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History > WW2 > 1939-1945
Axis powers, Germany, Europe > Antisemitism, Adolf Hitler, Nazi era, Holocaust / Shoah, Samudaripen
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warning: this page contains extremely graphic scenes of human suffering.
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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/
https://www.propublica.org/article/
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/
The Path to Nazi Genocide USHMM 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 1993
Schindler's List (1993) Official Trailer Video Liam Neeson, Steven Spielberg Movie
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/
500,000 Gypsies died in Hitler's death camps
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2004/nov/29/
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
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2015/apr/20/
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/05/
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/22/
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2015/apr/20/
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2015/jan/09/
documentaire
« À pas aveugles », la photographie comme acte de résistance
France, Allemagne, 2020, 110 minutes
(ce) long métrage de Christophe Cognet sorti en salles en 2023, (...) revient sur l’histoire des rares photographies prises dans les camps nazis par les déportés eux-mêmes, au risque de leur vie.
https://www.mediapart.fr/studio/documentaires/
https://www.mediapart.fr/studio/documentaires/culture-et-idees/
A vanished world:
Roman Vishniac's street photography of Jewish life from the 1920s to 1950s – in pictures
https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/gallery/2014/sep/17/
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/
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 live 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/
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/18/
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/
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/03/world/europe/
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/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/01/
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/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/01/
Antisemitism > Holocaust > Germany >
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Gerhard Bast 1911-1947
SS officer Gerhard Bast, scarred from duelling, in June 1944.
Photograph: Courtesy of Martin Pollack
My family and other Nazis My father did terrible things during the second world war, and my other relatives were equally unrepentant. But it wasn’t until I was in my late 50s that I started to confront this dark past G Tue 23 Jul 2024 06.00 CEST Last modified on Tue 23 Jul 2024 13.00 CEST
https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/jul/23/
The author’s mother, Hilda, and father, Gerhard, in Kočevje, southern Slovenia, in 1942.
Photograph: Courtesy of Martin Pollack
My family and other Nazis My father did terrible things during the second world war, and my other relatives were equally unrepentant. But it wasn’t until I was in my late 50s that I started to confront this dark past G Tue 23 Jul 2024 06.00 CEST Last modified on Tue 23 Jul 2024 13.00 CEST
https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/jul/23/
(Bast) was an Austrian lawyer, a Sturmbannführer in the Gestapo and a leader of a task force of the Einsatzgruppen.
After the war, Bast attempted to flee to South America.
Shortly before leaving, he decided to visit his family in Austria.
Before reaching the Brenner Pass, however, the smuggler transporting Bast abruptly decided to rob and murder him. - Wikipedia, 22 July 2023
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
Following in my grandfather’s footsteps, my father studied in Graz and like him joined the Germania fraternity, which after the first world war became even more radical.
In 1931, at 20, he became a member of the Nazi party, and at the same time, joined the SS, at this point a small organisation of thugs always ready to fight their political adversaries – socialists, communists, Christian socialists or the police.
Spurred on by the fraternity’s hard drinking and passion for duelling, my father got to know a new circle of friends, including Ernst Kaltenbrunner, later chief of the Reich security main office, a leading perpetrator of the Holocaust.
After the Anschluss in 1938, when Hitler’s troops marched into Austria and absorbed the country into the German Reich, my father got a job in the Gestapo in Graz.
He seemed an ideal candidate, a convinced Nazi since before Hitler seized power.
He had been imprisoned for his anti-Austrian activities, the same as my grandfather, a sure-fire recommendation for a career in the Gestapo, the SS and its intelligence agency, the SD.
After Graz he was assigned to different German cities.
In January 1941, he was sent to Linz, where he became acting chief of the Gestapo.
(...)
In a strange twist, my father’s career in the secret police came to an abrupt end in November 1943.
As chief of the Gestapo, he was invited to go hunting near the concentration camp of Mauthausen.
During the hunt he accidentally shot one of the beaters, a boy.
One might have thought that as a high-ranking Gestapo man and SS officer *he would have got away with a reprimand, but in these matters the Nazis were strict.
He was sentenced to four months in prison.
He was not required to serve out the sentence, but was instead sent to the front to lead a Sonderkommando, a taskforce whose function was to clean up behind the front and eliminate Jews, partisans and other so-called enemies of the regime.
It was a death squad.
That hunting accident near Linz marked a dramatic rift in his life.
Until this point, my father had been a so-called desk offender.
Now he became an active perpetrator.
(...)
In Białystok, the Sonderkommando 7a, also named Sonderkommando Bast after my father, took a group of old Poles as hostages and moved with them on to Warsaw.
They set up camp outside the city in the summer of 1944, where the Warsaw Uprising was raging, as citizens fought to liberate the city from Nazi occupation.
