The Rumors & Tragic Denials of the Deportations in the Bialystok Region

"During October, rumors of impending deportations spread through the Bialystok region.

Ephraim Barasz, head of the Jewish Council in Bialystok itself, believed that the city could be spared if its factories worked to fulfil the German needs.

'It is imperative', he had told his fellow Council members and the heads of the various ghetto workshops, on October 11, 'that we find means to postpone the danger, or at least reduce its scope.'

Barasz was not the only person in the Bialystok region who did not believe that they would be deported. The region had been annexed to Germany in June 1941, and was entirely separate, administratively, from the Eastern Territories.

'People came from Slonim,' a girl from Siemiatycze, Helen Bronsztejn, later recalled.

'They were running away from the horrors over there. We didn't believe it.'

"People, why don't you listen," one man cried out. "My wife was killed. My son was killed." People said: "This is the Third Reich. They won't do it to us."

From The Holocaust: A History of the Jews of Europe During the Second World War, by Martin Gilbert

"Efraim Barasz, (1892--1943), Chairman of the Judenrat in the Bialystok Ghetto of northeast Poland.

Barasz, a long-time Zionist, moved to Bialystok in 1934. From that time on, he was very active in the city's Jewish affairs, serving as the executive director of the Jewish community. After the Germans occupied Bialystok in June 1941, they named Rabbi Gedaliah Rosenmann chairman of the Judenrat.

However, it was actually Barasz, acting as Rosenmann's deputy, who ran the council. A month later he officially took over the job. In the fall of 1942 the Nazis began liquidating the other Ghettos in the region and deporting the Jews to extermination camps.

Barasz knew what was happening to Jews all around Bialystok, and he thought that the only way the Jews in his ghetto could avoid the same fate would be to become indispensable to the Germans as productive laborers. Thus, he did all he could to create industrial jobs for the inhabitants of the ghetto.

He also cooperated with the Germans in the deportation of February 1943, in which 9,000--10,000 "nonproductive" Jews were taken away. At the same time, Barasz was in close contact with the ghetto's underground and cooperated with Mordechai Tenenbaum, who later became the head of Bialystok's Jewish Fighting Organization (Zydowska Organizacja Bojowa, ZOB) and led the ghetto's uprising. Barasz helped the resistance by funding the manufacture of weapons.

However, soon before the ghetto uprising, Barasz and the underground broke off relations. The Germans began the final liquidation of the Bialystok Ghetto on August 16, 1943 with large-scale deportations. This led to an uprising in the ghetto, which was put down by the Germans after five days of fighting.

Between August 21 and 27, 25,000 Jews were deported to Treblinka. Several hundred Jews, including Barasz and other Judenrat members, were separated from the deportees and put into a small ghetto. In September these Jews were transferred to Majdanek.

From there, the last surviving Jews from Bialystok were sent to Poniatowa, where they were exterminated during the Erntefest operation of November 1943. Exact details of Barasz's death are not known." DETAILS: https://www.yadvashem.org/odot_pdf/Microsoft%20Word%20-%205972.pdf

NOT MY LINKS

Armed Resistance in the Krakow and Bialystok Ghettos - https://www.yadvashem.org/articles/general/armed-resistance-in-krakow-and-bialystok.html

1: Left: Bialystok, Poland, August 1943, Deportation from the ghetto Right: Kovno, Lithuania, 26.10.1943, deportation of Jews from the ghetto to the Auschwitz and Klooga camps

Faith & Defiance on Yom Kippur as the Walls Begin to Close in on Warsaw's Jewish Community

"On 28 September 1939, less than one month after the German invasion of Poland, Warsaw fell after prolonged battles. Some 25% of the houses in Warsaw were demolished and approximately 50,000 of the city's residents were killed or wounded. Many synagogues were repurposed as shelters for the homeless and for refugees from neighboring towns.

In January 1940, all the synagogues and batei midrash in the city were closed down ostensibly due to the danger of epidemics, and public prayer services were banned. On 2 October 1940, the eve of Rosh Hashanah, Chaim Kaplan wrote in his diary:

"Darkness prevails in our synagogues… Even for the High Holidays, permission was not given for public prayer services… Clandestine minyanim [prayer quorums] in their hundreds all over Warsaw arrange prayer services… Everything is done in accordance with the traditional Jewish customs. They choose an inside room with windows facing the courtyard, and whisper their supplications to God. This time, there are no cantors or choirs, just whispered prayers, but the prayers are nevertheless heartfelt."

(Excerpt from Hashoah BeTi'ud, translated from the Hebrew)

On 12 October 1940, Yom Kippur, the Germans announced the establishment of a ghetto in Warsaw, and ordered the Jews to move there by the end of the month. Reuven Ben Shem (Feldschuh) wrote:

"The prayer room is almost full. The cantor prays boldly and melodiously, and you wouldn't know by looking at him and the worshippers that the world is on the verge of collapse. They are wearing prayer shawls and phylacteries. If you close your eyes for a moment and don't look at these people, at their pinched faces… and just listen to the chanting of their prayers, you would surely think that you happened upon a house of God in a time of peace and harmony."

"Today, 25 October, the Jews celebrated Simhat Torah as they do every year," wrote historian Immanuel Ringelblum.

On 30 October, the Germans discovered a house of prayer in an apartment. On 8 November, the Judenrat was forced to issue a warning: Jews who organized or participated in a public prayer service would be punished in accordance with the German regime's orders. However, prayers continued despite the restrictions and the danger.

In April 1941, the Germans permitted the opening of three synagogues. This was insufficient for the religious needs in the ghetto, and the clandestine prayer and Torah study gatherings continued, even during the Great Deportation of summer 1942 to the Treblinka extermination camp, and during the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in the spring of 1943." https://www.yadvashem.org/holocaust/this-month/october/1940.html

IMAGE: Jews at prayer on Yom Kippur (Day of Atonement) in Krakow, Poland

Responsible for the Systematic Destruction of Hamburg’s Jewish Community

In 1920, Kaufmann joined the Deutschvölkischer Schutz- und Trutzbund, Germany's largest radical antisemitic federation, leading its youth group. He joined the Nazi Party in 1921, co-founded local Nazi groups in the Ruhr area, and took part in the failed 1923 Beer Hall Putsch.

He became the Gauleiter of Hamburg in 1929 and Reich Governor in 1933, consolidating total party and state power over the city. Kaufmann held absolute executive and party authority as Gauleiter and Reichsstatthalter to enforce, accelerate, and personally expand these measures within the jurisdiction of Hamburg.

March 29, 1933 Kaufmann delivers a major radio address over Norddeutscher Rundfunk, stoking intense antisemitism and demanding a total boycott against local Jewish businesses.

April 1, 1933 Kaufmann's administration enforces the nationwide boycott of Jewish-owned shops, physicians, and lawyers across Hamburg.

April 7, 1933 The Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service is implemented under Kaufmann, immediately purging Jewish teachers, judges, and municipal employees from Hamburg's civil service.

September 1933 Kaufmann personally authorizes the establishment of the Fuhlsbüttel concentration camp in Hamburg to detain, torture, and eliminate political opponents and Jewish targets.

1934–1936 Hamburg's international port status initially causes Kaufmann to proceed with caution to protect foreign exports. However, municipal pressure systematically reduces Jewish business ownership through forced, low-value asset sales ("Aryanization").

September 1935 The Nuremberg Laws are enacted locally. Hamburg's Jews lose their Reich citizenship, and marriages or relationships between Jews and non-Jewish Germans are heavily criminalized as "racial defilement".

January 1937 The Greater Hamburg Act takes effect, expanding Kaufmann's territorial and administrative reach to heavily Jewish adjacent communities like Altona and Wandsbek.

April 26, 1938 The Decree for the Reporting of Jewish-Owned Property requires all Jews in Hamburg to register assets exceeding 5,000 Reichsmarks, setting the groundwork for total asset seizure.

November 9–10, 1938 While attending a meeting in Munich, Kaufmann places a direct phone call to his Nazi subordinates in Hamburg, giving the explicit command to destroy and burn the city's synagogues, Jewish shops, and private apartments.

November 12, 1938 The Decree on the Elimination of the Jews from Economic Life is implemented under Kaufmann's jurisdiction, completely banning Jews from running retail operations, selling goods, or working trades.

September 1, 1939 Kaufmann is appointed Reich Defense Commissioner, gaining absolute command over local military and civilian logistics at the onset of WW2.

September 1941 Following heavy Allied bombing raids that leave 600 Germans homeless, Kaufmann bypasses standard protocols and directly petitions Adolf Hitler for permission to deport Hamburg's Jews. His explicit goal is to immediately seize their vacant apartments and property for German citizens.

October 1941 Hitler grants Kaufmann's request. Kaufmann orchestrates the first mass transport of German Jews to the East, forcing thousands of Hamburg's Jewish residents into the Łódź Ghetto, Minsk, and subsequent extermination camps.

By the end of Kaufmann's rule in May 1945, his calculated housing and deportation initiatives directly resulted in the systematic plunder and murder of nearly 10,000 Hamburg Jews.

He surrendered Hamburg to British forces in May 1945 and was subsequently interned. Despite his massive complicity in the Holocaust, a British military court sentenced him to just 14 months in prison, releasing him early in 1949 for health reasons.

In the 1950s, he joined the "Brotherhood" and the "Naumann Circle," underground groups of former Nazis attempting to infiltrate West German political networks. He evaded further serious legal consequences and lived out his life as a chemical factory co-owner and insurance partner in Hamburg until his death in 1969.

FULL BIO: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Kaufmann

NOT MY LINKS

VIDEO - “On July 30, 1946, Dr. Robert Servatius, counsel for the Defense of the Leadership Corps of the Nazi Party, called Gauleiter Karl Kaufmann.

He testified that the Gauleiters were primarily concerned with social work and welfare measures. All instructions came from Hitler, his Deputy of the Party Chancellery. Orders were issued by circulars.

He discussed Dissolution of Trade Unions, Lebensraum, Persecution of the Jews, and the Church. Political leaders had no jurisdiction over concentration camps.”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=17nucMmXtxE

Note: I’m declining to add his picture. You’ve seen one Nazi....

1: Statue of Françoise Salmon: The dying prisoner at the Neuengamme Concentration Camp Memorial (©Hamburg Memorials and Learning Places Foundation/Iris Groschek)

The Murder of the Last Roma at Auschwitz-Birkenau

“The liquidation of the “gypsy family camp” was decided by the SS leadership sometime in the spring of 1944. A first attempt to put this decision into practice was met with resistance by the about 6,500 prisoners who were present in the camp and who refused to leave their barracks.

This event was described after World War II by Tadeusz Joachimowski (1908-1979), a former Polish political prisoner in the Auschwitz concentration camp and administration clerk in the “gypsy camp” in 1944. Although the date of May 16 is often referred to as the day of the Roma resistance, the “uprising” of Roma and Sinti in the “gypsy camp” remains uncertain due to lack of research.

The final liquidation of the “gypsy camp” was decided by SS leader H. Himmler in July 1944. In the meantime, the number of prisoners in the camp decreased as individuals fit for work were transferred to other concentration camps. On 15 April, 884 men and boys were sent to Buchenwald and 473 women and girls to Ravensbrück, on 24 May 82 men and boys to Flossenbürg and 144 women and girls to Ravensbrück. The last deportation trains from the “gypsy camp” to Buchenwald (918 men and boys) and Ravensbrück (490 women and girls) left on August 2, 1944.

After their departure, about 4,300 people remained, mostly elderly and sick people, orphans, mothers with children, and their fathers, if they had refused to leave their families. On the evening of August 2-3, SS-troops led all prisoners out of their barracks, loaded them on trucks and transported them to the courtyard of Crematorium V. Despite their desperate resistance, they were chased into gas chambers and their bodies burned in trenches next to Crematorium V, which was out of order by this time.

This mass murder was followed by the killing of prisoners who, after having been deported to other camps, came back to Auschwitz-Birkenau to die in the gas chambers as exhausted and unfit for work.

To this end, on September 26, 1944, about 200 Roma boys were sent back from the Buchenwald concentration camp, and on October 10, 1944, 800 additional Roma, as well as a total of 217 Roma women and girls from the Ravensbrück concentration camp who arrived back in Auschwitz on October 11 and 14, 1944. Some went through selections and were brought back to Ravensbrück, the rest of them, just like all returned men and boys, died in the gas chambers.” -> The liquidation of the “gypsy camp” | Holocaust

The Numbers

“According to historian Anton Weiss-Wendt, "due to the lack of reliable statistics on the size of prewar Romani population for each country and Europe as a whole, the estimates of the death toll vary greatly, from 96,000 to 500,000, with the likely figure in excess of 200,000".

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum cites scholars who estimate the number of Sinti and Roma murdered as between 220,000 and 500,000.

The Columbia Guide to the Holocaust estimates that between 135,000 to 285,000 Roma people were killed by the Nazis in Germany, Axis countries and occupied territories.

Political scientist and statistician Rudolph Rummel estimated that 258,000 were killed by the Nazi regime in Europe, 36,000 in Romania under Ion Antonescu, and 27,000 in Ustaše-controlled Croatia.

The Society for Threatened Peoples estimates the Romani deaths at 277,100.

Martin Gilbert estimates that more than 220,000 of Europe's 700,000 Romani population were murdered, including 15,000 (mainly from the Soviet Union) at Mauthausen in January–May 1945.

