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Germany’s World War II Occupation of Poland: ‘When we finish, nobody is left alive’

by Speranza ( 183 Comments › )
Filed under Anti-semitism, Communism, Germany, History, Holocaust, Nazism, Poland, World War II at May 9th, 2013 - 7:00 pm

As the author states, the Nazis turned Poland into one vast cemetery. Hitler’s hatred of the Slavs was only surpassed by his hatred of the Jews and for 6 years Poland endured one nightmare after another. No other nation (outside of modern day Israel) has been stuck in such a terrible and dangerous neighborhood as Poland was – caught between Adolf Hitler on the West and Northeast (East Prussia) and Joseph Stalin in the East. Nevertheless Poland’s soldiers fought heroically in 1939 (it was a myth that Polish cavalry attacked German tanks with lances) and throughout World War II in the Battle of France, during the Battle of Britain (as pilots), in the Middle East and North Africa, at Monte Cassino in Italy (the Poles and French finally took the monastery and to this day the entire back of Monte Cassino is one vast Polish war cemetery), in Normandy and at Arnhem. Add in the heroic but doomed Warsaw Uprising of August 1944 and Poland’s 20th century history is one  of betrayal and heroism. As a side note, let us not forget the Polish defeat of the Red Army in 1920 at the Battle of Warsaw which probably saved Central Europe from Communism.

In Prague, big red posters were put up on which one could read that seven Czechs had been shot today. I said to myself, ‘If I had to put up a poster for every seven Poles shot, the forests of Poland would not be sufficient to manufacture the paper.’

Hans Frank, 1940

Governor-General of occupied Poland’s ‘General Government‘ territory.

by Michael Sontheimer

Adolf Hitler left no doubt about his goal before he ordered the invasion of Poland. Addressing generals and commanders at a reception he gave at his Berchtesgaden retreat on August 22, 1939, Hitler said he was not interested “in reaching a specific line or a new border.” He wanted “the destruction of the enemy.”

On September 1, 1939, German soldiers marched across the border into neighboring Poland. The vastly superior Wehrmacht forces advanced so quickly that the Polish government was forced to flee to Romania just 16 days later. On September 27, the defenders of the Polish capital, Warsaw, gave up. Nine days later, the last remaining Polish troops laid down their weapons.

Thus begun a nightmarish occupation that would last more than five years. In Poland, the Nazis had more time than in any other occupied country to implement their policies against people they classified as “racially inferior.”

The task of implementing Hitler’s plan fell to Hans Frank, a 39-year-old lawyer, Nazi Party member and brutal champion of the Nazis’ vision of racial purity. Frank was named “Governor-General” of a large chunk of Poland, an area of about 95,000 square kilometers (36,680sq mi), with approximately 10 million inhabitants. This was the western part of Poland that had been annexed by the German Reich, while the eastern half of the country was occupied by the Red Army in accordance with the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact, the 1939 non-aggression treaty between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union.

War Crimes Committed from the Outset

Frank was unashamedly proud of his ruthless regime, which contrasted with the comparatively lenient system of rule in the “Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia,” as the Nazis called the majority ethnic-Czech region they had occupied. In 1940, Frank told a reporter for the Völkische Beobachter newspaper: “In Prague, for example, large red posters were hung up announcing that seven Czechs had been executed that day.” That had made him think: “If I had to hang up a poster every time we shot seven Poles, we’d have to cut down all the Polish forests, and we still wouldn’t be able to produce enough paper for all the posters I’d need.”

German soldiers committed war crimes in Poland from the very outset. One soldier in the 41st infantry division noted, “Polish civilians and soldiers are dragged out everywhere. When we finish our operation, the entire village is on fire. Nobody is left alive, also all the dogs were shot.”

Wehrmacht soldiers without battle experience thought they saw snipers everywhere, and ended up firing at anything that moved — often their own comrades. And if Polish soldiers merely shot at them, the Germans took revenge by setting entire villages ablaze or taking hostages and executing them.

[........]

Although Jews weren’t persecuted systematically during the “Polish campaign,” the anti-Semitism of the German troops surfaced time and again. The war diary of one machine gun battalion noted, “All the male inhabitants are standing under guard in a large square. The only exceptions are the Jews, who are not standing, but have been made to kneel and pray constantly.”

On the very day the last Polish soldiers gave themselves up, Hitler gave a speech to the German parliament, the Reichstag, promising to “reorganize the ethnographic conditions” in Europe. Hitler appointed SS Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler to carry out this project, whereupon Himmler was named Reich Commissioner for the Consolidation of German Nationhood.

Plan for German Colonization up to the Urals

Himmler had his staff draw up an Eastern General Plan, a blueprint for the German colonization of all areas up to the Urals. After all, as Joseph Goebbels claimed, eastern Europe had always been Germany’s “destiny.” The propaganda minister predicted, “Tough peasant races will stand guard in the East.” SS leader Reinhard Heydrich said German settlers would act as a bulwark against the “raging tides of Asia.”

He wanted the annexed parts of western Poland to be “depolonized” and “germanized” as quickly as possible. To this end, some eight million Jews and Poles were to be moved into the General Government, the area of Poland under Nazi military control. Their places were to be taken by ethnic Germans “repatriated” from around the Baltic and from Volhynia and Galicia in western Ukraine.

[.......]

The people deported to the General Government were only permitted to carry one suitcase each, as well as “one blanket per Pole.” Beds had to be left behind. Securities and valuables could not be taken — “wedding rings excepted.”

Himmler ordered all those living in the annexed eastern zones to be classified by race. The list of alleged “Germanic peoples” divided ethnic Germans into four groups. These ranged from those who identified themselves as German and were thus naturalized immediately, to Poles considered “capable of germanization,” who were deported for so-called “training” in the Altreich (Old Empire), as the Nazis called the area under German control before 1939. Such Poles were thus given German citizenship on a probationary basis.

A Nation of Slaves

The Nazis’ aim was to transform the Poles into a nation of slaves. In May 1940 Himmler wrote that “the non-German peoples of the East may not receive any education beyond four-year elementary school.” Their educational goal was to be as follows: “The ability to do simple sums no higher than 500, write their name, and understand that it is their divine duty to obey Germans, be honest, diligent and well-behaved.” The SS Reichsführer did not consider reading an essential element of the Polish curriculum.

In October 1940 Hitler ordered “all members of the Polish intelligentsia” to be killed. SS leader Heydrich therefore instructed the heads of the security police task forces to ensure that the remaining members of the Polish “political leadership” be “rendered harmless and placed in a concentration camp.” He also saw to it that lists of “teachers, clergymen, noblemen, legionaries, returning officers, etc.” were drawn up immediately.

[........]

In the fall of 1939, occupied Poland became a nightmare of often spontaneous and wanton terror. For instance, the head of Radom district threatened the death penalty for anyone caught felling trees in the forest for use as firewood. Throughout the country, the SS and the police slaughtered all those they considered to be Polish nationalists. The race-based expulsions and resettlement carried out by Himmler’s henchmen sowed fear, unrest and chaos.

Creation of Jewish Ghettos

But the Jews would soon be the main focus of the Nazis’ attention. Poland’s Jews were forced to wear white armbands with a blue Star of David almost two years before Jews in the Altreich were made to sew yellow stars on their clothes. As early as September 21, 1939, Heydrich decreed that “the Jewry” in the areas under his control were to be “concentrated in ghettos for easier control and subsequent expulsion.”

The occupiers set up the first major ghetto in Lodz, which they renamed Litzmannstadt, in the “Reich District of Wartheland” (also known as the Warthegau), where 3.7 million Poles and 400,000 Jews were resettled for “germanization.” In late April 1940, regional governor Friedrich Uebelhoer had 144,000 Jews corralled into an area of just 4 square kilometers (1 sq mi). As a result, the people in Lodz ghetto had to live six to a room on average.