When I started researching this, I came across documents that threw light on my father’s role.
He was sent with his men into the city, heavily armed and in civilian clothes, to liquidate, as he put it himself, whoever they came across – unarmed civilians, insurgents or otherwise, men and women.
He showed no mercy. - Wikipedia, 22 July 2023
https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/jul/23/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/jul/23/
Ernst Kaltenbrunner 1903 - 16 October 1946
Kaltenbrunner testifying as a witness on his own behalf at the International Military Tribunal.
Wkipedia
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/
high-ranking Austrian SS official during the Nazi era and a major perpetrator of the Holocaust.
After the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich in 1942, and a brief period under Heinrich Himmler, Kaltenbrunner was the third Chief of the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA), which included the offices of Gestapo, Kripo and SD, from January 1943 until the end of World War II in Europe.
Kaltenbrunner joined the Nazi Party in 1930 and the SS in 1931, and by 1935 he was considered a leader of the Austrian SS.
In 1938, he assisted in the Anschluss and was given command of the SS and police force in Austria.
In January 1943, Kaltenbrunner was appointed chief of the RSHA, succeeding Reinhard Heydrich, who was assassinated in May 1942.
A committed anti-Semite, Kaltenbrunner played a pivotal role in orchestrating the Holocaust and Nazi genocide intensified under his leadership.
He oversaw the coordination of security and law enforcement agencies involved in widespread extermination, the suppression of resistance movements in occupied territories, extensive arrests, deportations, and executions.
He was the highest-ranking member of the SS to face trial (Himmler having committed suicide in May 1945) at the Nuremberg trials, where he was found guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Kaltenbrunner was sentenced to death, and executed by hanging on 16 October 1946.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/jul/23/
Holocaust by bullets
Photograph: 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:
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/
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 the 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/
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/25/
https://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/28/
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/
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/
https://www.theguardian.com/world/gallery/2024/jan/28/
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/
(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/
https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2023/sep/04/
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/25/
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/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
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/
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2013/feb/22/
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/gallery/2013/feb/22/
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/oct/16/
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/
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/05/
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/
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/11/
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/20/
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/long_reads/
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3606747/
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2007/aug/26/
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/
https://www.radiofrance.fr/franceinter/podcasts/
https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/
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/
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
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2009/02/04/
https://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/
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/may/05/
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
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/
The Middle East after the second world war
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/sep/11/
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/
https://www.ushmm.org/information/press/press-kits/
https://www.ushmm.org/information/exhibitions/
https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/
https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/photo/
https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/irn36450
https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/gallery/
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/
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
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/
https://www.yadvashem.org/yv/en/exhibitions/
https://www.yadvashem.org/yv/en/exhibitions/communities/
https://blogs.mediapart.fr/edition/patriotes-de-tous-les-pays/article/130520/
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/
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/nov/21/
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/
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/27/
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/
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/08/
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2013/feb/22/
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2005/jan/28/
Austria
Ebensee extermination camp subcamp of the Mauthausen camp
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/gallery/2009/feb/05/
https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/gallery/
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/
https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/pa1035415
https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/pa8880
https://www.ushmm.org/collections/the-museums-collections/
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/08/
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/
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/jan/27/
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/12/
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/
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/01/
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/07/
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/14/
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/26/
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/03/world/europe/
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/18/world/europe/
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/mar/17/
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/13/world/europe/
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/may/12/
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/dec/01/
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/jul/03/
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/may/12/
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/mar/11/
https://www.bbc.co.uk/films/2002/12/13/
http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2001/jul/27/artsfeatures
https://www.theguardian.com/film/News_Story/
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/
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/09/
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/
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/11/
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/
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/02/world/
December 7, 1941
Poland
Chelmno Death Camp established
http://www.holocaustresearchproject.org/othercamps/
https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/
https://www.bbc.co.uk/history/worldwars/genocide/holocaust
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/
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/31/
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/
https://www.radiofrance.fr/franceinter/podcasts/
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/
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/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/12/
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/
https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2023/sep/04/
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/
https://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/20/
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/
https://www.dailymotion.com/video/xu1bfp
http://www.ajpn.org/internement-Camp-de-Drancy-67.html
https://www.youtube.com/
https://www.liberation.fr/societe/2012/11/14/
https://www.lefigaro.fr/actualite-france/2012/09/21/
https://www.leparisien.fr/societe/
https://www.lexpress.fr/culture/livre/
https://www.lefigaro.fr/blogs/malbrunot/2011/07/
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/
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/
https://www.npr.org/2018/10/16/
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/08/
1941
Vilnius, Lithuania
It has not had the impact of Anne Frank’s classic journal, but another teenager’s diary from World War II has long provided a vivid picture of the miseries of life in a Jewish ghetto and the striking ways its doomed inhabitants endured.
