Holocaust History

[Sixties Fan]

Pope Pius XII, the head of the Catholic Church during World War II, engaged in secret negotiations with Nazi leader Adolf Hitler through an intermediary, in the hope of reconciling the Church with the Third Reich, a new book has revealed.

The significant new revelations about Pius’ relationship with the Nazi regime contained in “The Pope at War: The Secret History of Pius XII, Mussolini and Hitler,” by the American historian David Kertzer, are based on research in the wartime archives of the Vatican, which were first made available to scholars in March 2020. Scathingly described by critics as “Hitler’s Pope,” Pius has been condemned by many historians for downplaying, overlooking and even enabling the Nazi genocide of the Jews.


(full article online)

‘Once We Have Peace, the Catholics Will Be More Loyal Than Anyone’: New Book Reveals Wartime Pope’s Message to Hitler During Secret Talks

The Vatican opened the secret wartime archive of Pope Pius XII on March 2, 2020. Photo: Eric Vandeville/Abacapress.com via Reuters. …

www.algemeiner.com

 

[Sixties Fan]

In January, The New York Times wrote a story about a new documentary about the discovery and preservation of a remarkable color home movie.

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.

It isn't so easy to find the actual footage as a whole, but I found a lower-resolution version with some added background music.

The kids are excited, making faces, jumping into the view, even hitting each other. Men and women help their elderly parents down the stairs of the synagogue. It is all utterly unremarkable except that nearly all of them would be gone within a few years.

This is a rare view of how dynamic and alive the Jews of pre-war Europe were, and how many distinct worlds were lost in the Holocaust.

Three minutes of color film footage of the Jews of Nasielsk, Poland, on the eve of the Holocaust (video)

Blogging about Israel and the Arab world since, oh, forever.

elderofziyon.blogspot.com

 

[Sixties Fan]

al-Hajj Amin al-Husseini visits the Trebbin concentration camp, 1942KEDEM AUCTION HOUSE

Photo 1ORIGINAL PHOTO: KEDEM AUCTION HOUSE

Photo 2, with Arthur Seyss-Inquart appearing second from leftKEDEM AUCTION HOUSE

From left, Fritz Grobba, Uthman Kamal Haddad, Amin al-HusseiniHELMUT LAUX, BERLIN

Mile Budak was the ideologue of Croatia’s ethno-radical, anti-Semitic Ustasha party, which ran a Nazi satellite state formed in 1941. On the left is Dr. Fritz Grobba, a former envoy to Kabul, Baghdad, and Jidda. He was a Protestant and not a member of the Nazi Party. He had been in charge of the Middle East in the German Foreign Office since early 1942.

Grobba and the two Arab leaders pictured had supported the anti-British coup in Iraq, which was followed by the al-Farhud pogrom in mid-1941. In it, 179 Jews were killed and many stores looted. Masterminds like al-Kailani and al-Husseini wanted to signal, there in a 2,500-year-old community, how Arabia’s Jews should be treated.

In the second photo is the politician Arthur Seyss-Inquart, who presided over Hitler’s Anschluss of Austria in 1938 and two years later served as commissioner for the occupied Netherlands. In the process, he oversaw the deportation of 100,000 Jews to death camps and the enslavement of half a million Dutch people, half of whom were forced to go to Germany as slave laborers.
After the Nuremberg trials in 1946, Seyss-Inquart ended up on the gallows for his crimes against humanity. Budak shared this fate a year earlier in Zagreb, where he was hanged as a war criminal for his policy of sending Jews, Serbs, Sinti, and Roma to death camps.

On the other hand, both Arab leaders continued their anti-Jewish and Islamist policies unimpeded after the end of the war: al-Kailani until 1965 and al-Husseini until 1974. Outside of Israel, Nazism had hardly been delegitimized in the Middle East, and its adherents often came to power after the war ended. The Iraqi al-Kailani staged a coup in Baghdad but failed. He was sentenced to death, then exiled to Beirut.

