diary-nazi-camps

 

 

 

 

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/oct/16/
schoolgirl-who-fooled-the-nazis

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Florence Waren    1917-2012

 

(born Sadie Rigal)

 

Even in the depths of war

in occupied France,

Florence Waren

and Frederic Apcar

— or “Florence et Frederic,”

as they were billed —

dazzled Paris, he in tails,

she in jeweled gowns

with flowers in her hair,

the two of them gliding

and swirling across the stage

as one of the most famous

ballroom-dance teams

in Europe.

 

In old black-and-white

photographs,

Ms. Waren,

then in her early 20s,

is often airborne,

seemingly weightless

in Mr. Apcar’s arms.

 

At times

they shared the stage

with Édith Piaf

and Maurice Chevalier.

 

And on many nights

Nazi officers

were in the audience.

 

But what the members

of the Wehrmacht

did not know was

that Ms. Waren was,

as she put it,

“hiding in the spotlight.”

 

Ms. Waren

was a Jew in disguise,

performing in a Nazi-held city

where Jews lived

under constant threat.

 

She was a lawbreaker,

hiding other Jews

in her apartment,

risking her own deportation

to a concentration camp.

 

And she was a smuggler,

helping to supply guns

to the French Resistance.

https://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/05/
world/europe/florence-waren-dancer-who-resisted-nazis-dies-at-95.html

 

 

https://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/05/
world/europe/florence-waren-dancer-who-resisted-nazis-
dies-at-95.html

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

May 1945

 

Cap Arcona ship

 

(Cap Arcona)

was heavily laden

with prisoners from Nazi

concentration camps

when the Royal Air Force

sank her, killing about

5,000 people;

 

with more than

2,000 further casualties

in the sinkings

of the accompanying vessels

of the prison fleet;

Deutschland and Thielbek.

 

This was one

of the biggest single-incident

maritime losses of life

in the Second World War.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SS_Cap_Arcona

 

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SS_Cap_Arcona

 

 

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/11/
obituaries/henry-bawnik-survivor-of-death-camps-and-an-inferno-at-sea-
dies-at-92.html

 

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/20/
movies/the-sea-wolf-titanic.html

 

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/long_reads/
why-the-raf-destroyed-a-ship-
with-4500-concentration-camp-prisoners-on-board-
a7702666.html - 29 April 2017

 

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3606747/
How-German-Titanic-transformed-Hitler-luxury-ocean-liner-Nazi-barracks-
floating-concentration-camp-mistakenly-blown-RAF-pilots.html - 25 May 2016

 

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2007/aug/26/
historybooks.features

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Documentary "Les Alliés face à la Shoah"
 

Germany

 

Eisenhower à Ohrdruf    12 avril 1945

 

 

Le 12 avril 1945,

le général Eisenhower

pénètre dans le camp d'Ohrdruf,

annexe de Buchenwald.

 

Découvrant l'horreur

du génocide juif,

il ordonne que tous les soldats

qui ne sont pas indispensables

sur le front voient le camp

afin de comprendre

contre quoi ils se battent.

 

Parallèlement, il câble

à Londres et Washington

pour que viennent au plus vite

les délégations officielles

et les journalistes.

 

Les jours suivants,

les premières images de l'enfer

sont filmées et diffusées

dans le monde entier.

 

En choisissant

*de revenir sur le génocide

du point de vue

des quatre grands Alliés,

[ le documentaire

"Les Alliés face à la Shoah" ]

 propose une autre histoire

de la Seconde Guerre mondiale,

dévoilant les choix

et les motivations

qui guidèrent Roosevelt,

Churchill, Staline

et de Gaulle,

sur la base

de documents déclassifiés.

https://www.defense.gouv.fr/
actualites/memoire-et-culture/les-allies-face-a-la-shoah-diffusion-sur-france-3-le-29-octobre-2012 - broken link

 

  https://www.radiofrance.fr/franceinter/podcasts/
les-dessous-de-l-ecran/
ce-qu-ils-savaient-les-allies-face-a-la-shoah-
7722995

 

https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/
ohrdruf

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

SS doctor Aribert Ferdinand Heim    1914-1992

 

'Dr Death'

 

member of Hitler’s

elite Waffen-SS

and a medical doctor

at the Buchenwald,

Sachsenhausen

and Mauthausen

concentration camps.

 

[ ... ]

 

Dr. Heim was accused

of performing operations

on prisoners

without anesthesia;

 

removing organs

from healthy inmates,

then leaving them to die

on the operating table;

 

injecting poison,

including gasoline,

into the hearts of others;

and taking the skull

of at least one victim

as a souvenir.

 

After living below the radar

of Nazi hunters

for more than a decade

after World War II

— much of it in the German

spa town of Baden-Baden

where he had a wife, two sons

and a medical practice

as a gynecologist —

he escaped capture

just as investigators

closed in on him in 1962.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/05/world/africa/05nazi.html

 

 

https://www.lemonde.fr/europe/article/2012/09/21/
la-justice-allemande-officialise-la-mort-du-criminel-nazi-aribert-heim
_1763716_3214.html 

 

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/feb/05/nazi-doctor-death-cairo

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/05/world/africa/05nazi.html

 

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/feb/05/nazi-doctor-death-cairo

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/05/world/africa/05nazi.html

 

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2009/02/04/world/africa/20090204-nazi-documents.html

 

http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2009/02/04/world/20090204NAZI_index.html

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Carl Peter Værnet    1893-1965

 

A Danish Nazi,

SS Dr Carl Værnet,

conducted medical experiments

on gay concentration

camp prisoners.

 

Unlike most other Nazi doctors,

he was never put

on trial at Nuremburg.

 

Instead,

with Danish and British collusion,

he was able to escape to Argentina,

where he lived openly and continued

his research into methods

for the eradication of homosexuality.

 

Værnet was

a Copenhagen doctor who,

realising the opportunities

offered by

the homophobic policies

of the Third Reich,

joined the Nazi party

and enlisted in the SS

to pursue his research

to “cure” gay men.

 

This research was conducted

on the personal authority

of Heinrich Himmler.

 

The Gestapo chief demanded

the “extermination

of abnormal existence …

the homosexual must be

entirely eliminated”.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/may/05/
nazi-doctor-gay-people-carl-vaernet-escaped-justice-danish

 

 

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/may/05/
nazi-doctor-gay-people-carl-vaernet-escaped-justice-danish

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

American soldiers

liberating prisoners from the Nazi concentration camp

at the end of WWII.

 

Location: Woebbelin, Germany

 

Date taken: 1945

 

Life Images

http://images.google.com/hosted/life/l?imgurl=b5d529776faeca21 - broken link

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Germany

 

Wöbbelin concentration camp

 

 

The Wöbbelin camp,

near the city of Ludwigslust,

was a subcamp

of the Neuengamme

concentration camp.

 

The SS had established Wöbbelin

in early February 1945

to house concentration

camp prisoners

whom the SS had evacuated

from other camps

to prevent their liberation

by the Allies.

 

At its height, Wöbbelin

held some 5,000 inmates,

many of whom were suffering

from starvation and disease.

http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/article.php?lang=en&ModuleId=10006160

 

 

https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/
woebbelin

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Middle East

after the second world war

 

 

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/sep/11/
israel-palestine-second-world-war

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

WWII casualties

 

Civilian and Military Deaths

in the Second World War

 

National Death Tolls

for the Second World War

 

 

http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/A2854730

 

https://www.archives.gov/research/catalog 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Nazi persecution of homosexuals

 

Nazi Concentration and Extermination Camps

 

"Triangles roses"

déportés pour homosexualité

par les nazis

 

 

After taking power in 1933,

the Nazis persecuted

homosexuals

as part of their so-called

moral crusade

to racially and culturally

purify Germany.

 

This persecution ranged

from dissolution

of homosexual organizations

to internment

of thousands of individuals

in concentration camps.

 

Gay men, in particular,

were subject to harassment,

arrest, incarceration,

and even castration.

 

In Nazi eyes,

gay men were weak

and unfit to be soldiers,

as well as unlikely

to have children

and thereby contribute

to the racial struggle

for Aryan dominance.

http://www.ushmm.org/museum/exhibit/focus/homosexuals/  - broken link

 

 

https://www.ushmm.org/information/exhibitions/online-exhibitions/
special-focus/nazi-persecution-of-homosexuals

 

https://www.ushmm.org/information/press/press-kits/
traveling-exhibitions/nazi-persecution-of-homosexuals

 

https://www.ushmm.org/information/exhibitions/
traveling-exhibitions/nazi-persecution-of-homosexuals

 

https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/
persecution-of-homosexuals-in-the-third-reich

 

https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/photo/
incarcerated-for-homosexuality

 

https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/irn36450

 

https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/gallery/
persecution-of-homosexuals-in-the-third-reich-photographs

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Nazi Concentration and Extermination Camps

 

Six million Jews

were murdered

in the Nazi death camps

of World War II,

along with thousands

of Gypsies, homosexuals,

disabled people

and political dissidents.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/4262892.stm

 

 

 

The first to be singled out

for systematic murder

by the Nazis

were the mentally ill

and intellectually disabled.

 

By the end of World War II,

an estimated 300,000 of them

had been gassed or starved,

their fates hidden

by phony death certificates

and then largely overlooked

among the many atrocities

that were to be perpetrated

in Nazi Germany

in the years to follow.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/03/
world/europe/monument-seeks-to-end-silence-on-killings-of-the-disabled-by-the-nazis.html

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Bones of anti-Nazi German women

still are in the crematoriums

in the German concentration camp

at Weimar, Germany,

taken by the 3rd U.S. Army.

 

Prisoners of all nationalities

were tortured and killed.

 

Pfc. W. Chichersky, April 14, 1945.

111-SC- 203461.

Pictures of World War II

US National Archives

http://www.archives.gov/research/ww2/photos/images/ww2-182.jpg  - broken link

https://www.archives.gov/research/military/ww2/photos
?template=print#holocaust

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

May 15, 1944

 

Systematic deportations

of Jews from Hungary begin

 

 

German forces

occupy Hungary

on March 19, 1944.

 

In April 1944,

all Jews except

those in Budapest

are ordered into ghettos.

 

Systematic deportations

from the ghettos in Hungary

to Auschwitz-Birkenau

begin the next month,

in May 1944.

 

In less than three months,

nearly 440,000 Jews

are deported from Hungary

in more than 145 trains.

 

The overwhelming majority

are killed upon arrival

in Auschwitz.

http://www.ushmm.org/outreach/en/article.php?ModuleId=10007716

 

 

https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/
deportations

https://www.yadvashem.org/yv/en/exhibitions/
album_auschwitz/index.asp

https://www.yadvashem.org/yv/en/exhibitions/communities/
munkacs/during_holocaust.asp

 

 

https://blogs.mediapart.fr/edition/patriotes-de-tous-les-pays/article/130520/
la-nuit-ou-j-ai-ete-deportee-auschwitz

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

May 1944

 

Hungary

 

Budapest census

 

 

The May 1944 Budapest census

was to identify houses

to serve as holding

locations for Jews

before moving them

to a planned walled ghetto

in the city’s seventh district.

 

Two months earlier

Nazi Germany

had occupied Hungary

and deportations

in the countryside

to the gas chambers

of Auschwitz

began almost immediately.

 

Shortly after the census,

around 200,000 Jews

were moved

into 2,000 selected buildings,

“Yellow Star Houses”

with the Star-of-David

Jewish symbol

painted on the doors.

 

(...)

 

In late 1944,

they were crammed

into the ghetto,

where some died of starvation

or were shot next to the river

 

(...)

 

The arrival

of the Russian army

in January 1945

saved the rest though,

and unlike the Jews

from outside the city,

most of Budapest’s

Jewish population

survived.

 

An estimated total

of 600,000 Hungarian Jews

perished in the Holocaust,

most in Auschwitz.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/nov/21/
holocaust-documents-trove-unearthed-in-budapest-apartment
 

 

 

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/nov/21/
holocaust-documents-trove-unearthed-in-budapest-apartment
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

ct. 16, 1943

 

Rome, Italy

 

The murder of Rome’s Jews

 

 

On Oct. 16, 1943,

Nazis rounded up more

than a thousand of them

throughout the city,

including hundreds

in the Jewish ghetto,

now a tourist attraction

where crowds feast

on Jewish-style artichokes

near a church

where Jews were once forced

to attend conversion sermons.

 

For two days

the Germans held the Jews

in a military college

near the Vatican,

checking to see

who was baptized

or had Catholic spouses.

 

“They didn’t want

to offend the pope,

” Mr. Kertzer said.

 

His book shows

that Pius XII’s top aides

only interceded with

the German ambassador

to free

“non-Aryan Catholics.”

 

About 250 were released.

More than a thousand

were murdered in Auschwitz.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/27/
world/europe/vatican-history-secrets-david-kertzer.html

 

 

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/27/
world/europe/vatican-history-secrets-david-kertzer.html

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Some of the bodies

being removed by German civilians for decent burial

at Gusen Concentration Camp, Muhlhausen, near Linz, Austria.

 

Men were worked in nearby stone quarries

until too weak for more, then killed.

 

T4c. Sam Gilbert,

May 12, 1945.

 

111-SC- 204811.

Pictures of World War II

US National Archives

http://www.archives.gov/research/ww2/photos/images/ww2-180.jpg

http://www.archives.gov/research/ww2/photos/?template=print#holocaust

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Near Linz, Austria    Mauthausen-Gusen

 

 Extermination camp

 

Between 1933 and 1945,

Nazi Germany and its allies

established

more than 44,000 camps

and other incarceration sites

(including ghettos).

