Holocaust History

A scene staged by the Nazis for the International Red Cross inspection of the Theresienstadt ghetto. [LCID: 73362c]

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)


I’ve visited that place.
 
— Pope Francis has ordered the online publication of 170 volumes of its Jewish files from the recently opened Pope Pius XII archives, the Vatican announced Thursday, amid renewed debate about the legacy of its World War II-era pope.

The documentation contains 2,700 files of requests for Vatican help from Jewish groups and families, many of them baptized Catholics, so not actually practicing Jews anymore. The files were held in the Secretariat of State’s archives and contain requests for papal intervention to avoid Nazi deportation, to obtain liberation from concentration camps or help finding family members.

The online publication of the files comes amid renewed debate about Pius’ legacy following the 2020 opening to scholars of his archives, of which the “Jews” files are but a small part. The Vatican has long defended Pius against criticism from some Jewish groups that he remained silent in the face of the Holocaust, saying he used quiet diplomacy to save lives.

One recent book that cites the newly opened archives, “The Pope at War,” by Pulitzer Prize-winning historian David Kertzer, suggests that the people the Vatican was most concerned about saving were Jews who had converted to Catholicism, the offspring of Catholic-Jewish mixed marriages or otherwise related to Catholics.

Kertzer asserts that Pius was loath to intervene on behalf of Jews, or make public denunciations of Nazi atrocities against them, to avoid antagonizing Adolf Hitler or Italy’s Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini.

(full article online)

 
As Germany invaded Soviet-occupied Lithuania in June 1941, Lithuanian militiamen and others began attacking Jews in the city of Kovno (Kaunas). These militias were radically nationalist, anti-Communist, and pro-German. Alongside the German occupiers, they murdered hundreds of Jews in just a few days in late June, in what has become known as the Kaunas pogrom.

In one incident, dozens of Jewish men were taken to the courtyard of the Lietukis garage, where they were badly beaten by these Lithuanians and some Germans. The perpetrators then brutally hosed them down before beating them to death. Pictured here are men assembled at the garage.

"A young man—he must have been a Lithuanian ... with rolled-up sleeves, was armed with an iron crowbar. He dragged one man at a time from the group and struck him with the crowbar with one or more blows on the back of his head. Within three-quarters of an hour he had been beaten to death the entire group of 45 to 50 people in this way," remembered a German army photographer at the scene.

The Kaunas pogrom was just the beginning of the massacre of the city's Jewish population under German occupation. In early July 1941, German Einsatzgruppe detachments and their Lithuanian auxiliaries would begin systematic mass killings of Jews in several of the forts around Kovno. Very few of Kovno's Jews would survive the Holocaust.

Photo: USHMM, courtesy of Dokumentationsarchiv des Oesterreichischen Widerstandes.

33D4CB46-58F7-4452-8682-ACC85252E692.jpeg


Source: US Holocaust Museum.
 
“Your holiness,” Hier continued, “We stand before you today, 80 years after the infamous Wannsee Conference, where 15 Nazi officials, eight of them PhDs from some of the finest universities, made the decision, agreeing with Hitler’s orders, to mass murder all of Europe’s Jews. By May 1945, in addition to six million Jews, millions of non-Jews, including gypsies, Slavs, homosexuals and other enemies of the Reich, were also killed.

“That is why, your holiness, we’ve come here today to present to the Vatican Archives one of the most significant documents in the history of humankind: a copy of an original letter, typed and signed by Hitler on September 16, 1919, in which he openly maps out the need for the final removal of the Jewish people in Europe.”


In the letter, Hitler wrote: “Our final aim must be the uncompromising removal of the Jews altogether. Both are possible only under a government of national strength, never under a government of national impotence.”


Hier said that “what began as one man’s opinion would become state policy of Nazi Germany 22 years later, which led to the systematic murder of one-third of world Jewry. This document shows the power of words, and is a warning for everyone to take threats of any demagogue seriously.”


The pope denounced the current wave of antisemitism and cautioned that the threat of populism continues to be a threat. He noted that the letter written and signed by Hitler in 1919 revealed that he did not care about the German people, but only promoted a dangerous ideology.


 
The next time you bite into a Krispy Kreme donut or hop into a Volkswagen, your money could be helping obscure the Nazi past of some of Germany’s leading corporate families.