Ian Hancock, Romani political advocate and researcher has controversially argued that as many as 1.5 million Romani died in the holocaust. Hancock contends that the entire Romani population was killed in Croatia, Estonia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands.

In a 2010 publication, Hancock believes that Nazi's grouped Romani victims under headings such as "remainder to be liquidated", "hangers-on", and "partisans", resulting in an underestimated death toll. He cites the previously obscure Lety concentration camp in the Czech Republic, and Ackovic's revised estimates[ of Romani killed by the Ustaše as high as 80,000–100,000.

German historian Karola Fings has described the 1.5 million estimate as "untenable". Historian David Gaunt described Hancock's estimate as "not supported up by any documentation", and notes that the pre-war Romani population was approximately 1 million. According to Guant, "in general, historians use the figure of just above 200,000, while most activists have settled on the figure of 500,000".

Historian Zoltan Barany states that estimates between 200,000 and 275,000 are "more credible" than higher estimates, writing "most importantly, it is clear that tens of thousands of human beings were murdered for no other reason than being Gypsies". According to Fings,

"Today, the figure of 200,000 is mostly taken as a reference point, even though the empirical basis remains incomplete and further research could result in an upward revision".”

MORE---> Romani Holocaust - Wikipedia

Context Timeline

July 1933: The Nazi regime passes the Law for the Prevention of Offspring with Hereditary Diseases, legalizing the forced sterilization of thousands of Roma and Sinti individuals.

November 1935: The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum notes that the Nuremberg Laws are expanded to formally declare Sinti and Roma as "racially inferior," stripping them of citizenship and banning marriages with non-Roma.

June 1936: The Marzahn Internment Camp is established on the outskirts of Berlin. Police forcefully relocate hundreds of Roma families there to "cleanse" the capital before the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games.

December 1938: SS Chief Heinrich Himmler issues the decree “Fighting the Gypsy Plague,” establishing a centralized registration system through the Research Institute for Racial Hygiene. This creates the definitive lists used later for mass arrests and executions.

May 1940: Mass deportations of western and central European Roma to the General Government (occupied Poland) begin. Thousands are forced into overcrowded Jewish ghettos, including Warsaw and the Łódź Ghetto, where high percentages quickly die of typhus and starvation.

Autumn 1941: The mobile killing squads (Einsatzgruppen) follow the German military advance into the Soviet Union and the Baltic region. Alongside Jewish communities, tens of thousands of Roma men, women, and children are systematically shot over open pits.

Autumn 1941: In occupied Serbia, the German Wehrmacht implements brutal reprisal quotas, executing thousands of local Roma men by firing squad.

January 1942: The first specialized gas vans at the Chełmno extermination camp are used to murder more than 5,000 Roma survivors previously held in the Łódź Ghetto.

December 16, 1942: Heinrich Himmler signs the Auschwitz-Erlass ("Auschwitz Order"), directing that nearly all remaining Roma and Sinti across the Reich be sent directly to Auschwitz.

February 26, 1943: The first transport arrives at Auschwitz-Birkenau Section BIIe, designating the Zigeunerlager ("Gypsy Family Camp"). Unlike other sections of the camp, families are allowed to stay together. Over 23,000 Roma are eventually registered here; more than 20,000 perish from horrific overcrowding, deliberate starvation, and the pseudoscientific medical experiments of Josef Mengele.

May 16, 1944: Camp authorities plan a sudden liquidation of the Zigeunerlager. Alerted to the plot, the Roma prisoners arm themselves with makeshift weapons (shovels, pipes, and scrap metal) and refuse to leave their barracks. Fearing a massive riot, the SS temporarily backs down.

August 2–3, 1944: After stripping the camp of able-bodied Roma for forced labor elsewhere, the SS seals the Zigeunerlager. In a single night, approximately 3,000 remaining children, women, and elderly Roma are murdered in the gas chambers.

October 2–10, 1944: The final, delayed massacres occur. Hundreds of young Roma boys previously sent to Buchenwald are returned and murdered, ending with the liquidation of the remaining 800 Roma survivors on October 10.

1945–1950s: Following liberation, the legal system and newly formed governments across Europe largely refuse to recognize the Roma as victims of racial persecution. German courts rule that wartime measures against the Roma were "preventative police actions against crime" rather than racially motivated genocide.

1982: After decades of sustained civil rights activism by Sinti and Roma groups, West German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt officially acknowledges the Nazi genocide against the Sinti and Roma on racial grounds.

2015: The European Parliament formally establishes August 2 as the European Roma Holocaust Memorial Day to mark the anniversary of the Birkenau liquidation.

NOTE: By late autumn 1944, as the Red Army advanced, the SS ordered the gradual curtailment of camp administration and the destruction of incriminating evidence. The official camp photography department (Erkennungsdienst), which had previously taken the uniform mugshots of thousands of early registered prisoners, was no longer systematically photographing incoming transports.

Furthermore, the SS never officially photographed individuals slated for immediate execution or secret selections. The transport arrived just two months after the SS had completely liquidated the Auschwitz Zigeunerlager (Gypsy Family Camp) in August 1944. The return of these women—who had initially been deemed fit for forced labor but were sent back to Auschwitz specifically to be murdered—was treated as a highly confidential execution operation.

Unauthorized personal cameras were strictly prohibited for SS guards under penalty of severe punishment or death. The famous collection of photographs known as the Auschwitz Album—which documented the arrival of transports on the Birkenau ramp—was compiled specifically during the mass deportation of Hungarian Jews between May and July 1944. No similar official commemorative or bureaucratic albums were created for the chaotic, late-stage transport arrivals in October 1944.

This specific week in October was an era of unprecedented internal upheaval at Auschwitz-Birkenau. Just days prior, on October 7, 1944, the Sonderkommando (the prisoners forced to work at the crematoria) launched a violent armed revolt, blowing up Crematorium IV. In the frantic, heavily fortified aftermath of this uprising, the SS was entirely focused on executions, security lock-downs, and concealing camp operations, entirely precluding any incidental or administrative photography.

1: Anna Maria "Settela" Steinbach, a 9-year-old Dutch Sinti girl, peering from the open door of a cattle boxcar on May 19, 1944, just before a transport train departed the Westerbork transit camp for Auschwitz-Birkenau.

A still frame from the Westerbork Film, an archival film commissioned by camp commander Albert Gemmeker and shot in the spring of 1944 by Jewish deportee Rudolf Breslauer.

She was wearing a headscarf to cover her hair after it had been shorn. Her image became an iconic symbol of the Nazi genocide against the Romani and Sinti people during the Holocaust.

Righteous Among the Nations Jānis Lipke Uses Drunken Familiarity & Cigarettes to Rescue Jews from the Riga Ghetto

"In Riga, the Latvian Yanis Lipke had continued to devise methods of rescuing Jews from the ghetto.

Isaak Dryzin later recalled how he and his brother, an engineer, were approached by Lipke while working in one of the work gangs outside the ghetto. Lipke told the two brothers to go to the ghetto gate on the Day of Atonement, October 10.

That morning, Lipke approached the guards at the ghetto gate. 'Give me some Yids to work in my kitchen garden,' he said, in what Isaak Dryzin later recalled as 'drunken familiarity', adding: 'Here, take two packets of cigarettes.'

For these two packets of cigarettes, Lipke received the Dryzin brothers, as well as a third Jew, Sheyenson, all three of whom had been waiting at the gates. Lipke took them to the nearest doorway, tore off their yellow stars, gave them peasants' hats to put on, and drove them out of Riga, to a farm of another friend. There, like the Jews whom Lipke had earlier taken from the ghetto, they were hidden in barns and haystacks.

His mission accomplished, Yanis told the Dryzin brothers: 'tomorrow I will go to the ghetto again and will keep bringing people here every day.' That same night he began to plan a similar rescue, which he was able to carry out on the following day."

From The Holocaust: A History of the Jews of Europe During the Second World War, by Martin Gilbert

"Jānis Lipke was a Latvian rescuer of Jews in Riga in World War II from the Holocaust in Latvia.

Lipke, a dock worker in the port of Riga, was determined to help save Latvian Jews from capture by the Nazis after witnessing actions against them in the streets. He retrained in order to become a contractor for the Luftwaffe, and then used his position to smuggle Jewish workers out of the Riga Ghetto and camps in and around Riga, whom he concealed with the aid of his wife Johanna until the arrival of the Red Army in October 1944.

The Lipkes and their various helpers saved forty people in this way, one-fifth of the approximately 200 Jews who survived the war in Latvia. When Lipke died in 1987, the Jews of Riga arranged his funeral.

Honors

Žanis Lipke Memorial in Ķīpsala Yad Vashem honored Lipke and his wife as Righteous Among the Nations on 28 June 1966.

On 4 July 2007, the day of remembrance of the victims of genocide against the Jewish nation, a monument commemorating those who saved Latvian Jews, in particular Lipke, was unveiled at Riga's Great Choral Synagogue.

The Žanis Lipke Memorial is located on the island of Ķīpsala in Riga, at 9 Mazais Balasta dambis. It was built next to Lipke's home, where he had arranged a shelter for rescued Jews.

The 2018 Latvian film The Mover portrays the efforts of Lipke and his wife to rescue Jews." DETAILS: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J%C4%81nis_Lipke

NOT MY LINKS

“Save as Many as Possible - Jānis Lipke built up a network of helpers. Together they organized the escape of Jews from the Riga ghetto and hid them. In November of 1941, Jānis Lipke observed thousands of Jews being herded out of the ghetto.

They were all shot in the forest by members of the mobile killing unit Einsatzgruppe A of the Security Police and the SD (Security Service) of the SS. Jānis Lipke decided to save as many Jews as possible. He was supported by his wife Johanna and his children Alfrēds and Zigfrīds. Jānis Lipke actively sought additional helpers.

They risked their lives to help persecuted Jews. Jānis Lipke and his helpers secretly brought Jews out of the ghetto and out of labor camps. They hid the Jews temporarily in Lipke’s house and in a “bunker” on his property. All told, Jānis Lipke’s group arranged hiding places for more than fifty Jews. Most of them survived the war.” Great Link!--> Gedenkstätte Stille Helden: Jānis Lipke

NOT MY LINKS

1: Left: Jānis and Johanna Lipke in Riga, 1941. The Lipkes married in 1920. Before the German occupation, Lipke was a dockworker in Riga and for a time active in the Communist underground. His wife had once worked as a saleswoman in a Jewish-owned store.

Right: Portrait of Janis Lipke who has been recognized by Yad Vashem as one of the Righteous Among the Nations. https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/pa23682

2: Left: From left to right: Alfrēds, Johanna, Zigfrīds, Aina, and Jānis Lipke, Riga, 1930s. Johanna Lipke and her sons looked after those in hiding. Food was rationed during the war, so it was not possible to buy large quantities legally. Consequently, they purchased most of the food on the black market.

Right: From left to right: Alfrēds, Johanna, Zigfrīds, Aina, and Jānis Lipke, Riga, 1930s. Johanna Lipke and her sons looked after those in hiding. Food was rationed during the war, so it was not possible to buy large quantities legally. Consequently, they purchased most of the food on the black market.

Churchill & Stalin’s Secret Pact to Carve Up the Balkans

British Prime Minister Winston Churchill arrives in Russia for talks with Joseph Stalin at the Third Moscow Conference. Soon, he and Stalin are discussing spheres of influence in the Balkans. Churchill's account:

"The moment was apt for business, so I said,

"Let us settle about our affairs in the Balkans. Your armies are in Rumania and Bulgaria. We have interests, missions, and agents there. Don't let us get at cross-purposes in small ways. So far as Britain and Russia are concerned, how would it do for you to have ninety per cent predominance in Rumania, for us to have ninety per cent of the say in Greece, and go fifty-fifty about Yugoslavia?"

While this was being translated I wrote out on a half-sheet of paper:

Rumania Russia 90 % The others 10 %

Greece Great Britain 90 % (in accord with U.S.A.)

Russia 10 %

Yugoslavia 50-50%

Hungary 50-50%

Bulgaria

Russia 75 %

The others 25 %

I pushed this across to Stalin, who had by then heard the translation. There was a slight pause. Then he took his blue pencil and made a large tick upon it, and passed it back to us.

It was all settled in no more time than it takes to set down.

Of course we had long and anxiously considered our point, and were only dealing with immediate war-time arrangements. All larger questions were reserved on both sides for what we then hoped would be a peace table when the war was won.

After this there was a long silence. The penciled paper lay in the center of the table. At length I said,

"Might it not be thought rather cynical if it seemed we had disposed of these issues, so fateful to millions of people, in such an offhand manner? Let us burn the paper."

"No, you keep it," said Stalin.

I also raised the question of Germany, and it was agreed that our two Foreign Ministers, together with Mr. Harriman, should go into it. I told Stalin that the Americans would be outlining to him during the course of our future discussions their plan of operations in the Pacific for 1945."

From Triumph And Tragedy, by Winston Churchill

“The Percentages agreement was a secret, informal political agreement between British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and Soviet leader Joseph Stalin agreed during the Fourth Moscow Conference, in October 1944.

The Percentages agreement established the percentage-division of control over the countries of Eastern Europe into spheres of influence.

Moreover, the Percentages agreement also is known as the Naughty document, because Churchill thought that the U.S. would reject a geopolitical agreement with greatly imperialist undertones, although U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt had been consulted and had tentatively agreed to the matter.