 

The perpetrators

used these locations

for a range of purposes,

including forced labor,

detention of people

deemed to be

"enemies of the state,"

and mass murder.

 

Millions of people

suffered and died

or were killed.

 

Among these sites

was the Mauthausen camp.

 

Nazi Germany

incorporated Austria

in the Anschluss

of March 11-13, 1938.

 

Shortly thereafter,

Reichsführer-SS (SS chief)

Heinrich Himmler,

SS General Oswald Pohl,

the chief of the SS Administration

and Business Offices,

and SS General Theodor Eicke,

the Inspector

of Concentration Camps,

inspected a site

they thought suitable

for the establishment

of a concentration camp

to incarcerate,

as Upper Austrian Nazi Party

district leader

August Eigruber put it,

“traitors to the people

from all over Austria.”

 

The site was on the bank

of the Danube River,

near the “Wiener Graben”

stone quarry,

which was owned

by the city of Vienna.

 

It was located

about three miles

from the town of Mauthausen

in Upper Austria,

12.5 miles southeast of Linz.

https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/mauthausen

 

 

https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/
mauthausen

 

 

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/08/
opinion/holocaust-survivor.html

 

http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2013/feb/22/
helga-weiss-diary-nazi-death-camp

 

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2005/jan/28/
secondworldwar.lukeharding

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Austria

 

Ebensee extermination camp

subcamp of the Mauthausen camp

 

 

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/gallery/2009/feb/05/
war-crimes-nazi-holocaust

 

https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/gallery/
ebensee

 

https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/irn1000305

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Austria

 

Gunskirchen

- one of the many subcamps

of the Mauthausen concentration camp

 

 

https://www.ushmm.org/learn/timeline-of-events/1942-1945/
liberation-of-gunskirchen

 

https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/pa1035415

 

https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/pa8880

 

https://www.ushmm.org/collections/the-museums-collections/
collections-highlights/the-diary-of-lajos-ornstein/the-ornstein-family-experience-
during-the-holocaust-part-3

 

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/08/
opinion/holocaust-survivor.html

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Poland

 

Three million Jews

had been murdered

in occupied Poland by the Nazis

— half of all the Jewish victims

of the Holocaust.

 

Their assets were taken over

by Germans and in many cases,

after the war,

by Poles who were conveniently helped

by laws about abandoned property.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/12/
books/review/jews-in-the-garden-judy-rakowsky.html

 

 

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/jan/27/
breslau-1941-clandestine-photos-
tell-of-the-holocausts-upheaval-and-terror

 

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/12/
books/review/jews-in-the-garden-judy-rakowsky.html

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

North-eastern Poland

 

Sobibor death camp / forced labour camp

50 miles from Treblinka.

 

Nazi camp guard

John Demjanjuk / Ivan Demjanjuk    1920-2012

 

He was convicted

of being an accessory

to the murder of 28,060 Jews

and died in 2012,

while awaiting appeal.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/01/

us/allan-a-ryan-dead.html

 

 

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/01/
us/allan-a-ryan-dead.html

 

 

 

 

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/07/
obituaries/selma-engel-dead.html

 

 

 

 

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/14/
world/europe/philip-bialowitz-who-escaped-a-nazi-death-camp-and-testified-in-court-
dies-at-90.html

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/26/
travel/berlin-world-war-2.html

 

 

 

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/03/world/europe/
thomas-blatt-who-escaped-death-camp-during-revolt-dies-at-88.html

 

 

 

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/18/world/europe/
john-demjanjuk-nazi-guard-dies-at-91.html

 

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/mar/17/
john-demjanjuk-nazi-camp-guard-dies

 

 

 

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/13/world/europe/
13nazi.html

 

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/may/12/
john-demjanjuk-guilty-nazi-killings

 

 

 

 

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/dec/01/
holocaust-survivors-john-demjanjuk-trial

 

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/jul/03/
john-demjanjuk-trial-sobibor-death-camp

 

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/may/12/
john-demnanjuk-extradited-germany

 

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/mar/11/
demjanjuk-extradition-request

 

 

 

 

https://www.bbc.co.uk/films/2002/12/13/
sobibor_2002_review.shtml 

 

http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2001/jul/27/artsfeatures

 

https://www.theguardian.com/film/News_Story/
Critic_Review/Observer_review/0,,866033,00.html  

 

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/1673471.stm

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Film documentaire

 

Hitler et ses rançonneurs

Allemagne, 2011, 52mn

 

Réalisateurs:

Caroline Schmidt,

Stefan Aust,

Thomas Ammann

 

 

"Juifs d'échange" :

c'est ainsi que les nazis

désignaient

les prisonniers juifs qui,

par leur valeur marchande,

leur étaient plus utiles

vivants que morts.

 

C'est un chapitre peu connu

de l'histoire de la Shoah.

 

Dès 1943,

Himmler (1900-1945)

orchestre un juteux trafic :

 

certains déportés,

qui par leur nationalité

ou leurs relations

avaient un lien avec l'étranger,

sont échangés

contre des Allemands,

des armes,

ou simplement rachetés.

 

Au coeur du système,

le camp de Bergen-Belsen,

où sont regroupés ces juifs

jugés "utiles".

 

Mais quand les nazis

voient la défaite approcher,

la vie de ces marchandises humaines

n'a plus guère d'importance...

http://www.arte.tv/fr/programmes/242,dayPeriod=evening.html#anchor_4093268 - outdated link

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Northern Italy

 

Bolzano, Nazi concentration / transit  camp

 

 

In October

and November 1943,

German authorities

rounded up Jews

in Rome, Milan, Genoa,

Florence, Trieste,

and other major cities

in northern Italy.

 

They established

police transit camps

at Fossoli di Carpi,

approximately

12 miles north of Modena,

at Bolzano in northeastern Italy,

and at Borgo San Dalmazzo,

near the French border,

to concentrate the Jews

prior to deportation.

http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005455

 

 

https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/
italy

 

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/09/
world/europe/09seifert.html

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Poland    Fürstengrube subcamp

 

 

The Fürstengrube subcamp

was organized

in the summer of 1943

at the Fürstengrube hard coal mine

in the town of Wesoła

(Wessolla),

now part

of the city of Mysłowice

(Myslowitz),

approximately 30 kilometers

(18.6 miles)

from Auschwitz.

 

The mine,

which IG Farbenindustrie AG

acquired in February 1941,

was to supply hard coal

for the IG Farben factory

being built in Auschwitz.

 

Besides the old

Fürstengrube mine,

called the Altanlage,

a new mine

(Fürstengrube-Neuanlage)

had been designed

and construction had begun;

 

it was to provide

for greater coal output

in the future.

 

Coal production

at the new mine

was anticipated

to start in late 1943,

so construction was treated

as very urgent; however,

that plan proved

to be unfeasible.

https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/auschwitz-fuerstengrube

 

 

https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/
auschwitz-fuerstengrube

 

 

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/11/
obituaries/henry-bawnik-survivor-of-death-camps-and-an-inferno-at-sea-
dies-at-92.html

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Poland

 

Majdanek camp

 

 

During the entire period

of its existence,

the Majdanek camp

was under construction.

 

Construction on the camp

began in October 1941

with the arrival of about 2,000

Soviet prisoners of war.

 

Most of the Soviet

prisoners of war at Majdanek

were too weak to work;

virtually all were dead

by February 1942.

 

The SS also detailed

Jewish forced laborers

from the Lipowa Street camp,

located in the center of Lublin,

to help construct Majdanek.

 

On December 11-12, 1941,

the SS rounded up

more than 300 Jews

in the streets of Lublin

and selected 150 of them

as the first Jewish prisoners

to be incarcerated

in Majdanek.

 

During January

and February 1942,

the SS and police

selected Polish Jews

from the Lublin ghetto

and brought them

to Majdanek

for forced labor.

 

In January

and February 1942,

the first non-Jewish

Polish prisoners

also arrived

in Majdanek.

https://ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005190

 

 

https://ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005190

 

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/26/
travel/berlin-world-war-2.html

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/02/world/
israel-gutman-who-survived-and-documented-holocaust-dies-at-90.html

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

December 7, 1941

 

Poland

 

Chelmno Death Camp established

 

 

http://www.holocaustresearchproject.org/othercamps/
chelmno.html

 

https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/
chelmno

 

https://www.bbc.co.uk/history/worldwars/genocide/holocaust
_overview_01.shtml

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

September 1941

 

Ukraine

 

Babi Yar ravine outside Kyiv

 

Holocaust by bullets

 

 

Over two days

in September, 1941,

German soldiers,

assisted by

Ukrainian collaborators,

murdered 33,771 Jews

at the Babi Yar ravine

outside Kyiv.

 

The massacre

was one of the earliest

and deadliest episodes

in what is sometimes

called the “holocaust by bullets,”

a phase of the Nazi genocide

that took place outside

the mechanized slaughter

of the death camps.

 

These mobile killing squads,

known as Einsatzgruppen,

are estimated to have taken

at least 1.5 million lives.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/31/
movies/babi-yar-context-review.html

 

 

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/31/
movies/babi-yar-context-review.html

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Les 29 et 30 septembre 1941,

les Einsatzgruppen de Hitler

massacrent

33 771 juifs ukrainiens

dans le ravin

de Babi Yar, à Kiev,

simplement

parce qu'ils étaient juifs.

 

Quelque 100 000

autres malheureux

étaient exécutés

les semaines suivantes.

 

(...)

 

Le chiffre de 6 millions

de victimes de la Shoah

est retenu par la plupart

des autorités compétentes

sur le sujet.

 

L'historien américain

Raul Hilberg estime ce nombre

à 5,1 millions de victimes

avec la répartition suivante :

 

800 000

dans les ghettos,

 

1,3 million

exécutées

par les Einsatzgruppen

 

et 3 millions

dans les camps.

http://tvmag.lefigaro.fr/programme-tv/
article/documentaire/72335/shoah-les-allies-savaient.html
 - broken link

 

 

 https://www.radiofrance.fr/franceinter/podcasts/
les-dessous-de-l-ecran/
ce-qu-ils-savaient-les-allies-face-a-la-shoah-
7722995

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

10 July 1941

 

Poland

 

Jedwabne pogrom

 

The Jedwabne pogrom

was a massacre of Polish Jews

in the town of Jedwabne,

German-occupied Poland,

on 10 July 1941,

during World War II

and the early stages

of the Holocaust.

 

Estimates of the number of victims

vary from 300 to 1,600,

including women, children,

and elderly,

many of whom were locked

in a barn and burned alive.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
Jedwabne_pogrom

 

 

 

In 2000

the U.S.-based Polish historian

Jan Gross published “Neighbors,”

a book that presents substantial

evidence of a pogrom

in the Polish town of Jedwabne

on July 10, 1941.

 

Hundreds of Jews

who lived in the town

were murdered

by their non-Jewish

fellow townspeople.

 

Many of the victims were herded

into a barn and burned alive.

 

After a show of public remorse

led by Polish politicians

and members of the Catholic clergy,

outrage grew among Poles

who resented

the book and its author,

ascribing the massacre

instead to the SS.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/12/
books/review/jews-in-the-garden-judy-rakowsky.html

 

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
Jedwabne_pogrom

 

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/12/
books/review/jews-in-the-garden-judy-rakowsky.html

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

22 June 1941 - 7 January 1942

 

Operation Barbarossa / Операция Барбаросса

 

Under Operation Barbarossa,

the Germans invaded Ukraine

in 1941

and were hailed as heroes

for driving out the Russians.

 

Antisemitic propaganda

flooded the country

and helped smooth the passage

towards the acts of genocide

that would eventually mean

one in four of all the Jewish people

who died in the Holocaust

were murdered in Ukraine

in its few years

under Nazi occupation.

https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2023/sep/04/
ukraine-holocaust-ground-zero-review-
it-is-the-unfathomable-suffering-that-stays-with-you

 

 

https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2023/sep/04/
ukraine-holocaust-ground-zero-review-
it-is-the-unfathomable-suffering-that-stays-with-you

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

in June 1941,

(...)

the Germans invaded

the eastern half of Poland,

which had been occupied

by the Soviet Union.

 

With their Ukrainian collaborators,

the Germans began mass roundups

and machine-gun executions

of Jewish men.

https://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/20/
health/yehuda-nir-a-psychiatrist-and-holocaust-survivor-dies-at-84.html 

 

 

https://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/20/
health/yehuda-nir-a-psychiatrist-and-holocaust-survivor-dies-at-84.html

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

France    Drancy camp    1941-1944

 

The Drancy camp, named after

the northeastern suburb of Paris

in which it was located,

was established by the Germans

in August 1941

as an internment camp

for foreign Jews in France;

it later became

the major transit camp

for the deportations of Jews

from France.

 

Until July 1, 1943,

French police staffed the camp

under the overall control

of the German Security Police.