In “Nazi Billionaires: The Dark History of Germany’s Wealthiest Dynasties,” author and financial journalist David de Jong probes the Nazi-era activities of six German dynasties who operated businesses during the Third Reich. Some of them still are controlled by family members today.

Collectively, the families featured in “Nazi Billionaires” own, among others, Porsche, Volkswagen, and BMW, as well as American brands ranging from Panera Bread to Krispy Kreme. Other holdings include Dr. Oetker, a consumer foods company valued at $8 billion, and luxury hotels across Europe.

(full article online)

 
Her father, who news reports have said was named Joseph Bornstein, was a Jewish refugee who fled to France from Poland in 1940 and then fought in the French resistance during World War II. He was captured and deported to Auschwitz in 1944, but survived.

(full article online)

 
Walking past the countless photos of Holocaust survivors and victims at Warsaw’s POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews in 2016, New York-native Daniel Patt was haunted by the possibility that he was passing the faces of his own relatives without even knowing it.

For Patt, a 40-year-old software engineer now working for Google, that sort of conundrum presented the potential for a creative solution. And so he set to work creating and developing From Numbers to Names (N2N), an artificial intelligence-driven facial recognition platform that can scan through photos from prewar Europe and the Holocaust, linking them to people living today.

Patt has a personal stake in the project: All of his grandparents are Holocaust survivors from Poland, and he wants to help his grandmother find photos of the members of her family murdered by the Nazis.
--------------

csasacsacsac-640x400.jpg

Rush lead singer Geddy Lee with mother Mary Weinrib, an Auschwitz survivor, in an undated photo. (Instagram photo)
For users coming to the site, how does it work? What is required from them to use it?

For people coming to the site, they can click on “select an image.” They can then select a file from their computer or phone containing a cropped photo of a single face. Then they can click on the “search” button, which will show them 10 photos containing the most similar faces to the one provided by the user. The software works best when searching using photos that are roughly from the same time period (e.g., pre-1960s).

We make no software-based assertions about identifications and leave this judgment to individuals using the site. We simply show results, with similarity scores, and let individuals decide whether the results contain a positive identification.


(full article online)



 

How European Jews Spent Their Summers Before the Holocaust.​

From lake houses to spa days, Jews from all over Europe took full advantage of their summer vacations, building memories that would last a lifetime.

EE8B5B71-1B05-43DA-81EF-400C72E429B4.jpeg


 

How European Jews Spent Their Summers Before the Holocaust.​

From lake houses to spa days, Jews from all over Europe took full advantage of their summer vacations, building memories that would last a lifetime.

View attachment 662571


I forgot to mention that I started this thread as well.

 

Today is Monday, Sivan 28, 5782 · June 27, 2022​

Today in Jewish History​

• Lubavitcher Rebbe Arrives in US (1941)
After escaping Nazi-occupied Paris, and many perilous months in Vichy France, the Lubavitcher Rebbe, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson (1902-1994), and his wife, Rebbetzin Chaya Mushka (1901-1988), boarded the SS Serpa Pinto in Lisbon, Portugal. On Monday, June 23--Sivan 28 on the Jewish calendar--at 10:30 A.M., they arrived in New York.

Shortly after his arrival, the Rebbe's father-in-law, the then Lubavitcher RebbeRabbi Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn (who had been rescued from Nazi-occupied Warsaw in 1940), appointed him to head the social and educational outreachprograms of Chabad-Lubavitch. Thus the Rebbe began his decades-long revolutionary work to revitalize Jewish life in the Western Hemisphere, which spread, by means of the emissaries ("shluchim") he dispatched from his New York headquarters, to every part of the world.
 
Josef Schuetz, 101, a former SS concentration camp guard, was sentenced on Tuesday to five years in prison by the court in Brandenburg an der Havel for murder. Schuetz was specifically accused of complicity in murder in 3,518 cases, within the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, north of Berlin.


“Mr. Schuetz, you were active for about three years in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp where you were an accomplice to the mass murders," said the president of the court, Udo Lechtermann. "You were aware that prisoners had been killed there. By your presence, you supported [it]. Anyone wanting to flee the camp was shot. Thus, any camp guard actively participated in these murders.”
----

Sachsenhausen, a German Nazi concentration camp, was active between 1936 and 1945. The camp was mainly a prison for political prisoners such as Joseph Stalin's oldest son, prime ministers from European countries and their families. Sachsenhausen camp had an active gas chamber and an area where medical experimentation took place. In 2009, 83-year-old Josias Kumpf was deported from Wisconsin back to Austria after it was made known that he was a SS Guard at Sachsenhausen and Trawniki camps.