Al-Husseini also found himself in Beirut, where he was active in the World Islamic Congress, which he founded in Jerusalem in 1931 (he opened a Berlin branch a year later). With robust backing, he rose to become the first “Global Grand Mufti.” A mufti is a religious and legal authority who hands down rulings on everyday issues to believers in his jurisdiction. His late half-brother Kamil was the previous grand mufti of Jerusalem. Al-Husseini received the title in 1921, and in order to preserve and expand his transregional “Mideast-Europe” legacy after 1945, he chose as his representatives Said Ramadan for Europe, in Switzerland, and Yasser Arafat in the Middle East. The Mufti advised Arafat in 1968 to take over the Palestine Liberation Organization (which he headed until 2004) and “to liberate Palestine,” operating out of Gaza with Fatah troops.

(full article online)

Photographic Evidence Shows Palestinian Leader Amin al-Husseini at a Nazi Concentration Camp

An analysis of photographs sold at a Jerusalem auction house offers new insight into the role of foreign accomplices in Hitler’s Final Solution

www.tabletmag.com

 

[Sixties Fan]

They deconstruct the myth that depicts Boris as ”a savior of the Jews” – a myth later erected by both monarchists and Communists to advance political agendas. As Boris commented on June 22, 1943: “The great damage to humanity throughout the generations is caused by the Jewish spirit of profiteering” and related it to “the present global cataclysm.”


In a telegram to German foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop, Boris also consented to the deportation of thousands of Jews from Bulgaria itself in addition to those in the conquered territories. The other 25,000, wearing yellow stars, would be sent to camps to be conscripted into labor battalions, overseen and directed by the Bulgarian Army. Many subsequently testified to the brutality of their military overseers and the harshness of conditions.


Boris told Hitler that he would not send Bulgarians to fight alongside the Nazis in the assault on the Soviet Union, but, on the other hand, clearly thought that bartering Jews and other ethnic groups for territory was a worthwhile deal. An ethnically cleansed Greater Bulgaria would arise to take its place among the nations.

(full article online)

Bulgaria's tsar a Nazi-collaborator, not hero, new book reveals

Bulgaria's narrative is that Boris III was a savior to the Jews. But in reality, he allied with Hitler to regain territory in Thrace and Macedonia, lost during the Second Balkan War of 1913.

www.jpost.com

 

[Sixties Fan]

Here are six little-known facts.

Childhood “Heil Hitler” Gaffe​

One of the major plot elements in The Crown is the alleged Nazi sympathies of Elizabeth’s uncle, King Edward VIII, who reigned for less than a year in 1936. (He abdicated to marry American socialite Wallis Simpson; she was a divorcee, and at the time the Church of England didn’t allow the monarch to wed someone who’d been previously married.) Rumors have long swirled around Edward and Wallace - they took the titles Duke and Duchess of Windsor - that they sympathized with the Nazis in the run-up to World War II.

There’s plenty of evidence that the rumors do have some substance. In her 2008 book Edward VIII, biographer Frances Donaldson notes that in 1937, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor visited Hitler at his vacation home and Edward saluted Hitler throughout their stay. After World War II, the Allies found evidence of a top secret German project nicknamed “Operation Willi” which planned to overthrow Edwards’s successor (and Queen Elizabeth II’s father) King George VI and reinstall Edward on the throne.

It seems that the pro-Hitler feelings of some of her relatives influenced a very young Queen Elizabeth. In 2015, Britain’s newspaper The Sun released a private royal family video of a seven-year-old Elizabeth, along with her older younger Princess Margaret, her mother Queen Elizabeth, and her uncle Edward VIII, performing Nazi salutes. When the video came to light, Queen Elizabeth was said by the Palace to be “livid” and emphasized her extreme youth in the video. At age seven, back in 1933, she could hardly have been aware of how vile it was to make a Nazi salute.

Her Mother-in-Law Saved Jews During the Holocaust​

The third season of The Crown features a Greek-speaking, tough talking nun. Shockingly, that nun was Queen Elizabeth II’s mother in law, Princess Alice of Battenberg. Even more surprisingly, The Crown never explores Princess Alice’s heroism during the Holocaust, when she saved Jews by sheltering them in her home in Nazi-occupied Athens. It’s an amazing story that ought to be known.

Born in 1885 in Windsor Castle - where Queen Elizabeth II now lives - Princess Alice was Queen Victoria’s great granddaughter. She was deaf - a fact that the royal family hid - and learned to lip read as a child. Historians have speculated that this might have made Princess Alice more sensitive to other people who were different from the mainstream in some way.