 

In July 1943

the Germans took direct control

of the Drancy camp

and SS officer Alois Brunner

became camp commandant.

http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005215

 

 

https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/
drancy

 

 

https://www.dailymotion.com/video/xu1bfp

 

http://www.ajpn.org/internement-Camp-de-Drancy-67.html

 

https://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=GvXogxTVIrU - MDLS - 15 September 2016

 

https://www.liberation.fr/societe/2012/11/14/
drancy-sous-la-cite-le-camp_860172/

 

https://www.lefigaro.fr/actualite-france/2012/09/21/
01016-20120921ARTFIG00382-
drancy-ouvre-un-memorial-face-a-l-ancien-camp.php

 

https://www.leparisien.fr/societe/
drancy-c-etait-un-vrai-camp-de-concentration-21-09-2012-
2174793.php

 

https://www.lexpress.fr/culture/livre/
a-l-interieur-du-camp-de-drancy-
par-annette-wieviorka-et-michel-laffitte
_1105993.html 

 

https://www.lefigaro.fr/blogs/malbrunot/2011/07/
alois-brunner-les-allemands-on.html 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Lithuania

 

 

 

Lithuanian Jews

with compulsory “J” badges separating them

from the Aryan population,

1941.

 

Photograph: AP

 

Eighty years after Kristallnacht,

why my family has become German again

G

Sat 10 Nov 2018    15.00 GMT

Last modified on Sat 10 Nov 2018    15.45 GMT

https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/nov/10/
eighty-years-after-kristallnacht-family-german-robin-lustig

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Nazis wasted little time

after pushing into Lithuania

in June, 1941

 

The Jews of Zagare

were herded into a ghetto.

 

Almost 1,000 Jews

from nearby towns,

including Siauliai,

were forced to join them.

 

On Oct. 2, 1941,

they were ordered

into the main square

before being taken into the woods

for execution by Nazi SS killers

and their Lithuanian accomplices.

 

SS Standartenführer Karl Jäger

stated in a report that day

that 2,236 Jews were killed

in Zagare.

 

In 1944, the Soviets,

having fought their way back,

examined a mass grave

and found 2,402 corpses

(530 men,

1,223 women,

625 children,

24 babies).

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/08/opinion/cohen-the-last-jew-in-zagare.html

 

 

https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/nov/10/
eighty-years-after-kristallnacht-family-german-robin-lustig

 

https://www.npr.org/2018/10/16/
657482569/excavation-of-lithuanias-great-synagogue-
highlights-a-painful-page-from-history

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/08/
opinion/cohen-the-last-jew-in-zagare.html

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

May 1941 - March 1945

 

France

 

Camp de concentration de Natzweiler

 

 

Le camp central,

seul camp de concentration

sur le territoire français,

est situé en ce qui était

alors l'Alsace annexée.

 

Sa nébuleuse

de camps annexes,

répartie des 2 côtés du Rhin,

est composée d'un réseau

de près de 70 camps,

plus ou moins grands.

http://www.struthof.fr/fr/le-kl-natzweiler/introduction-a-lhistoire-du-camp/

 

 

 

 

Les déportés du Kl-Natzweiler,

arrivés de toute l’Europe,

proviennent de tous les horizons.

 

En grande majorité,

ce sont des déportés politiques,

dont les « Nacht und Nebel »,

mais aussi des Juifs, Tziganes,

homosexuels…

http://www.struthof.fr/

 

 

 

The Germans established

the Natzweiler-Struthof

concentration camp

near the town of Natzweiler,

about 31 miles

southwest of Strasbourg,

the capital

of the province of Alsace

(in eastern France).

 

It was one of the smaller

concentration camps

built by the Germans.

 

Until construction was completed

in May 1941,

prisoners slept in the nearby former

Hotel Struthof,

hence the name Natzweiler-Struthof.

 

The camp held

about 1,500 prisoners.

 

Prisoners worked

in nearby granite quarries,

in construction projects,

and in the maintenance

of the camp.

 

Beginning

in the summer of 1943,

the Germans detained

many "Night and Fog" prisoners

in Natzweiler-Struthof.

 

The "Night and Fog"

(Nacht und Nebel) operation

represented

a German attempt to subdue

growing anti-German resistance

in western Europe.

 

Suspected resistance fighters

were arrested

and their families

were not notified;

 

the prisoners

simply disappeared

into the "Night and Fog."

 

Many prisoners

in the Natzweiler-Struthof camp

were members

of the French resistance.

 

In August 1943,

a gas chamber was constructed

in Natzweiler-Struthof

in one of the buildings

that had formed part

of the hotel compound.

 

The bodies of more

than 80 Jewish prisoners

gassed at Natzweiler-Struthof

were sent to the Strasbourg

University Institute of Anatomy.

 

There,

anatomist Dr. August Hirt

amassed a large collection

of Jewish skeletons

in order to establish

Jewish "racial inferiority"

by means

of anthropological study.

 

The gas chamber was also used

in pseudoscientific

medical experiments

involving poison gas.

 

The victims of these experiments

were primarily Roma (Gypsies)

who had been transferred

from Auschwitz.

 

Prisoners were also subjected

to experiments involving treatment

for typhus and yellow fever.

http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10007260

 

 

https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/
natzweiler-struthof

 

https://fresques.ina.fr/jalons/fiche-media/InaEdu03085/
le-camp-de-concentration-de-natzwiller-struthof

 

 

https://www.mediapart.fr/journal/culture-et-idees/010723/
jean-villeret-
l-indomptable-centenaire-qui-maintient-l-esprit-de-la-resistance

 

https://www.lemonde.fr/societe/article/2015/04/26/
au-camp-nazi-du-struthof-francois-hollande-
rappelle-que-le-racisme-et-l-antisemitisme-sont-encore-la
_4622977_3224.html

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Netherlands    1941

 

 

 

Over the course of two days in February 1941,

some 400 Jewish men were rounded up

by Nazi police in raids in Amsterdam.

 

Only a few survived the war.

 

Photograph: NIOD/Jon van der Maas Collection

 

She Discovered

What Happened to 400 Dutch Jews Who Disappeared

In a new exhibition, Wally de Lang, a Dutch historian,

has tracked what happened

to each of the men rounded up in the first Nazi raids on Dutch Jews,

whose fates have largely been a mystery for decades.

NYT

March 16, 2022    5:00 a.m. ET

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/16/
arts/design/nazis-dutch-jews-disappearance.html

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In February 1941,

nine months after

the German Reich invaded

and occupied the Netherlands,

the first pogroms began

on Dutch soil.

 

Local Nazi party members

posted bills

in shop and cafe windows

that read “Jews Not Wanted.”

 

Then they trolled

the Jewish Quarter,

breaking windows

and shouting jeers.

 

Young Jewish men and boys

prepared to protect

their neighborhood.

 

When Dutch Nazis

returned a few days later,

the Jews fought back.

 

Street fights went on for days

resulting in many casualties,

including

the death of one Dutch Nazi,

Hendrik Koot.

 

In retaliation, the Green Police

— German Nazi officers

in long green coats and high boots —

randomly grabbed

about 400 Jewish men off the streets

during a two-day sweep,

ultimately forcing them into trucks

and driving off into the night.

 

(...)

 

The February razzias,

or roundups,

were a prelude

to much worse to come.

 

These men were only

the first of some 102,000 Jews

from the Netherlands

to be murdered during the Holocaust,

a figure that represents 75 percent

of the Dutch Jewish population.

 

De Lang found

that 151 of the 400 men

were among

the early Jewish victims

of Nazi gassing experiments

at Hartheim Castle, in Austria,

where National Socialist

doctors and administrators

tested techniques

for killing people on a mass scale.

 

The British historian

Mary Fulbrook,

a professor of German history

at University College London,

said that the techniques used

at Hartheim

and other “euthanasia centers”

would later be employed

at extermination camps

like Treblinka, Sobibor

and Auschwitz.

 

The deaths of the men

who had been seized

during the raids in Amsterdam,

Fulbrook said,

came at the “crucial stage”

in the Nazi genocidal program,

when National Socialist leaders

made the transition

from “killing some Jews

to killing all Jews.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/16/
arts/design/nazis-dutch-jews-disappearance.html

 

 

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/16/
arts/design/nazis-dutch-jews-disappearance.html

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hendrik_Koot

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Czechoslovakia

 

Theresienstadt camp, outside Prague

 

 

The Theresienstadt

"camp-ghetto" existed

for three and a half years,

between November 24, 1941

and May 9, 1945.

 

During its existence,

Theresienstadt

served three purposes:
 

1) First,

Theresienstadt served

as a transit camp

for Czech Jews

whom the Germans deported

to killing centers,

concentration camps,

and forced-labor camps

in German-occupied Poland,

Belorussia,

and the Baltic States.

 

2) Second,

it was a ghetto-labor camp

to which the SS deported

and then incarcerated

certain categories of German,

Austrian, and Czech Jews,

based on their age, disability

as a result of past military service,

or domestic celebrity in the arts

and other cultural life.

 

To mislead about or conceal

the physical annihilation

of the Jews deported

from the Greater German Reich,

the Nazi regime employed

the general fiction,

primarily inside Germany,

that the deported Jews

would be deployed

at productive labor in the East.

 

Since it seemed implausible

that elderly Jews

could be used for forced labor,

the Nazis used Theresienstadt

to hide the nature

of the deportations.
 

 

3) Third,

Theresienstadt

served as a holding pen for Jews

in the above-mentioned groups.

 

It was expected

that that poor conditions there

would hasten the deaths

of many deportees,

until the SS and police

could deport the survivors

to killing centers in the East.

 

Neither a "ghetto"

as such nor strictly

a concentration camp,

Theresienstadt

served as a “settlement,”

an assembly camp,

and a concentration camp,

and thus had

recognizable features

of both ghettos

and concentration camps.

 

In its function

as a tool of deception,

Theresienstadt

was a unique facility.

http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005424

 

 

https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/
theresienstadt

https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/
theresienstadt-red-cross-visit

 

 

https://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=GvXogxTVIrU
video - MDLS - 15 September 2016

 

https://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/28/
world/europe/alice-herz-sommer-pianist-who-survived-holocaust-
dies-at-110.html

 

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/feb/23/
alice-herz-sommer-holocaust-survivor-dies

 

http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2014/02/24/
281965889/oldest-known-holocaust-survivor-dies-pianist-was-110

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/07/
movies/lanzmanns-the-last-of-the-unjust-hears-a-wily-survivor.html

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/26/
movies/the-last-of-the-unjust-about-a-jewish-camp-official.html

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/19/
world/europe/19gans.html

 

http://www.theguardian.com/world/video/2010/jun/13/
alice-herz-sommer-terezin-video

 

http://www.theguardian.com/music/2006/dec/13/
classicalmusicandopera.secondworldwar

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Flemish Nazi SS guard

now himself a prisoner in Breendonk

after Allied forces overran

the notorious concentration camp.

 

Location: Antwerp, Belgium

 

Date taken: September 1944

 

Photographer: George Rodger

 

Life Images

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Belgium    Breendonck Internment Camp

 

http://www.holocaustresearchproject.org/nazioccupation/
breendonck.html

 

https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/
breendonk
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Transportation of Jews to concentration camps

 

 

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/sep/09/
holocaust-jewish-transports-concentration-camps

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Concentration camps in France

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concentration_camps_in_France

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Poland

 

Skarzysko-Kamienna camp

 

 

Forced labor camp for Jews,

located in the Polish town

of Skarzysko-Kamienna.

 

The camp belonged

to the German Hasag concern.

 

It was established

in August 1942

and was liquidated

on August 1, 1944.

 

Altogether,

25,000--30,000 Jews

were brought

to Skarzysko-Kamienna,

and between

18,000--23,000

perished there.

http://www1.yadvashem.org/odot_pdf/Microsoft%20Word%20-%206028.pdf

 

 

https://www.yadvashem.org/odot
_pdf/Microsoft%20Word%20-%206028.pdf

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Poland

 

Plaszow concentration camp

 

Schindler’s List

 

Mieczyslaw Pemper (1920-2011)

 

Oskar Schindler (1908-1974)

 

 

The Plaszow camp,

established in 1942

under the authority

of the SS and police leaders

in Krakow (Cracow),

was initially

a forced-labor camp for Jews.

 

The original site

of the camp included

two Jewish cemeteries.

 

From time to time

the SS enlarged the camp.

 

It reached

its maximum size in 1944,

the same year that it became

a concentration camp.

 

Until that time,

most of the camp guards

were Ukrainian police auxiliaries

chosen from among Soviet soldiers

in German prisoner-of-war camps

and trained

at the Trawniki training camp

in Lublin.

http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005301

 

 

https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/
plaszow

 

 

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/12/
books/review/jews-in-the-garden-judy-rakowsky.html

 

https://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/19/
world/europe/19pemper.html

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

July 22, 1942

 

Warsaw Jews

Deported to Treblinka Killing Center

 

Between July 22

and mid-September 1942,

over 300,000 people are deported

from the Warsaw ghetto:

 

more than

250,000 of them are deported

to the Treblinka killing center.

 

Deportees are forced

to the Umschlagplatz

(deportation point),

which is connected

to the Warsaw-Malkinia

rail line.

 

They are crowded

into freight cars

and most are deported,

via Malkinia, to Treblinka.

 

The overwhelming majority

of the deportees

are killed upon arrival

in Treblinka.

 

In September,

at the end of the 1942

mass deportation,

only about 55,000 Jews

remain in the ghetto.

http://www.ushmm.org/outreach/en/article.php?ModuleId=10007716

 

 

https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/
deportations

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

JULY 15, 1942

 

SYSTEMATIC DEPORTATIONS

FROM THE NETHERLANDS BEGIN

 

 

Jews in the Netherlands

have been systematically

concentrated

in the Westerbork

transit camp.