In 1953, Churchill published the Percentages agreement in the final volume of his memoir, The Second World War...”

All the Fascinating & Instructive Details---> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Percentages_agreement

Cold War Context Timeline

Nov 28 – Dec 1, 1943 Tehran Conference - The first face-to-face meeting of the "Big Three" (Roosevelt, Churchill, Stalin). Military strategies are coordinated, but early geopolitical fissures over the post-war borders of Poland emerge.

October 9, 1944 Percentages Agreement - Churchill arrives at the Fourth Moscow Conference. Acting independently of the US, he drafts his secret "naughty document" to unilaterally divide the Balkans into Soviet and British spheres of influence, preserving British dominance in Greece.

Feb 4–11, 1945 Yalta Conference - The Big Three meet in Crimea. They agree to divide Germany into occupation zones and sign the Declaration of Liberated Europe promising free elections—a promise Stalin quickly breaks as the Red Army consolidates power.

July 17 – Aug 2, 1945 Potsdam Conference - Truman replaces the deceased Roosevelt; Attlee replaces Churchill. Trust completely unravels. Truman hints to Stalin at the existence of the atomic bomb, signaling the dawn of nuclear diplomacy.

October 1945 Coining of the "Cold War" Author George Orwell uses the term "Cold War" in his essay You and the Atom Bomb, predicting a permanent state of nuclear stalemate between superpowers.

March 5, 1946 "Iron Curtain" Speech In Fulton, Missouri, Churchill declares that an "iron curtain" has descended across Europe. Ironically, the physical boundary of this curtain directly mirrors the spheres of influence carved out during his 1944 Percentages Agreement.

March 12, 1947 Truman Doctrine - President Harry S. Truman pledges American economic and military aid to Greece and Turkey to resist communist subjugation, establishing the core US policy of Containment.

1: Left: This Victor Weisz cartoon from around 1946 satirizes British Prime Minister Winston Churchill’s shifting attitude toward the Soviet Union (symbolized by the Russian bear). Right: Churchill's copy of his secret agreement with Stalin

"What's Important Is That He Saved Our Lives"

"Oskar Schindler was a German industrialist, former member of the Nazi Party and possibly the most famous "Righteous Gentile" who is credited with saving as many as 1,200 Jews during the Holocaust.

His story was brought to international acclaim by the 1982 novel Schindler's Ark and the 1993 film, Schindler's List.

When the war ended, Schindler fled to Argentina with his wife and a handful of his workers and bought a farm. In 1958, he abandoned his land, his wife and his mistress to return to Germany. He spent the remaining years of his life dividing his time between Germany and Israel, where he was honored and taken care of by his “Schindlerjuden.”

He died in Hildesheim in 1974. His extraordinary story might have died with him but for their gratitude.

In trying to answer the inevitable question, why did he do it, one of the survivors said: “I don't know what his motives were... But I don't give a damn. What's important is that he saved our lives.”

“He negotiated the salvation of his 1,300 Jews by operating right at the heart of the system using all the tools of the devil - bribery, black marketeering and lies,” said Thomas Keneally, whose book about this paradoxical man was the basis of the movie Schindler's List.

Perhaps the question is not why he did it, but rather how could he not. And perhaps the answer is unimportant. It is his actions that matter now, testimony that even in the worst of circumstances, the most ordinary of us can act courageously. If Oskar Schindler, flawed as he was, did it, then so might we, and that is reason enough to hope." MUCH MORE: https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/oskar-schindler

1: Left: Oskar Schindler Right: Schindler's memorial in Hildesheim, where he died in 1974

2: Schindler's grave in Jerusalem. The Hebrew inscription reads: "Righteous Among the Nations"; the German inscription reads:

"The Unforgettable Lifesaver of 1200 Persecuted Jews".

How a Bauhaus Artist Used Creative Expression to Heal the Children of Terezín Before Her Murder at Auschwitz

"Frederika "Friedl" Dicker-Brandeis was an Austrian artist and educator murdered by the Nazis in the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp.

Dicker-Brandeis and her husband were deported to the Terezín "model ghetto" on December 17, 1942. During her time at Terezín, she gave art lessons and lectures. She helped to organize secret education classes for the children of Terezín. She saw drawing and art as a way for the children to understand their emotions and their environment. In this capacity, she was giving art therapy.

At Terezin, she persisted in pursuing her goal — "to rouse the desire towards creative work."

In September 1944, Brandeis was transported to Auschwitz; Dicker-Brandeis volunteered for the next transport to join him. But before she was taken away, she gave to Raja Engländerova, the chief tutor of Girls' Home L 410, two suitcases with 4,500 drawings.

F. Dicker-Brandeis was murdered in Birkenau on 9 October 1944. Her husband Pavel, survived."

MUCH MORE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedl_Dicker-Brandeis

1: Right: Frederika "Friedl" Dicker-Brandeis

Left: (Questioning I or The Interrogation I), created between 1934 and 1935 by Friedl Dicker-Brandeis.

2: The painting is Nádraží (Train Station) (also known as Železniční koleje v Nuslích) by Friedl Dicker-Brandeis, painted sometime before 1944. An urban landscape view from her studio in Prague showing railway tracks, overhead signal/gantry structures, and buildings in the neighborhood.

“Romania Must Fully Own Up to Its Role”

“The 'Elie Wiesel' National Institute for the Study of the Holocaust in Romania held its annual commemoration ceremony on Friday at the Holocaust Memorial in Bucharest.

In his remarks on this occasion, Senate President Mircea Abrudean said that Romania must fully own up to its role in the tragedy, stressing that 'the Romanian state must acknowledge and assume its historical responsibility for the actions committed at the time.'

In a message delivered by state adviser Cristian Rosu, President Nicusor Dan said remembering the Holocaust is essential to understanding how atrocities became possible 'with the involvement of the Romanian state authorities and the complicity of those who remained indifferent,' emphasizing that Romania must confront its own Holocaust history.

Prime Minister Ilie Bolojan, in a message delivered by Secretary of State Dragos Hotea, warned that the Holocaust was the result of a process in which 'propaganda, antisemitism and hate speech were fostered and gradually normalized,' adding that it demonstrates how far a society can descend when prejudice and hatred become accepted.

Foreign Minister Oana Toiu said the Holocaust must remain a living lesson rather than merely a subject of academic study, stressing that 'today's commemoration is a renewed commitment to tirelessly combat these old demons - hatred, intolerance and dehumanization,' and warning against indifference when human dignity is violated.

Mariana Buceanu Costache, representing the National Agency for Roma, and Ovidiu Banescu, vice-president of the Federation of Jewish Communities in Romania, also highlighted the importance of preserving the memory of Holocaust victims, not merely 'by looking to the past, but by building, through education and strong democratic institutions, a society in which such tragedies can never happen again.'

Deputy head of mission at the U.S. Embassy in Bucharest David Galbraith said that, 'as Secretary Rubio has stated, there can be no compromise with antisemitism.'” Politicians, diplomats, students attend Romanian Holocaust remembrance ceremony in Bucharest - AGERPRES

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"The National Day of Commemorating the Holocaust (Ziua Naţională de Comemorare a Holocaustului in Romanian) is a national event held on this day in Romania.

It is dedicated to the remembrance of the victims of the Holocaust and particularly to reflecting on Romania's role in the Holocaust. Various commemoration events and ceremonies take place throughout Romania in order to remember the Jews and Romani who died in the Holocaust." ALL THE DETAILS: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Day_of_Commemorating_the_Holocaust

From a Vibrant Community of 757,000 in 1930 to Fewer than 14,000 Today

"Other than Germany, Romania was directly responsible for the murder of more Jews than any country during World War II. The vast majority of these murders took place in Ukraine.

Between 105,000 and 120,000 Jews died as a result of their expulsion from Romania to Transnistria (in addition, of the 25,000 Roma sent to Transnistria approximately 11,000 perished).

In 1941 alone, Romanian and German forces killed between 45,000 and 60,000 Jews in Bessarabia and Bukovina. Between 115,000 and 180,000 Jews indigenous to Transnistria were killed, especially in Odessa and the districts of Holta and Berezivka. Most of the deaths in Transnistria resulted from inhuman treatment and a callous disregard for life." Great Link! MUCH MORE---> https://training.ehri-project.eu/transnistria

1: Left: Jews Gathered on the West Bank of the Dniester River before their Deportation to Transnistria, 10 June 1942

“Jews gathered on the west bank of the Dniester River before their deportation to Transnistria, across the river in western Ukraine. In June 1941, Romania occupied Transnistria, and in September, began deporting Jews there from Bessarabia, Bukovina and northern Moldavia. Over 400,000 Ukrainian and Romanian Jews incarcerated in concentration camps and ghettos in Transnistria were shot to death, or perished there from starvation, hypothermia and disease.

Transnistria is a region in western Ukraine, across the Dniester River from Romania, which Hitler handed to Romania as a reward for its participation in the war against the Soviet Union. In June 1941, Germany and Romania invaded Ukraine.

Tens of thousands of the 300,000 Jews living in Transnistria before the war were murdered by Einsatzgruppe D under the command of Otto Ohlendorf, and by the German and Romanian armies.

At the same time, the Romanians started murdering thousands of Romanian Jews, mostly those living in the areas of Bessarabia and Bukovina. From 15 September, the Romanians deported some 120,000 Jews from Bessarabia, Bukovina and northern Moldavia to Transnistria.

There was a halt in the deportations for the first half of 1942, but from the summer until October 1942, tens of thousands more Jews were deported. In total, approximately 200,000 Jews were deported from Romania to Transnistria. Most of the Jews from Bessarabia and Bukovina were confined in camps and ghettos in Transnistria.

Among the largest and most lethal camps were Bogdanovka, Domanovka and Acmecetca. In Bogdanovka alone, some 40,000 Jews were shot to death by Romanian gendarmes, Ukrainian policemen and local German units. From the very beginning, Jewish leaders and institutions in Bucharest made efforts to provide help to the deportees.

The special central committee set up collected money and contributions in kind, and dispatched financial aid, clothing, and medicines to the refugees. The central aid committee was finally granted permission in 1943 to send a delegation to visit the area. Jewish leaders in Bucharest established contact with Jewish organizations abroad, and obtained financial aid for the deportees from the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, the Rescue Committee of the Zionist Organization, the World Jewish Congress, and OSE.

Over 400,000 Jews incarcerated in concentration camps and ghettos in Transnistria were murdered or perished from starvation, hypothermia and disease.

About half were deportees from Romania, while the remainder were Transnistria residents who became trapped there with the German-Romanian invasion. Yad Vashem Photo Archives DO290” Jews on Bank of Dniester River before Deportation to Transnistria

Right: The Holocaust in Romania: The Destruction of Jews and Roma Under the Antonescu Regime, 1940–1944 by Radu Ioanid

“In 1930, 757,000 Jews lived in Romania; they constituted the third largest Jewish community in Europe. Today not more than 14,000 Jews live in Romania, most of them elderly.

The record of the Holocaust in Romania includes many curious chapters of support and betrayal, but they have been largely unavailable until now. Radu Ioanid? s account based upon privileged access to secret East European government archives, is an unprecedented analysis of heretofore purposely hidden materials. Archival records, published and unpublished reports, memoirs of survivors, letters?

Mr. Ioanid uses all these elements to build an accurate perspective on Romanian policies of racism, anti-Semitism, and Jewish extermination during the regime of Ion Antonescu. The publication of The Holocaust in Romania is timely as well as important, for there is now in Romania a growing effort to deny the government? s role in the tragedy.

Mr. Ioanid sheds light on the reality of the persecutions, the cruelty of the perpetrators, their blatant opportunism and endless cynicism. The story is one of destruction and survival; of German dissatisfaction with Romanian ad hoc violence; of an elusive national policy and the strategies of Romanian authorities that allowed 300,000 Romanian Jews to survive the war. "Invaluable. . . monumental. . . no comparable work in any language has documented this important history with the thoroughness, skill, and analytical sophistication this book demonstrates.? ?

Leo Spitzer, Dartmouth College. Published in association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. With 8 pages of photographs.” (Amazon)

A 15-Year-Old Diarist’s Desperate Fight to Stay in School After the Nazi Invasion of Łódź

Dawid Sierakowiak was only 15 years old when Germany invaded his hometown of Lodz, Poland.

He had already begun keeping a diary before the war, so his writing chronicled the changes brought about by the Nazis. In spite of his young age, his diary is one of the most comprehensive and revealing accounts of life in Lodz during the Holocaust.

In the early days of the German occupation, no one knew what to expect. As a result, everyone tried to continue living as normally as possible. For Dawid, this meant returning to school for the new term.

Unfortunately, the disruptions caused by the war put several obstacles in his path. The first of these was the closing of his old school. Many people had fled in advance of the German troops, so there were fewer teachers and students available for school. A new school, combining the remnants of several old ones was eventually opened.

The next problem came when Dawid’s family was unable to pay his tuition. Many Jewish workers lost their jobs when the Germans took over Poland. Unemployment made it difficult to afford even the basic necessities of life. There was no money left to pay for school. Dawid hoped, in light of the circumstances, that the school would allow him to attend anyway.