(full article online)

Queen Elizabeth II and the Jews - aish.com

Six facts about the monarch’s tumultuous relationship with Jews, on the occasion of her Platinum Jubilee.

aish.com

 

[Sixties Fan]

The Nazi Holocaust that devastated European Jewry and virtually destroyed its centuries-old culture also wiped out the great European population centers of Sephardic (or Judeo-Spanish) Jewry and led to the almost complete demise of its unique language (Ladino) and traditions. Sephardic Jewish communities from France and the Netherlands in the northwest to Yugoslavia and Greece in the southeast almost disappeared.

On the eve of World War II, the European Sephardic community was concentrated in the Balkan countries of Greece, Yugoslavia and Bulgaria. Its leading centers were in Salonika, Sarajevo, Belgrade and Sofia. The experience of the Balkan Jewish communities during the war varied greatly and depended on the type of regime under which they fell.

The Jewish communities of Serbia and northern Greece, including the 50,000 Jews of Salonika, fell under direct German occupation in April 1941 and bore the full weight and intensity of Nazi repressive measures from dispossession, humiliation, and forced labor to hostage taking, and finally deportation to Auschwitz-Birkenau and extermination in March-August 1943.

(full article online)

The Sephardic Experience During the Holocaust | My Jewish Learning

The Nazi Holocaust that devastated European Jewry and virtually destroyed its centuries-old culture also wiped out the great European population ...

www.myjewishlearning.com

 

[Sixties Fan]

In 1960, Life magazine published small excerpts of transcripts of tapes from a fellow Nazi interviewing Adolf Eichmann in Argentina in the 1950s.

This excerpt explains the similarities between Nazis in the 1930s and the fanatic Israel haters today.

We did not devise the yellow star to put pressure on the Jews themselves. On the contrary, its purpose was to control the natural tendency of our German people to come to the aid of someone in trouble. The marking was intended to hinder any such assistance to Jews who were being harassed. We wanted Germans to feel embarrassed, to feel afraid of having any contact with Jews. So our administration was quite happy to distribute these bolts of yellow cloth and to regulate the time limit by which the stars would have to be worn.

The yellow star was not to punish the Jews, but to make it difficult for non-Jews to express sympathy with them.

Today, the people who advocate boycotts of Israel aren't primarily trying to hurt Israel. They are trying to make it difficult for other people to be pro-Israel.

Those who accuse Israel of "apartheid" or "ethnic cleansing" or "genocide" aren't trying to get Israel to treat Palestinians better. They are trying to make tar anyone who supports Israel's right to exist as supporting war crimes themselves.

"We wanted Germans to feel embarrassed, to feel afraid of having any contact with Jews. " Is there any better description of the purpose of BDS and anti-Zionism? Just look at how celebrities who visit Israel are treated by the "woke" crowd.

It is exactly the same.

Only exceptional people could stand up to the social pressure to ostracize Jews in Germany. And only exceptional people can stand up for Israel in Leftist circles. The weaker ones in both cases cower, and then it is but a small step to claim that their cowardice is really a moral, righteous position.

The yellow star was not meant to hurt Jews. It represents the original cancel culture.

(full article online)

The purpose of the yellow star in Nazi Germany was EXACTLY the same as that of BDS today

Blogging about Israel and the Arab world since, oh, forever.

elderofziyon.blogspot.com

 

[irosie91]

In 1960, Life magazine published small excerpts of transcripts of tapes from a fellow Nazi interviewing Adolf Eichmann in Argentina in the 1950s.

This excerpt explains the similarities between Nazis in the 1930s and the fanatic Israel haters today.


The yellow star was not to punish the Jews, but to make it difficult for non-Jews to express sympathy with them.

Today, the people who advocate boycotts of Israel aren't primarily trying to hurt Israel. They are trying to make it difficult for other people to be pro-Israel.

Those who accuse Israel of "apartheid" or "ethnic cleansing" or "genocide" aren't trying to get Israel to treat Palestinians better. They are trying to make tar anyone who supports Israel's right to exist as supporting war crimes themselves.

