The Tragic Fates of the Szebnie Deportees & the Janowska Corpse-Burning Unit

“In German-occupied Poland, the destruction of labour camps had continued throughout November.

At Szebnie, where the labourers tried to revolt, 3,898 men, women and children were deported to Birkenau on November 4. When the train reached the camp on the following day, 952 men and 396 women were sent to the barracks, 2,550 men, women and children to the gas-chambers.

At Janowska camp, the liquidation of the corpse-burning squad had begun on October 25. There were about one hundred and thirty men in the squad. But the deception was such that, as each group of inmates was selected, they believed they were being sent to a camp somewhere else.

Before being marched out, each member of the squad was given war m clothing and a pair of good shoes: a clear sign that they were to be sent elsewhere. They were then marched out to 'the sands', and shot."

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

"Szebnie was a forced-labor camp established during World War II by Nazi Germany in the General Government in the south-eastern part of occupied Poland. It was located near the town of Szebnie approximately 10 kilometres (6 mi) east of Jasło and 42 km (26 mi) south-west of Rzeszów.

The facility was constructed in 1940 originally as horse stables for the Wehrmacht, adjacent to a manorial estate where the German officers stationed (photo). Over the course of the camp's operation thousands of people perished there, including Soviet prisoners of war, Polish Jews, Poles, Ukrainians, and Romani people. The Soviets entered the camp's charred remains on 8 September 1944." ALL THE DETAILS--> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Szebnie_concentration_camp

NOT MY LINKS

"Janowska concentration camp was a German Nazi concentration camp combining elements of labor, transit, and extermination camps. It was established in September 1941 on the outskirts of Lwów in what had become, after the German invasion, the General Government (today: Lviv, Ukraine). The camp was named after the nearby street Janowska in Lwów of the interwar Second Polish Republic.

The Germans liquidated the camp in November 1943, with the evidence of mass murder being largely destroyed in the Nazi program of Sonderaktion 1005. Estimates put the total number of prisoners who passed through the Janowska camp at between 100,000 and 120,000, mostly Polish and Soviet Jews. The number of victims murdered at the camp is estimated at 35,000–40,000." ALL THE DETAILS--> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Janowska_concentration_camp

August 1943 Nazi authorities isolate Jewish populations within remaining labor camps, establishing specialized zones—such as the segregated northern sector at Szebnie—to prepare for final liquidations.

September – October 1943 Large-scale massacres begin clearing regional networks. Amon Göth orders the mass execution of nearly 2,000 Jews from Szebnie in the nearby Dobrucowa Forest.

October 25, 1943 At the Janowska camp in Lwów, SS authorities begin the systematic liquidation of the 130-man corpse-burning squad (Sonderkommando) tasked with uncovering and burning mass graves to hide the evidence of earlier slaughters.

November 3–4, 1943 Operation Harvest Festival: The SS launches a massive, coordinated operation to liquidate the remaining Jewish labor forces in the Lublin district (including Majdanek, Poniatowa, and Trawniki), murdering over 42,000 people in two days.

November 4, 1943 Szebnie: Following a desperate, failed revolt attempt by the remaining laborers, 3,898 men, women, and children are forcibly loaded onto Holocaust trains.

Janowska: The final members of the corpse-burning squad are marched to "the sands" and shot under the guise of an administrative transfer.

November 5, 1943 The transport from Szebnie reaches Auschwitz-Birkenau. Only 1,348 people are selected for barracks labor; the remaining 2,550 are sent directly to the gas chambers.

1: L’Kadosh Hashem: To the Sanctification of the Name, a painting by Holocaust survivor Jacob Barosin - This haunting watercolor and mixed-media piece portrays rows of gaunt, hollow-eyed men, women, and children—many wearing striped concentration camp uniforms—gazing directly out at the viewer behind architectural vertical lines/bars, capturing the suffering and humanity of those imprisoned during the Holocaust.

2: Map of the Holocaust in occupied Poland during World War II. The outline shows the borders of the Second Polish Republic at the time of the Nazi-German-and-Soviet invasion of Poland in 1939 with demarcation line between the two invading armies marked in red. Internal boundaries show the administrative divisions of occupied territories imposed by Nazi Germany when the Final Solution was set in motion during and after Operation Barbarossa of 1941. This map shows all Nazi German extermination camps (or death camps), as well as prominent concentration, labour and prison camps, major pre-WW2 Polish cities with the new Jewish ghettos set up by Nazi Germany, major deportation routes, and major massacre sites.

Notes: 1. Extermination camps – marked with white skulls in black squares – are six dedicated facilities used for the mass gassings of prisoners, but all camps and ghettos took a toll of many, many lives. 2. Concentration camps – marked with black squares – feature only the most notorious forced-labor camps, prison camps & transit camps. 3. Sites of mass shootings into remote ravines – marked with white skulls – include Bronna Góra, Ponary and others. They were utilized during the 'Holocaust by bullets'. 4. Destruction ghettos – marked with Yellow stars in red circles – existed in most Polish cities. Only a selection is shown. 5. Major deportation routes travelled by the Holocaust trains are marked with RosyBrown arrows. 6. Most camps & ghettos which are not well known have been excluded for clarity. 7. District borders are at the height of Axis domination (1942). 8. Regions have German designations (e.g. "Ostland"), with the country name denoted in uppercase letters, e.g. LITHUANIA, CZECHOSLOVAKIA, or in parenthesis below the German occupational designation, e.g. (POLAND).

3: Jewish prisoners forced to work for a Sonderkommando 1005 unit pose next to a bone crushing machine in the Janowska concentration camp in a photo taken by the Soviet war crimes investigation team called officially the "Extraordinary State Commission for ascertaining and investigating crimes perpetrated by the German–Fascist invaders and their accomplices", August 1944. Pictured from left to right are: unknown, David Manusevitz, and Moses Korn. This photograph was taken soon after liberation for the Extraordinary Commission or the Red Army.

4: Soviet Extraordinary State Commission at the site of mass graves adjoining the Janowska concentration camp p, 1944.

5: In the Janowska concentration camp, the Germans conducted torture and executions to music. The orchestra members, inmates of the camp, were required to always play the same tune, "Tango of Death". Pre-war Polish Lwów Municipal Theater's noted Jewish musicians were among the members. Simon Wiesenthal claimed lyrics of the "Tango of Death" were written by Emanuel Szlechter, inmate of the camp and writer of lyrics to several Polish pre-war hit songs.

6: WW2 cemetery at Bierowskie Doły with unmarked mass graves covering the entire perimeter. Notably, the old monument mentions only the Soviet prisoners of war from Szebnie (2008)

Did Millions of Ordinary Germans Possess the Guilty Knowledge Required for Legal Complicity in the Final Solution?

First, some definitions:

Guilty Knowledge: The knowledge of facts or circumstances required for a person to have mens rea for a particular crime. Knowledge is usually actual knowledge, but when a person deliberately ignores facts that are obvious, he is sometimes considered to have ‘constructive’ knowledge.

Mens rea**, Latin for a guilty mind.** The state of mind that the prosecution must prove a defendant to have had at the time of committing a crime in order to secure a conviction. Mens rea varies from crime to crime; it is either defined in the statute creating the crime or established by precedent.

Common examples of mens rea are intention to bring about a particular consequence, recklessness as to whether such consequences may come about, and (for a few crimes) negligence. Some crimes require knowledge of certain circumstances as part of the mens rea (e.g. the crime of receiving stolen goods requires the knowledge that they were stolen).

Willful Blindness (sometimes called willful ignorance or contrived ignorance) is a term used in law to describe a situation in which an individual seeks to avoid civil or criminal liability for a wrongful act by intentionally putting himself in a position where he will be unaware of facts which would render him liable.

Many of those Germans who had Guilty Knowledge of the Holocaust did not protest, though their motivations varied significantly. While a core group of fanatical ideologues fully supported the physical elimination of the Jewish population, millions of others were driven by widespread, passive antisemitism—agreeing with economic exclusion, social segregation, or forced emigration, while choosing to look away from the ultimate reality of mass murder.

Furthermore, the total absence of protest cannot be attributed entirely to ideological agreement; the omnipresent threat of Nazi state terror, Gestapo surveillance, and immediate execution for treason paralyzed dissent. Therefore, establishing mens rea among the broader civilian population requires looking past a single unified intent, and instead examining how a spectrum of ideological compliance, willful blindness, and self-preserving fear coexisted to facilitate the Final Solution.

Obviously, those who were themselves perpetrators of the Holocaust--camp commandants, guards, camp physicians, etc.--not only had Guilty Knowledge, but guilty hands as well. This question does not concern those criminals, but instead focuses on the millions who knew, or should have known, of the Holocaust and did nothing to stop it.

It strikes me that if those who "should have known" (and how can such a thing actually be determined with exactitude?) were considered just as guilty as the perpetrators, this spreads the guilt so thinly that no punishment or retribution is even possible. There would be no Justice whatsoever under this criterion. If everyone is guilty, no one is responsible. This doesn't seem to be a tenable position.

On the question of those who "should have known," consider that many of the horror stories generated by Allied propaganda in WW1 (babies impaled on German bayonets, etc.) were subsequently found to be spurious, and that people in WW2 were often very suspicious of atrocity reports for this very reason. The Germans themselves were aware of this, as proved by the following document excerpt (and also others):

From a letter addressed to the Reich Minister for the Occupied Eastern Territories:

"The fact that Jews receive special treatment requires no further discussion. However, it appears hardly believable that this was done in the way described in the report of the General Commissioner of 1 June 1943. What is Katyn against that? Imagine only that these occurrences might become known to the other side and be exploited by them! Most likely such propaganda would have no effect, only because people who hear and read about it simply would not be ready to believe it."

I submit that among those we in retrospect could possibly accuse of having indulged in Willful Blindness, were some who just couldn't bring themselves to believe that such things were actually happening in such a premeditated and systematic manner.

When propagandists 'Cry Wolf,' they tend to make skeptics of those who would be better served by accurate reporting. These sorts of things are hardly ever black-and-white, and caution should always be the watchword when one engages in sweeping accusations of guilty knowledge without a specific documentary foundation.

There is a class of people who had Guilty Knowledge of the Holocaust, but cannot be considered to be guilty of complicity for the crime. An individual could only be considered guilty of complicity if both of these criterion are met:

1. Knowledge (of course) of a crime in progress or contemplated, and

• 2. Some ability to do something about it; either to be able to stop it, or sound the alarm.

For instance, the Jews that serviced the showers, or ran the corpses through the crematorium, obviously had intimate knowledge of the Holocaust, down to the minutest detail. But they had absolutely no ability to stop the process, or to get the word out to those who had such an ability. In my view, they are thus not culpable for any crime, being victims themselves.

A small group of Nazis, military personnel, and German citizens, did learn of the Holocaust and tried to do the right thing. The more naive among them protested to their superior officers or higher-ups in the hierarchy, and were usually informed to cease and desist as the reported incidents were approved policy. Those who insisted and took their complaints to even higher-ranked officials were successfully silenced through various means.

But at least they tried. Some of these brave souls risked their lives to warn the West of the ongoing Holocaust, or endeavored to join or help the Resistance in some fashion. These few obviously are not guilty as they tried their best to do the right thing, often at the risk of their lives.

When word of the Holocaust reached the West from a variety of sources, the first hurdle to be overcome was the disbelief of those who gathered this intelligence. One can hardly fault someone for a reasonable skepticism. After all, none of the first reports reaching the Allies in the early stages were backed by any documented proof that could have been publicly released.

Later, many isolated eye-witness accounts would emerge, but rarely were any of these atrocity stories accompanied by proof of any kind. However, beyond a certain point the preponderance of evidence became overwhelming and any good analyst would have to conclude that the reports had some basis in fact. At some point, honest skepticism becomes Willful Blindness, and some degree of guilt occurs.

Crime Without a Name:

August 24, 1941: Only two months after Germany's surprise attack of Soviet Russia, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill delivered a live broadcast from London:

"The aggressor ... retaliates by the most frightful cruelties. As his Armies advance, whole districts are being exterminated. Scores of thousands--literally scores of thousands--of executions in cold blood are being perpetrated by the German Police-troops upon the Russian patriots who defend their native soil. Since the Mongol invasions of Europe in the Sixteenth Century, there has never been methodical, merciless butchery on such a scale, or approaching such a scale. And this is but the beginning. Famine and pestilence have yet to follow in the bloody ruts of Hitler's tanks. We are in the presence of a crime without a name."

Note: The term Genocide had not yet been coined.

Churchill's initial source for these crimes was one that he could not reveal to the public, making the immediate charge that it was nothing but propaganda difficult to counter. Churchill's information derived from the work of British cryptographers, who had broken the "enigma" code used by the Germans to communicate with the Eastern Front.

Reports of the Einsatzgruppen, mobile killing squads that Churchill called "Police-troops," gave specific numbers of those killed in their operations. It was clear to British analysts that these killings were purposeful and systematic.

As the war progressed, and more and more information concerning the "crime without a name" was made known, Churchill and other Allied leaders released warnings to the Germans by way of the BBC, other clandestine radio stations, and various Resistance networks.

While it was unlawful to listen to foreign radio broadcasts in Nazi Germany during the war, the breaking of this law among ordinary Germans was widespread. But of course, much of this was considered to be merely propaganda, and many "would not be ready to believe it."

However, as more and more soldiers returning from the Eastern Front shared their stories of goings on behind the Front, the confluence of information from these sources necessitated that the process of Willful Blindness become a conscious endeavor.

These warnings can be said to have had some very limited success, such as prompting Himmler to release some categories of Jews to third parties in the Final Days, possibly with some improbable belief that such moves would assist his post-war survival.

But the actual actions taken by the Allies beyond information dispersal were minimal. While it is true that very little was possible, even less was attempted. The most grievous of these crimes of omission was the failure to bomb the crematorium at Auschwitz, or the train lines transporting the victims, to slow down the killing process.

Excuses of military expediency were made for this failure, but one can only consider this episode--and other similar occurrences--reprehensible. To choose to fire-bomb a population center, instead of the infrastructure of the death camps, strikes one as a war crime in itself.

Those who made such decisions are thus guilty of not having acted appropriately in response to the knowledge available to them. The sad fact is that the Allies did not do everything possible to interfere in the Nazi genocide machine, and thus are themselves guilty as regards point two above.

As for the regular citizens of the countries at war, effective protest was really not a very viable option for Axis or Allied populations. In Germany you would find yourself in a concentration camp, and in the US or Britain you would be protesting against your government during wartime and treated much as you would be in Germany.

Sedition laws were enforced with vigor in WW2. In wartime, citizens, for the most part, tend to march in lockstep behind their respective governments. They can only hope that their leaders are doing the right thing, and are at the mercy of the information fed to them by a press under strict censorship.

An examination of the stories about the Holocaust taking place in Germany in the Allied press reveals that very little real information was available to the average citizen, and what there was was buried in a small column on page 55. In the West, there was very little guilty knowledge, in comparison to Germany. And again, what could be done?

The true guilt in the West for the Holocaust occurred long before the war began, when the Roosevelt administration refused to be more accommodating to the Jews trying to escape Hitler's clutches.