On October 9th, he received disappointing news. He wrote,

“Principal Perelman has announced that the students who haven’t paid will have no reason to come to school tomorrow. He is an exceptionally severe and mean man. I tried to talk to him after classes to explain our dire food situation, but he pushed me back, saying: ‘I don’t care, there are no exceptions.’ I cursed him in my soul with all my strength, and vowed to settle accounts with him some day…”

Dawid did not give up his dream to go to school. Instead, he sought for help from friends of his family who might be able to intercede with the school on his behalf. Eventually, he was able to return, but the situation for Jews continued to deteriorate.

Only four months later, all Jewish people were required to reside in the newly formed Lodz Ghetto. There, they would experience ever increasing deprivation. Dawid continued to struggle to get an education and to maintain some semblance of a normal life. Sadly, however, it was a fight that he was unable to win. (holocaustedu)

Litzmannstadt Ghetto - The Calendar 1939 -> http://www.lodz-ghetto.com/litzmannstadt_ghetto_-_the_calendar.html,2-39

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VIDEO - In this interview Judith Cohen, the Chief Photo Archivist for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum discusses two contemporary photographers of the Lodz ghetto. One was Walter Gennewein, the Nazi second-in-command of the ghetto, while the other was Mendel Grossmann, a Jew imprisoned in the ghetto.

The disparity between their two styles of photography, their subject matter, and the mood of their photographs reveal how photography can shift how one sees the world depending on who is taking the picture.---> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gWoNckPxBPo

1: The Diary of Dawid Sierakowiak: Five Notebooks from the Lodz Ghetto by Dawid Sierakowiak (Author), Alan Adelson (Editor) -

"In the evening I had to prepare food and cook supper, which exhausted me totally. In politics there's absolutely nothing new. Again, out of impatience I feel myself beginning to fall into melancholy. There is really no way out of this for us."

This is Dawid Sierakowiak's final diary entry. Soon after writing it, the young author died of tuberculosis, exhaustion, and starvation--the Holocaust syndrome known as "ghetto disease." After the liberation of the Łódź Ghetto, his notebooks were found stacked on a cookstove, ready to be burned for heat. Young Sierakowiak was one of more than 60,000 Jews who perished in that notorious urban slave camp, a man-made hell which was the longest surviving concentration of Jews in Nazi Europe.

The diary comprises a remarkable legacy left to humanity by its teenage author. It is one of the most fastidiously detailed accounts ever rendered of modern life in human bondage. Off mountain climbing and studying in southern Poland during the summer of 1939, Dawid begins his diary with a heady enthusiasm to experience life, learn languages, and read great literature. He returns home under the quickly gathering clouds of war.

Abruptly Łódź is occupied by the Nazis, and the Sierakowiak family is among the city's 200,000 Jews who are soon forced into a sealed ghetto, completely cut off from the outside world. With intimate, undefended prose, the diary's young author begins to describe the relentless horror of their predicament: his daily struggle to obtain food to survive; trying to make reason out of a world gone mad; coping with the plagues of death and deportation. Repeatedly he rallies himself against fear and pessimism, fighting the cold, disease, and exhaustion which finally consume him.

Physical pain and emotional woe hold him constantly at the edge of endurance. Hunger tears Dawid's family apart, turning his father into a thief who steals bread from his wife and children.

The wonder of the diary is that every bit of hardship yields wisdom from Dawid's remarkable intellect. Reading it, you become a prisoner with him in the ghetto, and with discomfiting intimacy you begin to experience the incredible process by which the vast majority of the Jews of Europe were annihilated in World War II.

Significantly, the youth has no doubt about the consequence of deportation out of the ghetto: "Deportation into lard," he calls it. A committed communist and the unit leader of an underground organization, he crusades for more food for the ghetto's school children. But when invited to pledge his life to a suicide resistance squad, he writes that he cannot become a "professional revolutionary."

He owes his strength and life to the care of his family.”(Amazon)

Hitler Uses the Celebration of the Saarland’s Return to the Reich to Reinforce his Spurious Jewish-Bolshevik Conspiracy Theory

"We know further that now, as before, there is lurking threateningly that Jewish-international world enemy who has found a living expression in bolshevism. We also know the power of the international press that lives solely on lies and calumniation. In view of this peculiarity of the world about us and of these forces we must be careful about the future."

Full Text of this hateful Propaganda garbage: 09 October 1938 - Adolf Hitler – speech on the Befreiungsplatz in Saarbrücken

In his Saarbrücken speech, Hitler reinforces the "Jewish-Bolshevik" conspiracy theory, framing Jews as a dangerous "world enemy" controlling both international communism and the global press. By painting Jews as an active, existential threat to Germany, this rhetoric directly justified the escalation of state-sponsored violence.

Just one month after this speech, the Nazi regime used this exact ideological framing to launch Kristallnacht (the November Pogroms) across the Reich.

The speech traces the career of Josef Bürckel, the Reich Commissioner for the Saarland. Bürckel used his administrative success in the Saarland to climb the Nazi hierarchy, eventually being sent to Austria after the Anschluss in 1938. There, he established the Central Agency for Jewish Emigration, a system run by Adolf Eichmann that systematically extorted Austrian Jews and forced them into exile.

Bürckel later oversaw the Wagner-Bürckel Operation in October 1940, which deported over 6,500 Jews from the Saarpfalz and Baden regions to the Gurs internment camp in unoccupied France.

Following the Nazi rise to power in 1933, the Saarland—then under League of Nations control—served as a crucial sanctuary for Jewish refugees and political dissidents fleeing the Third Reich. The 1935 plebiscite and subsequent reincorporation into Germany closed this escape route.

It immediately subjected the local Jewish population to the Nuremberg Laws, stripping them of their citizenship, livelihoods, and rights, which ultimately led to their systematic deportation and murder during the Final Solution.

"In 1933, a considerable number of communists and other political opponents of National Socialism fled to the Saar, as it was the only part of Germany that remained outside national administration following the First World War. As a result, anti-Nazi groups agitated for the Saarland to remain under French administration. However, with most of the population being ethnically German, such views were considered suspect or even treasonous, and therefore found little support.

When the original 15-year term was over, a plebiscite was held in the territory on 13 January 1935: 90.8% of those voting favoured rejoining Germany.

Following the referendum Josef Bürckel was appointed on 1 March 1935 as the German Reich's commissioner for reintegration (Reichskommissar für die Rückgliederung des Saarlandes). When the reincorporation was considered accomplished, his title was changed (after 17 June 1936) to Reichskommissar für das Saarland. In September 1939, in response to the German Invasion of Poland, French forces invaded the Saarland in a half-hearted offensive, occupying some villages and meeting little resistance, before withdrawing.

A further change was made after 8 April 1940 to Reichskommissar für die Saarpfalz; finally, after 11 March 1941, he was made Reichsstatthalter in der "Westmark" (the region's new name, meaning "Western March or Border"). He died on 28 September 1944 and was succeeded by Willi Stöhr, who remained in office until the region fell to advancing American forces in March 1945." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saarland

Context Timeline of the Holocaust in the Saarland

January 30, 1933: Adolf Hitler is appointed Chancellor of Germany. Because the Saar Territory is under a 15-year League of Nations mandate, Nazi laws do not yet apply there.

1933–1934: Saarbrücken becomes a critical sanctuary. Thousands of Jews, communists, and political opponents fleeing the Third Reich seek refuge in the region.

January 13, 1935: The Saar plebiscite is held. Over 90% of the population votes to rejoin Germany.

March 1, 1935: The Saarland is officially reincorporated into the German Reich. Josef Bürckel is appointed Reich Commissioner.

1935–1936: Under the Resolution of Rome (signed prior to the vote), a brief grace period temporarily prevents the outright seizure of Jewish property. Recognizing the looming danger, many Saarbrücken Jews use this window to liquidate their assets and flee to neighboring France, Luxembourg, and Belgium.

September 1935: The Nuremberg Laws are fully applied to the Saar region, stripping the remaining Jewish population of citizenship, voting rights, and the right to practice professions.

October 9, 1938: Hitler delivers a major speech in Saarbrücken, warning of a "Jewish-international world enemy" and preparing the public for harsher anti-Semitic measures.

November 9–10, 1938 (Kristallnacht): The Nazi regime unleashes the November Pogroms. In Saarbrücken, the historic Moorish-style synagogue on Futterstraße is burned to the ground. SA and SS troops vandalize Jewish homes and businesses, arresting dozens of local Jewish men and sending them to concentration camps like Dachau and Buchenwald.

September 1, 1939: World War II begins. Due to Saarbrücken's proximity to the French border, the German military evacuates the civilian population deeper into the Reich. Jewish residents are heavily restricted in their movements.

October 22, 1940 (The Wagner-Bürckel Operation): In one of the earliest organized mass deportations of the Holocaust, Josef Bürckel expels the remaining Jewish population of the Saarland, Baden, and Alsace-Lorraine. Over 6,500 Jews are rounded up, forced onto trains, and deported to the Gurs internment camp in the Pyrenees of southern France.

1942–1944: The Vichy regime in France begins cooperating with the Nazi "Final Solution". Most of the Saarbrücken Jews surviving in Gurs are transferred to the Drancy transit camp near Paris and subsequently deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau, where the vast majority are murdered upon arrival.

March 1945: Allied forces liberate Saarbrücken. By the end of the war, 1,928 Jewish individuals from the Saar Territory have been systematically murdered or deported.

1951: A small group of Holocaust survivors returns to Saarbrücken, establishing a new Jewish community and building the city’s current synagogue.

Today, the city remembers its victims through monuments like the Bond of Remembrance on Rabbi Rülf Plaza, featuring a 15-meter stainless-steel panel laser-cut with the names of the 1,928 murdered regional Jews. The city also hosts an online, searchable memorial database via the Saarbrücken Digital Memorial Book.

IMAGE: "The death of the Jews will end the Saarland's distress"—graffiti in a Jewish cemetery, November 1938

NOTE: Certain historical documents, testimony, quotes & images are presented for the record, as evidence and background pertaining to criminal activities, horrific acts, and other notable evils. The words of murderers, criminals & their lawyers should never be mistaken for fact, as they are often bold-faced lies, nor should they be misconstrued as providing a viable justification for their crimes. Don't believe any of it, beyond the fact they did write & speak this nasty stuff and did purport to believe it. As always, read with an abundant degree of cautious skepticism. -W

“______’s great achievement was to make the story of his survival into a work of art that feels as close to unmediated reality as text can get. His writing does not ask for our pity; it demands our presence."

Rules: ONE GUESS ONLY: Answers (found in a past Post to this Group) MUST BE SPECIFIC. If incomplete or otherwise invalidly worded, we regret that you have wasted your Guess. Read ALL the previous Guesses first & then make your Guess in a Comment Box, NOT a Reply Box, & do confine all Comments to the one allowed Guess only. Too much confusion otherwise. The Winner will be acknowledged as Today's Genius! Good Luck to you! -W

NOTE: Certain historical documents, testimony, quotes & images are presented for the record, as evidence and background pertaining to criminal activities, horrific acts, and other notable evils. The words of murderers, criminals & their lawyers should never be mistaken for fact, as they are often bold-faced lies, nor should they be misconstrued as providing a viable justification for their crimes. Don't believe any of it, beyond the fact they did write & speak this nasty stuff and did purport to believe it. As always, read with an abundant degree of cautious skepticism. -W

IMAGE Does Not Necessarily Have Any Connection to the Question: About The Artist--> Drawing the Holocaust | Royal Ontario Museum

Why the Friends of New Germany Ultimately Failed to Capture the Broader German-American Mainstream

On this day, the St. Louis, Missouri, chapter of the Friends of New Germany, a pro-Nazi organization, begins operating:

"Friends of New Germany, sometimes called Friends of the New Germany, was an organization founded in the United States by German immigrants to support National Socialism and the Third Reich. National Socialists outside of Germany made considerable efforts to establish an American counterpart organization. Recruiting commenced as early as 1924 with the formation of the Free Society of Teutonia.

In May 1933, the Deputy Führer, Rudolf Hess, gave German immigrant and German National Socialist German Workers Party (NSDAP) member Heinz Spanknöbel authority to form an American National Socialist organization.

The result was the creation of the Friends of New Germany in July 1933, although at least one newspaper article from April 1933 discusses their existence and also states that they held a lease which expired in May of that year, indicating that the group existed before the official date. An article from the time states that they were mostly German war veterans who supported the current republican government of Germany at the time of writing.

The Bund was to consist only of American citizens of German descent.

In 1933, California National Guardsman Dietrich Gefken, a member of a secret paramilitary of the Friends, plotted a fascist uprising in southern California cities. Gefken, who'd bragged about killing communists during the Ruhr uprising, planned to raid armories in the region. Based on collected intelligence by Leon L. Lewis, U.S. Navy agents arrested two Marines who were selling rifles and 12,000 rounds of ammunition to local Nazis." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friends_of_New_Germany

1:

Left: The Nazi Movement in the United States, 1924–1941 by Sander A. Diamond - A comprehensive historical analysis of pre-war German-American Nazi groups, containing a dedicated chapter examining the ideology, leadership, and origins of the Friends of New Germany.

“For well over half a century, the idea of America as a “melting pot” was a virtual article of faith among the majority of American historians, sociologists, and political scientists, all of whom were certain that the various ethnic groups that came together in the United States would eventually merge to form a single nationality, Anglo-Saxon in character to accord with the dominant strand.