In mid-November 1940, the Nazis set up the Warsaw ghetto, into which they packed at least half a million people. Very soon, more that 5,000 people a month were dying of hunger, typhoid and other infectious diseases in this “Jewish reservation.”

[.......]

The creation of Lviv ghetto in late 1941 more-or-less completed the imprisonment of Poland’s Jews, who could now be given “special treatment,” as their systematic annihilation was officially termed.

“The Jewish problem must be solved during the war because this is the only way it can be completed without a general global hullabaloo,” wrote Franz Rademacher, the diplomat who headed the “Jewish department” of the German foreign ministry. Although no written order has ever been found in which Hitler ordered the “final solution of the Jewish problem,” there is much evidence to suggest that the Fuhrer decided to wipe out the European Jewry in the fall of 1941.

‘We Have to Destroy the Jews Wherever We Find Them’

In mid-December of that year, Governor-General Frank told his cabinet in Krakow that he had asked Berlin what was going to be done with the Jews. The reply had allegedly been: “Liquidate them yourself.” Frank therefore announced, “Gentlemen, I would ask you to steel yourself against any thoughts of compassion. We have to destroy the Jews wherever we find them.”

Measures were quickly put into place to carry out this genocide. The SS had the first extermination camp built in Chelmno near Lodz in November 1941. To this they had added the slaughterhouses of Auschwitz, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka and Majdanek by the summer of 1942. The lack of technology for large-scale killing initially proved the biggest problem. At first the SS locked Jews in sealed trucks and poisoned them with exhaust fumes, but that wasn’t considered quick enough.

SS researchers eventually hit upon a more satisfactory procedure whereby Soviet prisoners-of-war and Poles in Auschwitz were poisoned using the pesticide Zyklon B, which contains cyanide. In this way, the SS murdered more than a million people at the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp alone. Rings, coins and tooth fillings from the victims were melted down, enabling Himmler’s men to send a phenomenal 33 metric tons of gold to the Reichsbank in Berlin.

[........]

Nevertheless, sympathy and solidarity with the Jews were more widespread in Poland than anti-Semitism. Tens of thousands of Jews in the General Government survived the occupation, most of them hidden by fellow Poles, even though the Nazis typically shot all the members of any family found to be harboring Jews.

Even minor offenses led to Poles being sent to Germany as forced laborers. In this way, more than two million people were enslaved.

Resistance Groups in the Forests

From the very beginning, the Nazis’ policy toward occupied Poland was beset by an intractable contradiction: You can’t destroy what you want to exploit. This dilemma became all too clear after Himmler ordered the city of Lublin and Zamosc district in southeastern Poland to be made a German “settlement area” within the General Government.

In November 1942, police officers began brutally evacuating more than 100,000 Polish farmers to make way for 20,000 ethnic Germans. Those fit for work were sent to Germany as slave laborers, old people and children were resettled in so-called “retirement villages,” while anyone deemed “inferior” or “unreliable” was deported to Auschwitz.

[........]

The defeat of the Wehrmacht forces besieging the Russian city of Stalingrad in January 1943 lifted the hopes of resistance fighters across Poland. On April 20, 1943, Governor-General Frank complained to the German head of chancellery: “The murder of Germans is increasing to an alarming degree. Trains are being attacked, and transport routes are being made unsafe.”

Warsaw Ghetto Uprising

The day before, posters had appeared on the walls of the Warsaw ghetto: “Brothers, the time has come to fight and take revenge on our occupiers. If you can bear arms, come and join our fighters! The elderly and women can provide support. Arm yourselves!” Unfortunately, weapons were in short supply. Only about a tenth of the approximately 1,200 insurgents had a gun, yet they soon found themselves up against almost 2,000 heavily-armed police officers and SS men.

The Germans even used flame-throwers on the Jewish resistance fighters. For a month, insurgents waged a desperate guerrilla war on their occupiers. Several thousand Jews were executed immediately. About 50,000 more died in the Treblinka gas chambers. On May 16, 1943, Jürgen Stroop, the SS officer in charge of Warsaw district, reported: “The former Jewish residential district of Warsaw no longer exists.”

The Nazis answered stiffer resistance with yet more brutality. Between October 1943 and July 1944, a total of 2,705 Poles were publicly executed in Warsaw. Another 4,000 were killed in secret.

Nevertheless, Governor-General Frank realized that the Germans were at a numeric disadvantage and could not keep the Poles under their thumb indefinitely. He conceded that “this negative, disapproving, destructive approach is now almost impossible to maintain.” [.......]

In a letter to Hitler, Frank raise doubts about the closing of schools as well as the mass arrests and executions by the German police. Referring to the Soviet massacre of more than 20,000 Polish officers and other professionals and academics in Katyn in 1940, Frank proposed the Poles be “actively involved in the defense against Bolshevism.” However Hitler refused to entertain any such notion, preferring ruthless brute force instead. In January 1944 loyal, obedient Frank therefore issued an order that a hundred Poles were to be executed for every German killed.

Another occupation-era tragedy occurred on August 1 that summer, when the Armia Krajowa — the home guard of the Polish government-in-exile — staged an armed uprising in an attempt to recapture Warsaw ahead of the arrival of the Red Army. Emboldened by the attempted assassination of Adolf Hitler on July 20 and the successful “D-Day” landing of Allied forces in Normandy on June 6, Polish patriots believed they could force the Germans to withdraw from Warsaw.

The insurgents managed to liberate the half of Warsaw west of the River Vistula, but the occupiers struck back with brutal might. Although the Soviets had already reached the eastern banks of the Vistula, they wanted to secure their positions before pressing on.

‘A Nation of Such Courage is Immortal’

Himmler, whom Hitler had tasked with quelling the rebellion, had the SS shoot civilians at random until ammunition began running low. The Germans then launched an offensive in which nearly 40,000 men were sent after the rebels holed up in the old town. Bitter house-to-house fighting ensued, but the insurgents lacked experience, weapons and ammunition.

More than 150,000 people died in the battle for the city. Before they eventually capitulated after 63 days, the Polish home guard sent out one last radio message from Warsaw: “A nation of such courage is immortal.”

[.......] Of the 35 million people who had lived in Poland at the start of the War, six million had perished — almost 18 percent of the population.

Red Army soldiers entered Krakow, the capital of the General Government, on January 17, 1945.

Frank’s official diary contains the following entry for that day: “The Governor-General left Krakow castle in a motorcade in splendid winter weather and brilliant sunshine.” On the journey back to his native Bavaria, Frank and three of his staff burnt most of the official files they had taken with them.

After the War, Frank was brought before the Nuremberg Trials, accused of war crimes and crimes against humanity. In a moment of enlightenment he admitted, “In a thousand years, people will still be blaming Germany.”

But in his closing remarks, Frank complained about the “most horrific mass crimes” allegedly committed against Germans in the East, acts which he said “easily match any guilt on our part.”

Frank was found guilty, and sent to the gallows.

Read the rest – ‘When we finish, nobody is left alive’

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Posted in Anti-semitism, Communism, Germany, History, Holocaust, Nazism, Poland, World War II | 183 Comments »

With the rise of the National Socialist Jobbik Party, Hungarian Jews fear for their safety

by Speranza ( 146 Comments › )
Filed under Anti-semitism, Holocaust, Iran, Israel at May 8th, 2013 - 7:00 am

Unfortunately  a lot  of the feelings expressed by the  Jobbik Party are reflected to a different extent  by the more “mainstream” political parties throughout Europe.

by Colin Freeman

As the self-declared “capital” of the ultra-nationalist Jobbik Party, the town of Tiszavasvári prides itself on being a showcase for how the whole of Hungary might one day look.

