Holocaust History

[Sixties Fan]

On November 9, synagogues and churches around the world will keep their lights on to commemorate Kristallnacht, Nazi Germany’s “Night of Broken Glass,” in which dozens of Jews were murdered and hundreds of synagogues were set ablaze in 1938.

Organized by Israel’s Religious Kibbutz Movement, the initiative called “Light from the Synagogue” has slowly grown over the past 15 years. Participating congregations are asked to teach about the November 1938 pogrom’s place in history, in addition to keeping the lights on until morning.

“Kristallnacht was a point of no return,” said Dalia Yohanan, the project’s coordinator. “The world did not care and that was a signal to the Nazis,” she told The Times of Israel.
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More than 400 synagogues in Israel are expected to participate this year, along with hundreds of synagogues and churches outside the Jewish state, said Yohanan. In Argentina, for example, commemorations will be held at 50 synagogues, said Yohanan.

“Every year we grow a little bit more in Israel and the Jewish world,” said Yohanan.


(full article online )

Israeli initiative asks synagogues to honor Kristallnacht by keeping their lights on

'Light from the Synagogue' organizers expect hundreds of synagogues and churches outside Israel to commemorate 'Night of Broken Glass' this year

www.timesofisrael.com

 

[Sixties Fan]

It was May 1940, and British citizens were gripped by a wave of panic that Germany would invade their shores at any moment.

Terrified of an imminent attack, the British government authorized the arrest and detention of all German citizens residing in the United Kingdom. Ultimately, around 30,000 Germans were rounded up and sent to internment camps – the vast majority of whom were Jewish refugees who had fled the Nazis, many with British assistance.

Among them were my grandfather, my great-grandfather and my great-uncle. Those three men were among the approximately 2,000 people held in Hutchinson Camp on the Isle of Man during World War II.

My great-grandfather, Rabbi Dr. Paul Holzer, and my grandfather, Otto Levy, both died before I was born. Relatives say that neither of them – nor my great uncle, Marcus Horovitz – spoke at any length about their experiences in the camp.

A new book from British journalist Simon Parkin, “The Island of Extraordinary Captives,” illuminates the lives of those men held in Hutchinson Camp after fleeing Germany, where they suffered the trauma of being “imprisoned by one’s liberator.”

Deemed “enemy aliens,” the refugees held in Hutchinson Camp were rounded up in mass arrests in 1940 after most had earlier been granted exemptions from internment. Some had arrived as teenagers on the Kindertransport; others – like my great-grandfather – had been imprisoned in concentration camps and managed to escape to the UK. Once there, they were placed behind barbed wire.


(full article online )

They fled persecution in Nazi Germany. Then the British put them behind barbed wire

A new book sheds light on the little-known story of thousands of German Jewish refugees held in internment camps in the UK during World War II - including several of my ancestors

www.timesofisrael.com

 

[Sixties Fan]

This Map Shows Many of the Synagogues Destroyed on Kristallnacht | My Jewish Learning

On the night of November 9, 1938, synagogues, Jewish schools and Jewish-owned businesses were targeted in violent riots throughout Nazi ...

www.myjewishlearning.com

 

[Sixties Fan]

Harrowing, previously unseen images from 1938’s Kristallnacht pogrom against German and Austrian Jews have surfaced in a photograph collection donated to Israel’s Yad Vashem memorial, the organization said Wednesday.

One shows a crowd of smiling, well-dressed middle-aged German men and women standing casually as a Nazi officer smashes a storefront window. In another, brownshirts carry heaps of Jewish books, presumably for burning.

Another image shows a Nazi officer splashing gasoline on the pews of a synagogue before it’s set alight.


(full article online)

Chilling, newly discovered photos show Nazi Kristallnacht up close

Yad Vashem says images are first to show pogrom from indoor vantage point; indicate German public was aware and that violence was coordinated by authorities

www.timesofisrael.com

 

[TheParser]

I started this thread to tell the HISTORY of the Holocaust, before, during and after.

Thank you for your contribution. It is well known that all countries did nothing to help Jews, because they were Jews, before and during. Possibly even after.

I once read that the Dominican Republic did offer refuge.

But for some reason, few Jewish people decided to accept the offer.

 

[Sixties Fan]

I once read that the Dominican Republic did offer refuge.