"We wanted Germans to feel embarrassed, to feel afraid of having any contact with Jews. " Is there any better description of the purpose of BDS and anti-Zionism? Just look at how celebrities who visit Israel are treated by the "woke" crowd.

It is exactly the same.

Only exceptional people could stand up to the social pressure to ostracize Jews in Germany. And only exceptional people can stand up for Israel in Leftist circles. The weaker ones in both cases cower, and then it is but a small step to claim that their cowardice is really a moral, righteous position.

The yellow star was not meant to hurt Jews. It represents the original cancel culture.

(full article online)

The purpose of the yellow star in Nazi Germany was EXACTLY the same as that of BDS today

Blogging about Israel and the Arab world since, oh, forever.

elderofziyon.blogspot.com

for the miserable record----it was not the germans who invented the COLOR YELLOW for jews----it actually goes all the way back to Constantine.
Muhummad aped the filth of justinian law when he
invented shariah shit. Adolf was just doing that which was done in his world

 

[Sixties Fan]

 

[Sixties Fan]

 

[Sixties Fan]

Jack Garfein in the trailer for “The Wild One.” Photo: YouTube screenshot.
A documentary about the life of Jack Garfein — a Holocaust survivor, Broadway and film director, and Actors Studio co-founder — had its world premiere on Saturday at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York City.

“The Wild One” is narrated by Willem Dafoe and a teaser trailer for the film was released last week.

The documentary traces Garfein’s life from his upbringing in Czechoslovakia, his family fleeing Nazi persecution, his experience surviving Auschwitz and other concentration camps, and his face-to-face encounter with Nazi SS physician Josef Mengele, who performed medical experiments on Jewish inmates and prisoners. The film also explores his arrival in New York in 1946 at the age of 16, his partnership with Hollywood icon Lee Strasberg, marriage to actress Carroll Baker, and friendship with Marilyn Monroe.


(full article online)

Documentary About Holocaust Survivor and Hollywood Filmmaker Premieres at Tribeca Film Festival

Jack Garfein in the trailer for “The Wild One.” Photo: YouTube screenshot. A documentary about the life of Jack Garfein …

www.algemeiner.com

 

[Sixties Fan]

Inside the exhibit “Ghost Army: The Combat Con Artists of World War II.” Photo: National Archives; The National WWII Museum.

A top secret unit of the US Army known as the “Ghost Army,” whose main goal was to deceive and trick Nazi forces in Europe during World War II, is the focus of a new exhibition that opened Thursday at the Illinois Holocaust Museum.

“Ghost Army: The Combat Con Artists of World War II” shares information about the US Army’s 23rd Headquarters Special Troops, which was activated on January 20, 1944, and became the first mobile, multimedia, tactical deception unit in the history of the American army. The selected group of 82 officers and 1,023 men — consisting of artists, engineers, professional soldiers, and draftees — carried out covert operations across Europe that saved thousands of lives and played a crucial role in helping the Allied forces be victorious in World War II.

New Exhibit at Illinois Holocaust Museum Highlights Nazi-Deceiving ‘Ghost Army’ in World War II

Inside the exhibit “Ghost Army: The Combat Con Artists of World War II.” Photo: National Archives; The National WWII Museum. …

www.algemeiner.com

 

[Sixties Fan]

Matt Lucas has uncovered his family’s extraordinary connection to the story of Anne Frank on the BBC1 show Who Do You Think You Are?

Viewers on Thursday night watched as the Jewish comedy star learned that he was related to Werner Goldschmidt, a lodger that the Frank family took in before they went into hiding.

Lucas had read the diary as a child without knowing about the connection.

The star had set out on his genealogical quest believing his German grandmother Margot had left much of the family’s story untold before she died in 1999.

Though they had a special bond and talked to each other at length, she never spoke to her grandson of her childhood in Berlin, or of her many cousins.

Lucas travelled to Germany and Holland to find out what happened to Margot, who came to Britain to work as a nurse in 1939.

https://www.thejc.com/news/news/matt-lucas-astonished-to-learn-his-cousin-features-in-anne-franks-diary-58rmv3RAojP69c2QHqj5G9

 

[Sixties Fan]

In the last two years, film producer Kobi Sitt has been constantly preoccupied with the story of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann, who was hanged in Israel on May 31, 1962, after being convicted of committing crimes against humanity. The international trial was held in Jerusalem’s Binyenei Ha’uma building and was the only time in Israel’s history that a person was sentenced to death.