 

The majority of Jews

sent to Westerbork

remain there

only a short time

before their deportation

to killing centers

in the east.

 

Beginning on July 15, 1942,

the Germans deport

nearly 100,000 Jews

from Westerbork:

about 60,000 to Auschwitz,

over 34,000 to Sobibor,

almost 5,000

to the Theresienstadt ghetto,

and nearly 4,000

to the Bergen-Belsen

concentration camp.

 

The overwhelming majority

of those deported

are killed upon arrival

in the camps.

http://www.ushmm.org/outreach/en/article.php?ModuleId=10007716

 

 

https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/
deportations

 

 

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/may/25/
anne-frank-full-story-bart-van-es

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Samudaripen

 

Romani genocide

 

As many

as a half million Romani people

were killed by the Nazis,

according to one estimate.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/29/
arts/roma-database-holocaust.html

 

 

 

500,000 Gypsies died

in Hitler's death camps

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2004/nov/29/
secondworldwar.biography
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/29/
arts/roma-database-holocaust.html

 

https://blogs.mediapart.fr/jean-claude-leroy/blog/270223/
samudaripen-le-genocide-des-tsiganes

 

https://www.npr.org/2014/05/20/
314293339/filmmaker-brings-light-to-roma-holocaust-victims-lost-to-history

 

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2004/nov/29/
secondworldwar.biography

 

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2004/jun/23/
secondworldwar.internationalnews 

 

 

 

 

 

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2002/aug/18/
artsandhumanities.germany

 

 

 

 

https://www.monde-diplomatique.fr/2000/10/
GANDINI/2512

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

After the Wannsee Conference

in January 1942,

the Nazis begin

the systematic deportation of Jews

from all over Europe

to six extermination camps

established

in former Polish territory --

Chelmno,

Belzec,

Sobibor,

Treblinka,

Auschwitz-Birkenau,

and Majdanek

 

 

https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/
wannsee-conference-and-the-final-solution 

https://germanhistorydocs.ghi-dc.org/
sub_document.cfm?document_id=1533
   

https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/
france

https://www.bbc.co.uk/history/worldwars/genocide/
hitler_audio.shtml

 

 

 https://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/31/
opinion/the-suffering-olympics.html

 

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/sep/09/
holocaust-wannsee-final-solution

 

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2004/may/23/
historybooks.features1  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

January 1942

 

Wannsee conference

 

 

Reinhard Heydrich,

chief of the Reich Security Main Office

(RSHA),

convenes the Wannsee Conference

in a villa outside Berlin.

 

At this conference,

he presents plans to coordinate

a European-wide

“Final Solution

of the Jewish Question”

to key officials

from the German State

and the Nazi Party.

 

The "Final Solution"

was the code name

for the systematic, deliberate,

physical annihilation

of the European Jews.

 

At some still

undetermined time in 1941,

Hitler authorized

this European-wide scheme

for mass murder.

 

Heydrich convened

the Wannsee Conference

to inform and secure support

from government ministries

and other interested agencies

relevant to the implementation

of the “Final Solution,”

and to disclose to the participants

that Hitler himself

had tasked Heydrich

and the RSHA

with coordinating the operation.

 

The attendees

did not deliberate

whether such a plan

should be undertaken,

but instead discussed

the implementation

of a policy decision

that had already been made

at the highest level

of the Nazi regime.

https://www.ushmm.org/learn/timeline-of-events/
1942-1945/wannsee-conference

 

 

https://www.ushmm.org/learn/timeline-of-events/
1942-1945/wannsee-conference

 

 

https://blogs.mediapart.fr/joelle-stolz/blog/280122/
il-y-80-ans-la-conference-de-wannsee

 

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/sep/09/
holocaust-wannsee-final-solution

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Poland

 

The Nazi-fighting women

of the Jewish resistance

 

 

More than 90 European ghettos

had armed Jewish resistance units.

 

Approximately

30,000 European Jews

joined the partisans.

 

Rescue networks supported

about 12,000 Jews in hiding

in Warsaw alone.

 

All this alongside

daily acts of resilience

— smuggling food

 writing diaries,

telling jokes to relieve fear,

hugging a barrack mate

to keep her warm.

 

Women, aged 16 to 25,

were at the helm

of many of these efforts.

 

I learned their names:

Tosia Altman,

Gusta Davidson,

Frumka Plotnicka.

Hundreds of others

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/18/
opinion/Jewish-women-Nazi-fighters.html

 

 

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/18/
opinion/Jewish-women-Nazi-fighters.html

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Poland    Trawniki camp

 

The SS camp at Trawniki

in the Lublin District

of the General Government

existed from July 1941

through July 1944.

 

It underwent four changes

of function and purpose

in the three years

of its existence.

 

From July

until September 1941,

Trawniki served

as a holding pen

for Soviet civilians

and soldiers.

 

From September 1941

until July 1944,

it was a training facility

for police auxiliaries deployed

in Operation Reinhard.

 

From June 1942

until September 1943,

it served as a forced-labor

camp for Jews

within the framework

of Operation Reinhard.

 

Between

September 1943

and May 1944

it was a subcamp

of the Lublin/Majdanek

concentration camp.

https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/trawniki

 

 

https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/
trawniki

 

 

https://www.npr.org/2019/01/11/
684324935/last-wwii-nazi-living-in-us-deported-to-germany-last-year-
is-dead-at-95

 

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/23/
nyregion/nazis-queens-holocaust-deportation.html

 

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/aug/22/
it-finally-happened-the-long-fight-to-expel-americas-last-known-nazi

 

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/21/
world/europe/nazi-guard-deported.html

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Once the Germans

invaded the Soviet Union

in June 1941

the mass killing of Jews

began.

 

Mobile killing units

known as Einsatzgruppen

conducted mass shootings.

 

With the assistance

of the German army

and police battalions,

as well as Lithuanian,

Ukrainian, Latvian

and Belorussian auxiliaries,

the Einsatzgruppen

murdered approximately

1 to 1.5 million Jews.

 

 

https://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005463

 

 

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/sep/09/
holocaust-analysis-deborah-lipstadt-germany

 

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/feb/22/
history-holocaust-books-jonathan-littell

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Poland

 

Treblinka killing center

 

 

Nazi death camp

where 875,000 people

were killed

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/feb/20/
samuel-willenberg-survivor-of-nazi-death-camp-treblinka-dies-aged-93

 

 

 

Quelque 870 000 juifs

ont été assassinés

dans ce camp en treize mois.

http://www.lemonde.fr/disparitions/article/2016/02/21/
mort-du-dernier-survivant-de-la-revolte-dans-le-camp-nazi-de-treblinka_4869172_3382.html

 

 

 

Operation Reinhard

(also known as Aktion Reinhard)

authorities chose the site

for the Treblinka killing center

in a sparsely populated area

near the villages of Treblinka

and Malkinia.

 

Malkinia was located

on the main

Warsaw-Bialystok rail line,

about 50 miles

northeast of Warsaw,

in the Generalgouvernement

(that part of

German-occupied Poland

not directly annexed

to Germany, attached

to German East Prussia,

or incorporated

into the German-occupied

Soviet Union).

 

In November 1941,

under the auspices

of the SS and Police Leader

for District Warsaw

in the Generalgouvernement,

SS and police authorities

established a forced-labor

camp for Jews,

known as Treblinka,

later as Treblinka I.

 

The camp also served

the SS and police authorities

as a so-called

Labor Education Camp

for non-Jewish Poles

whom the Germans

perceived to have violated

labor discipline.

 

Both Polish and Jewish inmates,

imprisoned in separate compounds

of the labor camp,

were deployed at forced labor.

 

The majority

of the forced laborers worked

in a nearby gravel pit.

 

In July 1942,

the Operation Reinhard authorities

completed

the construction of a killing center,

known as Treblinka II,

approximately a mile

from the labor camp.

 

When Treblinka II

commenced operations,

two other Operation Reinhard camps,

Belzec and Sobibor,

were already in operation.

http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005193

 

 

https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/
treblinka

https://www.hmd.org.uk/resource/
2-august-1943-uprising-of-prisoners-at-treblinka/

https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/gallery/
treblinka-uprising

 

 

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/nov/04/
himmler-execution-prisoners-britain-nazi-concentration-camp

 

https://www.lemonde.fr/disparitions/article/2016/02/21/
mort-du-dernier-survivant-de-la-revolte-dans-le-camp-nazi-de-treblinka
_4869172_3382.html 

 

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/feb/20/
samuel-willenberg-survivor-of-nazi-death-camp-treblinka-dies-aged-93

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Romania

 

Ion Antonescu    1882-1946

 

Romanian military officer

and marshal

who presided over

two successive wartime dictatorships

as Prime Minister and Conducător

during most of World War II.

 

He was shot by firing squad

for war crimes in 1946.

- Wikipedia, 28 February 2023

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ion_Antonescu

 

 

 

Dans Mein Kampf

Hitler insiste sur le fait

que le peuple juif

n’est pas un peuple nomade,

le nomadisme correspondant

en fait à une inscription

dans le territoire,

« territoire mouvant »

en l’occurrence,

où l’on se déplace en fonction

de possibilités de survivre

à tel ou tel endroit,

et donc évoluant

selon la fertilité des sols

et ce qu’ils offrent de pacage,

de moyen de subsistance,

tandis que,

selon le délire antisémite,

le peuple juif ne peut se résumer

qu’à son parasitisme.

 

Même si aucune référence à eux

n’apparaît dans l’ouvrage

propagandiste du futur dictateur,

pour l’idéologie hitlérienne,

ou même pré-hitlérienne,

pas plus que les Juifs,

les Tsiganes n’étaient considérés

comme dignes de l’Allemagne

et de sa jolie race arienne.

 

Et assurément

les Tsiganes étaient tout aussi

réfractaires au « travail »,

à la technique,

à tout ce qui permet

la maîtrise d’un territoire.

 

Ce qui est sûr,

c’est que, sous le régime nazi,

le sort des Tsiganes

ne fut pas meilleur

que ceux des Juifs.

 

Pour autant,

Shoah ou Samudaripen

sont-ils exactement

des équivalents,

faut-il les inscrire

dans un même génocide

ou les distinguer

l’un de l’autre ?

 

 

Le débat a lieu entre historiens.

 

Et en Roumanie, par exemple,

c’est une même commémoration

qui vaut pour l’holocauste

des Juifs et des Tsiganes.

 

Une Roumanie fasciste

où les Nazis ne furent pas attendus

pour qu’on y persécute

les Juifs et les Roms.

 

Sous le régime d’Antonescu

(1940-1944)

des milliers de Roms

furent déportés en Transnistrie

(région frontalière,

aujourd’hui indépendante).

 

Plus largement,

le mouvement dit

« La Garde de fer »

avait imprégné

une bonne partie

de la société roumaine

depuis les années 1920,

notamment

les jeunes intellectuels

tels que Mircea Eliade

et Emil Cioran.

 

En l’occurrence,

ce furent les Roms nomades

qui furent les premiers réprimés,

leur « nomadisme »

en étant le prétexte,

puis vinrent les Roms sédentaires,

c’était évidemment moins le mode de vie

que l’origine qui posait problème

aux idéologues racistes.

 

Ici il est question

de 36 000 morts de faim,

de froid ou du typhus,

là il est question

de 25 000 déportés en tout.

 

On voit bien

que les décomptes

ne peuvent être fiables

ni encore bien établis.

 

Toujours est-il

que cette population fut la cible

de ce régime féroce.

https://blogs.mediapart.fr/jean-claude-leroy/blog/270223/
samudaripen-le-genocide-des-tsiganes

 

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
Ion_Antonescu

 

https://www.lemonde.fr/livres/article/2023/05/07/
radu-ioanid-
une-partie-de-la-shoah-a-l-est-attend-toujours-d-etre-etudiee
_6172431_3260.html

 

https://blogs.mediapart.fr/jean-claude-leroy/blog/270223/
samudaripen-le-genocide-des-tsiganes

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

1941    Romania    Iași pogrom

 

 

 

 

Dir. Adrian Cioflâncã, Radu Jude

video    2020    Romania

 

This is a documentary essay

composed entirely of archive photographs

and documents of the first big massacre of the Jews in Romania:

in the city of Iași, on the 29th of June 1941,

more than 10.000 Jews were killed

- first by bullets, than by asphyxiation in freight trains.

 

The film, which is an attempt to use the montage of archive materials

in order to offer a deep and special view of History, has two parts:

The first part of the film could be titled "the encyclopaedia of the dead":

photographs of the people who were eventually killed

by the Romanian army and by civilians

are accompanied by voices

who recite the documents related to their fate in the massacre:

 

witness accounts, testimonies from the post-war trials,

interviews with survivors, private diaries etc.

 

The second part, shorter,

represents a montage of the remaining photographs of the actual massacre

(taken mostly by the German soldiers who were in town).

 

YouTube

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ooMRPSwPC_s

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Iași pogrom,

which over the course of a few days

in the summer of 1941

saw the massacre

of more than 13,000 Jewish civilians.