Since winning control of Tiszavasvári’s local council three years ago on a pledge to fight “Gipsy crime”, the party has been on a vigorous clean-up campaign, banning prostitution, tidying the streets, and keeping a watchful eye on the shabby Roma districts at the edge of town. It even swore in its own Jobbik “security force” to work alongside the police, only for the uniformed militia, which drew comparisons with Hitler’s brown-shirts, to be banned by Hungary’s national government.

Yet Gipsies are not the only bogeyman that Jobbik has in its sights, as a sign on the well-trimmed green opposite the Communist-era mayoralty building suggests. Written in both Hungarian and Persian, it proudly announces that Tiszavasvári is twinned with Ardabil, a town in the rugged mountains of north-west Iran.

Gabor Vona delivers a speech during a rally against the World Jewish Congress Plenary Assembly in Budapest (Reuters)

On the face of it, there is no obvious reason why a drab rustbelt town in Hungary’s former mining area should seek links to a city in a hardline Islamic Republic 2,000 miles away. But this is no ordinary cultural exchange programme, and friendship has very little to do with it. Instead, the real purpose of Jobbik’s links to Iran is to show their mutual loathing of the Jewish state of Israel, which the Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, notoriously declared should be “wiped from the pages of history”.

[........]

In many other countries in Europe, such a scheme might be dismissed as just petty town hall posturing, a Far right version of the “Loony Left” gesture politics practised in British town halls in the 1980s. But it is particularly sensitive in Hungarian towns like Tiszavasvári, where anti-semitism has seen Jews wiped from the pages of history once before.

Inquiries by The Sunday Telegraph via official Holocaust archives show a dozen names of Jewish victims from Tiszavasvári, part of the mass extermination programme that gave Jews in the Hungarian countryside only a one in ten chance of survival in 1944, Some simply disappeared, while others like Andor Krausz, a 30-year-old bookbinder, and Rozsi Gruenweld, a 48-year-old shoe merchant, were murdered in Auschwitz, along with among more than 400,000 other Hungarian Jews.

A Jobbik supporter, the tattoo reads ‘My Honor is Loyalty’ (Reuters)

It was one of the most intensive anti-Jewish campaigns of Holocaust, and while it was conducted during Hungary’s period of Nazi occupation, it was done with the active connivance of the Hungarian state.

” You can see Jobbik’s true nature through this,” said Peter Feldmajer, the President of the Federation of Hungarian Jewish Communities, which today represents an estimated 100,000 Hungarian Jews, nearly 90 per cent of whom still refuse to disclose their Jewishness publicly. “They hate the Jewish people, and so does the Iranian government, and that is why they have formed this allegiance. [.......]

Such concerns will loom large in the minds of delegates of the World Jewish Congress, which opens amid tight security today at the Soviet-era Budapest Intercontinental Hotel overlooking the Danube.

Normally the Congress meets in Jerusalem, but this year it has deliberately chosen to convene in the Hungarian capital to highlight what its president, the billionaire philanthropist and cosmetics heir Ronald Lauder, describes as a “dramatic” rise in anti-Semitism in Hungary.

Much of the blame for that is attributed to the Jobbik party, which was founded just ten years ago yet now represents the third-largest faction in politics, with 47 of 386 parliamentary seats.

Also in Mr Lauder’s sights, though, is the Hungarian prime minister, Viktor Orban, whose ruling centre-right Fidesz Party competes for many of the votes that Jobbik now vies for, and who has been criticised for not taking a firm enough stance against anti-Semitism.

[.........]

The Congress meeting adds to a growing sense of political isolation in Hungary, where earlier this year, the European Union said that Mr Orban’s party was placing too many curbs on the judiciary and media, measures it said could ultimately disqualify the country from EU membership.

While Mr Orban insists the measures have been necessary to end decades of corruption and inefficient government under his predecessors, the fear is that such measures are making it all the easier for groups like Jobbik to gain a foothold. A ban on the Jobbik party holding a counter-demonstration at the World Jewish Congress’s presence in town has only added to their sense of grievance.

Roughly translated as “the Movement for a Better Hungary”, Jobbik’s success has far outstripped similar movements in neighbouring former Communist states. Its appeal in towns like Tiszavasvári has been based partly on confronting problems associated with the country’s half-million strong Roma community, whom many Hungarians see as crime-prone and welfare-dependent.

But as the global banking crisis has hit Hungary hard, leaving more than 1 in 10 jobless, Jobbik has also revived a folk devil at the opposite end of social spectrum – the wealthy, all-controlling Jews, who were traditionally influential in the finance world.

Barely a month now passes in Hungary without a fresh furore over some anti-Semitic incident. Jewish community leaders have been attacked in the street and Jewish cemeteries desecrated. Far-Right biker gangs have also held ugly counter demonstrations to anti-Semitism rallies, entitled “Step on the Gas” days. Mr Gyongyosi, the Jobbik MP, was castigated recently for saying that a “security” register should be created of Hungarian MPs and civil servants who were of “Jewish origin”.

The Hungarian national football association, meanwhile, was recently fined after fans shouted anti-Semitic slogans during a recent World Cup qualifier. And only last week, the leader of the Raoul Wallenberg Association, a charity named after a businessman who rescued many Jews from Nazi-occupied Hungary, was beaten up after telling skinhead thugs to stop chanting “Seig Heil” at a soccer match.

[.........]

True, while verbal abuse has apparently increased, incidents of actual violence are still relatively rare in Hungary: Mr Feldmajer recollects only around 50 physical attacks in 20 years. And it is fair to say that the bootboy image by no means fits all of Jobbik’s supporters, many of whom are respectable working people whose motivations sound little different to the average UKIP supporter. The talk is of frustration with politically correct attitudes to crime and immigration, of children no longer being taught Hungarian history in schools properly, and of a loss of faith in mainstream political parties, whose economic record since communism’s collapse is patchy at best.

Typical is Sipos Ibolya, 55, a cheerful schoolteacher who is Jobbik’s deputy mayoress in Tiszavasvári. The twinning arrangement with Iran, she insists, is not borne of anti-semitism, but simple national self-interest.

“Economically, the Israelis do have too much power in Hungary,” she said.

[.........]

There was a similarly mixed picture at a Jobbik May Day fair last week, which combined elements of Glastonbury festival with a historical re-enactment society. In front of an open-air stage, burly men tattooed with skulls, crossbones and the odd swastika sat listening to bands play right-wing folk music, whose choruses of “we are all one blood” had them singing along. The sideshows, meanwhile, were devoted to displays of swordsmanship, archery and whipcracking, skill practised by the ancient Hungarian tribes whom many Jobbik supporters see as the country’s true forefathers.

But what was billed as a day of harmless, Far-Right family fun also had its darker side. At least one book stall had Hitler’s Mein Kampf on sale, and when it caught the attention of the Sunday Telegraph’s photographer, a youth was overheard was overheard saying “What are these Jews doing here?” What alarms Hungarian liberals, though, is the way that under Mr Orban’s government, such events have become part of the political mainstream. Songs by Far Right bands now do well in the charts, with one group, Carpatia, even receiving an official award, and last year, Hungary’s state-funded New Theatre planned to stage a play about a group of powerful Jews who plot the country’s downfall. Although it was eventually pulled after an outcry from anti-racism activists, it is hard to imagine such a production getting anywhere near a theatre in many other European countries.

Nonetheless, after the trauma of the Holocaust, most of Hungary’s remaining Jews have an all too well-developed sense of perspective about Jobbik. In the old Jewish quarter of Budapest, a maze of cobbled streets, synagogues and smart restaurants, few are planning to take to the streets to mount their counter-Jobbik protests. For one thing, Jews here have learned the hard way to keep a low-profile, and for another, the feeling is that while anti-Semitism comes and goes, it never disappears entirely.

[.......]