While working on this documentary, The Devil’s Confession: The Lost Eichmann Tapes, Sitt made use of long-lost interview recordings that had never been heard. In the recordings, Eichmann is heard describing the war crimes he’d carried out during World War II.


The recordings were made in 1957 by Dutch Nazi journalist Willem Sassen in Buenos Aires, Argentina, where Eichmann was hiding out. These recordings are now finally being made public in the documentary he created with Yariv Mozer, which was screened last week at the recent DocAviv Festival.
--------
“Right after I told Yariv about the recordings, he turned to me and said, ‘Kobi, you don’t understand what you have here.’ But I did understand, and that is how we set out on a two-year journey during which we didn’t get much sleep. This is especially exciting, since this is the first time people all over the world will be hearing these recordings.”


According to Sitt, he and Mozer went through all 67 of the reels of recordings that have excellent sound quality, and decided which sections they would use in the documentary. This was also the first time that anyone translated the recordings into English and Hebrew in an organized fashion,” Sitt continues.


“A small portion of recordings were released in the 1950s. During that time, Eichmann was shaking with fear, but his lawyer, Robert Servatius calmed his fears, telling him, ‘The oak tree is just fine.’ ‘Oak tree’ was his code name for the recordings, since they’d been buried under an oak tree in Buenos Aires.”


(full article online)

The long-lost Adolf Eichmann recordings shown in new documentary

"I am 100% convinced Eichmann had no mercy for anyone... he was a sworn Nazi through and through."

www.jpost.com

 

[Sixties Fan]

 

[Sixties Fan]

The film “Sevap/Mitzvah” (A Good Deed) is based on the true story of Muslim woman Zejneba Hardaga and her family who hid the Jewish Kabiljo family at their home, risking their own lives, and helped them escape Nazi-occupied Sarajevo in the 1940s and then move to Israel.

The Hardagas were recognized as Righteous Among the Nations by the Israeli Holocaust museum Yad Vashem, based on testimony provided by the Kabiljo family. The honorific is awarded to non-Jews who helped Jews escape persecution in the Holocaust.

Fifty years later, during the 1992-95 siege of Sarajevo by separatist Bosnian Serb forces, the Jewish community helped the Hardagas leave Sarajevo using fake Jewish identity cards and the Kabiljo family secured them a refuge inIsrael.

“Zejneba Hardaga is the first Muslim woman in the world who was recognized as Righteous Among Nations,” said Eli Tauber from the Sarajevo Jewish community.

Tauber, who wrote a book about 54 Bosnians who were honored as Righteous for saving Jews during the World War Two, said that Zejneba Hardaga also helped his grandparents to leave Sarajevo at that time.

“She gave my grandmother a veil and pantaloons to disguise herself as a Muslim woman… and gave my grandfather the money to buy tickets and run away from Sarajevo,” he recalled.

Vajraca hopes the film will be inspirational to the audiences with its message: “Do what you can, do a good deed no matter what and in some way it may come back to you.”

(full article online)

Film Tells of Bosnian Muslims and Jews Saving One Another in Wars

Sabina Vajraca Bosnian-American film director poses for a picture in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina June 13, 2022. Photo: REUTERS/Dado Ruvic …

www.algemeiner.com

 

[Sixties Fan]

If you walk all the way to the eastern end of Manhattan’s 25th Street, you come upon a small plaque explaining why the site was given the name “Bristol Basin” in June 1942. What it does not explain is the fascinating connection between that story and the plight of Jewish refugees fleeing from the Nazis.

Throughout the Holocaust years, the Roosevelt administration insisted that it did not have any ships to bring Jewish refugees to the United States. “There just is not any transportation” available for refugees, Assistant Secretary of State Breckinridge Long told a congressional committee in 1943.

In his autobiography, Congressman Emanuel Celler (D-New York) likewise recalled how he was told by an administration official that in order to rescue Jews, the U.S. would need to “divert shipping for the transportation of war materials and troops for the refugees.”