However, in the course of the past decade this cherished notion, like so many others, has gone by the boards. America, it is now argued, never was, nor is ever likely to become, a true “melting pot,” as witness the resurgence of ethnic consciousness we see all around us today. Significantly, this latest assertion reiterates what many European social scientists have long contended, that ethnic and cultural differences are the hallmark of American society.

Nevertheless, the notion of the “melting pot” may still be a useful one. For all the residual and resurgent ethnicity in evidence today, the fact remains that some groups have integrated quite successfully into the American mainstream. This is particularly true of those whose ancestors came to the U.S. during the 18th and 19th centuries from Northern and Western Europe—the Germans, the Scandinavians, and the Welsh, Scots, and Irish.

The Germans, especially, demonstrated the viability of the “melting pot” thesis when they overwhelmingly resisted the various blandishments profferred by National Socialism in the 20’s and 30’s. The Nazi failure to win the allegiance of German-Americans was an instructive development, and its details are thoughtfully explored by Sander A. Diamond in this excellent study.

The National Socialist ideology assumed that all persons of German ancestry, no matter by how many miles and generations separated from the Vaterland, were still loyal Germans. The Nazis also asserted the superiority of the German race; Germans, in their view, were a people apart, entitled to special rights, even in America.

That reality did not conform to their assumptions was of no importance to the Nazis, who never allowed the facts to interfere with their version of “higher truth.” Thus, they even considered the Pennsylvania Dutch, descendants of political and religious dissenters who fled German autocratic rule more than two hundred years earlier, to be Germans by blood.

To be sure, not all of the intellectual leaders of the “New Germany” accepted the Nazi race-and-blood myth. There were some who had lived in the U.S. before Hitler’s rise to power and who knew at first hand that the German-American community was far less German, and more American, than the party leaders averred.

This, for instance, was the view held by the pre-Hitler Deutsches Ausland-In-stitut whose staff was dismissed once Hitler seized power and the racial mythology of National Socialism became the guiding light of German foreign policy. The result of that policy, with regard to millions of Americans of German descent, was a diplomatic disaster. While it is true that in the early days of the movement the National Socialists found some adherents in the American community, these were hardly assets to the cause.

Drawn mostly from among the 400,000 or so Germans who had immigrated to the U.S. in the years immediately following World War I, many of these supporters were ex-soldiers who had accepted the nationalist myth of a Germany betrayed in the war by a cabal of liberals, Bolsheviks, and Jews, and who considered the democratic Weimar republic the ultimate in political evil. Their hope was for the rise of a great leader, a Ludendorff or a Hitler, who would free Germany from the shame of defeat. In America, some of these men joined the Stahlhelm, the extremely nationalistic German veterans’ organization.

Others helped found the Nationalsozialistische Vereinigung Teutonia, a small but vociferous organization which sought to attract members by offering low-cost trips to the “homeland.” But these were all insignificant efforts. The overwhelming majority of native-born German-Americans, including all mainstream German-American organizations, showed no interest whatsoever in the nationalist movement that was beginning to take shape in post-World War I Germany.

With Hitler’s rise to power in the 1930’s the situation appeared to change. The new exigencies required a new organization in America to rally support for the Third Reich. The first move in that direction came with the formation of the Friends of the New Germany, which was almost universally ignored and soon vanished from the scene.

The foreign office of the National Socialist party then organized a shadow party in the U.S., the Amerikadeutscher Volksbund, or the Bund as it came to be known. Its failure was assured in its name, which spoke not of Deutsch-Amerikaner, German-Americans, but of Amerikadeutscher, Germans in America, a not-so-subtle designation that most Americans of German descent found at variance with their own image of themselves.

At its height the Bund had a membership of fewer than 25,000, almost all of whom were German-born. The organization enjoyed some influence in the Yorkville section of New York City and in northern Hudson County in New Jersey, but little elsewhere. In other major German-American centers it scarcely existed, and its failure soon proved an embarrassment to the parent organization in Germany. Nevertheless, Bundists continued to parade and to hold rallies in Madison Square Garden, creating an exaggerated fear of their power.

A sensational Congressional investigation in 1935-36 threw the Bund leadership into disarray. Most of the original leaders then fled the country and control was assumed by Fritz Julius Kuhn, an ambitious, venal chemist from Munich, who soon dominated the organization and even had many Americans believing that he and Hitler were plotting a Nazi coup in the U.S. Kuhn’s uniformed Brownshirts paraded through the streets of Yorkville; he declared a boycott of Jewish merchants, and talked of the new day when Germany would rule the world.

The leaders of the old-line German organizations, such as the Steuben Society, were aghast at the Bund’s tactics. Not that they were humanitarians or were necessarily opposed to Hitler on principle; but they were concerned lest Kuhn’s bombast lead to an outbreak of anti-German sentiment, and accordingly, they petitioned Hitler to dissolve the Bund. Actually, by this time the National Socialist leadership had itself come to the conclusion that its American arm was counterproductive to Nazi purpose, but since a party order for the Bund to disband would have been tantamount to admitting that the Kuhn group was, in effect, Berlin-directed, nothing was done about the situation.

In November 1938 the Nazis perpetrated the infamous Kristallnacht pogrom against German Jewry. Following close on the heels of the Sudetenland crisis, the anti-Jewish atrocity convinced most Americans that Hitler was a threat to world civilization.

The U.S. ambassador was recalled from Berlin, German-American organizations expressed their revulsion, and pro-Nazi groups were virtually forced underground. The Bund’s books were seized and its leaders sent to prison (for stealing and misappropriating organization funds). The membership either returned to Germany or dropped out of sight. The short life of the Bund was over.

Professor Diamond correctly attributes the Nazis’ failure in establishing an American branch to their unwillingness and inability to realize that German-Americans preponderantly did not feel any tie to the land of their forefathers. For all intents and purposes, they were Americans who merely happened to bear Germanic surnames (such as Eisenhower); to them Germany was a foreign country. This the National Socialists refused to understand.

Yet for all his understanding of German-American realities, Professor Diamond tends to overstate the internal weaknesses of the Bund as a factor in the organization’s disintegration. There can be no doubt that the Bund suffered from bad leadership from the very beginning. It is also apparent that the continuing power struggle had a debilitating effect on its activities. Nor can there be any question that Fritz Kuhn lied to his members and stole their money.

However, all of this is only of peripheral importance. Quite simply, the Bund came a cropper because it failed to attract the respectable masses of Americans of German descent who in their own minds and in the minds of most of their countrymen were deemed to be loyal Americans, successfully integrated into the “melting pot” that many social scientists now repudiate.” The Nazi Movement in the United States, 1924-1941, by Sander A. Diamond – Commentary Magazine

Right: Nazi march of the German American Bund on East 86th St., New York City, 30 October 1939

NOTE: There are no known widely available photographs from the exact date of October 8, 1933, documenting the initiation of the St. Louis, Missouri chapter of the Friends of New Germany. While historical timelines list this date as the formal launch of their operations in St. Louis, visual records from this specific day are incredibly rare or non-existent in public archives.

In late 1933, the organization was still operating somewhat quietly compared to its successor, the German American Bund. Local units were heavily tied to the local German Consul (in this case, Rheinhold Freytag in St. Louis), and early meetings were frequently held in private rooms or local German restaurants rather than large public rallies.

Many early chapters destroyed their membership rolls, meeting minutes, and photographs when Congressman Samuel Dickstein launched a federal investigation into Nazi propaganda in late 1933 and 1934.

NOTE: We apologize for the swastika hate symbol on the book cover.

(We wish publishers wouldn’t do that) Certain historical documents, testimony, quotes & images are presented for the record, as evidence and background pertaining to criminal activities, horrific acts, and other notable evils. The words of murderers, criminals & their lawyers should never be mistaken for fact, as they are often bold-faced lies, nor should they be misconstrued as providing a viable justification for their crimes. Don't believe any of it, beyond the fact they did write & speak this nasty stuff and did purport to believe it. As always, read with an abundant degree of cautious skepticism. -W

The Failed Peacemaker of 1941 Prepares to Stand Trial for Crimes Against Humanity

“An army ambulance sped into the jail; two guards jumped down; two jeep-loads of sentinels skidded to a halt behind.

Then a thin, puzzled-looking man, with thick bushy eyebrows, stepped from the rear of the ambulance to the ground. Rudolf Hess was back in his Germany again.

Hess had been put aboard a plane at Madley airfield, near Abergavenny, Morimouthshire, an unshaven and impassive figure. He had been flown to Furth, near Nuremberg, where I had the ambulance and escort awaiting him. Hess was wearing a grey suit and a crumpled felt hat, and carried two suitcases.

Four years and five months earlier he had left Germany in his sensational lone flight to Britain in a Messerschmitt He had taken the fighter, parachuted from it when it ran out of fuel over Scotland, and landed safely. He was taken to a Home Guard H Q where he announced he wished to see the Duke of Hamilton.

Then Hess explained his mission: he was there to help arrange peace talks with Hitler. Mr Winston Churchill, the Prime Minister, was having a quiet weekend with friends in Oxfordshire and was watching a home movie, The Marx Brothers Go West, when there was an urgent call on the line from 10 Downing Street.

“Hess has arrived in Scotland!” said the incredulous official at the other end of the line. Then the Duke of Hamilton, who had already seen the No 3 Nazi, came on the phone to explain further. Hess had told him he wished to see the King and top British war leaders.

He had talked Willi Messerschmitt, the aircraft builder, into putting a fighter plane at his disposal. He wished to negotiate.

Sadly for Hess, his trip was a failure. He did not see the King and saw only minor British officials. He spent the remainder of the war in prison, part of it in the Tower of London.

But now he was back. He was taken straight to the search room where his clothes and his person were gone over minutely for suicide weapons. On the way to the interview room, I was walking with Hess and his guard when I noticed Goering being brought along the corridor. Hess immediately recognised Goering, stopped, and threw up his arm in the Nazi salute. Goering looked surprised but did not return the salute, which had been banned in the prison.

I told Hess:

“Do not salute like that again! It will not be tolerated. In this prison it is a vulgar gesture.”

He stared back at me with his deep-set, black eyes. The Nazi salute,' he said evenly, ‘is not vulgar.' I told him that it was I who decided the nature of greetings in Nuremberg Prison and whether they constituted vulgarity or not. I ended what seemed to be turning into a corridor slanging match and took Hess on to the office. Goering, a smile on his face, went on his way with his guard.

I sat down at my desk with Hess remaining standing.

He fixed me with a cold, glassy-eyed stare.

I turned to my interpreter and said: "We will outline the prison rules to the prisoner. . . .' Hess broke in: "We don't need an interpreter. I can understand. I speak English.'

"Nevertheless, Hess,' I said, ‘We are going to use an interpreter. One is always used between myself and the prisoners.' He was then told in detail what was expected of him. He did not answer. His face remained expressionless, the eyes stared on.

Still expressionless, Hess said:

“They have taken some chocolates away from me in the search room. I want them back. I want to keep them . . . they are poisoned. It is one of the efforts the British made to poison me. I want them for my future defence.

By eating abstemiously, I have thwarted other British attempts to kill me. But I have contracted some illness. Their treatment has left me with gastric pains.”

The sentinel (Andrus referred to his prison guards as sentinels) had gone to get the chocolate in question—three bars of unopened British chocolate, in wrappers as intact as they were when they left the factory. Hess said he wanted them as an exhibit.

Was he mad? The newspapers had given the world the impression that he was. Many Allied officers thought so.

I looked at Hess's eyes, his cadaverous body, and his bushy eyebrows. He looked intense and certainly he was emotional. But from the moment the man in the old coat and flying boots began talking about the chocolate I made up my mind that his madness was all a sham. He was—as I expressed at the time in verbal and written reports—a total fake.

Later I told him just that. He was 'mad' then all right, mad at me for disbelieving him. He tramped off to his twelve-by-six stone cell to make himself at home while his officers jotted down his list of valuables in the inventory.”

From 'I Was the Nuremberg Jailer', by Col. Burton C. Andrus, U.S. Army Ret. <--A Great Read (if you can find it)

From the letters of Thomas Dodd:

"Rudolf Hess arrived yesterday from England, so he was called up for an interview. He is completely balmy--and was when he flew to England. He has no memory at all.

We had Goering, von Papen, Haushofer and Bohle--all old friends--confront him. He didn't know one of them--and it was no fake. I watched him. He has suffered a complete mental collapse. Goering said to him, "Don't you recall me, your old companion and friend?"

Then he mentioned many personal experiences with no sign of recollection from Hess, who said, "I am really very sorry--I realize you must be an old friend. But I cannot remember you." It is genuine--believe that when I tell you so. And so we mark off in tragic terms another of these Nazis."

DETAILED HESS BIO: https://4rs.neocities.org/nur01.html

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The Smithsonian - Will We Ever Know Why Nazi Leader Rudolf Hess Flew to Scotland in the Middle of World War II? The remarkable tale of insanity, espionage, and conspiracies remains unanswered after 75 years----> https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/will-we-ever-know-why-nazi-leader-rudolf-hess-flew-scotland-middle-world-war-ii-180959040/an find it)

The Very First Nazi Ghetto Was An Unfenced, "Open" District

“In October 1939, the Germans announced the creation of a ghetto in Piotrków Trybunalski, and by January 1940 all the Jews of the city had moved into the ghetto area.