(full article online)

 
Efraim-Zuroff_Emil-Farkas_Felix-Klein_credit-ILANA-DREYER
HOLOCAUST SURVIVOR Emil Farkas (center), who testified against Sachsenhausen concentration camp guard Josef Schutze, poses with Dr. Felix Klein (right), the top German official responsible for combating antisemitism, and Dr. Efraim Zuroff. (credit: ILANA DREYER)
Brandenburg, Germany - The Simon Wiesenthal Center today welcomed the conviction and maximum jail sentence issued by a German court here in the case of
Sachsenhausen-guard_Josef-Schütze
former Sachsenhausen guard Josef Schütze (pictured), who served in the SS contingent in the notorious concentration camp for more than three years. Schütze denied serving in Sachsenhausen, but the prosecution was able to prove his lengthy service as an SS guard.
The Simon Wiesenthal Center Jerusalem office assisted the prosecution by finding Holocaust survivors from the camp, as well as first-degree relatives of the victims who can join the prosecution in accordance with German law.

The Center's chief Nazi-hunter, Holocaust historian Dr. Efraim Zuroff, praised the verdict as an unequivocal rejection of Schütze's attempts to deny his service in the SS as a guard at Sachsenhausen. He also praised the continued efforts of German lawyers, such as Thomas Walther, who represented the survivors as well as the relatives of the victims, several of whom were located by the Simon Wiesenthal Center.
 
Prof. David Weiss Halivni, a theologian and pioneer in the field of academic Talmudic scholarship, died Wednesday at age 94.

Born in today’s Ukraine, Halivni was raised in Sighet, Romania, by a Talmudic scholar grandfather who fostered his evident genius with rabbinic texts. In Sighet, he studied alongside Elie Wiesel, who remained a close, lifelong friend.

Halivni was ordained as a rabbi at 15, but by the age of 16, he was captured by the Nazis, and, like Wiesel, was sent to Auschwitz and a series of Nazi camps.

We were in the ghetto together. He was on the last transport. I was on the first. I left on Monday, he left Thursday,” said Halivni in an obituary for Weisel. “So we came to Auschwitz at different times.”

Halivni was the only member of his family to survive the Holocaust, which left an indelible mark on his future theological works, and indeed much of his scholarship, said former student and friend Dr. Zvi Leshem in conversation with The Times of Israel.

(full article online)


 
Holocaust-Survivor-Day-credit-JCC-Krakow27.png

A Holocaust Survivor Day event in Poland. Hosted by JCC Krakow. Photo: JCC Krakow.

An international effort to celebrate the lives of those who survived the Holocaust was renewed this past Sunday, as Jewish communities in the US, Israel and Poland marked the second annual Holocaust Survivor Day.

The initiative was founded last year by the Jewish Community Center in Krakow, Poland, with the recognition that while both Yom HaShoah and International Holocaust Remembrance Day are essential for mourning the 6 million Jews killed by Nazi forces during World War II, the accomplishments of those who lived are worth honoring also.

(full article online)

 
“This period when many Jewish Displaced Persons stayed in our midst is an important part of our history worth remembering,” says Feldafing resident Claudia Sack, who, along with Prof. Marita Krauss, organized the visit.

As our parents seldom spoke about this period, our group of second-generation survivors arrived with many questions. We knew that our parents, fleeing an uncertain future in Eastern Europe, took refuge in the American-controlled zone of Germany during the late 1940s. As their efforts to emigrate to pre-state Israel or other countries were blocked, they remained there for several years.

What was it like for them to be in the land of the murderers of their families? What was going on in the lives of their German counterparts?

As we talked with our German hosts, a picture of day-to-day life for both groups began to emerge. We also gained insights into present-day Germany and learned some lessons that may help prevent future conflicts.

Adolf Hitler slept here​

We stayed in Feldafing’s Kaiserin Elisabeth Golfhotel, a setting with an ironic history. Adolf Hitler vacationed there and hosted a widely-publicized gala event for the press corps in the 1930s. After the war, US General Dwight Eisenhower had soldiers restore the golf course so that he could partake in his favorite pastime; in 1946 the hotel was turned into a hospital for Jewish DPs where five members of our group were born.


(full article online)

 

New Topics

Forum List

Back
Top