Read the rest -  Inside the far-Right stronghold where Hungarian Jews fear for the future

 

 

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Nearly 70 years later, a new round of Auschwitz prosecutions

by Speranza Comments Off
Filed under Headlines, History, Holocaust at April 12th, 2013 - 3:16 pm

Never too late to do justice.

by Chris Cottrell

BERLIN — They worked as guards at the Holocaust’s most notorious death camp, and nearly seven decades later they may finally be brought to account before a court of law.

Germany’s Central Office for the Investigation of Nazi Crimes has prepared a list of 50 former guards who worked at the Auschwitz concentration camp in Nazi-occupied Poland and are still alive, said Kurt Schrimm, the head of the office.

Staff members searched old court records and Holocaust-related documents looking for names, and even traveled to Poland last year to try to augment their lists. One checked the names of the Auschwitz guards against databases to determine which were still alive.

The next step is ruling out those who were already tried, either by the occupation authorities or the German legal system. “We have to determine now whether or not these 50 people that we found on this list can be legally prosecuted,” Mr. Schrimm said Wednesday in a telephone interview.

The list includes names that have been known to his office since the Auschwitz trials in the ’60s as well as recent additions made last year, Mr. Schrimm said.

The Holocaust and the events of World War II continue to exert a significant pull on the German psyche. The television mini-series “Our Mothers, Our Fathers,” which portrayed five young friends in Germany and how World War II affected them, attracted about 7.6 million viewers for its final episode last month. Der Spiegel, the country’s leading newsweekly, often has articles related to Hitler, and regularly puts an image of him on its cover.

The significant new effort to broaden the pool of Holocaust prosecutions nearly seven decades after the end of the war came about as a result of the conviction two years ago of John Demjanjuk, a former guard at the Sobibor death camp. The case lowered the legal threshold necessary to win a conviction so long after World War II.

Mr. Demjanjuk was found guilty even though he was not directly linked to any specific crime. Instead the court, in Munich, ruled that his work as a guard at the camp automatically made him an accessory to any murders carried out there. It convicted him of being an accessory to the murder of all 28,060 people who died at the camp during his tenure as a guard there. He died before a higher court could rule on his appeal.

Efraim Zuroff, the chief Nazi hunter for the Simon Wiesenthal Center, welcomed the new push to bring Holocaust perpetrators to justice before they die. “We’re very happy that this thing is happening,” Mr. Zuroff said. “It’s definitely the right thing to do. But the real test of the initiative will come when these cases are turned over to the prosecutors.”

The current revelations have exposed a rift in how best to reconcile German society to the atrocities of the Third Reich. Since the Allies began trying top members of the regime in Nuremberg shortly after the war, court cases have been used to educate the public in Germany about the atrocities of the Nazi era.

As perpetrators and survivors grow older, some have called for a shift. Thomas Weber, a German historian at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland, proposed something like the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa as a way to persuade the accused to talk about their motivations for working with the Nazis. Internet forums already encourage witnesses, even collaborators, to Nazi tyranny to share long-kept secrets.

Court proceedings, while cathartic, can quickly distract from the real issues at hand. “As perpetrators are so old and frail,” Mr. Weber said, “the discussion then turns into a question over whether it’s morally acceptable to try people who have to be carried in on stretchers into a courtroom.”

Mr. Zuroff of the Wiesenthal Center dismissed the idea of truth commissions. “It’s good for countries where there’s apartheid,” Mr. Zuroff said. “Not where there’s genocide.”

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What FDR privately thought about Jews and Asians

by Speranza ( 132 Comments › )
Filed under Anti-semitism, History, Holocaust, World War II at April 9th, 2013 - 2:00 pm
Despite being the patron saint of liberalism, in private FDR exhibited many racial biases, biases which he quietly put into effect as U.S. Government policy. Given FDR’s stereotyped views on Asians, we can now better understand his decision to intern Japanese-Americans.
by Rafael Medoff

In May 1943, President Franklin Roosevelt met with British Prime Minister Winston Churchill at the White House. It was 17 months after Pearl Harbor and a little more than a year before D-Day. The two Allied leaders reviewed the war effort to date and exchanged thoughts on their plans for the postwar era. At one point in the discussion, FDR offered what he called “the best way to settle the Jewish question.”

Vice President Henry Wallace, who noted the conversation in his diary, said Roosevelt spoke approvingly of a plan (recommended by geographer and Johns Hopkins University President Isaiah Bowman) “to spread the Jews thin all over the world.” The diary entry adds: “The president said he had tried this out in [Meriwether] County, Georgia [where Roosevelt lived in the 1920s] and at Hyde Park on the basis of adding four or five Jewish families at each place. [.......]

Roosevelt’s “best way” remark is condescending and distasteful, and coming from anyone else it would probably be regarded as anti-Semitism. But more than that, FDR’s support for “spreading the Jews thin” may hold the key to understanding a subject that has been at the center of controversy for decades: the American government’s tepid response to the Holocaust.

Here’s the paradox. The U.S. immigration system severely limited the number of German Jews admitted during the Nazi years to about 26,000 annually — but even that quota was less than 25% filled during most of the Hitler era, because the Roosevelt administration piled on so many extra requirements for would-be immigrants. For example, starting in 1941, merely leaving behind a close relative in Europe would be enough to disqualify an applicant — on the absurd assumption that the Nazis could threaten the relative and thereby force the immigrant into spying for Hitler.

[.......] Why didn’t the president quietly tell his State Department (which administered the immigration system) to fill the quotas for Germany and Axis-occupied countries to the legal limit? That alone could have saved 190,000 lives. It would not have required a fight with Congress or the anti-immigration forces; it would have involved minimal political risk to the president.

Every president’s policy decisions are shaped by a variety of factors, some political, some personal. In Roosevelt’s case, a pattern of private remarks about Jews, some of which I recently discovered at the Central Zionist Archives in Jerusalem and from other sources, may be significant.

In 1923, as a member of the Harvard board of directors, Roosevelt decided there were too many Jewish students at the college and helped institute a quota to limit the number admitted. In 1938, he privately suggested that Jews in Poland were dominating the economy and were therefore to blame for provoking anti-Semitism there. In 1941, he remarked at a Cabinet meeting that there were too many Jews among federal employees in Oregon. In 1943, he told government officials in Allied-liberated North Africa that the number of local Jews in various professions “should be definitely limited” so as to “eliminate the specific and understandable complaints which the Germans bore towards the Jews in Germany.”

There is evidence of other troubling private remarks by FDR too, including dismissing pleas for Jewish refugees as “Jewish wailing” and “sob stuff”; expressing (to a senator ) his pride that “there is no Jewish blood in our veins”; and characterizing a tax maneuver by a Jewish newspaper publisher as “a dirty Jewish trick.” But the most common theme in Roosevelt’s private statements about Jews has to do with his perception that they were “overcrowding” many professions and exercising undue influence.

This attitude dovetails with what is known about FDR’s views regarding immigrants in general and Asian immigrants in particular. In one 1920 interview, he complained about immigrants “crowding” into the cities and said “the remedy for this should be the distribution of aliens in various parts of the country.” In a series of articles for the Macon (Ga.) Daily Telegraph and for Asia magazine in the 1920s, he warned against granting citizenship to “non-assimilable immigrants” and opposed Japanese immigration on the grounds that “mingling Asiatic blood with European or American blood produces, in nine cases out of ten, the most unfortunate results.” [.......]

FDR’s decision to imprison thousands of Japanese Americans in internment camps during World War II was consistent with his perception of Asians as having innate racial characteristics that made them untrustworthy. [......]Admitting significant numbers of Jewish or Asian immigrants did not fit comfortably in FDR’s vision of America.