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2022/oct/18/
the-exit-of-the-trains-review-deeply-moving-first-hand-accounts-of-holocaust-atrocity

 

 

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2022/oct/18/
the-exit-of-the-trains-review-
deeply-moving-first-hand-accounts-of-holocaust-atrocity

 

https://www.lemonde.fr/culture/article/2020/01/16/
juin-1941-en-roumanie-
le-cauchemar-antisemite-devenu-realite
_6026135_3246.html

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

1941

 

Romania

 

Painter Hedwig Lindenberg /

Hedda Sterne (1910-2011)

narrowly escaped a roundup

and massacre of Jews

at her apartment building

and fled Bucharest for New York

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/12/
arts/design/hedda-sterne-artist-of-many-styles-dies-at-100.html

 

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/12/
arts/design/hedda-sterne-artist-of-many-styles-dies-at-100.html

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Un espion au coeur de la chimie nazie :

Zyklon B - Les Américains savaient-ils ?

 

Documentaire

Allemagne, 2010, 52mn, WDR

 

Réalisateur:

Egmont R. Koch, Scott Christianson

 

 

Au-delà

de l'histoire du gaz Zyklon B

qui permit d'exterminer

des centaines de milliers de juifs,

une enquête

sur les relations étranges

qu'entretenaient industriels

allemands et américains.

 

Le procédé pour fabriquer

le gaz Zyklon B

à base d'acide prussique

était détenu

par le trust allemand IG Farben,

qui regroupait

les plus grandes entreprises

chimiques d'outre-Rhin.

 

De son côté,

la firme américaine

Dupont de Nemours,

qui avait passé dès 1927

des accords avec IG Farben

en matière de recherche

et de développement,

travaillait aussi

sur l'acide prussique

et avait déjà testé

son produit en 1924

sur un condamné à mort.

 

Le 3 septembre 1941,

les SS font une expérience

de gazage sur des prisonniers

de guerre soviétiques

internés à Auschwitz.

 

Parallèlement,

Erwin Respondek,

un économiste

au service d'IG Farben

qui désapprouvait

la politique des nazis

mais qui désapprouvait

leur politique (sic),

commence à faire

passer des informations

sur les gaz asphyxiants allemands

via l'ambassade américaine située

tout près de son bureau berlinois.

 

Mais le gouvernement américain

ne semble guère s'en préoccuper...

 

De Berlin à Bâle,

de la Bavière

au lac des Quatre-Cantons,

une enquête fouillée

qui veut aussi

réhabiliter la mémoire

d'Erwin Respondek,

un Juste à sa manière

http://www.arte.tv/fr/
semaine/244,broadcastingNum=1336642,day=4,week=45,year=2011.html
- broken link

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Final Solution

 

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/jun/16/
final-solution-the-fate-of-the-jews-1933-1949-david-cesarani-review

 

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/feb/07/
final-solution-fate-jews-david-cesarani-review

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Initiating the Final Solution

 

The Fateful Months of September-October 1941

 

https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/bib88717  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Modus Operandi - L'Holocauste Belge

 

Film documentaire

 

Réalisateur: Hugues Lanneau

Belgique, 2008, 98mn

 

 

Comment,

au nom de la politique

du "moindre mal",

les fonctionnaires et responsables

politiques belges ont collaboré

avec l'occupant nazi

pour déporter les juifs.

 

Ce documentaire

retrace la mise en place

d'un dispositif de répression qui,

avec la complicité

des fonctionnaires belges,

a mené à la déportation

de près de 25 000 juifs,

dont à peine 5 % ont survécu.

 

En mai 1940,

les nazis envahissent la Belgique.

 

Le gouvernement fuit à Londres,

laissant l'administration

gérer le quotidien de l'occupation.

 

À la manière

d'un piège qui se referme,

les mesures discriminatoires

contre les juifs vont aller crescendo,

comme dans le reste de l'Europe :

 

diabolisation dans le discours,

exclusion des lieux publics,

interdiction d'exercer

certaines professions,

port obligatoire de l'étoile jaune,

etc.

 

L'administration belge

va appliquer

les ordres de l'occupant

et parfois même les devancer,

facilitant les premières rafles,

qui surviennent en 1942.

 

Les images d'archives,

les témoignages

d'une dizaine de rescapés

wallons et flamands

ainsi que les photos des déportés

appuient la réalité abstraite

des chiffres énoncés

tout au long du film

et donnent des visages

aux vingt-six convois

ayant quitté la Belgique

pour Auschwitz.

 

Le documentaire soulève

un point sensible

de l'histoire nationale :

 

les responsabilités

de l'administration belge

ont longtemps été niées

et les rares personnes jugées

ont bénéficié de non-lieux

ou de remises de peine.

 

Il faudra attendre

les années 2000

pour voir attribuer

des réparations matérielles

aux victimes de l'holocauste

en Belgique.

http://www.arte.tv/fr/programmes/242,date=24/8/2011.html - outdated link

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Otto Wächter and his family, 1948.

 

Photograph: Horst Wächter

 

Following the Trail of a Nazi Mass Murderer

Who Was Never Caught

NYT

Feb. 2, 2021

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/02/
books/review/the-ratline-philippe-sands.html

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Vatican > Vigna Pia monastery

 

Baron Otto Gustav von Wächter

 

8 July 1901, Vienna, Austria-Hungary

– 14 July 1949, Rome, Italy

 

Von Wächter,

though indicted in 1945

for mass murder,

is the man who escapes justice,

the one who gets away.

 

(...)

 

a committed Nazi,

a party member since 1923

who rose through the ranks

as Hitler consolidated his power

to be appointed

governor of Kraków in 1939

and then of Galicia in 1942,

directly accountable

to Heinrich Himmler

until the fall of the Nazi regime.

 

In 1945, wanted by the allies,

Von Wächter evades capture,

surviving as a fugitive

for three years in the Austrian Alps

before coming under the protection

of a Vatican bishop, Alois Hudal.

 

Hiding in Rome,

an anonymous tenant

in the Vigna Pia monastery,

Von Wächter

waits for safe passage

via the secret channels

by which Nazi refugees

were trafficked to Argentina

along “the ratline”,

a shadowy pathway out of Rome

in a city now abuzz

with Soviet and American spies.

 

Three months in,

Von Wächter is taken ill

under mysterious circumstances.

 

Two monks drop him off

at the nearby Santo Spirito hospital,

under a false identity.

 

Four days later, he’s dead.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/may/03/
the-ratline-by-philippe-sands-review-on-the-trail-of-the-nazi-who-got-away

 

 

 

a big fish who was never caught:

Otto Wächter,

a high-ranking Nazi official

in occupied Poland

who was indicted

on a charge of mass murder

after the war, but escaped.

 

Wächter had been chosen

by Hitler himself to govern Galicia

and on his watch

the Krakow ghetto was constructed

and more than 130,000 people

from the area,

including 8,000 children,

died in death camps.

 

After the war,

while much of the Nazi high command

wound up at Nuremberg

— tried, convicted and hanged —

Wächter spent more than three years

hiding in the Austrian Alps

before escaping to Rome.

 

He died there in 1949

in mysterious circumstances

under the assumed name of Reinhardt,

given last rites

by a prominent Austrian

Catholic bishop

who had helped him in Rome

— entirely aware of his identity,

sympathetic to his cause

and well connected at the Vatican.

 

Wächter had crossed the Alps

on foot in the snow

and made his way to Rome,

where he lived in a religious

residence.

 

He had intended to flee

to South America

via the so-called “Ratline,”

the clandestine network

that helped many prominent Nazis

evade justice with the aid

of Catholic Church officials,

some perhaps even inside

the Vatican.

 

Sometimes,

Sands discovers in his research,

the Ratline had the implicit

or explicit support of the United States,

which valued these men’s

intelligence about

the growing Soviet threat

and turned a blind eye

to their murderous pasts.

 

This is the swampy world

of postwar Rome

in which Wächter died,

believing himself “to be hunted

by Americans, Poles,

Soviets and Jews,”

as Sands writes.

 

 

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/02/
books/review/the-ratline-philippe-sands.html

 

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/may/03/
the-ratline-by-philippe-sands-review-on-the-trail-of-the-nazi-who-got-away

 

https://www.ft.com/content/7d6214f2-b2be-11e2-8540-00144feabdc0

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

L to R:

Orsenigo with Hitler and Joachim von Ribbentrop

12 January 1939

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Bundesarchiv_Bild_183-H26878,
Berlin,_Neujahrsempfang_in_der_neuen_Reichskanzlei.jpg

 

Primary source > Das Bundesarchiv

Original title: Neujahrsempfang Hitler's in Berlin.

- Vorn im Bild: Naziaußenminister Ribbentrop

im Gespräch mit dem Nuntius Orsenigo.

511-39

Archive title: Empfang der Reichsregierung

in der neuen Reichskanzlei

Dating: 12. Januar 1939

Signature: Bild 183-H26878

Inventory:

Bild 183

- Allgemeiner Deutscher Nachrichtendienst

- Zentralbild

http://www.bild.bundesarchiv.de/archives/barchpic/search/_
1253694805/?search%5Bform%5D%5BSIGNATUR%5D=Bild+183-H26878 - broken link

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Vatican

 

Pope Pius XII

 

Eugenio Maria Giuseppe Giovanni Pacelli    1876-1958

 

Pope from 1939 to 1958

 

 

Pius XII

never openly denounced

the Nazi slaughter of Jews

 

 

Cesare Vincenzo Orsenigo    1873-1946

Apostolic Nuncio to Germany

from 1930 to 1945

 

 

 

Shoah: ce que savait l'Eglise

 

Les archives secrètes

du Vatican sur Pie XII

sont enfin ouvertes

[ depuis mars 2020 ].

 

Un historien allemand

a déjà trouvé la preuve

que le chef de l'Eglise catholique

était informé sur la Shoah

dès septembre 1942.

https://blogs.mediapart.fr/joelle-stolz/blog/240420/
shoah-ce-que-savait-leglise

 

 

https://www.nytimes.com/topic/person/
pius-xii

 

 

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/sep/16/
letter-suggests-pope-pius-xii-knew-of-mass-gassings-of-jews-and-poles-in-1942

 

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/27/
world/europe/vatican-history-secrets-david-kertzer.html

 

https://blogs.mediapart.fr/joelle-stolz/blog/240420/
shoah-ce-que-savait-leglise

 

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/feb/09/hitlers-pope-pius-xii-holocaust

 

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/jun/24/nazis-run-gerald-steinacher-review

 

http://www.lemonde.fr/opinions/article/2010/01/19/
camus-pie-xii-et-le-langage-clair-par-franck-nouchi_1293784_3232.html

 

http://www.independent.ie/topics/Pope+Pius+XII

 

http://www.independent.ie/opinion/analysis/
was-pope-pius-a-moral-coward-or-a-silent-saint-1506041.html

 

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1078579/
Vatican-plan-honour-wartime-Pope-Pius-XII-
severe-blow-Catholic-Jewish-relations.html - 17 October 2008

 

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7624455.stm

 

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/2611847.stm

 

https://www.nytimes.com/2003/08/31/
us/new-look-at-pius-xii-s-views-of-nazis.html 

 

http://www.nytimes.com/1999/10/21/
world/pius-xii-said-to-feel-nazi-crimes-were-overstated.html

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

1940

 

German director Veit Harlan's

“Jew Süss”

 

 

perhaps the most notoriously

anti-Semitic movie ever made

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/02/movies/02suss.html

 

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/02/
movies/02suss.html

 

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2010/feb/25/
jud-suss-film-without-conscience

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Hitler/Jaeger File

German soldiers in Sofia, Bulgaria.

 

Location: Sofia, Bulgaria

 

Date taken: March 1941

 

Photographer: Hugo Jaeger

Hugo Jaeger was one of Hitler's personal photographers.

http://www.life.com/image/ugc1000272/in-gallery/27022

 

Life Images

http://images.google.com/hosted/life/l?imgurl=2730dbde89a2ce69  - broken link

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Beginning in July 1940,

Bulgaria instituted anti-Jewish legislation.

 

Jews were excluded

from public service,

discriminated against

in their choice

of places of residence,

and restricted economically.

 

Marriage

between Jews and non-Jews

was prohibited.

 

During the war,

German-allied Bulgaria

did not deport Bulgarian Jews.

 

Bulgaria did, however,

deport non-Bulgarian Jews

from the territories it had annexed

from Yugoslavia and Greece.

 

In March 1943,

Bulgarian authorities

arrested all the Jews

in Macedonia and Thrace.

 

In Macedonia,

formerly part of Yugoslavia,

Bulgarian officials

interned 7,000 Jews

in a transit camp in Skopje.

 

In Thrace, formerly

a Bulgarian-occupied

province of Greece,

about 4,000 Jews were deported

to Bulgarian assembly points

at Gorna Dzhumaya and Dupnitsa

and handed over to the Germans.

 

In all,

Bulgaria deported

over 11,000 Jews

to German-held territory.

 

By the end of March 1943,

most of them had been deported

to the Treblinka extermination camp

in Nazi-occupied Poland.

http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005451

 

 

https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/
bulgaria

 

 

https://www.theguardian.com/world/video/2012/apr/19/
holocaust-survivor-memorial-day-video 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Poland

 

 

 

Hitler/Jaeger File

Jewish women and children in Gostynin Poland

after the German invasion.

 

Location: Gostynin, Poland

 

Date taken: October 1939

 

Photographer: Hugo Jaeger

Hugo Jaeger was one of Hitler's personal photographers.

http://www.life.com/image/ugc1000272/in-gallery/27022

 

Life Images

http://images.google.com/hosted/life/l?imgurl=6fb3e6286c8dc577 - broken link

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Czech Jews Enduring the Holocaust

 

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/27/
movies/27transport.html

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

1939-1945

 

Le génocide des Tsiganes européens

 

 

Les Nazis

considéraient les Tsiganes

comme "racialement inférieurs",

et le destin de ceux-ci fut,

en de nombreux points,

parallèle à celui des Juifs.