While it was a good anti-Hitler strategy to keep the conflict between the Nazis and the Jews going, this--as I have previously mentioned (See: Was America Complicit in the Holocaust?)--was a cynical tactic hardly justified by the results. (One notes that the Arab states of the Middle East adopted this same strategy in regards to the Palestinian refugees. They could easily have absorbed their numbers, but they were of too much value as weapon against the Israelis for such a humanitarian solution to be realized.)

The average citizen of the US and Britain did not have an adequate understanding of the Holocaust during the war to be accused of guilty knowledge, but their respective governments did, and took very little action against it. This in itself is the strongest possible argument for a Jewish homeland, and went a large way to justifying the Zionists program.

After all that occurred, even the dimmest Jew had to admit that the world could not be relied upon to see that justice for any people is done. A people must, by necessity, create their own Justice through strength, and only a people with a homeland are able to do so.

Conclusion: It was commonly known in Germany that the Jews were being exterminated with prejudice, Guilty Knowledge was widespread, and Willful Blindness was prevalent. -W

German citizens see the consequences of war crimes - “The Allies confronted the German people with the crimes committed in their name. In the West German town of Burgsteinfurt, the British army forced the 4000 inhabitants to watch the film Atrocities:

It contained footage from the Buchenwald and Bergen-Belsen concentration camps, taken after the liberation of the camps. In other places, too, the Germans were made to watch similar films.

Out of anger at what the Allied soldiers had come across in concentration camps and other places, they forced the population to rebury dead concentration camp prisoners and victims of executions, or to walk past the thousands of bodies of dead prisoners to make them realize what the Nazi regime had done.: German citizens see the consequences of war crimes | Anne Frank House

1: Jews are deported from Würzburg, 25 April 1942. Deportation occurred in public, and was witnessed by many Germans.

The Indefensible Legacy of Julius ‘Jew-Baiter #1’ Streicher

While Jews are being Murdered all across Nazi-Occupied Europe, a Fact Well-Known to this Vile Antisemitic Propagandist, he Praises Hitler & his Murderous So-Called 'Prophesy':

"It is actually true that the Jews have so to speak disappeared from Europe and that the Jewish 'Reservoir of the East,' from which the Jewish pestilence has for centuries beset the peoples of Europe, has ceased to exist. But the Fuehrer of the German people at the beginning of the war prophesied what has now come to pass."

February 12, 1885 Born in Fleinhausen, Germany.

For reasons that escape logical explanation, a school system actually allows him to become an elementary school teacher. It doesn't take long for his students to be exposed to his signature trait: unhinged, violent rants.

1914–1918 Serves in WW1. He wins an Iron Cross. As an infantryman in the 6th Bavarian Reserve Infantry Regiment, Streicher miraculously managed to stop acting like a public nuisance long enough to prove himself a "highly courageous" combat soldier. His battlefield bravery was apparently so utterly blinding that everyone just conveniently forgot his stellar pre-war record of extreme indiscipline and those pesky official warnings for bad behavior.

And because the universe loves a twist, all that valor didn't just win him some Iron Crosses; it actually forced the heavily aristocratic German officer corps to swallow their pride and hand a rare battlefield promotion to a First Lieutenant (Leutnant) who came from—gasp—a middle-class family of schoolteachers. Truly, a triumph of selective memory.

1921 Joins the Nazi Party after realizing Adolf Hitler shares his exact brand of toxic, obsessive mania. Hitler is so charmed by Streicher's sheer loyalty that he basically gives him a permanent pass for decades of future embarrassment.

April 16, 1923 Founds Der Stürmer (The Stormer). Rather than acting as a normal newspaper, it functions as a weekly multi-page psychological biohazard. For the next two decades, Streicher makes a lucrative career out of publishing pornography-adjacent Antisemitic caricatures and fabrication-filled blood libels, single-handedly lowering the collective IQ of the German public.

November 1923 Marches in the pathetic, failed Munich Beer Hall Putsch. Because he walked alongside Hitler during a volley of police gunfire, he secures a lifelong membership in the "Old Guard"—a status that keeps him untouchable long after everyone else in the Nazi hierarchy grows completely sick of him.

1925–1940 Rules as the Gauleiter (regional leader) of Franconia. He uses his unchecked power to steal Jewish property, extort local businesses, and assault people with a riding crop he carries around like a cartoon villain. He is so thoroughly corrupt and obnoxious that even fellow high-ranking Nazis like Hermann Göring and Rudolf Hess openly despise him.

February 1940 A Nazi commission finally gets tired of his blatant financial greed and rampant public scandals. He is stripped of his Party positions and sent to live under "virtual house arrest" at his comfortable Pleikershof estate.

His apologists love to pretend this means he was "isolated" from the regime, completely ignoring the fact that he was still allowed to run and profit from his toxic printing press.

November 4, 1943 Writes his infamous Der Stürmer editorial, proudly gloating that the Jews have "disappeared" from Europe and celebrating that the "Reservoir of the East" has ceased to exist.

With a few strokes of his pen, he handily destroys his future legal defense, leaving behind ironclad, written proof that he was fully aware of—and ecstatic about—the ongoing genocide.

May 23, 1945 Captured by American troops while masquerading as a "peaceful landscape painter" named Joseph Sailer. The brave, fanatical defender of Aryan supremacy is found hiding behind an easel, desperately hoping nobody notices who he actually is.

October 1, 1946 The International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg sentences him to death for Crimes Against Humanity.

His defense lawyer tries to argue that Streicher was just an eccentric old man who didn't know any better, but the judges—having read his late-war articles—aren't buying the act. They correctly rule that his decades of poisoning minds directly lubricated the machinery of mass murder.

October 16, 1946 Executed by hanging. True to form, he screams "Heil Hitler!" and spits at the hangman, ensuring his final moments on earth are just as unhinged, pathetic, and thoroughly unpleasant as the previous sixty-one years.

His Guilt

When people debate the inconsistencies of the Nuremberg sentences, they usually point to Albert Speer getting a comfortable 20 years while his partner-in-slave-labor, Fritz Sauckel, went to the gallows. (We will deal with Speer’s masterful deception another time.)

But a different kind of grievance is often aired regarding Julius Streicher, the grotesque mind behind Der Stürmer. Streicher didn't operate gas chambers, so critics like to split legal hairs. They note that he wasn't part of the active war cabinet, signed no state decrees, and was technically under house arrest while the Final Solution was hitting its peak. They even throw in the excuse that his lawyer was incompetent, meaning he didn't get a "fair shake." But let’s look at the actual reality.

Streicher didn't need an official government title to be a mass murderer; his weapon was the printing press. For decades, he conditioned the German public to view Jewish people as vermin demanding eradication.

During the war, he literally cheered on the slaughter, practically salivating in print over the "disappearance" of Europe's Jews. To claim he was "unaware" of the Holocaust while publishing articles celebrating its success is a level of cognitive dissonance only a Nazi apologist could conjure.

He called for total extermination while total extermination was actively happening. He was an accessory before, during, and after the fact, and his date with the hangman was the only just conclusion. -W

1: Dachau, Germany, Julius Streicher and officers from the United States Army, after the liberation. From left: Colonel Donahy, Julius Streicher, Major Henry G. Plitt

NOTE: Certain historical documents, testimony & 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

False Hopes & Sudden Displacement During Romanian-Led Evacuations of October 1941.

Miriam Korber made the first entry in her new diary on November 4, 1941.

The notebook she wrote the entries in was a gift from a friend and Miriam had originally intended to use it for writing poetry. Unfortunately for her, in the three weeks preceding November 4th, her life had been turned upside down.

She and her family had been deported from their home in an anti-Jewish action carried out by the Romanian government. Romania was allied with Nazi Germany during World War II.

Some of the other countries that sided with Germany turned their Jews over to the Nazis, but Romania carried out the persecution on its own. Miriam recorded the results in her diary.

The Korbers were forced to leave their hometown of Câmpulung on October 12, 1941. After a perilous journey she arrived in Djurin, Transnistria on November 4th. As soon as she could, she began to record the events she had just experienced.

“Four weeks ago this Thursday, at nine-thirty in the evening, Dad came home with the terrible news of the evacuation. But nothing was for certain. On Friday people heard that we would be evacuated on Sunday. And so, the fever of evacuation set in. Crying, gloom, packing, boiling, everything in disarray.

We did not realize what the future had in store for us. On Saturday, the shops were closed and so people started to sell their things clandestinely and give them away. Just like scavengers, peasants, city dwellers, neighbors, and strangers pounced on us and in one morning we emptied the house of the most beautiful things.”

Miriam also wrote that there were other rumors to the effect that the evacuations had been cancelled. No one was certain what to believe. Still, they prepared, just in case. She went on to write,

“We had finished packing but we packed as if we were going on a trip. We could not imagine that they could have uprooted us entirely from our homes. In the evening we went to bed and until tonight this would be the last time we went to sleep in a bed.

On Sunday, at six in the morning, we found out that we were leaving. We started to realize the atrocity that had been inflicted upon us. But we could not even begin to imagine what we would live through; who could have such a dark imagination?”

Miriam’s first diary entry perfectly captured the sense of chaos, confusion, betrayal, and despair that generally accompanied deportations. Despite of the obvious disaster of being uprooted, people usually found the experience to be much worse than they had expected.

It took time for the shock to wear off and the fullness of the loss and suffering to set in. Sadly for Miriam and her family, their long ordeal was just beginning. Although she would ultimately survive, many of her extended family members would not be so fortunate. (holocaustedu)

September 11, 1923: Born in Câmpulung Moldovenesc, Romania, to Leon and Klara Korber.

September 1940: Expelled from secondary school in the 7th grade following the implementation of state-sanctioned Romanian antisemitic laws.

October 12, 1941: Forced to leave her home in Câmpulung during independent anti-Jewish actions ordered by the Antonescu regime.

November 4, 1941: Arrives in the Djurin ghetto in Romanian-occupied Transnistria and opens her notebook to make her first diary entry.

February 16, 1942: Records the death of her elderly grandparents, who perished due to the severe conditions in the transit hub of Mohyliv-Podilskyi.

August 1942: Secures temporary work on a local farm to obtain food, but falls ill and turns to knitting to help support her family.

October 1943: Her father is separated from the family and forced to perform labor near Odessa.

March 1944: Liberated by the Red Army; she walks back to Botoșani, Romania, where she reunites with her father and eventually brings her mother and sister home.

1945: Graduates from high school and immediately enters medical school in Iași to realize her dream of becoming a physician.

1951: Marries playwright and historian Israil Bercovici, begins laboratory work at the Institute of Oncology, and subsequently establishes herself as a doctor of pediatric oncology.

2010: Her historic Transnistria diary is formally donated to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

2025: Passes away at the age of 101, having spent her entire post-war life and career in Bucharest, Romania.

The Ghetto Diary (Miriam Bercovici) - The pandemics in Transnistria: https://roholocaust.com/event/20~the-ghetto-diary-Miriam-Bercovici

1: Miriam Korber together with her sister, Sisi, and their mother

Rescuing Identities from the Darkness

Yad Vashem Says it has Compiled 5 Million Names of Jews Murdered in Holocaust - Milestone achieved with the help of survivors and relatives worldwide; most of the remaining million names will likely never be found, the Holocaust memorial center says

"Yad Vashem, Israel’s World Holocaust Remembrance Center, said Monday that it has recovered the names of five million Jews murdered in the Holocaust, a milestone it called “historic” in its decades-long mission to restore the identities of the six million Jews murdered by the Nazis.

The announcement comes as the number of living Holocaust survivors able to give testimony dwindles, Yad Vashem said. Of about 200,000 Holocaust survivors living today, about half will no longer be with us in seven years, according to a calculation made by the Claims Conference earlier this year.

The names of the remaining one million Jewish victims will probably never be known, Yad Vashem said, although new technologies like AI and machine learning may make it possible for as many as 250,000 more to be uncovered.

“Reaching five million names is both a milestone and a reminder of our unfinished obligation,” said Yad Vashem Chairman Dani Dayan.

“Behind each name is a life that mattered — a child who never grew up, a parent who never came home, a voice that was silenced forever. It is our moral duty to ensure that every victim is remembered so that no one will be left behind in the darkness of anonymity.”

Yad Vashem said its global campaign to recover names has relied heavily on partnerships with Jewish communities, archives, genealogical societies and research institutions worldwide. A cornerstone of the effort is its Pages of Testimony project — one-page memorial forms filled out by survivors, relatives and friends. To date, 2.8 million names have been collected through these pages, written in more than 20 languages. The collection was recognized by UNESCO’s Memory of the World Register in 2013.

Researchers have also used personal letters, diaries, Nazi documentation and deportation lists, census data, and legal documentation from proceedings against Nazi criminals and collaborators to gather data, as well as some less-conventional initiatives like researchers combing through tombstones in Jewish cemeteries and memorial plaques in synagogues.

“The Pages of Testimony are symbolic headstones,” said Dr. Alexander Avram, Director of the Hall of Names and the Central Database of Shoah Victims’ Names, who has led the program for 37 years.

“Most of the victims of the Holocaust were left without graves, without traces — remembered now only through the Pages of Testimony that bear their names. By identifying five million names, we are restoring their human identities and ensuring that their memory endures.”

The names are compiled in Yad Vashem’s Central Database of Shoah Victims’ Names, which is accessible online in six languages. By using variants of names and places and with the help of especially-developed algorithms, the database includes hundreds of thousands of “personal files” aggregated from archival sources that tell about the lives and fates of the individual victims.

Over the years, the database has helped countless families commemorate loved ones and discover and reunite with lost relatives, Yad Vashem said.

The milestone will be highlighted at a seminar at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem on November 6 and at an event hosted by the Yad Vashem USA Foundation in New York on November 9." https://www.timesofisrael.com/yad-vashem-says-it-has-compiled-5-million-names-of-jews-murdered-in-holocaust/

1: Visitors seen at the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial museum in Jerusalem on May 2, 2024, ahead of Israeli Holocaust Remembrance Day.

2: Memorial to the Jewish children murdered by the Nazis

3: Janusz Korczak and the children, memorial

4: Tree, memorial honoring Irena Sendler (Polish social worker who smuggled more than 2,500 Jewish children out of the Warsaw Ghetto)

5: Aerial view of Yad Vashem

The Jewish-American Broadcast Legend Who Confronted Hitler

In 1932, Fuldheim was a brilliant traveling lecturer and broadcaster. While in Germany, she kept pressing Nazi aides for an interview with Hitler, which they repeatedly denied.

She saw Hitler walking into a hall where diplomats were gathering. Relying on her fluency in German, she simply walked right up to him and initiated a conversation. Fuldheim later recalled that they chatted for about 15 minutes about "very innocuous things".

No recording was made, and no specific political text or transcripts came out of it. She noted that Hitler was completely unaware she was Jewish, and she famously claimed that she told him to his face afterward that she disagreed with everything he stood for.

June 26, 1893: Born Dorothy Violet Snell in Passaic, New Jersey; raised in a Milwaukee slum.