Other U.S. presidents have made their share of unfriendly remarks about Jews. A diary kept by Harry Truman included statements such as “The Jews, I find, are very, very selfish.” Richard Nixon‘s denunciations of Jews as “very aggressive and obnoxious” were belatedly revealed in tapes of Oval Office conversations.

But the revelation of Franklin Roosevelt’s sentiments will probably shock many people. After all, he led America in the war against Hitler. Moreover, Roosevelt’s public persona is anchored in his image as a liberal humanitarian, his claim to care about “the forgotten man,” the downtrodden, the mistreated. But none of that can change the record of his response to the Holocaust.

The observance of Holocaust Memorial Day begins Sunday night. It is the annual occasion to reflect on the Nazi genocide and the world’s response to it. In the case of the United States, it is sobering to consider that partly because of Roosevelt’s private prejudices, innocent people who could have been saved were instead abandoned.

Read the rest - What FDR said about Jews in private

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Eighty years ago this month- the Nazi boycott of Jews

by Speranza ( 212 Comments › )
Filed under Anti-semitism, Germany, History, Holocaust, Judaism at April 4th, 2013 - 2:00 pm

Boycotts leads to genocide – something that those who want to boycott the Jewish nation ought to know. In 1933 the Nazis were not calling for genocide, only for the Jews to get out of Germany, just as the boycott Israel crowd calls for Jews to get out of “Palestine” – however the logical step for boycotting Jews is their destruction.

 

Stormtroopers outside of the Israel’s Department store in Berlin, April 1, 1933. The signs read “Germans! Defend yourselves! Don’t buy from Jews”.

by Marc von Lüpke-Schwarz

On April 1 1933 German Jews became the target of systematic repression. Just days later, the Nazis introduced the so-called ‘Aryan paragraphs’ – the beginning of ethnic cleansing in Germany.

Eighty years ago, menacing and ominous scenes suddenly began to play out across Germany. Men in brown uniforms – storm troopers from the Nazi SA paramilitary group – took up positions outside Jewish shops, law firms and doctors’ offices. Potential customers and clients were threatened with violence if they did not stay away.

The messages on signs brought along by the brownshirts could not have been clearer: “Germans! Defend yourselves! Don’t buy from Jews!” The SA men marched through the streets spewing torrents of hatred.

This was no macabre April fool prank. It was the first day of the Nazis’ “Jewish boycott” – the beginning of a relentless and ruthless persecution of German Jews that culminated in the Nazi death camps and gas chambers.

‘The final solution’

Julius Streicher/ Photo. undated, (Kalenderblatt, Februar 1940). Publisher Julius Streicher was a prominent and notorious ‘Jew-hater’

More than a decade earlier, Adolf Hitler was already fanatically calling for a “solution” to the supposed “Jewish question.” In 1933, he was finally in a position to give his followers free rein to vent their hatred of the Jews. Hitler had been ruling Germany with an iron fist since March of that year, and the fundamental rights anchored in the Weimar Republic’s constitution had been suspended. Since the enactment of the so-called Enabling Act barely a week earlier, on March 23, the Hitler regime could pass any laws it wanted without parliamentary controls. It could now move with impunity against its political adversaries; in particular the Jews, whom it viewed as enemies of the Aryan race.

The call to boycott Jewish businesses was splashed across the pages of German newspapers. The SA and the SS were whipped into a veritable frenzy by Julius Streicher, a notorious Jew-hater, who was the founder and publisher of a newspaper called Der Stürmer [The Attacker]. [......] In Annaberg, in Saxony, for example, the SS attacked people coming out of Jewish shops. They pressed a rubber stamp onto their foreheads or cheeks which read: “We traitors bought from Jews.”

Boycott on the Sabbath

In other towns, the SA ransacked stores and offices. Fortunately for the victims, the start of the boycott was a Saturday, the Jewish Sabbath, and many shops were closed. Many Jews already knew what was coming after reading the newspapers.

Even so, they were shocked. [.......]A shopkeeper in Berlin even put a sign in his window explaining that he had fought for Germany for four years as a soldier in World War I.

For most Jews in Germany, April 1 1933 was the beginning of the end of the illusion that they were accepted as equals by their fellow Germans. But the majority continued to beileve that the Hitler regime would collapse at some point, or at least that things would not get any worse.

German reticence

circa 1930: Adolf Hitler (1889 - 1945) the German Nazi dictator. (Photo by Keystone/Getty Images) Adolf Hitler personally ordered the boycott of Jewish businesses

The non-Jewish population, however, did not respond as the Nazis had hoped. Very few people took part in the protest actions. A typical standpoint at the time was to view the whole business as nonsense and simply ignore it. [.......] In Hanover, scuffles were said to have broken out between shoppers who wanted to go into Jewish shops and SA hooligans who wanted to keep them out.

The Nazi leadership abandoned the boycott in the evening of April 1, disappointed by the lack of interest from the general public. [.......]However, the Nazis did achieve their aim of sidelining the Jews. Afterwards, the majority of the German population started going to “German” shops instead.

The Aryan paragraphs

Just seven days after the boycott, the Nazis took the next step toward segregating the Jews. A new law revamping government jobs and the civil service on April 7, 1933, contained anti-Jewish paragraphs that were to have serious repercussions. “Civil servants with no Aryan ancestry must go into retirement,” the law said. Anyone who had a Jewish parent or grandparent was considered “non-Aryan.”

This was the first law in a long line of racist, discriminatory and xenophobic legislation introduced during the Nazi dictatorship. The Aryan paragraphs were quickly expanded to include other occupational groups, and before long Jews had vanished from government offices, schools, higher education and other public domains.

For the Jews – the vast majority of whom regarded themselves as Germans – the noose of persecution was growing tighter and tighter. But most “Aryan” Germans continued to respond as they had to the boycott: with indifference.

Read the rest – The Nazis organized persecution of the Jews

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Obama, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and Zionism

by Speranza ( 54 Comments › )
Filed under Anti-semitism, Barack Obama, History, Holocaust, Israel, Judaism, World War II at March 19th, 2013 - 9:59 am

How ironic that for so many elderly Jews from FDR’s times, he is viewed as their patron saint. Given FDR’s tepid response to the Holocaust and to any rescue plans, there should be little doubt that FDR far from being a friend of the Jews, actually had a touch of the anti-Semite in him.

by Rafael Medoff

President Barack Obama has spoken of his deep admiration for Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his desire to emulate FDR’s leadership style. But in the wake of the discovery of new documents detailing FDR’s behind-the-scenes coldness regarding the creation of a Jewish state, many Israelis will be hoping that sentiment does not extend to Roosevelt’s views on Zionism.

[.....]

In private, however, FDR expressed very different views on the subject, according to the documents I found recently at the Central Zionist Archives in Jerusalem.

The first is an account by American Jewish leader Stephen S. Wise of a private meeting he had with the president in January 1938. Wise was dismayed to hear FDR assert, “You know there is not room in Palestine for many more people – perhaps another hundred or hundred and fifty thousand.”  [.......]

Rabbi Wise insisted there was room for at least another 1.5 million Jews in the Holy Land, but FDR would not budge. He urged Wise to come up with “a second choice for the Jews… Palestine possibilities are going to be exhausted.  [..........].” Wise left the meeting “surprised and shocked” by the president’s position.

Once World War Two began, President Roosevelt’s attitude toward Zionism grew even chillier.

British officials claimed any wartime expression of support for Zionism by the Allies would drive the Arab world into the arms of the Nazis. Rabbi Wise countered that the Arabs already supported the Nazis anyway.

“The [pro-Nazi] rebellion in Iraq, the presence of the Mufti in Berlin and Rome, [and] the failure of Egypt to live up to her treaty of alliance [with England]” show that “the sacrifice of friends in the interest of appeasing the unfriendly has repeatedly been proven to be in vain,” Wise argued. Nonetheless, FDR sided with the British view, as another newly discovered document makes plain.