 

Les Tsiganes

subirent l'internement,

le travail forcé

et beaucoup furent assassinés.

 

Ils étaient aussi

soumis à la déportation

dans les camps d'extermination.

 

Les Einsatzgruppen

(unités mobiles d’extermination)

assassinèrent

des dizaines de milliers de Tsiganes

dans les territoires de l'est

occupés par les Allemands.

 

En outre,

des milliers d’entre eux furent tués

dans les camps d'extermination

d'Auschwitz-Birkenau, de Chelmno,

de Belzec, de Sobibor et de Treblinka.

 

Les nazis incarcérèrent aussi

des milliers de Tsiganes

dans les camps de concentration

de Bergen-Belsen, de Sachsenhausen,

de Buchenwald, de Dachau,

de Mauthausen et de Ravensbrück.

http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/fr/article.php?ModuleId=75

 

 

 

Dans Mein Kampf

Hitler insiste sur le fait

que le peuple juif

n’est pas un peuple nomade,

le nomadisme correspondant

en fait à une inscription dans le territoire,

« territoire mouvant » en l’occurrence,

où l’on se déplace en fonction

de possibilités de survivre à tel ou tel endroit,

et donc évoluant selon la fertilité des sols

et ce qu’ils offrent de pacage,

de moyen de subsistance,

tandis que, selon le délire antisémite,

le peuple juif ne peut se résumer

qu’à son parasitisme.

 

Même si aucune référence à eux

n’apparaît

dans l’ouvrage propagandiste

du futur dictateur,

pour l’idéologie hitlérienne,

ou même pré-hitlérienne,

pas plus que les Juifs,

les Tsiganes n’étaient considérés

comme dignes de l’Allemagne

et de sa jolie race arienne.

 

Et assurément

les Tsiganes étaient tout aussi

réfractaires au « travail »,

à la technique,

à tout ce qui permet

la maîtrise d’un territoire.

 

Ce qui est sûr,

c’est que, sous le régime nazi,

le sort des Tsiganes

ne fut pas meilleur

que ceux des Juifs.

 

Pour autant,

Shoah ou Samudaripen

sont-ils exactement

des équivalents,

faut-il les inscrire

dans un même génocide

ou les distinguer

l’un de l’autre ?

 

 

Le débat a lieu entre historiens.

 

Et en Roumanie, par exemple,

c’est une même commémoration

qui vaut pour l’holocauste

des Juifs et des Tsiganes.

 

Une Roumanie fasciste

où les Nazis ne furent pas attendus

pour qu’on y persécute

les Juifs et les Roms.

 

Sous le régime d’Antonescu

(1940-1944)

des milliers de Roms

furent déportés en Transnistrie

(région frontalière,

aujourd’hui indépendante).

 

Plus largement,

le mouvement dit « La Garde de fer »

avait imprégné une bonne partie

de la société roumaine

depuis les années 1920,

notamment les jeunes intellectuels

tels que Mircea Eliade et Emil Cioran.

 

En l’occurrence,

ce furent les Roms nomades

qui furent les premiers réprimés,

leur « nomadisme »

en étant le prétexte,

puis vinrent les Roms sédentaires,

c’était évidemment

moins le mode de vie

que l’origine qui posait problème

aux idéologues racistes.

 

Ici il est question

de 36 000 morts de faim,

de froid ou du typhus,

là il est question

de 25 000 déportés en tout.

 

On voit bien

que les décomptes

ne peuvent être fiables

ni encore bien établis.

 

Toujours est-il

que cette population fut la cible

de ce régime féroce.

https://blogs.mediapart.fr/jean-claude-leroy/blog/270223/
samudaripen-le-genocide-des-tsiganes

 

(...)

 

Si le régime de Vichy

ne fit pas des Roms

sa cible principale,

ceux-là n’étaient déjà pas reconnus

comme de véritables citoyens,

considérés comme vagabonds

et donc contraints

par les mêmes règles.

 

Notamment cette loi de 1912

qui les obligent à détenir

un carnet anthropométrique

qu’ils ont obligation

de faire viser

à chaque déplacement.

 

« Ce carnet est délivré

par le préfet selon son bon plaisir

et il ne protège pas

les Roms étrangers de l’expulsion.

 

C’est une politique volontaire

de rejet des Tsiganes

par les pouvoirs publics.

 

En 1940,

ce fichage systématique

permit de franchir le pas

vers les camps de concentration

français. »

 

C’est en Alsace-Lorraine

que furent installés

les premiers camps de transit,

ainsi qu’un camp de concentration.

 

Beaucoup de Roms,

de multiples nationalités,

furent expulsés depuis ces camps.

 

Celui de camp

de Struthof-Natzweiler

possédait un four crématoire

et une chambre à gaz,

construite en 1941.

 

La police constate en 1943

que tous les Tsiganes

ont disparu d’Alsace.

 

Strasbourg,

à travers sa fameuse

université de médecine,

devint « la vitrine

de l’excellence médicale nazie ».

 

Des expériences

concernant le typhus

furent menées sur des Roms.

 

On sait par ailleurs

que le régime de Vichy

n’attendit pas

les consignes de l’occupant

pour réprimer les Juifs,

parfois à partir

de décrets anti-Tsiganes,

pour tout d’abord

les assigner à résidence.

 

 

En novembre 1940,

sous inspiration nazie,

une nouvelle ordonnance

concerne

les professions ambulantes,

qui mènera à l’arrestation massive

des Tsiganes.

 

Début 1941,

une dizaine de camps d’internement

sont ouverts et en état de fonctionner,

on y compte 1700 Tsiganes en tout.

 

À partir de novembre

de cette même année 1941,

inspiré du modèle autrichien,

on choisit de créer

des camps spécifiques

qui leur sont destinés.

 

C’est ainsi le camp de Saliers,

commune choisie pour sa proximité

avec Les Saintes-Marie-de-la-mer,

haut-lieu de pèlerinage des Tsiganes,

ou, au sud d’Angers,

celui de Montreuil-Bellay,

lequel renferma

jusqu’à 1000 prisonniers

à son plus fort taux de remplissage.

 

S’ils furent parmi

les plus importants,

ils sont loin d’être les seuls.

 

Le camp de Rennes

fut un des rares,

peut-être le seul à se situer

en plein cœur d’une ville.

 

On estime

qu’un quart des Tsiganes français

furent internés,

tandis que les autres

étaient assignés à résidence,

ou circulaient discrètement.

 

Il est à noter que les Tsiganes

« les plus menacés furent

ceux qui possédaient

un carnet anthropométrique ».

 

L’internement de ces « nomades »

fut pratiqué dans 57 départements.

 

« Le chef de camp est nommé

par arrêté préfectoral ;

il est placé

sous les ordres des préfets

et se conduit

en véritable chef d’entreprise.

 

Il reçoit

ses missions nomitativement ;

il est exhorté à être un guide,

un chef, un soutien.

 

Mais il ne contrôle pas

les gendarmes.

 

Les chefs de camp sont choisis

parmi les officiers

de l’armée en retraite ;

 

par exemple,

le chef du camp

de Moisdon-la-Rivière

sortait de la légion

des volontaires français (LVF)

créée par Doriot et Déat :

un triste portrait

qui confirme

la continuité idéologique

du national-pétainisme.

 

Les gardiens s’adonnent

à toute sorte de malversations

et ils entretiennent

les plus mauvaises relations

avec les déportés.

 

Les consignes qu’ils ont reçues

à leur entrée en fonction sont précises :

si un « nomade » tente de s’évader,

il faut tirer. »

https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/fr/
article/genocide-of-european-roma-gypsies-1939-1945

 

 

https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/fr/
article/genocide-of-european-roma-gypsies-1939-1945

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Poland

 

Belzec killing center

 

The small town of Belzec

was located

in southeastern Poland

between the cities of Zamosc

and Lvov (L’viv).

 

During the German occupation

of Poland in World War II,

this area was located

in the Lublin District

of the Generalgouvernement

(that part of German-occupied Poland

not directly annexed to Germany,

attached to German East Prussia

or incorporated

into the German-occupied

Soviet Union).

 

In 1940,

the Germans established

a string of labor camps

along the Bug (Buh) River,

which, until the German invasion

of the Soviet Union in June 1941,

formed the demarcation line

between German-

and Soviet-occupied Poland.

 

The headquarters

of this complex

was a labor camp established

on the outskirts of Belzec.

 

SS officials forced Jews

deported from Lublin District

and other parts

of the Generalgouvernement

to the Belzec labor camp

and its subsidiary camps

to build fortifications

and antitank ditches

along the Bug River.

 

The Belzec labor camp

and its subsidiaries

were dismantled

at the end of 1940.

 

In November 1941,

SS and police authorities

in Lublin District

began construction

of a killing center

on the site of the former

Belzec labor camp.

 

The choice of location

was dictated

by good rail connections

and proximity to

significant Jewish populations

in the Lvov, Krakow,

and Lublin districts

of the Generalgouvernement.

 

The facility was finished

in the late winter of 1942

as part of what later

would be called Operation Reinhard

(also called Aktion Reinhard),

the plan implemented by the SS

and Police Leader in Lublin

to murder the Jews

of the Generalgouvernement.

 

Belzec began operations

on March 17, 1942;

the first Jewish communities

deported to Belzec

were those of Lublin and Lvov.

 

Belzec was the second

German killing center,

and the first

of the Operation Reinhard

killing centers,

to begin operation.

 

Located along

the Lublin-Lvov railway line,

the killing center

was only 1,620 feet

from the Belzec railway station.

 

A small rail siding

connected the camp

and the station.

 

The SS staff

and auxiliary police guards

assigned to the camp

were housed

in a separate compound

near the railroad station.

https://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005191

 

 

https://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005191

 

 

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2016/04/05/
a-case-of-polish-jewish-relations/

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

1939-1945

 

North Netherlands    Westerbork transit camp

 

 

 

 

A map of Westerbork

as drawn by Mirjam Bolle during her internment there.

 

The Lost Diaries of War

Volunteers are helping forgotten Dutch diarists of WWII to speak at last.

Their voices, filled with anxiety, isolation and uncertainty,

resonate powerfully today

NYT

April 15, 2020

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/04/15/
arts/dutch-war-diaries.html

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

‘It’s important to understand where this girl was coming from’ …

Anne Frank in 1941.

 

Photograph: Anne Frank Fonds

Alamy

 

Unseen Anne Frank letters illuminate life before confinement

Translated into English for the first time,

letters to grandmother and others

reveal context of birthdays, boys and braces

as well as the rising Nazi menace

G

Sat 25 May 2019    07.00 BST

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/may/25/
unseen-anne-frank-letters-illuminate-life-before-confinement

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Anne Frank, left, and Mrs. Pick-Goslar,

then known as Hannah Goslar, in Amsterdam in 1940.

 

Photograph: Anne Frank Fonds - Basel via Getty Images

 

Hannah Pick-Goslar, a Presence in Anne Frank’s Diary, Dies at 93

The two young women knew each other

from kindergarten until their final encounter,

on opposite sides of a barbed-wire fence

in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.

NYT

Nov. 3, 2022    1:58 p.m. ET

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/03/
world/europe/hannah-pick-goslar-dead.html



 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Westerbork camp

was situated

in the northeastern part

of the Netherlands

in the Dutch province of Drenthe,

near the towns

of Westerbork and Assen.

 

The Dutch government

established

a camp at Westerbork

in October 1939

to intern Jewish refugees

who had entered

the Netherlands illegally.

 

The camp continued to function

after the German invasion

of the Netherlands in May 1940.

 

In 194

it had a population

of 1,100 Jewish refugees,

mostly from Germany.

 

From 1942 to 1944

Westerbork served

as a transit camp for Dutch Jews

before they were deported

to extermination camps

in German-occupied Poland.

 

In early 1942,

the Germans enlarged the camp.

 

In July 1942

the German Security Police,

assisted by an SS company

and Dutch military police,

took control of Westerbork.

 

Erich Deppner was appointed

camp commandant

and Westerbork's role

as a transit camp

for deportations to the east

began,

with deportation trains

leaving every Tuesday.

 

From July 1942

until September 3, 1944,

the Germans deported

97,776 Jews

from Westerbork:

 

54,930

to Auschwitz

in 68 transports,

 

34,313

to Sobibor

in 19 transports,

 

4,771

to the Theresienstadt ghetto

in 7 transports,

 

and 3,762

to the Bergen-Belsen

concentration camp

in 9 transports.

 

Most of those deported

to Auschwitz and Sobibor

were killed upon arrival.

http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=1000521

 

 

 

 Westerbork

was the last staging post

for nearly 107,000 Dutch Jews

before they were put on trains

to Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen

and other Nazi camps

in central and eastern Europe.

 

Only 5,000 returned.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/feb/12/
dutch-nazi-transit-camp-couples-who-married

 

 

https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/
westerbork

 

 

https://www.npr.org/2023/02/11/
1156279273/anne-frank-house-amsterdam-holocaust-antisemitic-projection

 

 

 

 

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/feb/12/
dutch-nazi-transit-camp-couples-who-married

 

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2022/feb/02/
the-betrayal-of-anne-frank-by-rosemary-sullivan-review-
who-tipped-off-the-nazis

 

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2022/jan/17/
anne-frank-betrayed-jewish-notary-book

 

 

 

 

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/may/25/
unseen-anne-frank-letters-illuminate-life-before-confinement

 

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/may/25/
anne-frank-full-story-bart-van-es

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Poland, Hungary > Antisemitism > Ghettos

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Poland

 

Stutthof concentration / extermination camp

 

 

In September 1939,

the Germans established

the Stutthof camp

in a wooded area

west of Stutthof (Sztutowo),

a town about 22 miles

east of Danzig (Gdansk).