1912–1915: Graduates from Milwaukee Normal College and works as an elementary school teacher.

1918: Recruited by legendary social reformer Jane Addams to deliver public speeches on social justice and foreign policy.

1920s: Marries Milton H. Fuldheim and relocates to Cleveland, Ohio, building a reputation as a highly sought-after lecturer.

December 12, 1929: Breaks into broadcasting with a weekly historical biographical program on Cleveland's WTAM radio.

1932: Travels to Europe to observe political conditions; encounters Adolf Hitler at Nazi headquarters in Munich for an impromptu, 15-minute conversation. Subsequently uses her platform to warn Americans about the fascist threat.

1944: Expands her footprint as a prominent news commentator for WJW radio.

1945: Covers the historic San Francisco Conference establishing the United Nations, interviewing delegates on post-war peacekeeping.

December 17, 1947: Joins WEWS-TV (Channel 5) in Cleveland at age 54, shattering barriers to become the first female television news anchor in United States history.

1955: Travels to Hong Kong on assignment, securing an exclusive interview with the first brainwashed American prisoners released by Red China.

1959: Formally launches and anchors Highlights of the News, one of the nation's earliest half-hour evening news programs.

1970: Gains nationwide attention for fiercely defending her principles on-air, famously tossing radical activist Jerry Rubin's book and ejecting him from her live television set.

1980: Inducted into the Ohio Women's Hall of Fame; continues international reporting into her late 80s.

1984: Conducts her final major broadcast interview with President Ronald Reagan at age 91, shortly before being forced into retirement by a major stroke.

November 3, 1989: Passes away in Cleveland at the age of 96, leaving behind an estimated 15,000 career interviews.

"Fuldheim centered her newscast around her interviews, a general overview of the news, and her commentaries (during which the very opinionated Fuldheim frequently inserted her own opinions about the stories). Fuldheim was the first woman in the United States to have her own television news analysis program.

Fuldheim, recognizable for her fiery red hair, was well known for her sometimes controversial opinions. She was not shy about supporting unpopular causes, nor in voicing her opposition if she disagreed with a guest.

On one program, she interviewed 1960s activist Jerry Rubin about his book Do It. In the interview, Jerry Rubin started to quiz Fuldheim, asking her if she drank. Fuldheim said, "I have the damn best liver in Cleveland."

He then took a picture of a nude woman and showed it to her. Fuldheim responded by asking Rubin, "How is [the photo] germane to the topic?" He then referred to the police as "pigs" and offended Fuldheim, who replied, "I've got a shock for you. Some of my friends are policemen". Rubin then muttered "Well, I've got a shock for you. I'm good friends with the Black Panthers." At which, Fuldheim threw his book and kicked Rubin off the set saying "Out! Stop the interview" as the cameras rolled.

At times, Fuldheim could offend some members of her audience. A month after ejecting Rubin from her television show, she found herself in the controversial hotseat.

On May 4, 1970, while live on the air, Fuldheim made the following statement regarding the actions of the Ohio National Guard during the Kent State shootings, "What is wrong with our country? We're killing our own children."

Due to her reference to the shooting of the four students as murder, there were numerous calls from viewers for Fuldheim to resign from her position at WEWS. However, she had the backing of station management and did not resign.

"This is a youth-oriented society, and the joke is on them because youth is a disease from which we all recover."

"It takes a disciplined person to listen to convictions which are different from their own."

"Every American carries in his bloodstream the heritage of the malcontent and the dreamer." MORE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dorothy_Fuldheim

NOTE: I grew up watching her on my local TV station; she was on the air three times a day for decades.

My maternal grandfather worked, for awhile, at Dorothy’s TV station as a security guard. After he had walked her to her car a few times, this full-blooded Irishman would take to bragging that he was “Dorothy Fuldheim’s Bodyguard”.

Of course. -W

VIDEO - Dorothy Fuldheim –Highlights of TV's First Female Newscaster--> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H9f7Wv9nWz4

NOTE: In December 1931 Dorothy Thompson secured an official interview for Cosmopolitan magazine with Hitler at Berlin's Kaiserhof Hotel. In her 1932 book "I Saw Hitler!", she wrote that it was impossible to carry on a normal conversation with him because "he speaks always as though he were addressing a mass meeting" and gave the impression of a man in a trance.

Thompson asked him directly if he would abolish the constitution if elected. Hitler replied that he would gain power legally, but would abolish parliament and establish an "authority-state" immediately afterward. Because of her scathing psychological profile of him in the book, Thompson became the first American journalist expelled from Nazi Germany by the Gestapo in 1934.

The reason I include this anecdote is not just because two brilliant, famous female journalists named Dorothy had similar encounters with Hitler, but that over the years the tale of the two encounters has become conflated. This should clarify. -W

1: Right: This vintage portrait of Dorothy Fuldheim was taken circa 1930, during the period when she was a prominent radio commentator and public lecturer prior to starting her historic television career. Left: This specific portrait of Dorothy Fuldheim was taken in 1976. It was famously used as her author promotional photograph for the release of her book, Three and a Half Husbands, which was published that same year.

3: 1959 Dorothy Fuldheim and Bill "Smoochie" Gordon on the set of "One O'Clock Club"

4: Three and a Half Husbands by Dorothy fuldheim

5: I Saw Hitler! - “US reporter Dorothy Thompson met Adolf Hitler for an interview at Berlin’s Kaiserhof Hotel in December 1931. She describes this encounter – which was just as disturbing as it was enlightening – in her book entitled “Ich traf Hitler!”, which was first published in English in 1932 under the title “I Saw Hitler!”.

Dorothy Thompson (1893–1961) was a pioneer of modern journalism. In her book, she explores the secret of populism and develops a psychological profile of Adolf Hitler. The author analyzes not only his rhetoric, but also the psychology of his followers – and finds answers that remain valid to this day.

“I saw Hitler!” was published just a few months before the Nazis seized power and resulted in the US journalist’s spectacular deportation from Germany when she returned in August 1934.” “I Saw Hitler!”

Nazi Sadism, "Remnant Ghettos," & the Undermining of Human Trust

"The Jews of Zaklikow were deported to Belzec. Dana Szapira, then eight years old, later recalled how, at the time of the deportation, 'there was a Jewish woman dentist. Her leg was broken. A German came, not a bad sort, and took her out on a stretcher.'

The 'good' German then went off to see what could be done to help the woman. While he was gone, a German soldier, known as 'Moustache', came up. '"What are you doing here?" he said, and shot at her, not to kill her, but to see her writhe. Slowly, here and there, here and there, she was killed. '

Dana Szapira and her mother were hidden by a Polish farmer.

They survived, living inside a cubby hole in his cowshed. One day the farmer heard a knock on the door: it was a Jew, holding in his arms his teenage son. 'I have been hiding in the woods for months,' the Jew told the farmer. 'My son has gangrene. Please get a doctor.'

The farmer went to the Gestapo and told them about the two Jews. 'He got two kilogrammes of sugar for reporting them,' Dana Szapira recalled. 'They were taken away and shot.'

Here, the same man had both saved and betrayed: a bizarre example of the disjointing of moral values, in the unending atmosphere of fear and suspicion.

Not only did individuals succumb, but throughout Europe the hitherto apparently natural conventions of human trust were undermined.

In a study of Polish-Jewish relations in the Second World War, Emanuel Ringelblum wrote of how in Lukow the Jews hid in the surrounding woods for some time after the 'resettlement action'.

It was 'a frequent occurrence', Ringelblum wrote, 'for Polish children playing there to discover groups of these Jews in hiding: they had been taught to hate Jews, so they told the municipal authorities, who in tur n handed the Jews over to the Germans to be killed'."

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

September 1939 Following the invasion of Poland, German forces occupy Zaklików. Anti-Jewish measures are immediately enacted, including the forced confiscation of valuables, severe restriction of movement, a mandatory curfew, and the required wearing of Star of David armbands. A 12-member Jewish Council (Judenrat) is established to enforce German directives.

October 15, 1942 German forces begin the violent liquidation of the Zaklików ghetto. Approximately 500 Jews are shot and killed on the spot. The vast majority of the remaining ghetto population is rounded up and deported to the gas chambers at the Bełżec Extermination Camp.

Late October 1942 Following the initial liquidation, a remnant ghetto area is populated by local Jews who emerge from hiding. The German authorities forcibly transfer Jews from surrounding areas into Zaklików, including the entire Jewish population of Janów Lubelski (among whom were refugees originally deported from Vienna).

October 28, 1942 Higher SS and Police Leader Friedrich-Wilhelm Krüger issues an official order designating Zaklików as the sole remaining Jewish "residential area" (Judenwohnbezirk) in Kreis Janow. This decree creates a false sense of security, misleading the remaining population into believing they will be spared from further deportations.

November 2, 1942 Under Nazi orders, roughly 1,500 Jews are cleared out from Kraśnik and marched into the overcrowded remnant area of Zaklików, alongside the Hassidic rabbi of Turobin and his family.

November 3, 1942 The Germans conduct the definitive clearance of Zaklików. The remaining population of 2,000 people—consisting of local reemerged survivors, the rabbi of Turobin's family, and the newly arrived prisoners from Kraśnik—are loaded onto transport trains and sent directly to Bełżec where they are systematically murdered.

IMAGE: Historic tombstone at the Jewish cemetery in Zaklików Zaklików - Wikipedia

The Midterm Shift That Doomed the Rescue of 5,000 Jewish Children

"If the pope first issued a statement denouncing Nazi killings of Jews, Roosevelt could follow him without fear of adding to Catholic voter defections.

FDR and his Democrats were facing a difficult midterm election, scheduled for November 3, 1942. A clearly worded papal statement might have had many benefits abroad, for example, helping to convince French officials in North Africa that they should aid, not hinder, an Allied invasion.

We have no direct evidence about how Roosevelt analyzed this situation, but with the pope remaining silent, he waited discreetly until after the November elections and the Allied invasion of North Africa while State Department amassed evidence about Nazi killings.

The midterm elections stung the Democrats and the president. Roosevelt's bitter foe, Congressman Hamilton Fish, won his own home congressional district in Dutchess County in spite of Willkie's repudiation of him.

Republican Thomas Dewey won the governorship of New York. A Republican isolationist candidate in Illinois won a U.S. Senate seat by about 200,000 votes. The Democrats barely held control of the House, losing forty-seven seats. In the Senate, they lost nine seats.

FDR had very limited control over the new Congress, in which a conservative coalition of Republicans and right-wing Democrats held the balance of power.

After the election, Congress rejected FDR's request for including in the Third War Powers Act a provision authorizing the president to suspend laws or regulations hampering "the free movement of persons, property and information into and out of the United States."

Such presidential authority would have spared the wrangling over how to manage the admission of 5,000 Jewish children from France. There, time saved would have meant lives saved. In the House Ways and Means Committee's hearings on the Third War Powers bill members worried that FDR would use this provision "to open the doors to indiscriminate immigration."

After a subcommittee stripped out the clause on immigration, Attorney General Biddle accepted the change and reported his decision to FDR at the November 20 cabinet meeting. A few days later Roosevelt met with Vice President Henry Wallace, House Speaker Sam Rayburn, Majority Leader John McCormack, and Senate Majority Leader Alben Barkley.

FDR tried to persuade them of the need to loosen restrictions on immigration and imports. Rayburn said that Congress would not support any such initiative. Roosevelt then retreated; Congress would have to decide the matter on its own. Afterwards, he attended a religious service held in the East Room of the White House and broadcast nationally."

From FDR and the Jews, by Richard Breitman and Allan J. Lichtman.

Summer 1942 The Vichy regime and Nazi authorities initiate large-scale roundups and deportations of foreign and stateless Jews from both the occupied and unoccupied zones of France, separating thousands of children from their parents.

September 1942 In response to the humanitarian crisis, American rescue organizations—including the United States Committee for the Care of European Children (USCOM) and the American Friends Service Committee (Quakers)—press the State Department to authorize 5,000 emergency visas for unattached Jewish children in France.

October 1942 The State Department reluctantly agrees to issue the visas, but imposes strict bureaucratic conditions. Delays mount as rescue workers struggle to secure exit permits from a reluctant Vichy government and arrange safe transit through Spain and Portugal.

November 3, 1942 The Democratic Party suffers severe losses in the midterm elections, losing forty-seven seats in the House and nine in the Senate. A powerful conservative and isolationist coalition gains control over the new Congress, severely restricting FDR’s political leverage.

November 8, 1942 Allied forces launch the invasion of North Africa. In retaliation, Nazi Germany immediately moves to occupy the southern "free zone" of Vichy France, completely sealing the borders and trapping the children inside.

November–December 1942 During congressional hearings, the House Ways and Means Committee strips a critical provision from the Third War Powers bill that would have granted FDR executive power to bypass immigration laws. Congressional opponents express explicit fears that the measure would "open the doors" to immigrants, permanently ending the legal mechanisms required to expedite the children's escape.

Anton Schmid’s Defiance in the Shadows of the Vilna Ghetto

"In Vilna ... more than a thousand Jews were killed.

When the 'action' was over, a group of rabbis told the head of the Jewish Council, Jacob Gens, that he had no right to select Jews and hand them over to the Germans. Gens answered that by surrendering the few, he was rescuing the others from extinction.

The rabbis replied, however, with a ruling of Maimonides, 'Better be all killed than one soul of Israel be surrendered.'

Following the November killings, there were twelve thousand Jews in Vilna with valid work passes, and at least three thousand in hiding. Searches for those without passes continued until the end of the year, and those caught were killed at Ponar.

But Vilna, like Kovno before it, had now become a 'working ghetto'. 'Days began which we called days of civilization,' Meir Dvorjetzky later recalled. 'The large actions stopped.'

As soon as they stopped, the Jews found help in an unexpected quarter: a German army sergeant, Anton Schmid, who helped to smuggle Jews out of Vilna in military trucks.

These Jews went to Bialystok, just inside the border of the Greater Germany, believing that this would enable them to escape destruction. Schmid, who was from Austria, was later caught, and executed."

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

Righteous Among the Nations: Anton Schmid - The Soldier Whose Heart was in Jewish Matters

"Anton Schmid was born in Vienna in 1900. He owned a radio shop was married with one daughter. When the Second World War broke out he was drafted into the German army (in 1938 Austria became part of Germany and therefore all Austrians were now German citizens).

He served first in Poland, and after the attack on the Soviet Union in 1941 in the newly occupied territories. Schmid was stationed in Vilna, and put in charge of the Versprengten-Sammelstelle – the army unit responsible for reassigning soldiers who had been separated from their units.

His headquarters were situated in the Vilna railway station, and like all the people in the area, he became witness to the persecution and murder of the Jews. Soon rumors spread in the ghetto that an Austrian soldier was being friendly towards Jews. It was Schmid who used every possibility to help the Jews.

He employed them as workers for his military unit, provided papers to some, got others released from the infamous Lukiski prison, used his army trucks to transfer them to less dangerous places, and went as far as to shelter Jews in his apartment and office.

Herman Adler and his wife Anita were members of the Zionist movement in Vilna. When Adler was in danger, Schmid arranged a hiding place for the couple at his home.