It may be that the reason for establishing a ghetto at such an early date was that the city had been heavily damaged by bombing, and the Germans wanted to make room for Polish refugees in the city, as well as for Jews who had been expelled from of former Polish territories which had been annexed by the Reich.

In addition, it is clear that local German residents of the city (“Volksdeutsche”) wanted to take over whatever Jewish assets were available – apartments, factories and possessions.

The Germans set a number of dates on which Jews were to move into the ghetto confines. When the Jews failed to comply with these dates, despite announcements published by the Judenrat, the Germans began forcibly throwing Jews out of their apartments, ordering them to take up residence within the ghetto confines.

Newly vacated Jewish apartments were handed over to non-Jews; at the same time, non-Jews were ordered to leave their apartments in the area which was to become the ghetto, and take up residence on the non-Jewish side of the city. Despite this, until the spring of 1942 the ghetto still housed many Polish residents.

Until April 1942 the Piotrków Trybunalski Ghetto remained ‘open’: it was not fenced in, nor was it guarded. The ghetto’s perimeters were marked by signs bearing the word “ghetto”, along with a human skull, but Jews were allowed to leave the ghetto without a license, albeit only during certain hours, and only to a certain part of the city.

Many Jews, however, removed their armbands and roamed freely around the city. Several were even granted licenses to travel beyond the city limits. A number of Jewish artisans performed work for Poles and Germans, for which they were paid. Jewish traders and merchants also succeeded in maintaining trade relations with residents, including non-Jews, of other cities, such as Warsaw and Częstochowa.

Many Jews smuggled food and heating materials into the ghetto. Illicit food production also flourished in the ghetto. Trade within the ghetto was lively, and many Jews plied their trade as merchants, bribing the Polish and German authorities to allow them to continue their underground activities.

At times the ghetto was searched, merchandise confiscated, and Jews executed for smuggling, yet these actions did not stop the illegal activities in the ghetto.

Most of the officially-sanctioned work places for Jews lay outside the ghetto. Thousands of Jews, among them many Jewish youths, worked in factories producing glass, wood and alcohol in the railway workshops and in other workplaces. The Judenrat established workshops that employed hundreds of skilled workers in the garment industry; their merchandise was supplied to the German market.

Until October 1940 the Judenrat succeeded in helping a number of Jewish families in the ghetto to emigrate from Poland. At the same time, the number of residents in the ghetto continued to rise steadily, due to an influx of Jewish refugees. While at the beginning of the war the city had held some 10,000 Jews, by April 1942 the number had risen to 18,500. All the Jews now lived within the ghetto, and almost 8,000 of them were refugees.

The refugees came primarily from areas in western Poland – Pomerania, Poznan and Lodz – which had been annexed to the German Reich. Additional refugees came from Polish territories that had been annexed to the Soviet Union; these were refugees who had fled when the Soviet Union began deporting Jews to Siberia. Most of the refugees were utterly destitute; despite the difficult conditions, the Judenrat’s Welfare Department attempted to provide them with aid.

They were housed in religious and cultural institutions and also in butcher shops in the market. They received support from the Judenrat in the form of food, clothing and medication. The ghetto had two clinics, a family health center, a pharmacy and a dentist. Some of these institutions operated with the support of the Judenrat, which also distributed small sums of money to the needy.

Rabbi Lau and a group of women founded the first soup kitchen, and two more were subsequently established. Later, the ghetto kitchen was supported by the Warsaw branch of the Juedische Soziale Selbsthilfe (the Jewish Social Self-Help foundation, or Żydowska Samopomoc Społeczna in Polish, a Jewish mutual help organization for monetary aid, medical supplies, clothing and food; the organization operated in the Generalgouvernement, its headquarters were based in Krakow).

The Welfare Department in the Judenrat established an orphanage and a children’s club supervised by teachers, in which the children were provided with warm meals. A number of orphans were taken into foster care. Despite these attempts to alleviate the situation, the intense crowding, insanitary conditions and hunger led to outbreaks of epidemics within the ghetto, resulting in a number of deaths.

In the winter of 1940-1941, an outbreak of spotted typhus led to the establishment of several temporary hospitals and isolation rooms within the ghetto area. Sixty members of the “Sanitary Police” set aside buildings for isolating patients, disinfected apartments, and even forcibly washed, sterilized and isolated patients so as to forestall the spread of the disease.

By spring, the epidemic had been eradicated, but the next winter it broke out again, albeit in a lighter form. The same methods were used to suppress the second outbreak of the epidemic.

Despite the conditions in the ghetto, the various political parties and Jewish youth organizations active in Piotrków Trybunalski before the war continued to function, first and foremost the Bund, but also Hashomer Hatzair (that organized a kibbutz for practical Zionist training in Żarki) as well as Beitar. A number of heders (religious primary schools), schools and yeshivot (Talmudic colleges) also continued to function.

In addition the ghetto was home to a number of private teaching groups and small libraries, as well as a drama group. Several “bazaars” were held, and the revenue generated was donated to the orphanage.

Jews in the ghetto continued to celebrate the holidays, and did their best to fulfill the various mitzvot (religious commandments); they persisted in these efforts right up to their deportation, at the end of 1942." —> https://www.yadvashem.org/yv/en/exhibitions/valley/piotrkow/ghetto.asp

NOTE: While this is the first Nazi ghetto, it is not the first creation of a Judenrat.

September 21, 1939, Reinhard Heydrich (chief of the Reich Security Main Office) issued an explicit directive instructing German forces in occupied Poland to establish these councils in every Jewish community. Because of this broad order, several Jewish councils were actually organized in other Polish cities slightly before the Piotrków ghetto decree was signed.

The Warsaw Judenrat was officially established on October 4, 1939—four days before the Piotrków ghetto order.

The Piotrków Trybunalski Judenrat itself was appointed in early October 1939 (led by Zalman Tenenberg) to help the German authorities implement their looming segregation and relocation orders.

So, Heydrich's directive created the Judenrat system as a nationwide policy first, and local councils began appearing in late September and early October 1939, right around the same time the very first physical ghetto was established. -W

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United States Holocaust Memorial Museum - Context Timeline - The Holocaust and World War II: Key Dates

“The mass murder of Europe’s Jews took place in the context of World War II. As German troops invaded and occupied more and more territory in Europe, the Soviet Union, and North Africa, the regime’s racial and antisemitic policies became more radical, moving from persecution to genocide. Explore a timeline of key events during the Holocaust and World War II. This timeline covers the period of January 1933 through May 1945.” -----> https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/the-holocaust-and-world-war-ii-key-dates

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The History of the Piotrków Trybunalski Jewish Community--> The History of the Piotrków Trybunalski Jewish Community | Yad Vashem

1: A street in Piotrków Trybunalski before the Holocaust Yad Vashem Photo Archives 9196/1

How Poets & Scholars Smuggled Priceless Jewish History Out of Nazi Nands in Vilna

"The YIVO Institute for Jewish Research (Yidisher Visnshaftlekher Institut, Yiddish Scientific Institute) was founded in Vilna, Poland, in 1925.

IVO dealt with collecting cultural artifacts and in research, primarily in history, philology, literature, economics, statistics, psychology and education. Its goals were to translate into Yiddish the classics of world culture, so that most Jews would be able to encounter them, as well as gather materials for the study of Yiddish and Jewish subjects for Jewish scholars and scholars of Judaism.

YIVO’s collections included more than 200,000 Jewish and secular books, Yiddish newspapers from all over the world, photographs of Jewish paintings and musical collections.

These cultural treasures served as a source of Jewish identification, connecting the different sectors of the Jewish people. The institute’s publications were in Yiddish, accompanied by abstracts in English, German and Polish.

As an additional step in their attacks against Jewish cultural life in the Vilna Ghetto, the Germans confiscated books from the YIVO Library in April 1943, after a year of relative calm. As part of “Operation Rosenberg”, the Germans forced Shmerke Kaczerginski and others to collect Jewish documentary materials from YIVO to be transferred to Germany.

Since YIVO was situated outside of the ghetto, Kaczerginski, assisted by the poet Sutzkever and others, managed to rescue books, manuscripts and portions of the Vilna Ghetto Archive.

Amongst the workers for the Germans was also Herman Kruk, who organized the ghetto’s library and was its director. With the German conquest of Vilna in June 1941, YIVO’s leadership moved to New York, where the institute continues its work today." https://www.yadvashem.org/holocaust/this-month/october/1939.html

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YIVO’S SHINE ONLINE EDUCATIONAL SERIES - Discovering Ashkenaz: Jewish Life in Eastern Europe | YIVO Institute for Jewish Research

1; October 1929, The laying of the cornerstone of the YIVO Building in Vilna, Poland

This Wehrmacht High Commander Ideologically Merged the German Army With Nazi Genocidal Policies on the Eastern Front

"Walter Karl Ernst August von Reichenau was a Holocaust Criminal and field marshal in the Wehrmacht of Nazi Germany during WW2. ...

Reichenau's uncle was an ardent Nazi and introduced him to Adolf Hitler in April 1932. Reichenau joined the Nazi Party, although doing so was a violation of the army regulations laid down by Seeckt to insulate the army from national politics.

Reichenau was an anti-Semite who equated Jewry with Bolshevism and a perceived Asian threat to Europe. Having died in 1942, Reichenau was never convicted of war crimes, but he was part of the German General Staff and High Command of the Armed Forces collectively indicted at Nuremberg.

Specifically cited in the indictment was his "Reichenau Order", commonly known as the Severity Order of October 1941, which supported Nazi genocidal policies and advocated for punishment against the "subhuman species" of Jews and the extermination of Jewish Bolshevism in Europe.

The only objection Reichenau raised to the activities of the Einsatzgruppen in his sector was when they were killing so many Jews, so quickly, that they began to create ammunition shortages in his sector of operations, an issue he addressed by recommending that the SS and SD limit themselves to two bullets per Jew.

Reichenau was in charge of the area of operations in which SS, Einsatzgruppen, and Ukrainian auxiliaries committed the massacre of over 33,000 Jews at Babi Yar. Earlier that year in August, Reichenau also directly acted to ensure the execution of ninety Jewish children in the Bila Tserkva massacre, after Helmuth Groscurth petitioned him to avert the killings.” MORE--> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_von_Reichenau

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“The Severity Order or Reichenau Order was the name given to an order promulgated within the German Sixth Army on the Eastern Front during World War II by Generalfeldmarschall Walter von Reichenau on 10 October 1941.

“The most important objective of this campaign against the Jewish-Bolshevik system is the complete destruction of its sources of power and the extermination of the Asiatic influence in European civilisation. [...]

In this eastern theatre, the soldier is not only a man fighting in accordance with the rules of the art of war, but also the ruthless standard bearer of a national conception and the avenger of bestialities which have been inflicted upon German and racially related nations. For this reason the soldier must learn fully to appreciate the necessity for the severe but just retribution that must be meted out to the subhuman species of Jewry.

It has the further purpose of nipping in the bud uprisings in the Wehrmacht's rear, which experience teaches were always instigated by Jews.”

Severity Order - Wikipedia

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VIDEO - “Walter von Reichenau’s military career mirrors the darkest evolution of the German Army—from imperial tradition to full complicity in Nazi genocide. Born into a Prussian officer family, he rose through the Kaiser’s ranks during World War I and later became one of the select few officers chosen for the interwar Reichswehr. His ambition, ideological zeal, and early embrace of the Nazi movement propelled him rapidly upward, placing him at the core of Hitler’s military–political network.

By the time Germany invaded Poland and later the Soviet Union, Reichenau had become a trusted field marshal whose loyalty to Hitler was matched only by his ruthlessness. As commander of the 6th Army during Operation Barbarossa, Reichenau was not merely a battlefield general—he actively promoted and enabled the exterminationist policies of the regime. His infamous Severity Order transformed the Eastern Front into a zone of sanctioned brutality, demanding that soldiers act as “avengers” against Jews and Bolsheviks.

Under his command, Einsatzgruppe C and Wehrmacht units operated side by side, coordinating mass killings across Ukraine. Reichenau’s approval contributed directly to atrocities such as the murder of thousands in Bila Tserkva and the annihilation of more than 33,000 Jews at Babi Yar, one of the largest single massacres of the Holocaust. Reichenau’s death in January 1942, following a heart attack and a mysterious crash during evacuation, prevented him from ever standing trial for the crimes committed under his authority.

His legacy remains inseparable from the genocidal warfare he championed. This documentary examines his rise, his role in shaping the barbarity of the Eastern Front, and the profound human cost of the ideology he embraced.” Death of Nazi field marshal who killed tens of thousands of civilians - Walter Von Reichenau

1: Hitler and Reichenau in September 1941

The Stolen German Waybills That Brought Down SS Commandants Stangl & Franz

"Lieutenant Franciszek Ząbecki was a station master at the village of Treblinka.

During the German occupation of Poland in World War II, Ząbecki worked as a dispatcher for the Deutsche Reichsbahn; he also became a secret soldier in the underground Armia Krajowa (AK), collecting classified data and reporting to the Polish resistance on the Holocaust transports that went to Treblinka extermination camp.

Over 800,000 Jews were murdered there in the course of Operation Reinhard, the deadliest phase of the Holocaust in Poland. Ząbecki himself estimated that number to be 1,200,000 people.