Now, beginning on July 17, the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in Manhattan will focus attention on the diary of the teenager, Yitskhok Rudashevski, by making it the second installment in what the institute calls its “online museum” of Jewish history.
In June 1941, at age 13, Yitskhok, began chronicling daily life in Vilnius, Lithuania (Vilna in Yiddish).
He recorded the German army’s takeover of the city from its Soviet occupiers, depicting the confinement of Vilnius’s 55,000 Jews into two ghettos and documenting the first reports of systematic massacres at the forested suburb of Ponar, where ultimately 70,000 Jews, 8,000 Soviet prisoners of war and 2,000 Polish intelligentsia were shot or machine gunned to death by Nazi “einsatzgruppen” killing squads and Lithuanian volunteers.
Yitskhok was murdered at Ponary in October 1943.
His cousin located the diary, written in Yiddish, in an attic hideaway and gave it to the poet Abraham Sutzkever, who had rescued scores of precious books, manuscripts and letters from YIVO’s original library in Vilna.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/02/
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/02/
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…
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/
https://fresques.ina.fr/jalons/fiche-media/InaEdu03085/
https://www.mediapart.fr/journal/culture-et-idees/010723/
https://www.lemonde.fr/societe/article/2015/04/26/
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/
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/
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/16/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
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 - broken link
https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/
https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/
https://www.youtube.com/
https://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/28/
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/feb/23/
http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2014/02/24/
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/07/
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/26/
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/19/
http://www.theguardian.com/world/video/2010/jun/13/
http://www.theguardian.com/music/2006/dec/13/
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
Photograph: George Rodger
Life Images
Belgium
Breendonck Internment Camp
http://www.holocaustresearchproject.org/nazioccupation/
https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/
Transportation of Jews to concentration camps
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/sep/09/
Concentration camps in France
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
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/
Poland
Plaszow concentration camp
Schindler’s List
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/
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/12/
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/19/
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/
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/
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/may/25/
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/
500,000 Gypsies died in Hitler's death camps
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2004/nov/29/
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/29/
https://blogs.mediapart.fr/jean-claude-leroy/blog/270223/
https://www.npr.org/2014/05/20/
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2004/nov/29/
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2004/jun/23/
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2002/aug/18/
https://www.monde-diplomatique.fr/2000/10/
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/
https://germanhistorydocs.ghi-dc.org/
https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/
https://www.bbc.co.uk/history/worldwars/genocide/
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/31/
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/sep/09/
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2004/may/23/
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/
https://www.ushmm.org/learn/timeline-of-events/
https://blogs.mediapart.fr/joelle-stolz/blog/280122/
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/sep/09/
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/
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/18/
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/
https://www.npr.org/2019/01/11/
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/23/
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/aug/22/
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/21/
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/
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/feb/22/
Poland
Treblinka killing center
Nazi death camp where 875,000 people were killed
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/feb/20/
Quelque 870 000 juifs ont été assassinés dans ce camp en treize mois.
http://www.lemonde.fr/disparitions/article/2016/02/21/
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/
https://www.hmd.org.uk/resource/
https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/gallery/
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/nov/04/
https://www.lemonde.fr/disparitions/article/2016/02/21/
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/feb/20/
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/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
https://www.lemonde.fr/livres/article/2023/05/07/
https://blogs.mediapart.fr/jean-claude-leroy/blog/270223/
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/
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2022/oct/18/
https://www.lemonde.fr/culture/article/2020/01/16/
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/
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/12/
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/
Final Solution
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/jun/16/
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/feb/07/
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/
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/
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/
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/02/
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/may/03/
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,
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/_
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/
https://www.nytimes.com/topic/person/
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/sep/16/
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/27/
https://blogs.mediapart.fr/joelle-stolz/blog/240420/
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/
http://www.independent.ie/opinion/analysis/
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1078579/
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/
https://www.nytimes.com/1999/10/21/
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/
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2010/feb/25/
Hitler/Jaeger File German soldiers in Sofia, Bulgaria.
Location: Sofia, Bulgaria
Date taken: March 1941
Photograph: 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/
https://www.theguardian.com/world/video/2012/apr/19/
Poland
Hitler/Jaeger File Jewish women and children in Gostynin Poland after the German invasion.
Location: Gostynin, Poland
Date taken: October 1939
Photograph: 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
https://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/27/
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/
(...)
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/
https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/fr/
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/
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/
‘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/
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/
The Westerbork camp was located in the Dutch countryside in the northeastern part of the Netherlands.
It was in the Dutch province of Drenthe, near the towns of Westerbork and Assen.