In reality, American troop-supply ships, known as Liberty ships, were returning to the United States empty after delivering their cargo to Europe. They had plenty of room to carry people on the return trip.

Moreover, the ships needed something heavy on board—known as ballast—to keep them from capsizing. Jewish refugees could have served that purpose. Instead, the ballast was found in the English city of Bristol—or, more precisely, in the city’s remnants.

(full article online)

80 Years Ago This Week: The Rubble That Could Have Been Jews

Today known as FDR Drive, it was renamed to honor a president who is deservedly revered for his many achievements, but whose legacy is tarnished by his tragic abandonment of the Jews.

jewishjournal.com

 

[Sixties Fan]

The files revealed how the succession of events in Levi’s life coalesced to make him into a natural spy. He was born in Genoa, Italy, in 1902 to an assimilated Italian Jewish family. His parents moved to India in 1910 where he became a British subject and fluent in English. A few years later Levi was sent to Switzerland to complete his education where he learned to speak German and French like a native. He had a thirst for adventure which led him to try his hand at becoming a businessman in Australia. He joined the Australian Italian chamber of commerce, he even served as a witness in a robbery trial. He ended up going bankrupt and trying to flee the country only to be arrested by Australian police. A judge ordered he be held until he coughed up the cash he owed. These experiences would have served him well later as he was interrogated and cross-examined by the Italian security services.

The word “Jew” catches the eye when reading through the declassified intelligence files. It follows Levi through all the reports on his activities. He was even described as being “of Jewish appearance” by the British intelligence officer who debriefed him. There is no evidence of Levi hiding his Jewish identity from the British, Germans, or Italians nor any evidence of it impacting his ability to carry out espionage, though as we have seen it did come up at the end of his trial.

But why did the Germans recruit a Jewish spy? A historian at the Holocaust Educational Trust Martin Winstone told Tablet that he suspects the reason may have been the involvement of the less ideological Abwehr (German military intelligence). “The Abwehr was not led by ideological Nazis and its head Wilhelm Canaris was involved in many of the military plots against Hitler. This does not necessarily mean that these people were free from antisemitism themselves, but there was perhaps a more pragmatic approach than other organizations such as the Gestapo when it came to intelligence operations.” There are references in the British intelligence reports to the Abwehr and the even less ideological Italians playing a role in handling Levi.

Tablet contacted one of Levi’s surviving relatives, his great-nephew Kee Levi, to find out more about him.

“He was always a bit of a black sheep in the family; he was always going to my grandfather because my grandfather was always bailing him out,” Kee confides. “I’m so glad he survived the war because I think that so many people like him didn’t!” he added. “Immensely brave some of the things he did. Foolhardy, really.”


(full article online)

The Jew Who Spied for the Nazis

Renato Levi was recruited to spy for the Germans in World War II, but he was actually a double agent, secretly working for the British

www.tabletmag.com

 

[Mindful]

Well I will start that Hitler was Mary Poppins compared to Lenin, Stalin, and Trotsky

Hitler killed 6 million..........Them?????.........40?....50.....60? million

So we must start this thread saying the Soviets were 10 times worse. You have to admit that reality before you think further

We don't learn that in public skewls even 50 yrs ago. It was forbidden

It wasn’t a question of just killing, and comparative numbers.

 

[Sixties Fan]

Propaganda scene in the Theresienstadt ghetto​

A scene staged by the Nazis for the International Red Cross inspection of the Theresienstadt ghetto. The people are probably watching a soccer match. Czechoslovakia, June 23, 1944.

• Comite International de la Croix Rouge

Theresienstadt

In response to growing international awareness of Nazi atrocities, the Nazis decided to allow a Red Cross investigation committee to visit the Theresienstadt ghetto in Czechoslovakia. Elaborate measures were taken to disguise conditions in the ghetto and to portray an atmosphere of normalcy. This footage, showing an orchestral performance, is part of a German propaganda film made following the Red Cross visit to Theresienstadt.

• Bundesarchiv Filmarchiv

(full article online)

Theresienstadt: Red Cross Visit

Learn more about the Danish Red Cross visit to Theresienstadt and the Nazi attempt to clean and hide the true conditions of the camp.

encyclopedia.ushmm.org