But for some reason, few Jewish people decided to accept the offer.

The Dominican Republic was one of the very few countries willing to accept mass Jewish immigration during World War II. At the Évian Conference, it offered to accept up to 100,000 Jewish refugees.[3] It is estimated that 5,000 visas were actually issued, and the vast majority of the recipients did not reach the country because of how hard it was to get out of occupied Europe.[4

History of the Jews in the Dominican Republic - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

 

[Sixties Fan]

Reading the contemporaneous newspaper coverage of Kristallnacht is overwhelming. While the story did not start out on the front pages, the coverage snowballed over the next few days as Nazi restrictions on Jews increased and editorials in newspapers expressed outrage.

The outrage did not extend to doing a damn thing to help Jews in Germany, though.

A French newspaper published this editorial cartoon:



And the New York Times reported of angry reactions to the pogroms and anti-Jewish edicts in France:




But there were two other stories out of France that week.

In this one, we see that France turned away the Jews who were fleeing Germany - Jews the Nazis were allowing to leave.



And days later, after French newspapers said how unacceptable it would be for France to make an agreement with a Nazi Germany that so cruelly and proudly persecuted Jews, France worked hard to make exactly that agreement.



That agreement was signed on December 6, 1938, and the articles about it didn't mention a thing about Jews.

Then, as now, the world pretended to care about Jews - but was not willing to lift a finger to actually save their lives. It was all lip service.

So whenever the world demands that Israel compromise on its security today, remember that it is also no lip service. No one will guarantee Jewish security and survival besides Jews themselves.

The only difference is that now we have a state and an army.

There's another relevant lesson for today. Don't make agreements with genocidal madmen.

They tend not to be too trustworthy.

The French reaction to Kristallnacht: Let's pretend to care about Jews while watching them suffer

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

elderofziyon.blogspot.com

 

[Sixties Fan]

 

[Sixties Fan]

 

[Sixties Fan]

William Patrick Stuart-Houston had the dubious distinction of having the most infamous uncle in history. Name not ringing any bells? Stuart-Houston was born William Patrick Hitler in Liverpool, England in 1911, to Irish mother Bridget Dowling and Austrian father Alois Hitler, Jr., the half-brother of Nazi leader Adolf Hitler. As fate would have it, William would end up fighting against his uncle's German forces as a member of the U.S. Navy in World War II.

William was brought up by his mother after Alois abandoned the family in 1914. When he turned 18, William visited his father in Germany. He returned in 1933 and tried to benefit from his uncle's position as chancellor, asking him for increasingly better jobs. However, the two shared little affection. “I didn’t become Chancellor for the benefit of my family (and) no one is going to climb on my back,” wrote Adolf Hitler, who called William “my loathsome nephew" on at least one occasion. William even tried to blackmail his uncle for a better job by revealing alleged family secrets.

After a stint back in Britain, where William wrote "Why I Hate My Uncle" for Look magazine, he eventually moved to the United States. After many attempts to enlist in the U.S. military (his motives were looked on skeptically, to say the least), he wrote directly to President Franklin D. Roosevelt. He was eventually allowed to join the Navy in 1944 and served for three years as a hospital corpsman. After a battlefield injury, he was awarded a Purple Heart.

From Hitler to Houston:

• William changed his name to William Stuart-Houston after the war, married Phyllis Jean-Jacques, and lived a normal life of relative anonymity in Patchogue, New York. He owned a business that analyzed blood samples and died of natural causes in 1987.
• William and Phyllis had four sons, but none had sons or daughters of their own. Contrary to a popular rumor, though, they did not have a pact about refusing to sire children.
• The neighborhood where William Hitler spent his earliest years was reduced to rubble in the Liverpool Blitz in January 1942.

Did Any of Adolf Hitler’s Relatives Fight Against Him in World War II?

Brief and Straightforward Guide: Did Any of Adolf Hitler’s Relatives Fight Against Him in World War II?

www.wisegeek.com

 

[flan327]

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

Read a real book

 

[Dayton3]

The Rooskies killed millions of Jews too. Again this is forbidden in public skewls

I thought everyone knew that?

 

[WinterBorn]

I know that a lot of holocaust survivors were really offended by Hogan's Heroes, which poked fun at the event back in the 1960's. Many contended that the camps were nothing like the one that was portrayed and that Colonel Klink and Sergeant Schultz were really atypical of those that they met in the German camp system.