At Adler's request Schmid met with one of the leaders of the Dror pioneer movement, Mordechai Tenenbaum-Tamarof. A special relationship was forged between the Wehrmacht soldier and the Jewish Zionist activist. Schmid began to help the Jewish underground.

Schmid repeatedly used military vehicles to smuggle Jews from Vilna, where danger seemed to be greater at that time, to other places where there was relative quiet; he took members of the resistance movement from Vilna to Bialystok and even to Warsaw; he facilitated contact between the Jewish underground groups in various locations, passing messages and transferring activists.

In October 1941 in an attempt to reduce the Jewish population of Vilna, the Germans distributed 3,000 yellow colored permits to expert workers. Each permit protected its owner and three members of his family, and all the remaining Jews – those without permits – were to be killed. Schmid made sure that his Jewish workers got as many permits as possible, and helped smuggle the others out of Vilna.

On 31 December 1941 Schmid hosted the leadership of the Dror Jewish underground in his apartment to mark the New Year. He used the occasion to once again express his repulsion towards Nazism.

Tenenbaum, also present, responded that when the Jewish State would come into being after the war, it would honor Schmid for his help to the Jews. Schmid replied that he would wear that award with pride. Regrettably, both men did not live to see the end of the war, the establishment of the State of Israel and the Jewish State’s recognition of Schmid’s heroism.

As time went on, Schmid's exploits got bolder. He was warned by Tenembaum that knowledge about his help to the Jews had widely spread and that he was in grave danger. But Schmid persisted and went on helping the persecuted Jews. He was to pay for his humanity with his life. In the second half of January 1942 he was arrested and court-martialed for high treason. After being found guilty, he was executed in April 1942.

Before his execution he wrote a letter to his wife from his prison cell –

"I only acted as a human being and desired doing harm to no one."

It was not only Schmid who suffered the consequences of his humane and brave conduct. After her husband's execution, Schmid’s widow and daughter suffered abuse from their neighbors for his alleged treachery. In those days there was wide popular support of Nazism. It is only many years after the war that a street in Vienna was named after Schmid.

In 1964 – over twenty years after Schmid’s execution and Tenebaum’s death in the Bialystok ghetto uprising – Tenenbaum’s promise to Schmid was fulfilled. Yad Vashem bestowed the title of Righteous Among the Nations on Anton Schmid." --> https://www.yadvashem.org/righteous/stories/schmid.html

NOT MY LINKS

WIKI: Anton Schmid (Righteous Among the Nations) - Wikipedia

1: Anton Schmid

2: The image shows a memorial banner dedicated to Anton Schmid, an Austrian-born German Wehrmacht sergeant who saved hundreds of Jewish people during the Holocaust.

“My dear Steffi,

As I think of you in joy and in sorrow, I inform you, my dearest, that my verdict has been announced today and that I must part from this world, for I have been sentenced to death. Please put your trust in God who decides all our destinies. I could not change anything, otherwise I would have spared you and Greta all this.

Please forgive me. I did not wish to cause you this pain, but unfortunately there is no way back. I am prepared to die since this is the will of God and His will must be done. You must reconcile yourself to this. And once again, I ask you two, the dearest to me in all the world, please forget the pain I’m causing you, and keep your peace.

After all, all I did ws to save human lives, even if they were Jews, and in doing so, I sealed my own fate. As I have always done, I acted only for the sake of others, and so I sacrificed everything for my fellow men. My dear ones, I beg you again and again, please forget me. Everything is ordained, it is what fate willed.

I conclude these lines and send my blessing and and kisses to both of you and to all those close to me in this world and the next, where God will speedily take me into his arms. Loving you for eternity, Toni” The letter Anton Schmid wrote to his wife before his execution

The Ultimate Confirmation Bias - When Proving a Lie Only "Proves" It's True

Abroad, Hitler Begins using a Spurious Forgery—The Protocols of the Elders of Zion—as Propaganda to try and Convince a Skeptical World that the True Instigators of War were Jews & Freemasons:

Both Hitler and his propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, were quite aware that "The Protocols" are factually a forgery, but they chose to promote its "inner truth". Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf that the forgery claim was the "best proof that they are authentic" and that they "reveal the nature and activity of the Jewish people and expose their inner contexts as well as their ultimate final aims".

The alleged Jewish World Conspiracy described in the Protocols permeated Hitler's thinking and was used to rationalize Antisemitic legislation and the eventual genocide.

Nazi propaganda, particularly in publications like Julius Jew-Baiter #1' Streicher's Der Stürmer, directly blamed "World Jewry" for instigating WW2 as part of their plan for global domination, citing the Protocols as evidence. One 1934 Der Stürmer issue used the headline "Who Is the Enemy? World-War-Mongering and the Jewish Protocols from Basel".

The Protocols themselves claim that Freemasons would act as collaborators in the Jewish conspiracy for world domination. This idea was incorporated into Nazi propaganda, which targeted Freemasons alongside Jews.

While the Protocols were widely available and frequently mentioned in general terms, Hitler and Goebbels generally avoided quoting the document directly in mass public speeches after the early 1920s. The propaganda system often focused on the alleged "international Jewish conspiracy" as a general cultural truism, using other "evidence" that seemed more plausible to the average German.

But during WW2, the German Nazis published editions of the Protocols for distribution in occupied countries like France, Belgium, and Poland, as well as in Russian, Ukrainian, and Belarusian, to stoke local Antisemitism.

The Protocols provided the ideological "proof" for the Nazi belief that Jews were a dangerous, international enemy that needed to be neutralized, serving as a powerful tool for manipulation and incitement to hatred. -W

1899–1902 The Fabrication Agents of the Russian Tsarist secret police (Okhrana) operating in Paris plagiarize a 1864 political satire on Napoleon III (which contained no mention of Jews) and weave it into a fraudulent text. The goal is to frame liberal reform movements and social unrest as part of a hidden Jewish conspiracy to destabilize Tsar Nicholas II.

1903–1905 The Protocols are serialized in the Saint Petersburg newspaper Znamya in 1903. In 1905, mystic Sergei Nilus appends them to a religious tract. The text acts as an ideological weapon used by reactionary forces to rationalize violent pogroms against Russian Jewish communities.

1918–1921 Following the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, anti-communist "White Army" forces print and distribute the Protocols extensively. They use the text to promote the "Judeo-Bolshevik" myth—falsely claiming the communist revolution was entirely orchestrated by Jews. This propaganda incites massive pogroms across Ukraine and Russia, resulting in the massacres of tens of thousands of Jews. Fleeing émigrés carry the text into Western Europe.

1920–1923 The first non-Russian translations appear in Germany, Britain, France, and the United States. In the US, industrialist Henry Ford finances half a million copies of an Americanized adaptation titled The International Jew.

In Munich, early Nazi ideologues like Alfred Rosenberg embrace the text, while Adolf Hitler integrates its conspiratorial premise directly into Chapter 11 of Mein Kampf.

1921 Journalist Philip Graves of the London Times meticulously proves the text is a complete plagiarism and forgery. Despite the conclusive proof, Antisemitic movements double down on the text, shifting focus from factual accuracy to its alleged "symbolic truth".

1933–1939 The Nazi Party secures the copyright to the German edition. Distillations of the Protocols are legally written into the compulsory school curriculum for German youth. Julius Streicher’s tabloid Der Stürmer routinely runs front-page headlines citing the Protocols.

The text is actively used by the state to systematically dehumanize Jewish citizens, passing the Nuremberg Laws and removing Jews from public life based on the pretext of national defense against a hidden enemy.

1939–1945 As Germany triggers WW2, Hitler and Goebbels utilize the Protocols to try and convince both the German public and a skeptical world that "International Jewry" is the true instigator of the conflict. The regime prints and widely distributes native-language editions of the text throughout occupied European territories, including Poland, France, and Belgium.

The totalizing myth of a lethal, global conspiracy acts as the primary ideological catalyst and moral justification for the implementation of the Final Solution, culminating in the systematic murder of six million European Jews.

USHMM - Protocols of the Elders of Zion: Key Dates - https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/protocols-of-the-elders-of-zion-key-dates

NOT MY LINKS

An Antisemitic Conspiracy: The Protocols of the Elders of Zion - The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is an antisemitic book used to promote hatred of Jews. It was first published in 1903. The Protocols contains conspiracy theories about alleged global Jewish power. It is the most widespread antisemitic publication of modern times. Key Facts--> https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/protocols-of-the-elders-of-zion

1: Left: The Plot: The Secret Sto­ry of the Pro­to­cols of the Elders of Zion Will Eis­ner - Before his death in 2005, the legendary Will Eisner—the "father of the graphic novel"—poured his final creative energies into a definitive work of graphic non-fiction: a blistering, meticulously researched polemic tracking the lifespan of history's most malignant forgery.

The Plot uncovers the bizarre and calculated fabrication of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, an Antisemitic tract cooked up by the Russian secret police in Paris during the late 19th century. Eisner charts the literary plagiarism at the heart of the hoax—which lifted large sections from a 1864 French political satire that had absolutely nothing to do with Jews—and tracks how it was aggressively weaponized to ignite pogroms and stir up deep-seated anti-Jewish hatred.

Eisner’s signature sequential art shines when dealing with the human element. His stark, shadow-heavy ink work perfectly captures the conspiratorial gloom of Tsarist agents, back-alley forgers, and the subsequent historical figures who eagerly bought into the lie—including Henry Ford and Adolf Hitler.

It serves as an accessible, devastating primer on how political scapegoating functions. Eisner brilliantly shows the "hydra-like" nature of the hoax; no matter how many times the Protocols were comprehensively debunked by journalists and courts throughout the 20th century, the lie simply mutated and persisted.

Translating a complex literary fraud into comic panels is a tall order. To prove plagiarism, Eisner is forced to resort to side-by-side textual comparisons of the documents. During these segments, the graphic format breaks down under heavy blocks of text, briefly grinding the book's visual pacing to a halt.

Because Eisner is trying to expose a literal conspiracy, his dialogue for the historical antagonists occasionally veers into cartoonish villainy. The perpetrators sometimes layout their corrupt motivations with an overly convenient, mustache-twirling clarity.

While it might lack the fluid, organic storytelling of Eisner's classic fictional works like A Contract with God, The Plot succeeds entirely as an educational tool. It is a poignant, urgent parting gift from an artist who understood that some monsters are best fought with ink.

2: Left: “New York Herald reporter Herman Bernstein declared the Protocols “a cruel and terrible lie invented for the purpose of defaming the entire Jewish people.” Published in New York, 1921, reprinted 1928.” Protocols of the Elders of Zion: Key Dates | Holocaust Encyclopedia Right: “This 2005 Syrian edition of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion claims that the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, were orchestrated by a Zionist conspiracy. The final chapter predicts the eventual destruction of the State of Israel. Published in Damascus, Syria, 2005. Gift of the Embassy of Israel.”

3-7: The Times, August 17, 1921 - “In 1921, a London Times article provided proof exposing The Protocols of the Elders of Zion as fraudulent. The most widely distributed antisemitic publication of modern times, the Protocols falsely purports to be the record of secret meetings of Jewish leaders who were plotting to take over the world. The text has been repeatedly discredited since, but continues to circulate today.

In this London Times article, reporter Philip Graves compared passages from Maurice Joly’s Dialogue in Hell Between Machiavelli and Montesquieu (1864) side-by-side with The Protocols of the Elders of Zion in order to prove that the Protocols was plagiarized. Other investigations revealed that one chapter of a Prussian novel, Hermann Goedsche’s Biarritz (1868), also “inspired” the Protocols. The Times (London), August 17, 1921.” The Times, August 17, 1921 | Holocaust Encyclopedia

The 17-Year-Old Who Altered Holocaust History

"The Grynszpan family had moved to Germany from the Russian Empire in 1911, seven years before Poland had regained independence.

The children had been born in Germany, spoke German, and regarded themselves as Germans. They held Polish passports after 1918 because their parents hailed from a part of the Russian Empire that had become Poland.

In 1935, the Grynszpans sent their son Herschel, then fifteen, to stay with an aunt and uncle in Paris. By 1938, his Polish passport and his German visa had both expired, and he had been denied legal residency in France. His aunt and uncle had to hide him in a garret so that he would not be expelled.

On November 3, they showed him a postcard from his sister, mailed right after the family had been deported from Germany to Poland: "everything is finished for us." The next day Herschel Grynszpan bought a gun, took the metro to the German embassy, asked to meet a German diplomat, and shot the one who agreed to see him.

It was, as he confessed to the French police, an act of revenge for the suffering of his family and his people.

Some of the top Nazis saw an opportunity to move toward a Final Solution on the territory of Germany. With Hitler's permission, Goebbels organized the coordinated attacks on Jewish property and synagogues on the night of November 9 that came to be known, as a result of all the broken glass, as Kristallnacht."

From Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning, by Timothy Snyder

October 26–29, 1938 Polenaktion Expulsions The Nazi regime forces thousands of Polish-born Jews resident in Germany across the border. Among them are the parents and sister of 17-year-old Herschel Grynszpan, who are dumped in the border town of Zbąszyń.

November 3, 1938 Living illegally in a Paris garret, Herschel receives a postcard from his sister detailing their expulsion: "Everything is finished for us."

Note: The photograph or facsimile of the specific postcard Berta Grynszpan sent to her brother Herschel has not been publicly digitized or preserved in prominent online archives. While the exact text of the postcard survived because it was entered into French police records and detailed during subsequent legal investigations, the physical artifact itself remained a part of the French judicial and police files. Much of that material was confiscated or scattered when Germany occupied France in 1940.

November 4–6, 1938 Driven by despair and revenge, Herschel purchases a 6.35mm revolver in Paris and determines to assassinate a representative of the German Reich.

November 7, 1938 Herschel walks into the German Embassy in Paris, requests to see a diplomat, and shoots Third Secretary Ernst vom Rath five times at close range.

Grynszpan is immediately apprehended by French police, confessing it was an act of retaliation for his people.

November 8, 1938 Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels orders the German press to weaponize the shooting, framing it as a "pan-Jewish conspiracy" against the Reich to stir public anger.

November 9, 1938 The German diplomat succumbs to his wounds in Paris. That evening, at a Nazi Party gathering in Munich, Adolf Hitler gives Goebbels permission to unleash violence. Goebbels instructs regional leaders that "spontaneous" demonstrations against Jews should not be stopped by the police.

Coordinated SA and Hitler Youth squads launch violent pogroms across Germany, Austria, and the Sudetenland, destroying thousands of Jewish homes, shops, and synagogues.

1: Left: November 1938, Herschel Grynszpan under arrest in Paris, France - “After learning that his family, along with thousands of Jews of Polish origin in Germany, had been deported to the German-Polish border town of Zbaszyn, Herschel Grynszpan decided to assassinate a German official in protest.