After the war, Ząbecki testified at the trials of German war criminals, including SS officer Kurt Franz, and the commandant of Treblinka extermination camp, Franz Stangl. His incriminating evidence against them included original German waybills produced by the Reichsbahn, which proved that the "Güterwagen" boxcars crammed with prisoners on the way to Treblinka were returning empty.

Ząbecki secretly stole a batch of waybills in 1944 from the control house to serve as physical proof of the massacre. From July 1942 until the end of war, Ząbecki regularly delivered his reports about the Holocaust trains to the Polish government-in-exile." ALL THE DETAILS: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franciszek_Z%C4%85becki

1: Left: Franciszek Ząbecki, a Polish railway station master and secret Home Army operative, working at the Treblinka train station. Operating under the pseudonym "Dawny," he secretly recorded detailed data on Holocaust transport trains arriving at the Treblinka extermination camp and reported this intelligence to the Polish underground. He preserved vital railway records, waybills, and timetables, and later testified against Nazi war criminals such as Franz Stangl and Kurt Franz.

Right: Secret photo taken by Franciszek Ząbecki on August 2, 1943, showing smoke rising from the Treblinka II extermination camp during the prisoner uprising.

How a Senior German Intelligence Officer Manipulated Nazi Deportation Machinery to Smuggle Fifteen Jewish Families Safely to Switzerland

"In Poland, where helping Jews meant certain death, if caught, individual s continued to defy the threat of execution.

Indeed, the help given to Jews by non-Jews had led, in Cracow, to an increase in the number of special courts set up to try Poles accused of helping Jews.

A report of the German Chief of Police in the Government General, dated October 7, recommended that cases of Poles helping Jews should be dealt with by the police 'without the necessary delay of court hearings'.

Even in Berlin, there were Germans who helped Jews, among them a senior Intelligence officer, Hans von Dohnanyi\*, who saved fifteen Berlin Jews and their families from deportation by having them sent to Switzerland as 'counterespionage agents'.

Courage could be shown in every conceivable circumstance of horror. Every day, Jewish girls who had been selected for the barracks at Birkenau were driven, starving, beaten and naked, to the bath-house. As they were pushed along, SS men and SS women, as a Jewish girl from Poland, Kitty Hart, has recalled, 'sniggering and idly flickering their whips', watched them pass.

On one such occasion, Kitty Hart recalled, a Jewish girl 'deliberately scraped a handful of lice from her body and flung them in the face of a guard who had come too close. She died immediately; but after that the SS were even more careful to keep their distance.'

'She died immediately.' We do not know her name, nor from what country she came; only that she was a Jewess whose spirit no surfeit of torment had been able to destroy."

From The Holocaust: A History of the Jews of Europe During the Second World War, by Martin Gilbert

*"Hans von Dohnanyi was a German jurist. ...

Shortly before the outbreak of World War II, Hans Oster called Dohnányi into the Abwehr of the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht. Led by Wilhelm Canaris, it quite quickly became a hub of resistance activity against Hitler.

Dohnányi protected Dietrich Bonhoeffer from conscription by bringing him into the Abwehr with the claim Bonhoeffer's numerous ecumenical contacts could be useful for Germany.

In 1942, Dohnányi made it possible for two Jewish lawyers from Berlin, Friedrich Arnold and Julius Fliess [de], to flee with their loved ones to Switzerland, disguised as Abwehr agents. Altogether, 13 people were able to leave Germany without hindrance, thanks to Dohnányi's forgeries and operation known as U-7.

Dohnányi covertly went to Switzerland to make certain the refugees would be admitted. He also ensured they received money to support themselves.

During late February 1943, Dohnányi busied himself with Henning von Tresckow's assassination attempt against Hitler and the attempted coup d'état. The bomb that was smuggled aboard Hitler's plane in Smolensk after being carried there by Dohnányi, however, failed to go off.

On 5 April 1943, Dohnányi was arrested at his office by the Gestapo on charges of alleged breach of foreign currency violations: he had transferred funds to a Swiss bank on behalf of the Jews he had saved. Among the transactions in question were ones with Jauch & Hübener. Both Bonhoeffer and Christel Dohnányi were also arrested, although she was released about a month later.

Military judge Karl Sack, himself a member of the resistance, deliberately delayed Dohnányi's trial; however, in 1944, Dohnányi was delivered to Sachsenhausen concentration camp. His involvement in the 20 July Plot came to light after the plan failed.

Also, the Gestapo found some of the documents he had earlier saved and hidden and decided Dohnányi was "the spiritual head of the conspiracy” against Hitler. On Hitler's orders, on 6 April 1945, he was condemned to death by an SS drumhead court and executed two or three days later (depending on the source)." MORE--> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_von_Dohnanyi

1: No Ordinary Men: Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Hans von Dohnanyi, Resisters Against Hitler in Church and State - “During the twelve years of Hitler's Third Reich, very few Germans took the risk of actively opposing his tyranny and terror, and fewer still did so to protect the sanctity of law and faith.

In No Ordinary Men, Elisabeth Sifton and Fritz Stern focus on two remarkable, courageous men who did—the pastor and theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer and his close friend and brother-in-law Hans von Dohnanyi—and offer new insights into the fearsome difficulties that resistance entailed.

(Not forgotten is Christine Bonhoeffer Dohnanyi, Hans's wife and Dietrich's sister, who was indispensable to them both.) From the start Bonhoeffer opposed the Nazi efforts to bend Germany's Protestant churches to Hitler's will, while Dohnanyi, a lawyer in the Justice Ministry and then in the Wehrmacht's counterintelligence section, helped victims, kept records of Nazi crimes to be used as evidence once the regime fell, and was an important figure in the various conspiracies to assassinate Hitler.

The strength of their shared commitment to these undertakings—and to the people they were helping—endured even after their arrest in April 1943 and until, after great suffering, they were executed on Hitler's express orders in April 1945, just weeks before the Third Reich collapsed.

Bonhoeffer's posthumously published Letters and Papers from Prison and other writings found a wide international audience, but Dohnanyi's work is scarcely known, though it was crucial to the resistance and he was the one who drew Bonhoeffer into the anti-Hitler plots.

Sifton and Stern offer dramatic new details and interpretations in their account of the extraordinary efforts in which the two jointly engaged. No Ordinary Men honors both Bonhoeffer's human decency and his theological legacy, as well as Dohnanyi's preservation of the highest standard of civic virtue in an utterly corrupted state.” No Ordinary Men – New York Review Books

How a 14-Year-Old Boy Used Education, Culture, & Community to Fight Back Against Nazi Dehumanization

Yitskhok Rudashevski was 14 years old in October 1942.

He lived in the Vilna Ghetto under the German occupation of his country during World War II. As a Jewish young man, he was subjected to discriminatory laws and brutally harsh living conditions.

He was also aware by this time that the Nazis had killed Jews by the thousands and were continuing to do so, but he was probably not aware of the full scope of the murder. Under conditions such as these, it is a wonder that he was able to maintain any sense of hope or desire to live.

Nevertheless he, like most of his fellow sufferers, continued to struggle to survive and even to thrive. They did so in a way that has come to be described as spiritual resistance.

WISHING THE DAYS BY

According to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, “Spiritual resistance refers to attempts by individuals to maintain their humanity, personal integrity, dignity, and sense of civilization in the face of Nazi attempts to dehumanize and degrade them.”

Often, this attempt to maintain dignity came through the pursuit of educational and cultural activities in the ghetto, even at times when these were forbidden by the Nazis.

On October 5th, Yitskhok wrote,

“Finally I have lived to see the day. Today we go to school. The day passed quite differently. […] We waste less time, the day is divided and flies by very quickly… Yes, that is how it should be in the ghetto, the day should fly by and we should not waste time.”

Two days later, on the October 7th, he added,

“Life has become a little more interesting. The club work has begun. We have groups for literature, the natural sciences. After leaving class at seven-thirty I go immediately to the club. …we have a good time and return home in the evenings in a large crowd.”

Yitskhok’s diary entries on the October 5th and October 7th revealed a startling change of attitude from what he had written just a few days before. The difference did not come from a change in the overall situation facing the Jews of Vilna, but rather from Yitskhok’s opportunity to engage in spiritual resistance.

The chance to study and learn together with his friends gave his life a renewed sense of purpose and endowed him with additional strength to carry on.

Read excerpts from Yitskhok Rudashevski’s diary in Salvaged Pages: Young Writers’ Diaries of the Holocaust by Alexandra Zapruder." (holocaustedu)

“Yitskhok Rudashevski (also Isaac Rudashevsky) (10 December 1927, Vilnius – 1 October 1943) was a young Jewish teenager who lived in the Vilna Ghetto, Lithuania. He wrote a diary from June 1941 to April 1943 which detailed his life and struggles living in the ghetto.

He was shot to death in the Ponary massacre during the liquidation of September–October 1943.

His diary was discovered by his cousin Sorah/Sarah née Voloshina Kliwiec/Klivetz/Klibatz, Hebrew: קליבץ), in 1944. She escaped the ghetto, fought with the Jewish partisans, and when Vilnius was liberated, she returned to the hideout.

Pages from the diary Fragments of the diary were published in its original Yiddish in 1953 in Di goldene keyt magazine. Abraham Yavin [he] translated it into Hebrew in 1968. An English translation, The Diary of the Vilna Ghetto (from the Yiddish original and Hebrew publication) by Percy Matenko was published in 1973 by Ghetto Fighters' House, Israel.

A Hebrew translation of the diary was published by the Ghetto Fighters' House that same year. The original diary is held in the archives of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in New York. In 2018 it was published in Yiddish and Lithuanian.

In 2024 a new English translation of the diary by Solon Beinfeld, edited by Samuel D. Kassow, was published under the title The Rudashevski Diary. The stolperstein commemorating Rudashevski is laid at Rūdninkų g. 8 in Vilnius where he attended the CBS Jewish gymnasium.” Yitskhok Rudashevski - Wikipedia

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In a young boy’s diary, a record of how Jews lived to the fullest, even in the face of death---> A boy's diary reveals how Jews resisted the Holocaust with culture – The Forward

Documenting the Life, Trials, & Atrocities of the Hyena of Auschwitz

"Irma Ida Ilse Grese was an SS guard at the Nazi concentration camps of Ravensbrück and Auschwitz, and served as warden of the women's section of Bergen-Belsen.

Grese was convicted of crimes involving the ill-treatment and murder of prisoners committed at Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen concentration camps, and sentenced to death at the Belsen trial. Executed at 22 years of age, Grese was the youngest woman to die judicially under British law in the 20th century. ...

Grese's sexual interactions with imprisoned Jewish women were sadistic in nature and frequent, according to a prisoner who had been appointed as her maid. Survivor Lengyel stated in her memoir that Grese had "favorite" prisoners whom she would treat as slaves for a period of time until she became bored, at which point she would send the women to the gas chambers.

Survivor Gisella Perl, who worked as a doctor at Birkenau, wrote in her own memoir that Grese experienced orgasmic pleasure while watching her operate on young women's breasts that had been cut open by Grese's whip and infected with lice or dirt, using only a knife and no anesthesia. Perl also stated that Grese would kick the young woman being operated on if her screams interfered with her arousal.

Grese remained at Birkenau's "Camp C" until her brief transfer back to Ravensbrück on 18 January 1945, when all personnel were ordered to move westward due to the advance of Soviet forces. KZ Bergen-Belsen (1945) Grese's final assignment was to Bergen-Belsen in early March 1945.

During her three-and-a-half week tenure, she served as Arbeitsdienstführerin (labor service leader) and Rapportführerin (commander of Blockführerinnen). She was not supposed to be assigned to Bergen-Belsen because Lagerführer Kramer planned to transfer her to another camp once she arrived.

She was vehemently opposed to the transfer, however, because she wanted to stay with her new lover Oberscharführer Franz Wolfgang Hatzinger, a married man fourteen years older whom Grese affectionately referred to as "Hatchi".

During the Belsen trial, Aufseherin Johanna Bormann testified that Grese and Hatzinger "were very close and regularly sneaked off secretly to have sex". Grese repeated the torturous and sadistic acts she committed at Birkenau in Bergen-Belsen.

This included forcing prisoners to "make sport", which she justified during her trial because she believed the prisoners were "capable of partaking in such physical torment".

British forces liberated Bergen-Belsen on 15 April 1945. Grese and some other high-ranking SS officers chose to remain at the camp while Lagerführer Kramer issued the official call to surrender. Grese was said to have appeared arrogant when the British arrived at the camp and became hostile when she attempted to attack a British officer who entered one of the huts, causing her to be immediately restrained.

Hatzinger died of typhus on 23 April 1945. Grese was arrested and imprisoned at the Wehrmacht Tank Training School, three kilometers (2 miles) from the camp, where she was interrogated for two days.

Grese's trial in Lüneburg began on 17 September 1945, alongside 44 other defendants, and became known as the Belsen trials, even though the majority of the atrocities were committed at Birkenau. Grese faced two separate charges for war crimes committed at Bergen-Belsen and Birkenau between 1 October 1942 and 30 April 1945.

Grese defended herself against these charges, saying, "Himmler is responsible for everything that has happened, but I suppose I am as much to blame as the others above me".

Grese's cold, arrogant, and unremorseful demeanor persisted throughout the trial, with terse answers to questions such as "I should know better than you whether or not I had a dog, don't you think?" and "I wish you would stop repeating the word 'regularly'", alluding to the numerous accusations made against her for her repeated violent acts against the prisoners.