 

The area was secluded:

 

to the north

was the Bay of Danzig,

to the east the Vistula Bay,

and to the west

the Vistula River.

 

The land was very wet,

almost at sea level.

 

The camp was situated

along the Danzig-Elbing highway

on the way to the popular

Baltic Sea resort town

of Krynica Morska.

 

Originally, Stutthof

was a civilian internment camp

under the Danzig police chief.

 

In November 1941,

it became

a "labor education" camp,

administered

by the German Security Police.

 

Finally,

in January 1942,

Stutthof became

a regular concentration camp.

 

The original camp

(known as the old camp)

was surrounded

by barbed-wire fences.

 

In 1943,

the camp was enlarged

and a new camp

was constructed

alongside the earlier one.

 

It was surrounded

by electrified

barbed-wire fences.

 

The camp staff

consisted of SS guards$

and, after 1943,

Ukrainian auxiliaries.

 

Tens of thousands of people,

perhaps as many as 100,000,

were deported

to the Stutthof camp.

 

The prisoners were

mainly non-Jewish Poles.

 

There were also Polish Jews

from Warsaw and Bialystok,

and Jews from forced-labor camps

in the occupied Baltic states,

which the Germans evacuated

in 1944

as Soviet forces approached.

 

Conditions in the camp

were brutal.

 

Many prisoners died

in typhus epidemics

that swept the camp

in the winter of 1942

and again in 1944.

 

Those whom the SS guards

judged too weak or sick

to work were gassed

in the camp's

small gas chamber.

 

Gassing with Zyklon B gas

began in June 1944.

 

Camp doctors also killed

sick or injured prisoners

in the infirmary

with lethal injections.

 

More than 60,000 people

died in the camp.

http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005197

 

 

 

Many prisoners

were left to starve

and freeze in the open air.

 

An estimated 63,000

to 65,000 people,

about 28,000 of whom

were Jewish,

were murdered at Stutthof,

mostly in gas chambers,

some by a shot

to the back of the neck,

for which the prison

had a specially built facility.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/dec/20/
nazi-camp-secretary-irmgard-furchner-stutthof-germany

 

 

https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/
stutthof

 

 

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/dec/20/
nazi-camp-secretary-irmgard-furchner-stutthof-germany

 

https://www.npr.org/2022/12/20/
1144315459/german-court-convicts-97-year-old-ex-secretary-at-nazi-camp

 

 

 

 

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/sep/30/
former-nazi-concentration-camp-secretary-96-faces-trial

 

https://www.npr.org/2021/02/05/
964426537/german-woman-95-charged-with-complicity-
in-more-than-10-000-murders-during-wwii

 

 

 

 

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/oct/27/
indifferent-horror-nazi-reistance-fighter-bruno-dey-stutthof

 

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/oct/25/
former-nazi-camp-guard-admits-seeing-people-being-led-into-gas-chamber

 

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/may/25/
anne-frank-full-story-bart-van-es

 

 

 

 

https://www.npr.org/2018/11/06/
664673163/94-year-old-accused-in-concentration-camp-murders-
goes-on-trial-in-germany

 

 

 

 

https://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/25/
arts/25pitt.html

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Germany

 

Neuengamme concentration camp

and subcamps

 

 

The SS established Neuengamme

in December 1938

as a subcamp of Sachsenhausen

concentration camp.

 

It was located on the grounds

of an abandoned brickworks

on the banks of the Dove-Elbe,

a tributary of the Elbe River

in the Hamburg suburb

Neuengamme,

in northern Germany.

http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/article.php?lang=en&ModuleId=10005539

 

 

 

The entire Neuengamme system

— which included scores of camps —

imprisoned some

100,000 men and women,

about 40,000 to 55,000 of whom died,

the Justice Department said.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/21/
us/us-deports-former-nazi-guard.html

 

 

https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/
neuengamme

 

 

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/21/
us/us-deports-former-nazi-guard.html

 

https://www.npr.org/2021/02/20/
969752794/u-s-deports-alleged-nazi-concentration-camp-guard-to-germany

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Ravensbrück

 

 

 

 Sunday Book Review

‘Ravensbrück,’ by Sarah Helm

NYT

APRIL 7, 2015

https://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/12/
books/review/ravensbruck-by-sarah-helm.html 

 

Related

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/apr/09/
the-bitter-taste-of-victory-in-the-ruins-of-the-reich-lara-feigel-review

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Ravensbrück

 

Northern Germany, 90 km north of Berlin

 

Women's concentration camp

 

 

Construction of the camp

began in November 1938

by SS leader

Heinrich Himmler [1900-1945]

and was unusual in that it was

a camp primarily for women.

 

The camp opened in May 1939.

 

In the spring of 1941,

the SS authorities established

a small men's camp

adjacent to the main camp.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ravensbr%C3%BCck_concentration_camp

 

 

https://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005199

 

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/12/
books/review/ravensbruck-by-sarah-helm.html

 

https://www.telerama.fr/monde/
germaine-tillion-cent-ans-de-resistance,27949.php

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

November 9-10, 1938

 

Germany

 

Kristallnacht / Crystal Night

 

Pogroms

 

Hitler’s gangs

attack Jewish property

 

 

Grynszpan maintained

he had marched

into the German embassy

on 7 November, 1938

and shot Ernst vom Rath

five times in revenge

for the thousands

of Jewish refugees,

including members

of his own family,

who had been expelled

from Germany

and were trapped

in horrible conditions

at the Polish border.

 

The Nazi propaganda minister,

Joseph Goebbels,

seized on Vom Rath’s murder

as a long-awaited opportunity

to unleash brutal violence

against Jewish shops,

businesses and synagogues,

citing the Paris killing

as proof of the deadly danger

Jews supposedly posed.

 

(...)


About 100 Jews died

during Kristallnacht,

and 30,000 were sent

to concentration camps.

 

The pogrom

is widely viewed by historians

as the start of the Holocaust

in which 6 million Jews

were slaughtered.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/dec/18/
herschel-grynszpan-photo-mystery-jewish-assassin-kristallnacht-pogrom

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

https://www.theguardian.com/world/kristallnacht

https://www.ushmm.org/learn/timeline-of-events/1933-1938/
kristallnacht 

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/
holocaust-kristallnacht/ 

http://www.bbc.co.uk/ww2peopleswar/categories/c55365/

http://www.bbc.co.uk/ww2peopleswar/stories/51/a7184351.shtml

 

 

https://www.npr.org/2018/11/14/
663059048/a-toy-monkey-that-escaped-nazi-germany-and-reunited-a-family

 

 

 

 

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/dec/18/
herschel-grynszpan-photo-mystery-jewish-assassin-kristallnacht-pogrom

 

 

 

 

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/nov/10/
kristallnacht-vienna-concert

 

http://www.npr.org/2013/11/09/
241903489/bearing-witness-to-nazis-life-shattering-kristallnacht

 

http://www.theguardian.com/theguardian/from-the-archive-blog/2013/nov/08/
kristallnacht-guardian-archive-1938

 

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/12/
lotte-passer-obituary?INTCMP=ILCNETTXT3487

 

 

 

 

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/apr/11/
night-broken-glass-kristallnacht-review

 

 

 

 

https://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/10/
world/europe/10germany.html 

 

 

 

 

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/sep/09/
holocaust-broken-glass-kristallnacht

 

 

 

 

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2008/aug/23/
history.secondworldwar

 

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2008/oct/22/
secondworldwar-germany

 

 

 

 

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2006/mar/19/
historybooks.features1

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

June 1938

 

Adolf Hitler ordered

Munich's main synagogue

to be demolished in June 1938

 

The synagogue

was one of the first in Germany

to be torn down during Hitler's rule,

authorities say.

 

It had been a center of Jewish life

and a major Munich landmark.

 

The massive building was designed

by prominent German architect

Albert Schmidt

and opened in 1887.

 

It had more than 1,500 seats

and served as the city's main synagogue,

Purin says.

 

And it had been in use

for barely a half-century

when Hitler ordered

its demolition in June 1938

— months before Kristallnacht

(or the November Pogrom)

wrought the destruction

of hundreds of synagogues

across the country.

 

Purin says

two main reasons explain

why this particular synagogue

was one of just a small handful

razed so early.

 

For one, the Nazi party,

which was founded

and headquartered in Munich,

simply didn't want

such a huge synagogue there.

 

"The synagogue was very close

to a main art gallery with a restaurant

where Hitler liked to have dinner

when he was in Munich," Purin says.

 

"And ...

he had to look out at the synagogue,

[which] he disliked."

 

Hitler deemed the structure an eyesore

and personally ordered its removal,

the Jewish Telegraphic Agency reported

at the time.

 

It also served as a "test" for Kristallnacht,

to see how the German public would react

to the destruction of a synagogue,

according to Purin.

 

There was no reaction, he said.

 

The Nazi movement was also

targeting Catholic

and Protestant churches,

he added,

and Hitler had ordered

the demolition of a Protestant church

around the same time,

which prompted considerable backlash.

 

"And so they saw

it's quite difficult

to start demolishing churches,

but no problem

 

with demolishing synagogues,"

he said.

https://www.npr.org/2023/07/06/
1186049726/munich-synagogue-hitler-demolished-found-river

 

 

https://www.npr.org/2023/07/06/
1186049726/munich-synagogue-hitler-demolished-found-river

 

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-66107481

 

https://www.lbi.org/griffinger/record/211377

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A Film Captures

Jewish Life in a Polish Town

Before the Nazis Arrived

 

A documentary based

on a home movie

shot by an American in 1938

provides a look at the vibrancy

of a Jewish community in Europe

just before the Holocaust.

 

Glenn Kurtz found the film reel

in a corner of his parents’ closet

in Palm Beach Gardens, Fla.,

in 2009.

 

It was in a dented

aluminum canister.

 

Florida’s heat and humidity

had nearly solidified the celluloid

into a mass “like a hockey puck,”

Kurtz said.

 

But someone

had transferred part of it

onto VHS tape in the 1980s,

so Kurtz could see

what it contained:

 

a home movie titled

“Our Trip to Holland,

Belgium, Poland,

Switzerland, France

and England, 1938.”

 

The 16-millimeter film,

made by his grandfather,

David Kurtz,

on the eve of World War II,

showed the Alps,

quaint Dutch villages

and three minutes of footage

of a vibrant Jewish community

in a Polish town.

 

Old men in yarmulkes,

skinny boys in caps,

girls with long braids.

 

Smiling and joking.

 

People pour

through the large doors

of a synagogue.

 

There’s some shoving in a cafe

and then, that’s it.

 

The footage ends abruptly.

 

Kurtz, nevertheless,

understood the value of the material

as evidence of Jewish life in Poland

just before the Holocaust.

 

It would take him

nearly a year to figure it out,

but he discovered

that the footage depicted Nasielsk,

his grandfather’s birthplace,

a town about 30 miles

northwest of Warsaw

that some 3,000 Jews called home

before the war.
 

 

Fewer than 100

would survive it.

 

Now,

the Dutch filmmaker

Bianca Stigter

has used the fragmentary,

ephemeral footage to create

“Three Minutes: A Lengthening,”

a 70-minute feature film

that helps to further define

what and who were lost.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/03/
movies/three-minutes-a-lengthening-documentary.html

 

 

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/03/
movies/three-minutes-a-lengthening-documentary.html

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

late 1930s

 

Jewish refugees in ShangaI

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In the late 1930s,

as the Nazis stepped up

their persecution of German

and Austrian Jews,

many countries in the West

severely limited

the number of visas

they granted to refugees.

 

But there was one place

refugees could go

without even obtaining a visa:

Shanghai.

 

Long known as an "open city,"

the Chinese port

was tolerant of immigrants.

 

Much of it was controlled

not by the nationalist government,

but by foreign powers

– including France,

Britain and the United States –

that had demanded

their own autonomous districts.

 

Jewish people had been moving there

since the mid-1800s,

and as long as people could reach it

– at the time, most likely by boat –

they could live there.

 

Shanghai would go on to harbor

nearly 20,000 Jewish evacuees

from Europe before

and during World War II.

 

But life there was not always pretty.

 

Japan had invaded China

earlier in the decade

and eventually seized

control of the entire city.

 

The Japanese army forced Jewish refugees

into one working-class district, Hongkou,

leading to crowded, unsanitary conditions

in which disease spread rapidly.

https://www.npr.org/2023/08/06/
1192118339/jewish-refugees-shanghai-world-war-ii

 

 

https://www.npr.org/2023/08/06/
1192118339/jewish-refugees-shanghai-world-war-ii

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Muhammad Amin al-Husayni    189?-1974

 

Mufti

(chief Muslim Islamic

legal religious authority)

of Jerusalem

under the political authority

of the British Mandate

in Palestine

from 1921 to 1937.

 

His primary

political causes were:

 

1) establishment

of a pan-Arab federation or state;

 

2) opposition

to further immigration

of Jews to Palestine

and Jewish national aspirations

in Palestine;

 

3) promotion of himself

as a pan-Arab

and Muslim religious leader.