The second document, from October 1941, records Nahum Goldmann, co-chairman of the World Jewish Congress, briefing American Zionist leaders on worrisome rumors that the British were holding secret negotiations with the Arabs over the future of Palestine.

Goldmann said his request to the State Department for information about the talks had been ignored because State “is very much influenced by the British Colonial Office.”

To make matters worse (Goldmann continued), “There are reasons also to believe that even in higher quarters” – a reference to the Roosevelt White House – “there are certain prejudices that have to be overcome in order to get effective support from the administration for a Jewish Palestine.” (In a similar vein, Rabbi Wise wrote to a colleague that FDR was “hopelessly and completely under the domination of the English Foreign Office [and] the Colonial Office.”)

By 1942, FDR was so averse to being seen as pro- Zionist that he rejected even a request to permit the Palestine (Jewish) Symphony Orchestra to name one of its theaters the “Roosevelt Amphitheatre.”

A third new document concerns an April 1943 meeting between FDR and a delegation of seven Jewish congressmen. They urged the president to press the British to cancel the White Paper policy of closing off Palestine to all but a handful of Jewish refugees.

“It was a very unsatisfactory interview,”Congressman Daniel Ellison (R-Maryland) reported to Jewish leaders. “[We] asked the President about refugees, the White Paper, etc. What he proposed to do about these things. [We] made a number of suggestions to him as to what [we] thought he ought to do and the answer to all of these suggestions was ‘No.’”

The fourth document is a transcript of Nahum Goldmann briefing David Ben-Gurion and other Jewish Agency leaders, in 1944, about the political situation in Washington. According to Goldmann, FDR’s support for Zionism was “tentative.”

He added: “It is impossible to educate [President Roosevelt], because you get to see him only once every six months, for thirty minutes, ten of which are spent by him telling anecdotes, after which he expects to hear you tell him anecdotes, and then there are only ten minutes left for a serious conversation – what can one accomplish like this?”

Goldmann’s description dovetails with Chaim Weizmann’s bitter experience when he met with FDR at the White House in July 1942. The Zionist leader wanted to speak about the Allies’ policy on Palestine, but the president diverted the conversation into a long discussion about the production of synthetic rubber. Roosevelt pushed aside Weizmann’s request to mobilize a Jewish army to defend Palestine against a German invasion; FDR supported the British view that such a move would antagonize the Egyptian Army. Weizmann argued that the US-British position was like “trying to appease a rattlesnake,” but once again, Roosevelt would not budge.

David Niles, a close adviser to FDR, once remarked that if Roosevelt had lived (and thus Harry Truman remained vice president), he probably would not have supported the creation of Israel, and as a result the Jewish state might never have been established. Today it is more clear than ever why Niles doubted FDR genuinely supported Zionism.

Read the rest - Obama, FDR, and Zionism

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Posted in Anti-semitism, Barack Obama, History, Holocaust, Israel, Judaism, World War II | 54 Comments »

Germans veering towards Anti-Semitism thanks to Progressives and Muslims

by Speranza ( 72 Comments › )
Filed under Ahmadinejad, Anti-semitism, Germany, History, Holocaust, Israel, Leftist-Islamic Alliance, Palestinians, World War II at March 5th, 2013 - 8:00 am

Given the left-wing culture running rampant through Western Europe, combined with a long and sad history of Jew hatred,  and a growing militant Muslim population, I cannot say that I am surprised. As the author states, Angela Merkel may be the last Chancellor of Germany even remotely sympathetic towards Jews and Israel.

by Isi Leibler

In the aftermath of the Holocaust, successive German governments have meticulously upheld their obligations to the Jewish people. Study of the Holocaust is a mandatory component of the German state education curriculum, Holocaust denial is classified as a crime and restitution commitments were honored and even exceeded.

Chancellor Angela Merkel is a genuine friend of the Jews and despite intense political pressures and occasional minor vacillations, has consistently supported Israel, describing its security as “part of my country’s raison d’etre”. However in recent years, as in other European countries, German public opinion has turned against Israel, perceiving it as the principal threat to global stability and peace. This hostility has increasingly assumed overt anti-Semitic tones.

There is growing resentment against Jews, who are blamed for imposing excessive emphasis on collective German national guilt for the Holocaust.

Anti-Jewish hostility is often expressed in the more ‘politically respectable’ demonization of the Jewish nation state, allegedly not related to anti-Semitism although the “Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe” (OSCE) explicitly defines such behavior as anti-Semitic.

The German left has accused Israel of war crimes, occupation and racism and also engages in inverse Holocaust imagery, enthusiastically condemning Israel for allegedly behaving towards the Palestinians as its Nazi forebears did to the Jews.

[.......]

These trends are fortified by the sizable Islamic migrant community – now numbering over four million – which aggressively agitates against Israel, utilizing obscene placards at demonstrations chanting “gas the Jews” or “death to the Jews”. Moslems are at the forefront of violence directed at identifiable Jews in urban areas, especially in Berlin, where some Jewish communal leaders are now recommending to avoid wearing kipot in public.

Yet, the government has welcomed the immigration of almost 200,000 former Soviet Jews and invested major funds to resurrect a vigorous Jewish communal life and foster Jewish education.

Despite receiving state subsidies, the Jewish leadership displays its independence and frequently speaks out if it considers the government is not fulfilling its obligations to the Jewish community or fails to act evenhandedly towards Israel.

However the intensification of extreme anti-Israeli hostility combined with a recent spate of disconcerting incidents has created angst within the Jewish community.

Last year, there was a traumatic national debate which assumed ugly anti-Semitic overtones after a judgment in Cologne ruled that male circumcision causes “bodily harm” and declared the practice illegal. The matter was only resolved following the direct intervention of Chancellor Merkel who initiated the passage of legislation legalizing circumcision.

In April 2012, in a provocative outburst, 84 year old Nobel Prize laureate Gunter Grass bitterly accused the Israeli government of seeking to obliterate the Iranian population. He warned that the Jewish state, which he considers ‘insane and unscrupulous’, represents the principal obstacle to peace in the region and called on his government to cancel delivery to Israel of the last Dolphin submarine.

Despite being discredited for having initially concealed that he had served as a member of the Nazi Waffen SS, Grass’s vicious attack on Israel, whilst condemned by numerous politicians and journalists, was enthusiastically endorsed by many Germans.

Shortly after that incident, the state-sponsored Berlin Jewish Museum invited Judith Butler, a notorious Jewish promoter of BDS against Israel, as a guest lecturer. Butler received enthusiastic applause from the 700-strong audience when, purporting to act in accordance with the highest Jewish moral values, she renewed calls to boycott Israel and ‘abolish political Zionism’ in order to create a bi-national Palestinian state.

To provide a platform for such an outspoken anti-Israeli activist at a state-sponsored Jewish Museum in Berlin is surely obscene but not unprecedented. Former Israeli communist Felicia Langer, lives in Germany where she condemns the German government for supporting Israel, constantly equates Israelis with Nazis, calls for Israeli leaders to be tried as war criminals, describes Israel as an apartheid regime and even praises Iranian President Ahmadinejad. In August 2009, German President Horst Kohler, who four years earlier had addressed the Knesset, shocked the Jewish community by honoring Langer with the Federal Cross of Merit, Germany’s most prestigious award.

In 2010, despite protests from the Israeli Embassy, Frankfurt’s Mayor Petra Roth invited Alfred Grosser, a German-born Jew known to be frenziedly hostile to Israel, to give the annual Kristallnacht oration in the Paul’s Church. He used the occasion to draw parallels between the behavior of Israelis and Nazis and was lauded by the media.