This location was noteworthy because it was near the German-Dutch border and far from the major cities of Amsterdam, Rotterdam, and The Hague.
Westerbork as Refugee Camp Administered by the Dutch, 1939–1942
The Dutch government established a camp at Westerbork (Centraal Vluchtelingenkamp Westerbork) in 1939 to intern Jewish refugees, mostly from Germany.
The first refugees arrived in Westerbork in October of that year.
In April 1940, there were approximately 750 Jewish refugees housed in the camp.
Some of them were German Jews who had been passengers on the St. Louis ship.
In May 1940, Nazi Germany invaded and occupied the Netherlands.
In the first two years after the invasion, Westerbork continued to function as a refugee camp.
From May 1940 to July 1942, the camp remained under Dutch administration. Under the Dutch, conditions were fairly good. https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/westerbork
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/
https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/
https://www.npr.org/2023/02/11/
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/feb/12/
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2022/feb/02/
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2022/jan/17/
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/may/25/
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/may/25/
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/
https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/
https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/aug/20/
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/dec/20/
https://www.npr.org/2022/12/20/
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/sep/30/
https://www.npr.org/2021/02/05/
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/oct/27/
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/oct/25/
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/may/25/
https://www.npr.org/2018/11/06/
https://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/25/
Germany
Neuengamme concentration camp and subcamps
The SS established Neuengamme in December 1938 as a subcamp of Sachsenhausen
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/
https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/21/
https://www.npr.org/2021/02/20/
Sunday Book Review ‘Ravensbrück,’ by Sarah Helm NYT APRIL 7, 2015
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/12/
Related
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/apr/09/
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. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ravensbr%C3%BCck_concentration_camp
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/12/
https://www.telerama.fr/monde/
Charlotte Delbo France 1913-1985
Charlotte Delbo est une écrivaine française, née le 10 août 1913 à Vigneux-sur-Seine et morte le 1er mars 1985 à Paris 4e.
Résistante, elle a été déportée à Auschwitz-Birkenau de janvier 1943 à janvier 1944 puis à Ravensbrück de janvier 1944 à avril 1945.
Membre des Jeunesses communistes, issue d'une famille d'immigrés italiens, elle travaille avant la guerre comme assistante du metteur en scène Louis Jouvet.
Elle s'engage en 1941 dans la Résistance avec son mari Georges Dudach qui sera arrêté avec elle et fusillé au Fort Mont-Valérien en 1942.
Elle est déportée à Auschwitz-Birkenau dans le convoi du 24 janvier 1943 dit « le convoi des 31000 » qui comprend 230 femmes, résistantes pour la majorité d'entre elles.
Elle sera l'une des 49 rescapées de ce convoi.
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/
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.
(...)
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/
https://www.theguardian.com/world/kristallnacht
https://www.ushmm.org/learn/timeline-of-events/1933-1938/
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/ http://www.bbc.co.uk/ww2peopleswar/stories/51/a7184351.shtml
https://www.npr.org/2018/11/14/
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/dec/18/
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/nov/10/
https://www.npr.org/2013/11/09/
https://www.theguardian.com/theguardian/from-the-archive-blog/2013/nov/08/
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/12/
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/apr/11/
https://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/10/
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/sep/09/
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2008/aug/23/
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2008/oct/22/
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2006/mar/19/
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/
https://www.npr.org/2023/07/06/
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/
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/03/
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/
https://www.npr.org/2023/08/06/
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/
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-
https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/
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/
Germany
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/
https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/
https://www.npr.org/2022/06/28/
https://www.theguardian.com/news/gallery/2021/oct/07/
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/
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/mar/16/
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/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lager_Heuberg
https://blogs.mediapart.fr/edition/patriotes-de-tous-les-pays/article/290121/
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://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/
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/
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/mar/16/
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/sep/09/
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/
https://www.theguardian.com/books/
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/mar/13/
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.
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-
http://www.lepoint.fr/culture/
German antisemitism before and after Hitler's rise to power
Hitler/Jaeger File Hitler at the Berghof, Obersalzburg.
Location: Germany
Date taken: 1938
Photograph: 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/
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/sep/09/
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/sep/09/
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/sep/09/
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/sep/09/
Antisemitism in the United States
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
Austria-Hungary Antisemitism 19th and Early 20th centuries
http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-free/pdf?res=9805E4DC1431E733A25755C1A9679C94689ED7CF
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/
https://blogs.mediapart.fr/joelle-stolz/blog/301121/
https://www.nytimes.com/1895/05/30/
https://www.nytimes.com/1899/01/16/
Related > Anglonautes > History > 20th century > WW2 (1939-1945)
Antisemitism, Adolf Hitler, Nazi era,
1938-1940 > UK, British Empire >
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