 

In exile

between 1937 and 1945,

al-Husayni,

claiming to speak

for the Arab nation

and the Muslim world,

sought an alliance

with the Axis powers

(Nazi Germany

and Fascist Italy)

based on their

publicly recognizing

 

1) the independence

of the Arab states;

 

2) the right of those states

to form a union

reflecting a dominant Muslim

and specifically Arab culture;

 

3) the right of those states

to reverse steps taken

towards the creation

of a Jewish homeland

in Palestine;

 

and 4) al-Husayni himself

as the spiritual and political

representative of this pan-Arab,

Muslim entity.

 

In exchange,

al-Husayni collaborated

with the German

and Italian governments

by broadcasting pro-Axis,

anti-British,

and anti-Jewish propaganda

via radio to the Arab world;

inciting violence against Jews

and the British authorities

in the Middle East;

and recruiting young men

of Islamic faith

for service in German military,

Waffen-SS, and auxiliary units.

 

In turn,

the Germans and the Italians

used al-Husayni

as a tool to inspire

support and collaboration

among Muslim residents

of regions under Axis control

and to incite anti-Allied

violence and rebellion

among Muslims residing

beyond the reach of German arms.

http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10007665

 

 

 https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/
hajj-amin-al-husayni-the-mufti-of-jerusalem

 

 

 

 

 

Palestine

 

Documentaire

 

La croix gammée et le turban

Allemagne, 2009, 53mn

 

 

Défenseur

de la cause panarabe

dès les années 20,

Amin al-Hussein lutte contre

l'émigration des juifs

organisée par les Britanniques

dans son pays, la Palestine.

 

Affichant

une sympathie évidente

pour les thèses nazies

dès 1937,

il s'installe à Berlin,

fréquente

les dignitaires du IIIe Reich

et s'intéresse

à la solution finale (sic).

 

Il est également

à l'origine de la création

d'un corps d'élite musulman

destiné à combattre les Alliés,

incorporé à la Waffen SS

et composé de 12 000 hommes

recrutés en Bosnie et en Croatie.

http://videos.arte.tv/fr/videos/la-croix-gammee-et-le-turban--7105850.html - outdated link

 

 

https://www.monde-diplomatique.fr/carnet/2009-12-08-
Grand-mufti

 

https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/
hajj-amin-al-husayni-the-mufti-of-jerusalem
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Poland

 

Gross-Rosen concentration camp

 

 

The Gross-Rosen concentration camp

was originally established in 1940

as a subcamp of the Sachsenhausen

concentration camp.

 

The camp was named

for the nearby village

of Gross-Rosen.

 

Now called Rogoznica,

the village is approximately

40 miles southwest of Wroclaw

in present-day western Poland.

 

In 1941,

Gross-Rosen was designated

an autonomous concentration camp.

http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005454

 

 

https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/
gross-rosen 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Germany

 

Sachsenhausen camp

 

 

The SS established

the Sachsenhausen

concentration camp

as the principal

concentration camp

for the Berlin area.

 

Located near Oranienburg,

north of Berlin,

the Sachsenhausen camp

opened on July 12, 1936,

when the SS transferred

50 prisoners

from the Esterwegen

concentration camp

to begin

construction of the camp.

http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/article.php?lang=en&ModuleId=10005538

 

 

https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/
sachsenhausen 

 

https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/
gross-rosen 

 

 

https://www.npr.org/2022/06/28/
1108121373/a-german-court-sentences-101-year-old-to-5-years-
for-role-as-nazi-guard

 

 

https://www.theguardian.com/news/gallery/2021/oct/07/
hollywood-star-channel-crossing-thursday-best-photos

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


Submerged:

the Jewish woman

who hid from Nazis in Berlin

 

 

Marie Jalowicz Simon

was one of 1,700 'U-boats',

German Jews

who survived the war

submerged below

the surface of daily life.

 

Now she has told all

in a book

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/mar/16/
submerged-jewish-woman-hid-nazis-berlin
 

 

 

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/mar/16/
submerged-jewish-woman-hid-nazis-berlin

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

1933

 

Lager Heuberg

 

From March to December 1933

it was one of the first

Nazi concentration camps.

- 29 January 2021

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lager_Heuberg

 

 

 

Après la prise du pouvoir

par les nazis,

les prisons allemandes

se sont rapidement remplies

de prisonniers politiques.

 

Un phénomène encore amplifié

après l'incendie du Reichstag

le 27 février 1933,

qui a servi de prétexte

à persécuter

les opposants politiques

au nazisme.

 

Dans le cadre

de cette politique de répression

sont créés en mars 1933

les premiers camps

de concentration dont,

dans le sud-ouest

de l'Allemagne,

le camp de Heuberg.

 

Installé sur une zone

d'entraînement militaire

près du village allemand

de Stetten am kalten Markt,

il est édifié entre mars et août

1933.

 

Près de 3 400 prisonniers,

pour la plupart des communistes

et des sociaux-démocrates,

ont été enfermés à Heuberg

en "détention préventive",

souvent sans autre forme

de procès.

 

(...)

 

Contrairement à Auschwitz,

Heuberg n'était pas

un camp d'extermination.

 

Cependant,

les gardiens de Heuberg

étaient des membres des SA

et la torture ainsi que l'humiliation

des prisonniers

y étaient systématiques :

battus, torturés

et perpétuellement

menacés d’exécution,

ils subissaient

aussi des humiliations,

comme le fait à leur arrivée

de leur raser le crâne

pour y dessiner

une croix gammée au rasoir.

https://blogs.mediapart.fr/edition/patriotes-de-tous-les-pays/article/290121/
le-roman-des-venedey-46-lignes-de-fuite

 

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lager_Heuberg

 

 

https://blogs.mediapart.fr/edition/patriotes-de-tous-les-pays/article/290121/
le-roman-des-venedey-46-lignes-de-fuite

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Signature: "Bild 183-R99542"

Old signature: Bild 146-1971-006-01

Original title: ADN-ZB/Archiv

Deutschland unter dem faschistischen Terrorregime 1933-1945

Weltweit als Dokument der Schande

für die Nazi-Schergen wurde dieses Foto vom März 1933.

ein jüdischer Anwalt,

der noch auf die Polizei als Hüterin von Recht und Ordnung vertraut hatte,

wird von SA-Rowdys, die als Hilfspolizisten fungierten,

über den Stachus in München getrieben.

Der Mann, den das Bild zeigt,

der Münchner Rechtsanwalt Dr. Michael Siegel,

einer der ersten Opfer des braunen Terror-Regimes,

war einer der wenigen, der es überlebte,

obwohl er bis in die Kriegszeit hinein in Deutschland ausharrte.

Er ist am 15. März 1983 im 97.

Lebensjahr in Lima (Peru) gestorben.

Foto: Heinrich Sanden

Archive title: München.- Kahlgeschorener,

barfüßiger jüdischer Rechtsanwalt Dr. Michael Siegel unter SS-Bewachung

mit einem Schild (retuschierte Aufschrift:

"Ich werde mich nie mehr bei der Polizei beschweren")

auf der Prielmayerstraße laufend; vgl. Bild 146-1971-006-02

Dating: 10. März 1933

Photographer: Sanden, Heinrich

Origin: Bundesarchiv

http://www.bild.bundesarchiv.de/archives/barchpic/search/_1260350398/?search[view]=detail&search[focus]=1

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Bundesarchiv_Bild_183-R99542,_M%C3%BCnchen,_Judenverfolgung,_Michael_Siegel.jpg

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Bundesarchiv/Gallery

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Window of shop owned by Jewish merchant

w. sign reading JUDEN GESCHAFT (Jewish owned business),

sign is now required to be displayed by Nazi laws.

 

Location: Linz Oberdonan, Germany

 

Date taken: 1938

 

Life Images

http://images.google.com/hosted/life/l?imgurl=281f53d3b32636e2 - broken link

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

1933

 

The persecution

of Jews in Germany

begins

 

 

Berufsverbot

 

The 1933 law (prohibits)

Jews and political opponents

from seeking employment

in certain professions

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/mar/16/
submerged-jewish-woman-hid-nazis-berlin

 

 

 

In 1933,

Nazi students

at more than 30 German universities

pillaged libraries in search of books

they considered to be "un-German."

https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/
article/friedrich-wilhelm-forster

 

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/mar/16/
submerged-jewish-woman-hid-nazis-berlin

 

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/sep/09/
holocaust-analysis-deborah-lipstadt-germany 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Heidegger's 'black notebooks'

reveal antisemitism

at core of his philosophy

- March 2014

 

 

New publication shows

highly influential philosopher

saw 'world Judaism' as driver

of dehumanising modernity

 

He is widely regarded

as one of Europe's most influential

20th century philosophers

whose writings inspired some

of the important thinkers

of the modern era.

 

But almost four decades

after Martin Heidegger's death,

scholars in Germany and France

are asking whether

the antisemitic tendencies

of the author  of Being and Time

ran deeper than previously thought.

 

The philosopher's sympathies

for the Nazi regime

have been well documented

in the past:

 

Heidegger joined the party in 1933

and remained a member until the end

of the second world war.

 

But antisemitic ideas

were previously thought

to have tainted his character

rather than touched

the core of his philosophy

– not least by Jewish thinkers

such as Hannah Arendt

or Jacques Derrida,

who cited their debt to Heidegger.

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/mar/13/
martin-heidegger-black-notebooks-reveal-nazi-ideology-antisemitism

 

 

https://www.theguardian.com/books/
martin-heidegger
 

 

 

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/mar/13/
martin-heidegger-black-notebooks-reveal-nazi-ideology-antisemitism

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Virginie Linhart :

"Le monde d'avant-guerre

est un monde antisémite"

 

La réalisatrice du documentaire

"Ce qu'ils savaient.

Les Alliés face à la Shoah"

explique le silence

de Churchill, Staline,

Roosevelt et de Gaulle.

 

Le remarquable

documentaire

de Virginie Linhart

révèle l'indifférence

générale des Alliés

face à la Shoah.

Le Point.fr -

Publié le 26/10/2012 à 18:40

Modifié le 27/10/2012 à 10:12

 

 

 

"La préoccupation principale

est de gagner la guerre.

 

N'oublions pas

que le monde d'avant-guerre

est un monde antisémite.

 

On aurait démobilisé

les populations

si on avait clamé

qu'on faisait la guerre

pour stopper

le génocide juif.

 

Cela aurait donné d'ailleurs

du grain à moudre

à la propagande allemande

qui martelait que les Alliés

faisaient la guerre

pour sauver les Juifs.

 

Il faut aussi rappeler

que les Juifs d'Europe de l'Est

étaient considérés

comme des moins que rien.

 

De Gaulle

établit cette hiérarchie

entre les Juifs de l'Est

et les Juifs français,

dont il est persuadé

qu'il ne leur arrivera rien.

 

Morgenthau,

le secrétaire d'État

au Trésor de Roosevelt,

est un Juif qui se soucie

assez peu des Juifs de l'Est.

 

Quand la Suède

négocie le passage en pays neutre

de quatre mille enfants juifs,

elle spécifie "préférer

éviter les enfants juifs

d'origine polonaise".

 

Il y a donc

une hiérarchie très forte.

http://www.lepoint.fr/culture/virginie-linhart-le-monde-d-avant-guerre-
est-un-monde-antisemite-26-10-2012-1521550_3.php

 

 

http://www.lepoint.fr/culture/
virginie-linhart-le-monde-d-avant-guerre-est-un-monde-antisemite-26-10-2012-
1521550_3.php
- broken link

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

German antisemitism

before and after Hitler's rise to power

 

 

 

Hitler/Jaeger File

Hitler at the Berghof, Obersalzburg.

 

Location: Germany

 

Date taken: 1938

 

Photographer: Hugo Jaeger

Hugo Jaeger was one of Hitler's personal photographers.

http://www.life.com/image/ugc1000272/in-gallery/27022

 

Life Images

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/jan/27/
adolf-hitler-holocaust-atrocities

 

 

 

 

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/sep/09/
jewish-persecution-holocaust-hitler

 

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/sep/09/
holocaust-wannsee-final-solution

 

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/sep/09/
holocaust-broken-glass-kristallnacht

 

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/sep/09/
german-antisemitism-holocaust-second-world-war

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Antisemitism in the United States

 

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/
2993242.stm

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
Henry_Ford

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Austria-Hungary    Antisemitism

19th and Early 20th centuries


 

 

http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-free/pdf?res=9805E4DC1431E733A25755C1A9679C94689ED7CF

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=9E07EEDB173CE433A25753C3A9639C94649ED7CF

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

https://blogs.mediapart.fr/joelle-stolz/blog/301121/
luniversite-de-vienne-etait-devenue-bien-avant-1938-
un-bastion-de-lantisemitisme
 

 

https://www.nytimes.com/1895/05/30/
archives/antisemitism-in-austriahungary.html

 

https://www.nytimes.com/1899/01/16/
archives/austriahungarys-fate-
signs-of-the-growing-ascendency-of-russian.html 

 

https://www.cambridge.org/catalogue/
catalogue.asp?isbn=0521773083 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Related > Anglonautes > History >

20th century > WW2 (1939-1945)

 

Germany, Europe >

Antisemitism,

Adolf Hitler,

Nazi Germany / era,

Holocaust / Shoah,

Samudaripen

 

 

UK, British Empire

Kindertransport    1938-1940

 

 

 

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