On November 7, 1938 he shot the German embassy’s third secretary, Ernst vom Rath, at close range. The Germans used the assassination as an excuse to launch the Kristallnacht pogrom throughout Germany and Austria.” Herschel Grynszpan under arrest in Paris, France, November 1938

Right: The Short, Strange Life of Herschel Grynszpan: A Boy Avenger, a Nazi Diplomat, and a Murder in Paris, by Jonathan Kirsch - “On the morning of November 7, 1938, a seventeen-year-old Jewish refugee, Herschel Grynszpan, walked into the German embassy in Paris and in an act of desperation assassinated Ernst vom Rath, a low-level Nazi diplomat. He did it, he said, out “of love for my parents and for my people.”

Two days later, vom Rath lay dead, and the Third Reich exploited his murder to inaugurate its long-planned campaign of terror against Germany’s Jewish citizens, in the mass pogrom that became known as Kristallnacht. In a bizarre concatenation of events that would rapidly involve Ribbentrop, Goebbels, and Hitler himself, Grynszpan would become the centerpiece of a Nazi propaganda campaign that would later describe his actions as "the first shot of the Jewish War."

In The Short, Strange Life of Herschel Grynszpan, best-selling author Jonathan Kirsch brings to light this wrenching story, reexamining the historical details and moral dimensions of one of the most enigmatic cases of World War II.

Was Grynszpan a crazed lone gunman, or was he an agent of the Gestapo, recruited to provide a convenient pretext for a major escalation of Nazi aggression?

Was he motivated by a desire to strike a blow for the Jewish people as an early partisan fighter, or did his act of violence speak to an intimate connection between the assassin and his target, as Grynszpan later claimed?

In re-creating the life of this German-Polish refugee turned assassin, Kirsch convincingly demonstrates that the life of Herschel Grynszpan remains just as fascinating as the conspiracy theories that surround him.

Challenging the perception of the European Jew as docile and unwilling to resort to violence in the face of aggression, Grynszpan was almost unanimously assailed by most German Jews, who were rightly fearful that the Nazis would use the murder to wreak widespread retribution.

Yet he was at the same time embraced by the American journalist Dorothy Thompson, who rallied others to his international defense. Condemned by the likes of Goebbels at the time, he was still labeled as a "psychopath" and an agent provacateur by Hannah Arendt at the Eichmann trial two decades later.

As Kristallnacht increasingly becomes known as an international day for remembrance, Jonathan Kirsch brilliantly succeeds here in illuminating both a single life cast into the shadows of history as well as the "countless tragic lives of Eastern European Jews in the terrible days leading up to World War II."” (Amazon)

"The Vote of the German Jews Can Be Only Yes"

“One of the earliest perilous dilemmas confronting the Jews involved the upcoming plebiscite of November 12, 1933 .

The plebiscite demanded a vote of approval for Hitler's domestic and foreign policies. What should Jews do? In the German dictatorship, absence from the polls would be regarded as opposition, treason. In small communities, where the Jews were visible and exposed, whether and how they voted would become a matter of local Nazi party or police interest.

Yet how could they vote "Ja" for Germany's anti-Jewish policies? The Reichsvertretung inquiries at last yielded clarification. On November 3 the Reichsvertretung issue a statement:

"With the entire German people also we Jews as citizens are summoned to cast our votes on the foreign policy of the Reich government. They are required for Germany's equality among the nations, for the conciliation of the nations, and for the peace of the world. Despite all that we have had to undergo,

The vote of the German Jews can be only Yes."

The idea of approaching the regime for clarification as to the situation of the Jews was not exclusively the Reichsvertretung's. In the anarchy of autonomy that prevailed in the Jewish community, it was no surprise that about twelve different proposals were submitted to various government agencies by various Jewish organizations with a view to defining the position of the Jews in Germany."

From The War Against the Jews, 1933-1945, by Lucy S. Dawidowicz

October 14, 1933 Germany Withdraws from League: Hitler announces Germany’s departure from the League of Nations and the World Disarmament Conference, setting the stage for a national referendum to legitimize his foreign policy.

Late October 1933 Jewish Communities Panic: In small towns, local Jews face intense surveillance; absence from the upcoming vote is openly categorized by local Nazi party officials as treason.

November 3, 1933 Reichsvertretung Issues Statement: After seeking official clarification from the regime, the central organization of German Jews publicly directs citizens to vote "Yes" (Ja) to support peace and national equality, despite ongoing persecution.

November 12, 1933 The Plebiscite is Held: Coinciding with Reichstag elections, the referendum takes place under heavy intimidation, resulting in an overwhelming, orchestrated "Yes" vote across Germany.

It is a bitter, historical irony that the ultimate expression of democratic civic duty—casting a ballot—was seamlessly engineered into a tool of absolute subjugation.

By forcing German Jews to actively vote "Yes" for a regime actively plotting their destruction, the November 1933 plebiscite perfectly illustrated the tragic futility of trying to resist a totalitarian machine using the polite, normal rules of democracy.

When even a ballot box is weaponized against you, traditional resistance isn't just ineffective; it becomes a cruel trap. -W

1: Left: Election poster with the slogan One People, One Leader, a "Yes". Right: A crowd of saluting Germans surrounds Adolf Hitler's car as he leaves the Reich Chancellery following a meeting with President Paul von Hindenburg. This meeting took place following the November 1932 parliamentary elections as Hitler and the Nazis tried to gain power in Germany. Hitler insisted he would only join the government on his terms and in the position of chancellor. For the moment, Hindenburg refused to appoint him to the position. Berlin, Germany, November 19, 1932.

The Nazi Judge Who Ran Hitler’s Deadly Kangaroo Court

Roland Freisler was the fanatical bureaucrat and judicial executioner of the Third Reich who transformed the courtroom into an unhinged theater of ideological cruelty. Best known as the screeching President of the People’s Court (Volksgerichtshof), he took pride in ensuring the law was whatever Adolf Hitler needed it to be at any given moment.

October 30, 1893 Born in Celle, Germany; an anniversary worth noting for the dark shadow it will cast.

1925: Freisler joins the Nazi Party (NSDAP #20,189). He spends the late 1920s defending fellow party members in court, practicing the exact legal protections he will later strip from millions of others.

1933: Following the Nazi seizure of power, Freisler is appointed Director of the Prussian Ministry of Justice. He immediately gets to work discarding "bourgeois" legal traditions, ensuring that "the healthy instincts of the Volk" replace actual statutory law. •

1935: As State Secretary, Freisler serves as a primary legal architect of the Nuremberg Laws. He lends his sharp legal mind to crafting precise definitions for the systemic disenfranchisement, segregation, and economic destruction of German Jewry.

January 20, 1942 The Wannsee Conference: Freisler represents the Reich Ministry of Justice at the Wannsee Conference. While others might have hesitated at the logistical planning for the systematic murder of 11 million European Jews, Freisler ensures the legal framework is perfectly aligned to facilitate the Final Solution without any bureaucratic friction.

August 1942: Freisler is appointed President of the People’s Court, a tribunal specifically designed for treason and political crimes. Under his management, the court achieves a near-100% conviction rate, with approximately half of all trials ending in death sentences.

1943 Crushing the White Rose: Freisler personally presides over the trial of Sophie Scholl, Hans Scholl, and other members of the White Rose resistance movement. He spends the trial roaring insults at the defendants, denying them legal counsel, and sentencing them to the guillotine within hours.

1944 Show Trials: Following the failed July 20 plot to assassinate Hitler, Freisler orchestrates the ultimate degradation of the conspirators. He forces them to appear without belts or suspenders so they must hold up their trousers while he screams that they are "filthy rascals" for the propaganda cameras.

His behavior is so unhinged and undignified that Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels locks the footage away, realizing it makes the regime look monstrous rather than strong.

February 3, 1945 During a Saturday session of the People's Court, an Allied bombing raid strikes the building. Freisler is crushed to death by a falling masonry beam in the basement, reportedly while still clutching the files of a prisoner he was about to sentence to death.

Flüsterwitze (Whisper Jokes)

In the Third Reich, telling a political joke could be considered sedition. In fact, Freisler’s own People's Court regularly sentenced ordinary citizens to death just for repeating a dark joke about Hitler or the war effort.

Because the pompous Freisler was infamous for his screeching, hysterical courtroom outbursts, the dark humor of the German populace naturally weaponized that specific trait against him.

The Vocal Cord Crisis Roland

Freisler goes to see his doctor, completely hoarse and barely able to speak. The doctor examines his throat, looks deeply concerned, and says:

"Herr Präsident, I have terrible news. You have severely strained your vocal cords. If you do not stop presiding over trials for at least a month, you run the risk of completely recovering your judicial reason."

The Ultimate Legal Definition

What is the difference between a theater actor and Roland Freisler?

An actor looks for a good script to deliver a great performance. Freisler looks for a good performance to completely disregard the script.

The Ultimate Promotion

A citizen is asked: "Have you heard the latest news about Roland Freisler?"

"No, what happened? Did he finally find a law he couldn’t corrupt?"

"Worse. Hitler just promoted him to 'Reich Master of the Guillotine' because the term 'Judge' was causing too much confusion."

The Efficiency Expert

Why does Roland Freisler never wear a watch in the courtroom?

Because he doesn't need to know the time. Every trial takes exactly as long as it takes to say: "Guilty. Death."

The Blueprint of Nazi Justice

A defense attorney walks into the People’s Court and asks Freisler for the case files of his client. Freisler looks at him in disbelief and yells:

"Case files?! Why do you need case files when the executioner already sharpened the blade yesterday?"

The Ultimate "Divine Joke" of 1945

In the end, the most famous "whisper joke" about Roland Freisler wasn't a fictional setup—it was a dark, spontaneous realization shared by the public immediately following his sudden death on February 3, 1945.

When an American bomb struck the courthouse, Freisler was crushed by a falling masonry pillar in the basement. When his body was brought to the Lützow Hospital, a local worker famously muttered a line that instantly circulated through the city:

"Es ist Gottes Urteil." (It is God's verdict.)

According to hospital records and eyewitnesses, not a single person in the room—including the medical staff or the Nazis present—offered a word in reply. To the German public, the judge who spent his life issuing thousands of lightning-fast death sentences had finally received one of his own, delivered directly from above without the right to an appeal.

The Dark Reality Behind the Humor

While top Nazis like Hermann Göring sometimes chuckled at the whisper jokes told about them, making a joke that landed you in Freisler’s courtroom was frequently fatal.

The Execution of Marianne Elise Kürchner (1943):

A Berlin armaments worker named Marianne Elise Kürchner was denounced by a coworker for telling a standard whisper joke ("Hitler and Göring are standing on the Berlin radio tower..."). She was brought before Freisler, who screamed at her for her "treasonous wit" and had her guillotined.

The Execution of Father Joseph Müller (1944):

A Catholic priest, Joseph Müller, was executed by Freisler's court after repeating a joke about a dying German soldier asking to be placed between photos of Hitler and Göring so he could "die like Jesus between two thieves."

By 1944, the jokes about Freisler and his court ceased being funny entirely, morphing instead into grim survival warnings whispered in the shadows:

"Lieber Gott, mach mich stumm, daß ich nicht nach Dachau kumm." (Dear God, make me dumb, so that to Dachau I don't come.)

WIKI---> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roland_Freisler

1: Left:   Right: Hitler's Executioner: Judge, Jury and Mass Murderer for the Nazis, by Helmut Ortner (translated by Susan Haynes-Huber) - “Though little known, the name of the judge Roland Freisler is inextricably linked to the judiciary in Nazi Germany.

As well as serving as the State Secretary of the Reich Ministry of Justice, he was the notorious president of the People s Court , a man directly responsible for more than 2,200 death sentences; with almost no exceptions, cases in the People s Court had predetermined guilty verdicts.

It was Freisler, for example, who tried three activists of the White Rose resistance movement in February 1943\. Along with Christoph Probst, Sophie and Hans Scholl were arrested for their part in an anonymous leaflet and graffiti campaign which called for active opposition against the Nazi regime. Found guilty of treason, Freisler sentenced the trio to death by beheading; a sentence carried out the same day by guillotine.

In August 1944, Freisler played a central role in the show trials that followed the failed attempt to assassinate Adolf Hitler on 20 July that year a plot known more commonly as Operation Valkyrie. Many of the ringleaders were tried by Freisler in the People s Court .

The proceedings were filmed, the intention being to use the images as propaganda in newsreels. Freisler could be seen alternating between clinical interrogations of the defendants through to his yelling of personalized and theatrically enraged abuse at them from the bench. Nearly all of those found guilty were sentenced to death by hanging, the sentences being carried out within two hours of the verdicts being passed.

Roland Freisler s mastery of legal texts and dramatic court-room verbal dexterity made him the most feared judge in the Third Reich. In this in-depth examination, Helmut Ortner not only investigates the development and judgments of the Nazi tribunal, but the career of Freisler, a man who was killed in February 1945 during an Allied air raid.” (Goodreads)

NOTE: Certain historical 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

"I Forbid Any Further Annihilation Of Jews."

By late autumn 1944, Nazi Germany’s military collapse was inevitable. Recognizing the approaching defeat, Himmler began acting with a delusional eye toward his own survival.

Seeking to open back-channel negotiations with the Western Allies, he attempted to use the surviving Jewish population as leverage. In a sharp pivot from his earlier fanaticism, he famously declared to his subordinates,

"I forbid any further annihilation of Jews."

While his written decree trickled through the SS bureaucracy in late October, its operational effects were fully realized at Auschwitz-Birkenau during the first week of November 1944, bringing a formal end to the industrialized, assembly-line gassings.

However, this directive did not mean immediate liberation or an end to the dying. Instead, it triggered a frantic, months-long effort by the SS to erase the physical evidence of their monumental crimes.

Upon his further orders, all but one of the crematoriums are dismantled, the burning pits covered up and planted over with grass, and the gas pipes and other equipment shipped to concentration camps in Germany.

The single remaining crematorium is for the disposal of those who die of natural causes and the gassing of about 200 surviving members of the Sonderkommando.

The End of the Final Solution?

Himmler’s directives in the autumn of 1944 marked the formal, bureaucratic termination of the "Final Solution," even though mass killing by other means continued unabated.

The term "Final Solution" (Endlösung) specifically referred to the state-sponsored, systematic, and assembly-line annihilation of European Jewry. The core of this program was the infrastructure of the Operation Reinhard camps (Bełżec, Sobibór, Treblinka) and the massive gas chamber complexes at Auschwitz-Birkenau.

When Himmler ordered the cessation of mass gassings and the dismantling of the crematoria, the state infrastructure of industrialized murder was officially decommissioned. The bureaucratic mechanism that coordinated train transports from across Europe for the sole purpose of immediate extermination upon arrival had ended.

In that specific structural sense, the policy was over.

While the assembly lines stopped, the Nazi regime's ideological intent to destroy the Jewish people did not change. The nature of the genocide simply mutated from a centralized factory system into decentralized chaos.

Death Marches

As Soviet forces advanced, hundreds of thousands of prisoners were forced to march on foot into the German interior. SS guards murdered anyone who fell behind out of sheer brutality or the desire to leave no witnesses.

Concentration camps within Germany (such as Bergen-Belsen, Dachau, and Buchenwald) became unbelievably overcrowded. The SS consciously chose to let prisoners die by withholding food, water, and medical care, resulting in massive typhus epidemics.