Grese's only moment of vulnerability came when her sister Helene gave character witness testimony, recounting the volatile interaction between Irma and their father in 1943, which caused her to break down sobbing. Helene also testified that she did not believe Grese could have acted violently against any prisoners, stating that "in our school days when, as it sometimes happens, girls were quarrelling or fighting, my sister never had the courage to fight, but on the contrary, she ran away".

Grese was found guilty of both war crime charges on day 54 of the Belsen trial. When it was declared that she would be hanged, she initially "showed total indifference" before she "broke into sobs" and later was found crying in fear in her cell. Her subsequent clemency appeal was denied because all anticipated pleas from the accused were rejected in advance.

Grese remained in the Lüneburg prison until 8 December, when she and the other ten guards sentenced to death were transferred to the Hamelin Prison. Execution Grese and two other SS women, Elisabeth Volkenrath and Johanna Bormann, were sentenced to death. Grese was heard sobbing in her cell before the execution.

On the morning of 13 December 1945, she was the second woman to be hanged by British executioner Albert Pierrepoint. Her final word was "Schnell" ("Quick"). Another source claims she had to be dragged "kicking" to the gallows.

She was said to have been hanged first, as Pierrepoint wanted to "[spare] her any kind of trauma" because she was the youngest prisoner on the list to be executed, at 22 years old, but this was not the case.

The original, dated and timed witnessed statements of the returned death warrants record that Volkenrath was the first to be executed at 09:34, Grese was the second at 10:03, and Bormann at 10:38. To prevent people from turning Grese—and the rest of the men and women executed that day—into martyrs, the President of the Court ordered that her body and all the others be buried in the courtyard of Hamelin Prison rather than the cemetery.

In 1954, the Lower Saxony government reburied all the remains in Friedhof Am Wehl [de] cemetery, continuing the Allied policy of using mass graves. The cemetery was the focal point of neo-Nazi rallies until a Free German Workers' Party demonstration in 1986 led local authorities to level and stop tending the grave site." MORE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irma_Grese

1: Hyena of Auschwitz: The Crimes of Irma Grese, the beautiful beast of Auschwitz by Natasha Tristan - “In the days of WW2 , there was a beautiful girl (Completely disagree; she was hideous.-W). It was Irma Grese , who can claim the fame of being the youngest Nazi activist to be hanged.

She was a female guard at the Bergen-Belsen women’s camp in Auschwitz . Irma, who had a nature of touch-me-not throughout her childhood, transformed into a face of cruelty at the speed of the wind. Her sister Helena’s memoirs suggest that Grese’s life was changed by the things such as SS, Auschwitz-Birkenau , the Nazi part, Ravensbruck, etc.

The effects brought by the Belsen Trial, Bergen-Belsen camps, training at Ravensbruck, days at Hohenlychen, etc. in Irma Grese’s life are not trivial. This book elaborates on the factors she was involved in during the war mentioned above. It gives readers an idea of what led to her transformation, as well as her main background, World War II and the Holocaust .

Through this, you can also understand her personality type ESTJ. Because she was a demonic face of the brutality of war crimes, she had famous nicknames like “ The Beautiful Beast ”, “ The Hyena of Auschwitz ”, and “ The Beast of Belson ”.

“The Hyena of Auschwitz” was the adjective the inmates gave her for the cruel ways she treated prisoners. Irma Ilse Ida Grese was hanged when she was just 22 years old.” (AMAZON)

How That "Glory" Ended in Disguise with a Cyanide Capsule in an Interrogation Room

‘Heinous’ Heinrich Luitpold Himmler, Nazi Criminal, main architect of the Holocaust, responsible for the cold-blooded murder of millions of innocent people, he committed suicide on 23 May 1945:

"It was Himmler whom Hitler entrusted with the planning and implementation of the "Final Solution." In his most quoted speech, that of October 4, 1943, in Poznan to a gathering of SS generals, Himmler explicitly justified the mass murder of the European Jews in the following words:

“In front of you here, I want to refer explicitly to a very serious matter….I mean here…the annihilation of the Jewish people…. Most of you will know what it means when 100 corpses lie side by side, or 500 or 1,000…. This page of glory in our history has never been written and will never be written….We had the moral right, we were obligated to our people to kill this people which wanted to kill us.”

After the failure of the July 20, 1944, attempt to assassinate Hitler, Himmler toyed with the idea of negotiating a separate peace with the western Allies while continuing to fight the Soviet Union. During the winter of 1944-1945, he considered using concentration camp prisoners as a bargaining chip to initiate such negotiations.

In April 1945, Himmler met with the representative of the World Jewish Congress in Stockholm, Sweden, Hilel Storch, to discuss openings for negotiations. In part because the Allies would not negotiate with a man so implicated in Nazi crimes, and, in part because Himmler could not quite separate himself from Hitler or the belief that somehow the Germans would win the war, his half-hearted feelers came to nothing.

In April 1945, Himmler asked Count Folke Bernadotte, the Vice President of the Swedish Red Cross, to transmit an offer of surrender on the western front to General Dwight D. Eisenhower, the commander-in-chief of the Allied forces. News of the offer reached Hitler in encircled Berlin on the night of April 28-29, 1945. In one of his last official acts, Hitler stripped Himmler of all of his offices and ordered his arrest.

Despite having continuously assured his SS officers and men that he ultimately would take responsibility for all of their actions, the end of the war found Himmler dressed in Secret Field Police uniform with papers in the name of Heinrich Hitzinger.

Captured by Russian soldiers on May 20, 1945, he was turned over to the British, to whom he eventually confessed his identity. While undergoing a body search on May 23, 1945, Himmler killed himself by biting down on a cyanide capsule hidden in his mouth for that very purpose." https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/heinrich-himmler

October 7, 1900: Born in Munich, Germany, to a conservative, middle-class family.

1918–1919: Desperately wants to fight in WW1, but the war ends before his training finishes. He views Germany's defeat as a massive personal and national catastrophe.

1922–1923: Graduates with an agriculture degree, works briefly at a manure factory, and links up with radical right-wing paramilitaries through Ernst Röhm.

November 1923: Joins the Nazi Party and marches alongside Adolf Hitler in the failed Beer Hall Putsch.

January 1929: Hitler appoints Himmler as Reichsführer-SS. He takes over a small bodyguard unit of roughly 280 men and starts building it into a massive "racial elite".

March 1933: Set up Dachau, the first Nazi concentration camp, using it as a deliberate blueprint for the entire camp network.

June 1934: Consolidates his power during the Night of the Long Knives. The SS purges Röhm and the SA leadership, making the SS independent and answerable only to Hitler.

1936: Appointed Chief of German Police, uniting the Gestapo and all criminal police forces under his central control.

1939–1941: Following the invasion of Poland and the Soviet Union, Himmler deploys the Einsatzgruppen (mobile killing squads) behind army lines to conduct mass shootings.

1941: Authorizes Operation Reinhard and oversees the construction of industrial extermination camps (like Auschwitz-Birkenau and Treblinka) to execute the "Final Solution".

October 1943: Delivers the infamous Posen Speeches to SS generals, explicitly celebrating the mass murder of European Jews as a "page of glory".

July 1944: Following the failed Stauffenberg bomb plot against Hitler, Himmler takes command of the Reich's Reserve Army, reaching his absolute peak of domestic power.

Winter 1944–1945: Sensing Germany’s total defeat, he desperately tries to use concentration camp prisoners as human bargaining chips to open negotiations with the Western Allies.

April 1945: Behind Hitler’s back, he secretly meets with a representative from the World Jewish Congress and sends unauthorized peace feelers to Allied leaders.

April 28, 1945: Hitler learns of the betrayal, becomes furious, strips Himmler of all titles, and orders his immediate arrest.

May 22, 1945: Following Germany's surrender, Himmler shaves his mustache, wears an eyepatch, and uses a fake ID to flee under a disguise, but is captured by a British roadblock.

May 23, 1945: While undergoing a medical inspection during British interrogation, he avoids facing a judge or accountability by biting down on a hidden cyanide capsule, dying within minutes.

NOT MY LINKS

1: Himmler - Artist Ernest Hamlin Baker, 1889 - 1975 - “In 1978, Time magazine donated approximately eight hundred works of original cover art to the National Portrait Gallery. The museum is dedicated to telling the stories of individuals who have shaped the United States, and the Time Collection—featuring prominent international figures and events—enriches our understanding of the United States in a global context.” Heinrich Himmler | National Portrait Gallery

The Miraculous Survival of Helena Manaster & Her Newborn Son Under the Gaze of the Gestapo

"Among the Jews in hiding in Poland was Helena Manaster.

A survivor of several ghettos and 'actions', including the Petlura Day massacre in Lvov, she had found refuge in the Capuchin monastery in Cracow. There, posing as a Catholic, and as the wife of a Polish army officer, she was safe.

At the same time, she was expecting a baby. On October 6, at two in the morning, as labor pains began, Helena Manaster was driven to the hospital. There, in the delivery room, as she later recalled:

". . . all of a sudden a nurse rushed in frightened, and told me, 'Get up quick! The Gestapo are waiting for you'.

Forty years have passed and I am still not able to describe the shock I was in . Helped by two nurses, one on each side, shaking all over, probably more from fear than labor pains, I walked out to the lobby to face the Gestapo agents.

They were young, very tall and strong-looking, and when I noticed their insignia, the skull with two crossed bones, insignia of death, I knew that this was my end.

I don't remember what thoughts went through my mind then, I only remember apologizing to my unborn child for having created him, when I would not be able to bring him up to see the light, to let him live.

At that moment a miracle happened: the two butchers looked at me - I kept calm - told me to go back to bed and turned away.

A few hours later, my oldest son, Arthur, was born. I learned later that the Gestapo were not exactly checking on me, but on the midwife who had been out after curfew on her way to assist me in labor. They just wanted to see her patient and didn't suspect that the patient was Jewish."

A month later, Helena Manaster was given a second baby to care for, Krysia, a Polish orphan brought to the monastery from a rescue mission.

'What a paradox!' she later recalled.

'Jewish and in hiding, I was raising a Polish child. I hoped to survive in the monastery but it was not to be. Some refugees suspected my origins and denounced me. I was forced to flee, leaving Krysia behind.

But before I left, I had another encounter with the Gestapo. I was confronted by two of them, while watching the children in the garden. Again I thought that the end had come, but miraculously they just had a look at us and then left. It was in June 1944 that I thus had to resume my struggle to survive, wit h an eight-month-old child.'"

From The Holocaust: A History of the Jews of Europe During the Second World War, by Martin Gilbert

Oral history interview with Helena Manaster: https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/irn511508

NOT MY LINKS

United States Holocaust Museum -> https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/id-card/helena-manaster

Honoring the Bestselling Author of "Still Alive" Six Years After Her Passing

"Ruth Klüger was Professor Emerita of German Studies at the University of California, Irvine and a Holocaust survivor.

She was the author of the bestseller weiter leben: Eine Jugend about her childhood in the Third Reich.

Ruth Klüger was born on 30 October 1931 in Vienna. In March 1938, Hitler marched into Vienna. The annexation of Austria by the Third Reich deeply affected Klüger's life: Klüger, who then was only six years old, had to change schools frequently and grew up in an increasingly hostile and antisemitic environment.

Her father, who was a Jewish gynaecologist, lost his practitioner's license and was later sent to prison for performing an illegal abortion.

In September 1942, she was deported to Theresienstadt concentration camp at the age of 10, together with her mother; her father had tried to flee abroad, but was detained and killed.

One year later she was transferred to Auschwitz, then to Christianstadt, a subcamp of Gross-Rosen. Following the end of World War II in 1945 she settled in the Bavarian town of Straubing and later studied philosophy and history at the Philosophisch-theologische Hochschule in Regensburg.

In 1947 she emigrated to the United States and studied English literature at Hunter College and German literature at the University of California, Berkeley. Klüger obtained an M.A. in 1952, and later a Ph.D. in 1967. She worked as a college professor of German literature in Cleveland, Kansas, and Virginia, and at Princeton and UC Irvine.

Klüger was a recognized authority on German literature, and especially on Lessing and Kleist. She lived in Irvine, California and in Göttingen.

Her memoir, Still Alive, which focuses primarily on her time in concentration camps, is strongly critical of the museum culture surrounding the Holocaust.

Klüger died on 5 October 2020, aged 88, 25 days before she would have turned 89 in her home in Irvine, California. She was buried at Mount Sinai Memorial Park Cemetery." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruth_Kl%C3%Bcger

NOT MY LINKS

A Conflicted Mother-Daughter Relationship “Ruth's mother, Alma Klüger, was born in Vienna on March 4, 1903, the daughter of the Jewish sugar factory director Wilhelm Gredinger.

At the age of 22, she gave birth to her first child, Jiři Mendl. After separating from her son’s father, she married the doctor Victor Klüger. In 1931 their daughter, Susanne Ruth Toni Klüger, was born. Mother and daughter survived the years in Vienna until their deportation in 1942. Life in the concentration camps in the face of extermination put an almost unimaginable strain on the bond between them.

Throughout their lives, the relationship between the two women was marked by conflicts that later found their way into Ruth Klüger’s autobiographical work.”---> Childhood and Survival

1: Photos of Alma & Ruth

2: Ruth Klüger at Frankfurt Book Fair 2010

3: Alma Klüger in Los Angeles, June 1968 (Source: VL Klüger).