It was a comedy tv series. It was not meant to be historically accurate.

And one of the stars, Robert Clary, who played Corporal Louis LeBeau, was a Holocaust survivor.

 

[DudleySmith]

It was mostly Jewish actors playing the Nazis and Germans. Mel Brooks and other comedians made fun of Nazis all the time. Some racist Jewish bigots just hate it when the Evul Goy say anything at all about their Master Race, is all.

 

[Sixties Fan]

I stumbled upon this JTA story from 1944:



I wanted to learn more about this, but couldn't find anything online about "Staroshentzi" or the people named here.

So I crowdsourced the research on Twitter.

I was pointed by Aviva Hadara to the town of Storozhynets, Ukraine, sometimes spelled Storozhynets' [Ukr], Storozhinets [Rus], Storojineţ [Rom], Storojinet [Ger], Shtrozshnitz [Yid], Stordjinet [Yid], Storojineti [Hun], Storozynetz, Strizinitz, Strozynetz, or Sorojinet.

Then SD Homnick pointed me to another person who saved Jews from Storozhynets, also an agronomist, so chances are he was the real hero.

From "Solidarity and Rescue in Romania" written by the Elie Wiesel Commission:

Attempts to save Transnistria deportees were severely punished by the regime; therefore, rescue efforts—and they were not few—deserve great respect. Unfortunately, no systematic research has been done on this topic. However, several individual cases are highly relevant. .... Serban Flondor, a doctor of agronomics and renowned specialist in heraldry and geneology and son of Iancu Flondor (who played an important role in uniting Bukovina with Romania), supplied the Jews in the Storojinet camp with food. Additionally, with the assistance of railway managers,he sent Jews to Bucharest by locking them in unoccupied sleeping car compartments. While serving as councilor for the Chamber of Agriculture, he used his train car to take Jews from Bukovina to Bucharest, where they could hide more easily.

This website calls him the "Schindler from Bucovina:"

Serban Flondor, center

Agronomist engineer, deputy in the interwar Romanian Parliament, a well-known genealogist and mayor of his hometown, Storojinet, Serban Flondor was truly a character-hero, of a refinement and intelligence that all the Bucharest aristocrats of the interwar period and who would measure his own humanity in terrible times.

A few years after this photograph, Serban Flondor would fight to save the lives of dear Jewish friends, simple acquaintances or people he had never seen: Rubi Klein (whom he hid in the house in the yard of which the photograph was taken, at Storojinet), students Zalman Leon, Elias Corneliu or Iancu Moscovici from "Cultura" and "Ciocanul" high schools (he got involved and obtained their pardon), whole families from a death train heading towards Transnistria and which he managed to stop en route.

(full article online)

Serban Flondor, a Holocaust "righteous gentile" you never heard of

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

elderofziyon.blogspot.com

 

[Sixties Fan]

 

[Sixties Fan]

In a Jewish artist's stunning photographs, a Holocaust story with a happy ending

Photographer Erwin Blumenfeld, subject of a new Paris exhibition, excelled both in fashion and the avant-garde.

forward.com

 

[Mindful]

(JTA) — For his 2021 book “How the Word Is Passed,” winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction, poet and journalist Clint Smith explored the landscape of American memory — specifically how the history of slavery is explained, commemorated, distorted and desecrated in sites across the United States.

While on tour promoting the book, he explained in an interview Tuesday, he’d often be asked if any country had gotten it right when it came to memorializing its own dark past. “I kept invoking the memorials in Germany, but I had never been to the memorials in Germany,” Smith said. “As a scholar, as a journalist, I felt like I had to do my due diligence and excavate the complexity and the nuance, and the emotional and human texture, that undergirds so many of these places and spaces.”

A Black writer explores how Germany remembers its ‘unthinkable’ past - Jewish Telegraphic Agency

Clint Smith, author of a prize-winning book about slavery and American memory, tours Holocaust memorial sites.

www.jta.org

 

[Sixties Fan]

The man who saved more Jews than Schindler

Descendants of those rescued by Aristides de Sousa Mendes returned to Jerusalem to dance in his honor.

forward.com

 

[Sixties Fan]