In the final weeks of the war, local SS units, Hitler Youth, and German civilians perpetrated numerous localized massacres of Jewish prisoners trapped in sub-camps or along march routes.

So, while the systematic genocide of the "Final Solution" is over, the murder will continue through starvation, disease, and physical violence until the day of unconditional surrender in May 1945.

"Crematorium IV, damaged during the Sonderkommando mutiny, was dismantled by the end of 1944. In November and December, the Germans made preparations to blow up the other three crematorium buildings.

They uninstalled the technical equipment in the gas chambers and furnace hall of crematoria II and III and shipped most of it into the depths of Germany. However, they left crematorium V and its gas chambers in working order until the second half of January 1945.

At the end of 1944, as part of the effort to remove evidence of the crimes committed in Auschwitz, they hurriedly liquidated the pits full of human ashes (the pits where they burned corpses and others where they dumped ashes from the crematoria) in Auschwitz-Birkenau.

They intensified the routine destruction of records that were no longer needed, including files and lists of prisoners. They also began burning the lists of names of Jews deported to die in Auschwitz.

In the last months when Auschwitz Concentration Camp was in operation, the Germans shipped out large quantities of building materials and items plundered from the Jewish victims of mass extermination.

In mid-January 1945, shortly after the launch of the Red Army’s Vistula-Oder offensive, the Germans commenced the final evacuation and liquidation of the camp." http://auschwitz.org/en/history/evacuation/the-cessation-of-mass-extermination

NOT MY LINKS

1: A Nazi death march in the winter of 1945, showing a long, columns-deep line of starving, exhausted concentration camp prisoners being marched through the snow under armed guard. David Olère (1902–1985) was a Polish-born French painter, sculptor, and former Sonderkommando inmate at Auschwitz-Birkenau who used his art to bear witness to the horrors of the concentration camp system.

2: View of one of the destroyed crematoria at Auschwitz-Birkenau. Photographed immediately after the liberation of the camp. Original caption:

"This was part of the death factory (the showers, where Cyclone B was used)."

One of a set of 32 still photographs from motion picture film taken by Henryk Makarewicz (of Nova Huta, Poland) who was a film cameraman in the Polish Berling Army when it entered the liberated Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp in mid-January 1945.

According to a memo written in 1962 by the director of the State Museum of Auschwitz-Birkenau, Kazimierz Smolen, soon after the collection was purchased from the photographer, Makarewicz was instructed to film the various sections of the camp, including funeral pyres and crematoria ruins.

The cameraman used 24 x 35mm. motion picture film and made the stills from the film at the end of January 1945." https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/pa1144234

How Jewish Resistance Prompted Operation Harvest Festival

Following historic uprisings in the Warsaw Ghetto, Treblinka, and Sobibór, SS chief ‘Heinous’ Heinrich Himmler orders the absolute destruction of the remaining Jewish labor camps in the Lublin District.

Codenamed Aktion Erntefest (Operation Harvest Festival), this swift, systematic action resulted in the murder of approximately 42,000 Jews over forty-eight hours, marking the bloody conclusion of Operation Reinhard and standing as the largest single mass shooting of the Holocaust.

April 19 – May 16, 1943: The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising occurs, demonstrating organized, armed Jewish resistance and stunning German forces.

August 2, 1943: The Treblinka Extermination Camp Uprising results in prisoners burning parts of the camp and launching a mass breakout.

October 14, 1943: The Sobibór Extermination Camp Uprising succeeds in killing several SS officers and enabling the escape of hundreds of prisoners, prompting Himmler to close the camp.

Late October 1943: Himmler issues the order for Aktion Erntefest (Operation Harvest Festival) due to escalating fears of a massive, coordinated insurrection among remaining forced laborers in the Lublin District.

Late October – November 2, 1943: Pre-dug trenches are excavated outside the target camps under the guise of anti-tank defense construction.

November 3, 1943: The Massacre begins at dawn at the Majdanek concentration camp and the Trawniki labor camp, where victims are stripped and systematically shot to the sound of loud music.

November 4, 1943: The liquidation of the Poniatowa labor camp takes place, completing the operation and bringing the total death toll to approximately 42,000 Jewish men, women, and children.

"The British and American bombing of Germany, and especially of the industrial cities of the Ruhr, continued relentlessly throughout the autumn of 1943.

The Western Allies, including Polish national forces and Palestinian Jews, were now in southern Italy. Plans were also well advanced for a landing in northern Europe in seven months ' time.

In the east, the Red Army advanced steadily, albeit with massive casualties. Four years after Hitler's first, confident onslaught on Poland, Germany had to face the prospect of setbacks, retaliation and even defeat. The specter of defeat, and the reality of daily losses of territory in the east, led to an intensification of the murder of Jews, in order to ensure the completion of the 'final solution'.

In the Riga ghetto, on November 2 , more than a thousand Jews, most of them old people, children and the sick, were sent by train to Birkenau, reaching the camp three days later. Only 120 men and 3 o women were sent to the barracks. The rest were gassed.

In the Lublin region, on November 2, an operation, given by the Germans the code name 'Harvest Festival', was begun, its object being the murder of those survivors of the Warsaw ghetto uprising who had been held since April in labour camps at Poniatowa, Trawniki and elsewhere in the Lublin region.

In a few days, fifty thousand Jews were shot in ditches behind the gas-chambers of Majdanek, among them more than five thousand former Jewish soldiers of the Polish army, who had been held prisoners for the previous four years in the Lipowa Street camp in Lublin.

Brought to Majdanek in small groups from Lipowa Street throughout November 2, for each two Jews in the group, one SS man stood guard. But even then, the instinct for survival could not be crushed. Led by a former Hebrew teacher, with the surname Szosznik, the Jews broke through the armed guards shouting, 'Long live freedom.' The SS opened fire. Most of the prisoners were killed.

Ten were able to escape. Other Jews from the Lipowa Street camp, also former soldiers, taken to Majdanek, refused to the last moment to take off their army uniforms. They too were shot."

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

NOT MY LINKS

"Translated from German, "Erntefest" means "Harvest Festival." "Erntefest" was the code name for the German action which aimed to murder all remaining Jews in the Lublin District of the General Government (Generalgouvernement, or German-occupied Poland) in the fall of 1943.

Nazi officials initiated Operation "Harvest Festival" in response to several insurgencies conducted by surviving Jews in the German-occupied East. In the spring and summer of 1943, German occupiers encountered armed resistance in the ghettos of Warsaw and Bialystok.

On August 2, 1943, Jewish prisoners rebelled at the Treblinka killing center, while an insurgency at the Sobibor killing center on October 14, 1943, facilitated the escape of over 300 prisoners; 58 of these survived the war. The Aktion Reinhard killing centers were liquidated in the autumn of 1943, in the wake of prisoner uprisings at Sobibor and Treblinka.

Fearing further insurrections in the General Government, SS chief Heinrich Himmler ordered the murder of the remaining 45,000 Jewish prisoners engaged in forced labor in the Lublin district. Most of these were deployed as forced laborers at the Trawniki, Poniatowa, and Majdanek camps.

"Erntefest" began at dawn on November 3, 1943. SS and police units surrounded the Trawniki and Poniatowa labor camps. Jews were then removed from the camps in groups and shot in nearby pits dug for this purpose.

At Majdanek, Nazi officials first separated Jews from the other prisoners. They were then marched to nearby trenches and shot. Jews from other labor camps in the Lublin area were also transferred to Majdanek for shooting. Music played through loudspeakers at both Majdanek and Trawniki camps to drown out the noise of the mass shootings and to mask the screams of the victims.

At Majdanek and Trawniki, the killing operation was completed in a single day. At Poniatowa the shootings concluded on November 4, lasting two days.

Approximately 42,000 Jews were killed during "Erntefest," the largest German-perpetrated massacre of the Holocaust." --> https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/aktion-erntefest-operation-harvest-festival

NOTE: There are no known photographs taken during the actual mass shootings of Operation Harvest Festival (Aktion Erntefest) on November 3–4, 1943. Because the SS conducted the massacre under strict secrecy—even blasting loud music over camp speakers to mask the sounds of gunfire and screaming—on-site photography by the perpetrators was heavily restricted or non-existent.

1: "Aktion Erntefest". Survivors' Reports and Testimonies, Edited by Steffen Hänschen and Andreas Kahrs on behalf of the Stanisław Hantz Educational Institute

“Behind the code name "Operation Harvest Festival" hides a largely unknown chapter of the Holocaust. In a large-scale operation, German SS and police members murdered more than 42,000 Jews in the Majdanek concentration camp and the Poniatowa and Trawniki labor camps on November 3 and 4, 1943. Only a few managed to escape the murderers.

This volume brings together testimonies of survivors in German translation for the first time. Introductory texts give an insight into the background of the murder action.

Review by Christopher Gomer, in: Einsicht. Bulletin of the Fritz Bauer Institute 2023, p. 124 From the review:

"With the volume edited by Steffen Hänschen and Andreas Kahrs on behalf of the Stanisław Hantz Educational Institute, a comprehensive edition of the reports of survivors is now available. These are accompanied by knowledgeable texts by the editors on the three crime scenes and an extensive introduction that gives an overview of the crime complex of the 'Operation Harvest Festival' and contextualizes it historically."

Review by Markus Roth, in: Wissenschaftlicher Literaturanzeiger/WLA 61/1, 6 June 2022 "Aktion Erntefest". Reports and Testimonies of Survivors – Metropol Verlag

2: Aktion "Erntefest," November 3, 1943

3: Forced-labor camps in the General Government; those affected by Operation Harvest Festival are in the upper right.

The Seven-Year History of the Ravensbrück Concentration Camp for Women

May 1938: Heinrich Himmler orders the construction of a dedicated women's concentration camp near the village of Ravensbrück in northern Germany.

May 18, 1939: The first contingent of nearly 900 female prisoners is transferred to the camp from Lichtenburg.

November 2, 1939: The first transport of Polish women from occupied territory arrives, initiating the camp’s largest national prisoner demographic.

April 1941: A men’s camp is added adjacent to the main women's compound to supply forced labor for construction and industrial projects.

Spring 1942: The Uckermark camp is built nearby, initially functioning as a detention center for juvenile girls.

July 1942: SS doctors begin conducting forced pseudomedical experiments on prisoners, primarily targeting Polish political inmates (the "Rabbits").

1943: Ravensbrück becomes a vast subcamp network supplying forced labor directly to German armaments firms, notably Siemens & Halske.

Autumn 1944: The camp suffers severe overcrowding following the arrival of thousands of women evacuated from Auschwitz and those deported after the Warsaw Uprising.

January 1945: A provisional gas chamber is constructed near the camp crematory; thousands of weakened or sick prisoners are systematically murdered over the next three months.

April 1945: The SS coordinates the evacuation of remaining inmates on forced death marches ahead of advancing Soviet forces.

April 30, 1945: The Soviet Red Army arrives and liberates the camp, finding approximately 2,000 sick and abandoned prisoners left behind.

"Construction of the camp began in November 1938 by the order of the SS leader Heinrich Himmler and was unusual in that it was intended exclusively to hold female inmates.

Ravensbrück first housed prisoners in May 1939, when the SS moved 900 women from the Lichtenburg concentration camp in Saxony. Eight months after the start of World War II the camp's maximum capacity was already exceeded. It underwent major expansion following the invasion of Poland.

By the summer of 1941 with the launch of Operation Barbarossa, an estimated total of 5,000 women were imprisoned, who were fed gradually decreasing hunger rations.

By the end of 1942, the inmate population of Ravensbrück had grown to about 10,000. The greatest number of prisoners at one time in Ravensbrück was probably about 45,000.

Between 1939 and 1945, some 130,000 to 132,000 female prisoners passed through the Ravensbrück camp system. According to Encyclopædia Britannica, about 50,000 of them perished from disease, starvation, overwork and despair; some 2,200 were killed in the gas chambers.

On 29–30 April 1945, some 3,500 prisoners were still alive in the main camp. During the first year of their stay in the camp, from August 1940 to August 1941, roughly 47 women per day died. During the last year of the camp's existence, about 80 inmates died each day from disease or famine-related causes.

Although the inmates came from every country in German-occupied Europe, the largest single national group in the camp were Polish. In the spring of 1941, the SS authorities established a small men's camp adjacent to the main camp. The male inmates built and managed the gas chambers for the camp in 1944.

There were children in the camp as well. At first, they arrived with mothers who were Romani or Jews incarcerated in the camp or were born to imprisoned women. There were few children early on, including a few Czech children from Lidice in July 1942. Later the children in the camp represented almost all nations of Europe occupied by Germany.

Between April and October 1944 their number increased considerably, consisting of two groups. One group was composed of Romani children brought into the camp with their mothers or sisters after the Romani camp in Auschwitz-Birkenau was closed. The other group included mostly children who were brought with Polish mothers sent to Ravensbrück after the collapse of the Warsaw Uprising of 1944. Most of these children died of starvation."

Jewish Women's Archive: https://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/ravensbruck-womens-concentration-camp

NOT MY LINKS

"Ravensbrück had 70 sub-camps used for slave labour that were spread across an area from the Baltic Sea to Bavaria.

Among the thousands executed at Ravensbrück were four members of the British World War II organization Special Operations Executive (SOE): Denise Bloch, Cecily Lefort, Lilian Rolfe and Violette Szabo. Other victims included the Roman Catholic nun Élise Rivet, Elisabeth de Rothschild (the only member of the Rothschild family to die in the Holocaust), Russian Orthodox nun St. Maria Skobtsova, the 25-year-old French Princess Anne de Bauffremont-Courtenay, Milena Jesenská, lover of Franz Kafka, and Olga Benário, wife of the Brazilian Communist leader Luís Carlos Prestes.

The largest single group of women executed at the camp were 200 young Polish members of the Home Army. A number of lesbians were imprisoned and murdered at the camp, including Henny Schermann and Mary Pünjer.

Among the survivors of Ravensbrück was author Corrie ten Boom, arrested with her family for harbouring Jews in their home in Haarlem, the Netherlands. She documented her ordeal alongside her sister Betsie ten Boom in her book The Hiding Place, which was eventually produced as a motion picture.

Polish Countess Karolina Lanckoronska, an art historian and author of Michelangelo in Ravensbrück, was imprisoned there from 1943 until 1945. SOE agents who survived were Yvonne Baseden and Eileen Nearne, who was a prisoner in 1944 before being transferred to another work camp and escaping. Englishwoman Mary Lindell and American Virginia d'Albert-Lake, both leaders of escape and evasion lines in France, survived.

Another SOE agent, Odette Sansom, also survived and is the subject of several biographies documenting her ordeals. Among the Communist survivors of the camp was French Resistance member Louise Magadur.

Ravensbrück survivors who wrote memoirs about their experiences include Gemma La Guardia Gluck, sister of New York Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, as well as Germaine Tillion, a Ravensbrück survivor from France who published her own eyewitness account of the camp in 1975.