Another ongoing scandal prevails at the German Center on anti-Semitism in Berlin, considered the most important German institute engaged with the subject. Until last year it was headed by Professor Wolfgang Benz, who received his PhD from Professor Karl Bosl, a former Nazi storm trooper who maintains an ongoing association with right wing extremist groups. To this day, Benz continues defending his mentor.

Benz equates Islamophobia with anti-Semitism, alleging that critics of Islamic practice are reminiscent of Nazi anti-Semites attacking the Talmud. He recently challenged the fact that the Muslim terrorist murders in Toulouse had an “anti-Semitic dimension”. He dismisses concerns about the Moslem Brotherhood as being reminiscent of anti-Semitic phobias like the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and bizarrely complains that drawing attention to the fact that Moslems comprise 70% of Berlin prison inmates is comparable to Hitler’s ravings over “the fact that 89% of Berlin pediatricians in the 1930s were Jews”.

[.......]

The most recent upheaval erupted in response to a list compiled by the US-based Simon Wiesenthal Center, purporting to identify the ten worst anti-Semitic statements of 2012. It included President Ahmadinejad, the Moslem Brotherhood, Nation of Islam founder, Louis Farrakhan and European anti-Semites. Ninth on the list was Jakob Augstein, publisher of the magazine Der Freitag, who also provides columns to Der Spiegel, Germany’s leading weekly, founded by his father.

I have an aversion to simplistic lists prioritizing bigots and having reviewed some of Augstein’s outbursts, I consider that bracketing him with Ahmadinejad or Farrakhan absurdly magnifies his standing and impact.  [.......]

Augstein alleges that when “Jerusalem calls, Berlin bows its will”; that US presidents were obliged to “secure the support of Jewish lobby groups”; that American Republicans and the Israeli government profit from violence in Libya, Sudan and Yemen; that “the Netanyahu government keeps the world on a leash with an ever swelling war chant”; that “Israel incubates its opponents in Gaza”; that the recent Prophet Mohammed video provoking riots was initiated by Israel; that ultra-Orthodox Jews are like Islamic fundamentalist terrorists and “follow the law of revenge”.

Even the broadest interpretation of the OSCE definition would qualify such demonization of Israel and allusions to Jewish global power as anti-Semitic.

[.......]

Prominent German Jewish writer and commentator, Henryk Broder, was sufficiently outraged to describe Augstein as “a pure anti-Semite… who only missed the opportunity to make his career with the Gestapo because he was born after the war”.

The president of the Jewish Central Council of Jews, Dieter Graumann, whilst condemning his “horrible, hideous” articles on Israel, criticized his placement on such a list. His vice president, Salomon Korn, went further and foolishly defended Augstein against charges of anti-Semitism.

Juliane Wetzel from the German Center on anti-Semitism was amongst those who rejected suggestions that Augstein was disseminating hatred of Jews. Overall, the bulk of the German media, as well as both leftist and CDU politicians defended him, insisting that he was merely expressing legitimate criticism of Israel.

It was significant that in 2010, two Bundestag leftist representatives were aboard the Turkish Marvi Marmara and that for the first time, the left and the right united in parliament to carry a unanimous resolution censuring Israel for the Gaza flotilla episode.  [.......]

For Jews, the positive side of Germany is the evident abundance of pro-Israeli and even philo-Semitic rank and file Germans in all walks of life. Yet, simultaneously the intensifying efforts by left wing activists uniting with Moslem extremists and occasionally even Nazis, to demonize Israel and promote anti-Semitism, provide valid grounds for concern about a future for Jews in Germany.

The situation is likely to further deteriorate drastically after the culmination of Angela Merkel’s term as Chancellor.

Read the rest – Germans lurching towards Anti-Semitism

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Posted in Ahmadinejad, Anti-semitism, Germany, History, Holocaust, Israel, Leftist-Islamic Alliance, Palestinians, World War II | 72 Comments »

The myth of Pius XII being “Hitler’s pope” is debunked

by Rodan ( 36 Comments › )
Filed under Holocaust, Special Report, World War II at February 17th, 2013 - 11:44 pm

For years Catholic haters claimed Pope Pius XII was a Nazi Collaborator. A Smear book called Hitler’s Pope has become gospel. Now an Independent researcher who had access to Vatican files, has debunked the myth of Hitler’s Pope.

by Dalya Alberge

Pius XII has long been vilified as “Hitler’s pope”, accused of failing publicly to condemn the genocide of Europe’s Jews. Now a British author has unearthed extensive material that Vatican insiders believe will restore his reputation, revealing the part that he played in saving lives and opposing nazism. Gordon Thomas, a Protestant, was given access to previously unpublished Vatican documents and tracked down victims, priests and others who had not told their stories before.

The Pope’s Jews, which will be published next month, details how Pius gave his blessing to the establishment of safe houses in the Vatican and Europe’s convents and monasteries. He oversaw a secret operation with code names and fake documents for priests who risked their lives to shelter Jews, some of whom were even made Vatican subjects.

Thomas shows, for example, that priests were instructed to issue baptism certificates to hundreds of Jews hidden in Genoa, Rome and elsewhere in Italy. More than 2,000 Jews in Hungary were given fabricated Vatican documents identifying them as Catholics and a network saved German Jews by bringing them to Rome. The pope appointed a priest with extensive funds with which to provide food, clothing and medicine. More than 4,000 Jews were hidden in convents and monasteries across Italy.

During and immediately after the war, the pope was considered a Jewish saviour. Jewish leaders – such as Jerusalem’s chief rabbi in 1944 – said the people of Israel would never forget what he and his delegates “are doing for our unfortunate brothers and sisters at the most tragic hour”. Jewish newspapers in Britain and America echoed that praise, and Hitler branded him “a Jew lover”.

However, his image turned sour in the 1960s, thanks to Soviet antagonism towards the Vatican and a German play by Rolf Hochhuth,The Deputy, which vilified the pope, accusing him of silence and inaction over the Jews. It was a trend that intensified with the publication ofHitler’s Pope, a book by John Cornwell.

However, as the Vatican’s secretary of state before the war, the future pope contributed to the damning 1937 encyclical of Pius XI, With Burning Anxiety, and, as Pius XII he made condemnatory speeches that were widely interpreted at the time – including by Jewish leaders and newspapers – as clear condemnations of Hitler’s racial policies. [........]

Professor Ronald J Rychlak, the author of Hitler, the War and the Pope, said: “Gordon Thomas has found primary sources … He has tracked down family members, original documentation and established what really was a universal perception prior to the 1960s. He’s shown what the people at the time – victims, rescuers and villains – all knew: that Pius XII was a great supporter of the victims of the Holocaust.”

Asked why the Vatican had not made the new material available until now or, where stories were known, disseminated them more widely,Thomas said: “The church thinks across centuries. If there’s a dispute for 50 years, so what?”

William Doino, a Vatican historian, described Thomas’s research as “unique and groundbreaking”. He spoke of the book’s new insight, for example, into Hugh O’Flaherty, an Irish priest: “Everybody has always praised [O'Flaherty] because he helped Jews and escaped POWs. They made a movie about him, The Scarlet and the Black, with Gregory Peck. However, they always say he was acting on his own authority and that Pius was either aloof or not giving him anything. [........]

The book also tells the story of Vittorio Sacerdoti, a young Jewish doctor who was able to work in a Vatican hospital, inventing a fictitious deadly disease that deterred Germans from entering. Dozens of fake patients were taught to cough convincingly.

Thomas interviewed Sacerdoti’s cousin, who recalled that as a child she was one of those patients – “feeling there was nothing wrong with her, yet having to cough regularly in the ward”.

The Vatican is so excited by The Pope’s Jews that it is supporting a feature documentary film being planned by a British producer who has bought the rights to it.

[.........]

Thomas, who also wrote the book Voyage of the Damned, about Jewish refugees, recalled: “The Vatican people said, ‘How wonderful, the truth out at last’.”