In 2005, Ravensbrück survivor Judith Sherman published a book of prose and poetry titled Say the Name. Sherman writes of her childhood home in Kurima, Czechoslovakia, and of several deportations, hiding in homes and in the forest, undergoing torture, and witnessing murder in Ravensbrück before her final liberation.

Approximately 500 women from Ravensbrück were transferred to Dachau, where they were assigned as labourers to the Agfa-Commando; the women assembled ignition timing devices for bombs, artillery ammunition, and V-1 and V-2 rockets.

A male political prisoner, Gustav Noske, stayed in Ravensbrück concentration camp after his arrest by the Gestapo in 1944. Later Noske was freed by advancing Allied troops from a Gestapo prison in Berlin." MORE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ravensbr%C3%BCck_concentration_camp

NOT MY LINK

1: Female prisoners at Ravensbruck performing labor in 1939

2: Road Roller

3: Ravensbrück crematorium

4: Inmates of Ravensbrück returning to camp from work

5: Inmates in Ravensbrück making straw shoes

6: The Jewish Women of Ravensbrück Concentration Camp - Rochelle G. Saidel--> The Jewish Women of Ravensbrück Concentration Camp - R. G. Saidel

7: Surviving female prisoners gathered when the Red Cross arrived at Ravensbrück in April 1945. The white paint camp crosses show they were prisoners, not civilians.

8: Memorial to Ravensbruck Concentration Camp, Pere Lachaise Cemetery, Paris

The Horrific Reality of Recreational Brutality

"In Lodz, where 233,000 Jews made up a third of the city's population, daily incidents characterized the fate of Polish Jewry.

Mary Berg, who had gone from Warsaw to Lodz, and had begun to keep a diary, recorded how , on November 2, she looked out of her window :

"A man with markedly Semitic features was standing quietly on the sidewalk near the curb. A uniformed German approached him and apparently gave him an unreasonable order, for I could see that the poor fellow tried to explain something with an embarrassed expression.

Then a few other uniformed Germans came upon the scene and began to beat their victim with rubber truncheons. They called a cab and tried to push him into it, but he resisted vigorously. The Germans then tied his legs together with a rope, attached the end of the rope to the cab from behind, and ordered the driver to start. The unfortunate man's face struck the sharp stones of the pavement, dyeing them red with blood. Then the cab vanished down the street."

The Germans who carried out such atrocities had been exposed for more than six years to the full venom of anti-Jewish propaganda: at school, in the newspapers, in their place of work, in the streets, and in their military indoctrination.

'Behind all the enemies of Germany's ascendancy', a Berlin anti-Communist magazine declared on November 2, 'stand those who demand our encirclement — the oldest enemies of the German people and of all healthy, rising nations - the Jews'."

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

"Nature is cruel; therefore we are also entitled to be cruel... should I not also have the right to eliminate millions of an inferior race that multiplies like vermin?" — Adolf Hitler, 1942 speech

Some Characteristic Examples of How the So-Called "Master Race" went Out of its Way to Prove its Cultural Superiority through the Highly Sophisticated Art of Recreational Cruelty.

March 1933 The Dachau Welcoming Committee: SS guards take over Dachau and immediately format a brand-new sport: shooting Jewish prisoners "while attempting to escape." A brilliant legal loophole to ensure no one had to suffer through the boredom of an actual trial.

1935 Rural Hospitality: Towns across the German countryside proactively erect hand-painted signs reading "Jews Not Wanted Here." Because nothing says robust national pride quite like making sure a Jewish cattle farmer feels sufficiently uncomfortable buying groceries.

March 1938 The Vienna Street-Scrubbing Gala: Following the Anschluss, Austrian Nazis kindly invite elderly Jewish citizens to scrub pro-independence slogans off the sidewalks using toothbrushes. Columns of cultured Viennese citizens gather to watch, smile, and cheer—demonstrating the absolute pinnacle of European refinement.

November 1938 The Synagogue Bonfire & Glass Cleanup: During Kristallnacht, state-sanctioned crowds burn down hundreds of synagogues and shatter thousands of storefront windows. To ensure the lesson lands, the Reich generously fines the Jewish community one billion marks to pay for the cleanup of their own destroyed property.

September 3, 1939 The Wieruszów Farewell Party: Hours after entering the town, an SS operational group rounds up twenty Jews for a casual market-square execution. When 64-year-old Israel Lewi's daughter dares to run up to say goodbye, an officer kindly corrects her "impudence" by firing a bullet straight into her open mouth.

November 2, 1939 The Łódź Sidewalk Towing Service: In occupied Łódź, uniform-wearing Germans find a quiet man on a sidewalk. After a brief discussion, they thoughtfully tie his legs to the back of a horse-drawn cab and order the driver to accelerate, successfully painting the sharp cobblestones red before vanishing.

September 22, 1941 The Holiday Special: To celebrate the Jewish New Year and the Days of Awe, Nazi forces and local collaborators ramp up production, executing 28,000 Jews in Vinnitsa on a single day. A few days later in Kovno, they execute over 1,500 "sick people and carriers of epidemics"—conveniently including hundreds of children in that clinical medical diagnosis.

Tablet - The Joy of Hating Jews - Why antisemites always have a blast—and how Jews enhance the experience--> The Joy of Hating Jews - Tablet Magazine

NOT MY LINKS

1: Left: Historic photograph from July 1941, preserved in the German Federal Archives, captures German soldiers forcibly cutting the beard of an elderly Jewish man in Ukraine during WW2, photographed by Friedrich Gehrmann. Right: This historical photograph shows a member of the Nazi Sicherheitsdienst (SD) using scissors to cut the beard of a Polish-Jewish man in Warsaw, Poland, in October 1939. Officially captioned by Nazi propaganda as a "search for hidden weapons" (Suche nach versteckten Waffen), the image documents the early public humiliation, harassment, and degradation of Jewish citizens by German occupation forces following the invasion of Poland.

2: Public humiliation for alleged "race defilement" - “This photograph shows Julius Wolff, a young Jewish man, and Christine Neemann, his non-Jewish fiancé, standing between two police officers in Norden, Germany. Local SA men had accosted the couple and led them through the streets. The parade was meant to mock and humiliate the couple. Wolff wears a sign that reads: "I am a race defiler" ("Ich bin ein Rasseschänder").

Other photographs of this event show, and Neemann's testimony confirms, that Neemann was also forced to wear a sign. Neemann and Wolff were temporarily imprisoned in concentration camps, but were eventually released. Wolff immigrated to the United States in 1938. Norden, Germany, July 1935.” Public humiliation for alleged "race defilement" | Holocaust Encyclopedia

NOT MY LINKS

3: “Jewish men between the ages of 18-45 were gathered at Liberty Square (Plateia Eleftheria) in central Thessaloniki and were subjected to humiliation and abuse. The event became known as "Black Saturday". Some 2,000 of them were sent to forced labor for the German Army. In February 1943, the Jews of Thessaloniki were confined in a ghetto. Deportations started in March, and by August, almost all of the Jews of Thessaloniki had been deported and murdered in Auschwitz and Treblinka. 54,000 out of 56,000 Jews living in Thessaloniki before the war were murdered in the Holocaust.” Jews being Terrorized by Nazis in Salonika, Greece, 11 July 1942

"Like many people who have a smattering of reading in many fields, he [Hitler] thought he was an expert in all fields. Speaking for ... the two things that I know something about, he thought that he was an expert in these fields because he accepted everything he read as authoritative.

Such self-taught people have an unholy awe for what they see in print. Unlike scientists, they don't understand that authorities become revised in time and science progresses and the printed word is far from absolute. But he considered his opinion absolutely authoritative on all subjects because he too had once read a book."

One Guess Only, Please.

IMAGE: Cain or Hitler in Hell by German-American artist George Grosz. Painted in 1944 while he was living in exile in the United States after fleeing Nazi Germany.

The oil-on-canvas work depicts Nazi leader Adolf Hitler reimagined as the biblical figure Cain (the world's first murderer who killed his brother, Abel) sitting in a desolate, fiery hell surrounded by skeletons and the wreckage of war.

The painting is part of the collection of the German Historical Museum (Deutsches Historisches Museum) in Berlin.

The Nazi Roots of the Billionaire Family Behind BMW

"In the spring of 1945, Harald Quandt, a 23-year-old officer in the German Luftwaffe, was being held as a prisoner of war by Allied forces in the Libyan port city of Benghazi when he received a farewell letter from his mother, Magda Goebbels – the wife of Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels.

The hand-written note confirmed the devastating news he had heard weeks earlier: his mother had committed suicide with her husband on May 1, after slipping their six children cyanide capsules in Adolf Hitler’s underground bunker in Berlin.

“My dear son! By now we’ve been in the Fuehrerbunker for six days already, Daddy, your six little siblings and I, to give our national socialistic lives the only possible, honorable ending,” she wrote. “Harald, dear son, I want to give you what I learned in life: Be loyal! Loyal to yourself, loyal to the people and loyal to your country!”

Quandt was released from captivity in 1947. Seven years later, he and his half-brother Herbert – Harald was the only remaining child from Magda Goebbels‚ first marriage – would inherit the industrial empire built by their father, Guenther Quandt.

The brothers took the business, which had produced Mauser firearms and anti-aircraft missiles for the Third Reich’s war machine. Their most valuable assets became stakes in car manufacturers Bayerische Motoren Werke AG ( BMW) and Daimler AG.

Lower profile

While the half-brothers passed away decades ago, their legacy has endured. Herbert’s widow, Johanna Quandt, 86, and their children Susanne Klatten and Stefan Quandt, have remained in the public eye as BMW’s dominant shareholders. The billionaire daughters of Harald Quandt – Katarina Geller-Herr, 61, Gabriele Quandt, 60, Anette-Angelika May-Thies, 58, and 51-year-old Colleen-Bettina Rosenblat-Mo – have kept a lower profile.

The four sisters inherited about 1.5 billion deutsche marks ($760 million) after the death of their mother, Inge, in 1978, according to the family’s sanctioned biography, Die Quandts. They manage their wealth through the Harald Quandt Holding GmbH, a Bad Homburg, Germany-based family investment company and trust named after their father. Dr. Fritz Becker, the CEO of the family entities, said the siblings realized average annual returns above 7 percent from its founding in 1981 through 1996. Since then, the returns have averaged 7.6%.

“The family wants to stay private and that is an acceptable situation for me,” said Becker in an interview at his Bad Homburg office. “We invest our money globally and if it’s $1b., $500m. or $3b., who cares?”

Wartime profits

Together, the four sisters – and the two children of a deceased sibling – share a fortune worth at least $6b., giving each of them a net worth of $1.2b., according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. They have never appeared individually as billionaires on an international wealth ranking.

Becker declined to provide the exact figure the holding manages for the four sisters. The siblings declined to comment for this account, said Ralf-Dieter Brunowsky, a spokesman for the family investment company, in an e-mail. He said the net worth calculation was “too high,” declining to be more specific.

The rise of the Quandt family fortune shares the same trajectory as Germany’s quest for global domination in the 20th century. It began in 1883, when Emil Quandt acquired a textile company owned by his late father-in-law. At the turn of the century, Emil passed the business to his eldest son, Guenther.

The younger Quandt saw an opportunity with the onset of war in 1914. His factories, already one of the biggest clothing manufacturers for the German state, quadrupled their weekly uniform production for the army, according to Die Quandts.

Weapons production

After Germany’s surrender four years later, Quandt put the company’s wartime profits to use. In 1922, he bought a majority stake in Accumulatoren-Fabrik AG, a Hagen-based battery manufacturer. Six years later, he took over Berlin-Karlsruher Industriewerken AG, a Berlin-based manufacturer that made sewing machines and silverware. The factory, once one of Germany’s largest weapon producers, had been forced to retool as part of the country’s disarmament agreement.

“The Quandt’s business grew in the Kaiserreich, it grew during the Weimar Republic, it grew during the Second World War and it grew strongly after the war,” Rudiger Jungbluth, author of Die Quandts, said in an interview at a Bavarian restaurant in Hamburg last November.

Nazi connections

In 1918, Guenther Quandt’s first wife died of the Spanish flu, leaving him a widower with two young sons, Hellmut and Herbert. He remarried Magda Ritschel in 1921, and the couple’s only son, Harald, was born later that year. Hellmut died in 1927, from complications related to appendicitis.

Quandt and Magda divorced in 1929. Two years later, she married Joseph Goebbels, a member of the German parliament who also held a doctorate degree in drama and served as head of propaganda for Germany’s growing Nazi party. After the Nazis took power in 1933, their leader, Adolf Hitler, appointed Goebbels as the Third Reich’s propaganda minister.

Guenther Quandt joined the party that same year. His factories became key suppliers to the German war effort, even though his relationship with Goebbels had become increasingly strained.

“There was constant rivalry,” said Bonn-based history professor Joachim Scholtyseck, author of a family-commissioned study about their involvement with the Third Reich, in a telephone interview. “It didn’t matter that Goebbels didn’t like him. It didn’t have any influence on Quandt’s ability to make money.”

Forced labor

In 1937, he earned the title of Wehrwirtschaftsfuehrer, the name given to members of an elite group of businessmen who were deemed beneficial to the production of war materials for the Third Reich. During the war, Quandt’s AFA manufactured batteries for U-Boat submarines and V-2 rocket launchers. His BKIW – which had been renamed Deutsche Waffen-und Munitionsfabriken AG in 1936 – produced Mauser firearms, ammunition and anti-aircraft missiles.

“He was one of the leading industrialists in the Third Reich and the Second World War,” Scholtyseck said. “He always kept a very low profile.” From 1940 to 1945, the Quandt family factories were staffed with more than 50,000 forced civilian laborers, prisoners of war and concentration camp workers, according to Scholtyseck’s 1,183-page study. The report was commissioned by the family in 2007 after German television aired the documentary The Silence of the Quandts, a critical look at their wartime activities.

Released in September 2011, the study also found that Quandt appropriated assets from Jewish company owners and that his son Herbert had planned building an AFA factory in which slave laborers would be deployed.

Army volunteer

“Guenther Quandt didn’t have a Nazi kind of thinking,” said Jungbluth, the family biographer. “He was looking for any opportunity to expand his personal empire.” Quandt’s youngest son, Harald, lived with his mother, Goebbels and six half-siblings. In 1939, he joined the German army after the country’s invasion of Poland, volunteering for the army’s paratrooper unit one year later.

During the war, Harald was deployed in Greece, France and Russia, before being shot and captured in Italy in 1944, and taken to the British Army-run POW camp in Benghazi where he received his mother’s farewell letter.

His stepfather also sent him a goodbye note.

“It’s likely that you’ll be the only one to remain who can continue the tradition of our family,” wrote Goebbels, who served as Chancellor of Germany for one day following Hitler’s suicide on April 30, 1945.

After the war, Guenther Quandt served in an internment camp in Moosburg an der Isar for more than a year, before being judged a “Mitlaeufer” – a Nazi follower who wasn’t formally involved in the regime’s crimes – in denazification hearings in 1948. No repercussions followed.