Read the rest – Vatican hopes secret files exonerates ‘Hitler’s pope’

As a reminder as to why the Pope did not do more against the Nazis, Stalin once asked “How many divisions the Pope had?”  Most of the Nazi collaboration accusations were invented by Communists. So next time a person repeat this junk and lies, just point out they are using Communist talking points.

Posted in Holocaust, Special Report, World War II | 36 Comments »

“I Am Israel” – See the video that YouTube is suppressing

by 1389AD ( 79 Comments › )
Filed under Free Speech, Holocaust, Israel at January 29th, 2013 - 5:00 pm

At this time, to view the video directly on YouTube, you must have a YouTube/Google account and sign in to confirm that you are over 18 years of age. This restriction interferes with the proper education of young people who need to know what is going on in the world.

I Am Israel – Documentary Film HD Version

Uploaded on Jan 24, 2010 by PuttingItMildly

Feel free to reupload the video to youtube or to another video website, and share it on facebook, twitter, email or any other place :)

Made by PuttingItMildly and phoenixred999.

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_________________________________

I Am Israel.

I was born millennia before I was renamed Palestine by the conquering Romans, and before the british decided to turn my Eastern lands into Jordan, My people, the Jews, maintained communities here for three thousand years, that is until the arabs decided to massacre those Jews in 1920 (Nabi musa riots) and 1929 (Hebron massacre). hundreds of civilians were murdered, most of them women and children. Meanwhile, their brother Arab states exiled 1,000,000 Arabic Jews, Erasing their History.

I Am Israel – I’ve been attacked four times by five Arab armies in 60 years. I am a survivor, I won every war they waged against me. I told the Arabs who lived on my land that they were welcome to stay, but their brothers said, “leave temporarily while the Jews are taken care of”. I have been offering a message of peace since the day I was born. But my enemies answered only in bombs, bullets and blood – our own, and theirs.

Realizing they could not defeat me with arms, my enemies turned to lies. Pallywood Production.

I Am Israel – time and time again my name is smeared. Though like the Muhamad Al-Dura hoax, each lie is eventually disproven. My enemies continue to claim that I am committing “genocide”. Tell me, is giving educational opportunities to Palestinian Arabs “genocide” ? 20% of the students in Haifa University are Arabs. If I exiled all the Arabs in 1948, why are 20% of my citizens Arabs who vote ? Why did I give up the entire Sinai and the Gaza strip, uprooting my own people from their home, only for the HOPE of peace ?

I Am Israel – In combat ops, I risk the lives of my teenagers to minimize civilian casualties. I make every attempt to target only fighters, often putting my soldiers in harm. In war, I drop leaflets on areas to be attacked, warning civilians to evacuate – Has any other army in the history of mankind done this for its enemy?

I waited 8 years to stop Hamas from it’s daily rocket attacks, some fell on my kindergartens, I am patient, but my patience is not infinite.

I Am Israel – I discover new medicines to treat devastating diseases. I’ve developed technology for the creation of Intel, anti-virus, and cellphones. And I lead the world in scientific publications per capita.

I send humanitarian missions to developing countries, including Muslim countries. I have absorbed hundreds of Muslim refugees who faced genocide in Darfur – refugees no Muslim state would take.

I Am Israel – one of the smallest countries in the world, and probably the most stubborn – I refuse to give up hope for peace. My friends support me not because of any lobby, but because they see the truth, I am the heart of the Middle East, and the hope for it’s future.

My prophet said, “Nation shall not lift up sword against nation”, and I will try…
And try…
And try, until those words are true.
Because, I Am Israel.

Right-click on this link to download the video in .avi format.

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Posted in Free Speech, Holocaust, Israel | 79 Comments »

The little known first uprising of the Warsaw Ghetto, January 1943

by Speranza ( 100 Comments › )
Filed under Anti-semitism, History, Holocaust at January 18th, 2013 - 7:00 pm

Many people are familiar with the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of April 1943. However three months earlier, there was a little known Warsaw Ghetto Uprising which took place 70 years ago this month.

by Robert Rozett

Warsaw Ghetto monument in Poland

Warsaw Ghetto monument in Poland Photo: Agencja Gazeta/Reuters
In January 1943 there were only 60,000 Jews left in the Warsaw Ghetto.They were what remained of the approximately 440,000 Jews who had been confined there. One-fifth had died of disease and starvation during the past two years, and the previous summer some 265,000 had been deported to the Treblinka extermination camp, and over 30,000 to other camps.At the start of the great deportation, the head of the Jewish Council, Adam Czerniakow, had committed suicide rather than comply with German demands to provide census information about the ghetto, realizing the Germans would use it for the coming Aktion. His death, however, did nothing to stop the trains from rolling out of Warsaw.With Czerniakow dead, in the wake of the deportations a new de facto leadership emerged in the ghetto – the Jewish Fighting Organization (ZOB), headed by Mordecai Anielewicz. The ZOB was a coalition primarily of various Zionist youth movements and the Jewish socialist Bund.

Alongside it there was a smaller armed underground group, the Jewish Military Union (ZZW) which represented the Revisionist Zionists.

ON MONDAY, January 18, 1943, 70 years ago, German forces entered the ghetto to round up Jews for transport.

They planned to take about 8,000 people, but the ghetto population believed the final destruction of the ghetto was at hand. To the great surprise of the German forces, they met armed resistance.

A group of Hashomer Hatsair members, led by Anielewicz and armed with pistols they had received from the Polish Home Army, intercepted a column of Jews being led by a German force and fired upon the solders. In a nose-to-nose battle, most of the underground contingent was killed, but Anielewicz managed to overpower the soldier with whom he was struggling and he escaped unharmed.

The news of the clash spread quickly to other cells of the underground and they too began to resist. Yitzhak Zuckerman, with a party from the Dror Youth Movement, lay in wait for the German force on Zamenhof Street, and when they approached fired a volley at them.

During four days the Germans tried to round up Jews and were met by armed resistance. The ghetto inhabitants went through a swift change.

With the news of the first incident of fighting they stopped responding to the Germans’ calls that they gather in the Umschlagplatz. They began devising hiding places, and the Germans had to enter many buildings and ruthlessly pull out Jews. Many were killed in their homes when they refused to be taken.

On the fourth day, having only managed to seize between 5,000 to 6,000 Jews, the Germans withdrew from the ghetto. The remaining inhabitants believed that the armed resistance, combined with the difficulties in finding Jews in hiding, had led to the end of the Aktion. As a result, over the next months the armed under-grounds sought to strengthen themselves and the vast majority of ghetto residents zealously built more and better bunkers in which to hide.

All of this would be put to the test on April 19, 1943, when the Germans reentered the ghetto, this time to liquidate it completely.

Again they met armed resistance. The fighting would continue for three weeks before the ghetto was razed, and it would come to be known as the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.

THE FOUR days of Jewish armed resistance in the Warsaw Ghetto in January 1943 is much less known than the April uprising, but its significance was great at the time and remains consequential.

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Nonetheless, this first uprising provided a glimmer of hope, and was an enormous source of pride – tremendously important to people who had been profoundly traumatized by preceding events and had a good idea what was in the offing for them.

[......] We would be hard pressed to say they survived directly because of the armed resistance in the ghetto, but unquestionably, that resistance was crucial in helping the few survivors maintain their pride, dignity and motivation to survive, and ultimately rebuild their shattered lives.

The January 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising teaches us a great deal about the human spirit, about resilience and about courage. It demonstrates that the very act of resistance against oppression can inspire further resistance.

In taking up arms against those who considered them less than human, the men and women in the Warsaw Ghetto on January 18, 1943, issued a resounding clarion call asserting their humanity.

It is this, above all, that we must remember and hold dear.

Read the rest – The little-known uprising: Warsaw Ghetto, January , 1943

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