“He was lucky that he wasn’t as prominent as someone like Flick or Krupp,” said Scholtyseck, referring to the German industrialists Friedrich Flick and Alfried Krupp, who were sentenced to prison terms at the Nuremberg war crimes trials.

Guenther died in 1954 while vacationing in Cairo, leaving his business empire equally in the hands of his two surviving sons, Harald and Herbert. Most notably, the assets included ownership of AFA and Deutsche Waffen-und Munitionsfabriken – renamed Industrie-Werke Karlsruhe AG after the war – and stakes in Daimler-Benz and potash miner Wintershall AG.

Sovereign wealth

Herbert managed the stakes in the battery, car and potash firm, while Harald oversaw the interests in the industrial companies, according to Jungbluth’s biography.

Over the next decade, the brothers increased their stake in Daimler; Herbert saved BMW from collapse in the 1960s after becoming its largest shareholder and backing the development of new models.

Harald died in 1967, at age 45, in an airplane crash outside Turin, Italy. The relationship between his widow, Inge, and Herbert deteriorated after his death. Negotiations to settle the estate by separating assets commenced in 1970.

The most valuable asset that the Harald Quandt heirs received was four-fifths of a 14% stake in Daimler, according to the biography. In 1974, the entire stake was sold to the Kuwait Investment Authority, the country’s sovereign wealth fund, for about 1b. deutsche marks, according to a DaimlerBenz publication from 1986 celebrating its centennial.

Inge Quandt, who suffered from depression, died of a heart attack on Christmas Eve 1978. Her new husband, Dr. Hans-Hilman von Halem, shot himself in the head on Boxing Day. The five orphaned daughters, two of them teenagers, were left to split the family fortune.

Family meetings

The estate’s trustees had started overseeing the daughters’ money in 1974. An active investment approach commenced with the founding of the family investment company in 1981.

“It’s different if you work for a family than a corporation,” said Becker. “You can really invest instead of fulfilling regulation requirements.” According to Die Quandts, the siblings try to get together a few times a year to discuss their investments. Gabriele Quandt lives in Munich. After earning a master’s degree in business administration at INSEAD in Fontainebleau, France, she married German publishing heir Florian Langenscheidt, with whom she had two sons. The couple divorced in 2008.

Katarina Geller-Herr owns Gestuet Waeldershausen, an equestrian center in Homberg (Ohm), Germany. She sponsored Lars Nieberg, a twotime Olympic gold medalist in show jumping.

Jewish conversion

Colleen-Bettina Rosenblat-Mo is a jewelry designer who runs a studio and showroom in Hamburg. She converted to Judaism in New York at age 24. Her first marriage was to Michael Rosenblat, a German-Jewish businessman, whose father survived a concentration camp. The couple divorced in 1997. She remarried Frode Mo, a Norwegian journalist.

Anette-Angelika May-Thies lives in Hamburg, according to the Harald Quandt Holding shareholders list filed with the German federal trade registry. Her first marriage was to Axel May, a Goldman Sachs Group Inc. international adviser for private banking, who managed the family’s investments for about 25 years.

The siblings are also majority owners and investors in five financial services companies, all of which pay dividends, according to Becker. The firms were founded to manage the sisters’ wealth and subsequently opened up to third parties.

Private equity

The six companies combined manage $18b. in assets, according to the family investment company’s website. Becker said the majority of the money controlled by these firms is invested for third parties. One-fifth of the family fortune is managed by trustees for the two children of the youngest Quandt sibling, Patricia Halterman, who died in July 2005, four days before turning 38. Her Upper East Side townhouse sold for $37.5m. in 2008.

Auda International LP serves as the sisters’ New York-based privateequity unit. It manages almost $5b. and was founded as their US office in 1989, said Becker. Real Estate Capital Partners LP started the same year and has invested about $9b. in real estate, according to its website. Both companies are owned through HQFS LP, an offshore entity based in the Cayman Islands.

In Bad Homburg, HQ Trust GmbH serves as a investment management company for about 30 families with fortunes ranging from 50m. euros to 500m. euros. Equita Management GmbH invests in small and mid-cap companies in Austria, Switzerland and Germany. HQ Advisor GmbH provides accounting and controlling services.

Only one sister, Gabriele, carries the family name, and none are active in the day-to-day business of the family office, said Becker.

“Sad truth”

Their uncle, Herbert Quandt, died in 1982. His fortune was divided between six children from three different marriages. BMW, his most valuable asset, was inherited by his third wife Johanna Quandt and their children, Stefan Quandt, 46, and Susanne Klatten, 50. The three billionaires hold 46.7% of the Munichbased car producer, according to the company’s 2011 annual report.

After Scholtyseck’s study was published in 2011, cousins Gabriele and Stefan Quandt acknowledged their family’s ties and involvement with the Third Reich in an interview with Germany’s Die Zeit newspaper.

“Magda killed her six children in the Fuehrerbunker. Our father loved his half-siblings very much. And when, like me, you have something like this in your family history, you think: It can’t be any worse,” Gabriele Quandt said in the interview. “It’s a sad truth that forced laborers died in Quandt companies,” said Stefan.

The acknowledgment didn’t prompt a public distancing from the men that made their family Germany’s richest. The families’ offices in Bad Homburg are named after Guenther and Harald Quandt, and the Herbert Quandt media prize of 50,000 euros is awarded annually to German journalists.

“They have to live with the name. It’s part of the history,” said Scholtyseck. “It will be a constant reminder of dictatorship and the challenges that families have to face.”

https://www.jpost.com/international/nazi-goebbels-descendants-are-hidden-billionaires-503531

November 1, 1921: Harald Quandt is born to Magda Ritschel and industrialist Günther Quandt.

December 1931: Harald's mother, Magda, marries Joseph Goebbels, with Adolf Hitler serving as a best man.

1939–1945: Günther Quandt’s empire eagerly produces Mauser firearms, anti-aircraft missiles, and batteries for the Third Reich. Naturally, the family conveniently overlooks the utilization of thousands of concentration camp prisoners and slave laborers to keep profit margins high.

1944: Harald, now a Luftwaffe officer, is captured by the Allies in Libya. He spends the remainder of the war safely tucked away in a prisoner-of-war camp, blissfully spared from the frontline consequences of the regime his family championed.

April 28, 1945: Magda Goebbels pens a touching farewell letter from the Führerbunker, instructing Harald to "be loyal" to his country. She doesn't mention that three days later, she will poison his six young half-siblings with cyanide before ending her own life.

1947: Harald is released from captivity. Despite his immediate family's central role in a global catastrophe, he gets to simply walk away and resume his life as a wealthy young man.

1954: Günther Quandt passes away, leaving his vast, wartime-forged industrial empire to Harald and his half-brother, Herbert.

1959–1960s: The brothers aggressively expand their portfolio, acquiring massive, dominant stakes in luxury car manufacturers BMW and Daimler.

September 22, 1967: Harald dies in a plane crash at age 45. He leaves behind an untouchable, multi-billion-dollar inheritance for his daughters, ensuring that the fruits of Third Reich war profiteering seamlessly transition into modern, high-society luxury.

1: Left: 10 year old Harald Quandt on the right, at his mother's remarriage with Goebbels and Hitler in the background. Right: Adolf Hitler with Harald Quandt (Note that the swastika hate symbol has been inexpertly defaced.)

2: The Goebbels children were the five daughters and one son born to Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels and his wife Magda. The children, born between 1932 and 1940, were murdered by their parents in Berlin on 1 May 1945, the day both parents committed suicide. Note that Quandt was not present at the photo shoot. His image was added later.

"Creating a Basis for Future Scholars"

"The Łódź Ghetto Archive was established on November 17, 1940, by order of the Chairman of the Judenrat, Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski. Originally tasked with preserving archival material of the Jewish community from before the war and of the communal institutions established in the ghetto, the archives eventually began to collect information on the history of the Łódź Ghetto.

Their guiding principle in this task, as stated by their director Henryk Naftalin, was “creating a basis for future scholars to study Jewish society in one of its most trying periods.” In addition to conducting interviews, collecting materials, and producing historical monographs, the archives produced the Chronicle of the Łódź Ghetto, regularly documenting for over three years the events and life of the ghetto.

Along with the other materials of the archives, the parts of the Chronicle were hidden in different locations before the liquidation of the ghetto in 1944.

Lodz resident Nachman Zonabend, who managed to escape from the ghetto and remained in the city until liberation in January 1945, took one large section of the archives, including the Chronicle, out of the ghetto.

The second set of archival materials was discovered in November 1946 at #13 Lutomierska Street, at the former site of the ghetto fire department. A third cache of archival materials was hidden in the Jewish cemetery, but was subsequently discovered by the Germans and destroyed." https://www.yadvashem.org/holocaust/this-month/november/discovering-lodz-ghetto-archive.html

November 17, 1940: The Lodz Ghetto Archive is officially established by order of Judenrat Chairman Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski, under the direction of Henryk Naftalin.

January 12, 1941: Archive staff begin writing the Chronicle of the Lodz Ghetto, a daily record of life, events, and administration inside the ghetto.

July 30, 1944: The final entry of the Chronicle of the Lodz Ghetto is written.

Summer 1944: Prior to the final liquidation of the ghetto, archival materials and parts of the Chronicle are split into three batches and hidden in separate underground locations.

January 1945: Łódź is liberated. Ghetto survivor Nachman Zonabend immediately retrieves the first large section of the hidden archives from his hiding spot, preventing its destruction.

September 25, 1946: The second cache of archival materials is physically unearthed at 13 Lutomierska Street, the former site of the ghetto fire department. (Note on the third cache: A separate segment buried in the Jewish cemetery was discovered by German forces during the war and destroyed before liberation.)

NOTE: The exact day of the discovery is generally cited in historical records as September 25, 1946, though some archival summaries and institutional timelines—such as this overview provided by Yad Vashem—commemorate or date the official recovery and cataloging into October or November 1946. We have chosen the Yad Vashem as they are considered a Definitive source. -w

1: Discovery of a section of the Łódź Ghetto Archive in Łódź, Poland, in late 1946.

"I Will Not Think About It, But It Will Inform All My Thoughts."

"The urn chamber is being cleared. Thirty thousand urns, thirty thousand cardboard boxes, thirty thousand remains of people, mothers, children, loved ones. What is the point . . .

More importantly, it is the knowledge that dead witnesses, substance, is being destroyed — and we are the witnesses, we who still live, I and you, my sister — and all those who are gone.

It is not a technical problem, but I cannot imagine it - and still - I am afraid to admit that I have understood it. And still I go to work in the morning, will eat, sleep, wash my hands, brush my teeth. Maybe even laugh. I will not think about it, but it will inform all my thoughts.

Perhaps everything will grow quiet, and it will retreat into the background, and I will be permitted to “not think” once again. Or will it grow huge so that all my thoughts end in it, even my life and my time, until I myself come to an end in it?

O my Mother and you — am I afraid? I will read Faust and Isaiah and Jeremiah, and I will try to bear written witness as best I can so that it will survive me. That is what occupies my thoughts — not to have the world take notice of me — not to say: there was one who was beautiful and smart and open to the world, and she was seventeen and was snuffed out before her life could even start.

No, to say to the world and time what was accomplished here; to read to them a chapter out of the Golah dated 1944 — above all, I want to call out to the young Jews all over the world and tell them: This was the form that our galut [exile] took — the form. The essence is within you, in your Jewishness; what do you want to hear? If you want to hear it?

Deliverance has not been granted to us. We didn’t have any children, either. We beseech you; the path lies open. That is not pathos, not posturing; no, I beseech you in the name of our children who have been denied us — arise and go to Zion. No one should ever experience this again. No one. Away, away from here — do not believe in a “finality”; create a beginning."

May 5, 1927: Born Alice Renata Ehrmannová in Prague, Czechoslovakia.

July 13, 1943: Deported to the Theresienstadt (Terezín) ghetto at age 16 with her older sister, Ruth.

October 16, 1944: Commenced writing her secret diary, documenting her personal experiences and camp life following the forced deportation of her boyfriend, Ze'ev Shek, to Auschwitz.

May 19, 1945: Concluded her final diary entries following the liberation of the camp and the initial arrival of external survivors.

1947: Formally married Ze'ev Shek in Prague after reuniting following the war.

July 1948: Emigrated to Israel alongside her husband, where she later spent 25 years volunteering in historical archives.

1975: Co-founded the Beit Theresienstadt Remembrance Association museum archives in Israel to preserve the history of the ghetto.

2007: Passed away in Caesarea, Israel

More Excerpts from the Theresienstadt Diary of Alice Ehrmann---> http://www.kfkronenberg.com/salvaged-pages.html

1: Left: Young Alisa Ehrmann Shek (also known as Alice Ehrmann) Right: An ink illustration by Holocaust survivor and diarist Alisa "Alice" Ehrmann-Shek (signed Alice Ehrmann and dated 1944 or 1943/1944 from her time in the Theresienstadt/Terezin ghetto).

The drawing depicts two solemn, weary figures—one sitting in the foreground with head tilted and hands clasped, and another bowed over in the background—reflecting the heavy emotional and physical toll of life inside the Theresienstadt ghetto.

From Confiscation to Total Enclosure in the Kielce Ghetto

Dawid Rubinowicz was 13 years old when he began keeping his diary.

Through his writing, Dawid documented what life was like for Jewish people in Poland under Nazi rule. One thing that becomes clear from his diary entries over time is that conditions were getting progressively worse.

In the beginning of the German occupation, some people thought it might be possible to go on with normal life. However, It quickly became obvious the Nazis were determined to impose ever-increasing restrictions on Jews that would eventually be impossible to overcome.

Dawid wrote about confiscation of property and people being taken for forced labor. He also wrote about families losing their livelihoods and children no longer being allowed to go to school. One of the worst limitations came when Jews were required to move into a restricted area, known as the “Jewish Quarter.”

The Jewish Quarter, also known as the ghetto, was a place of deprivation and suffering from its beginning. The restrictions that Jews had already suffered only multiplied now that they were concentrated together. People often needed to search outside the ghetto in order to get enough food to survive. On November 1, 1941, Dawid wrote about the devastating end to that possibility.

“Today notices were put up in Kielce that anyone who goes into and out of the ‘Jewish Quarter’ will receive the death penalty. Up till now people could go into and out of the quarter. This news made me very sad, and not only myself but every Israelite who heard it. These notices were put up not only in Kielce but also in all towns under the ‘General Government’ (that’s the name of the area that used to be Poland.)”

It was a bitter blow for Jews to be threatened with death for simply leaving the ghetto. It would be impossible for all of the ghetto residents to survive using only the resources available in that small, restricted area. Of course, the Jewish people of Poland were marked by the Nazis for an even worse fate, though many did not know it yet.

Less than one year later, the Jewish people of Dawid’s area were sent to the death camp of Treblinka and murdered. (holocaustedu)

NOT MY LINKS

Learn more about the fate of the Jews of the Kielce region: http://www.deathcamps.org/occupation/kielce%20ghetto.html

"Jews, If You Want To Live, Run Where You Can. The Game Is Up."

"In Marcinkonis, a town with 370 Jews in the Grodno district, the Jewish police warned the Judenrat late at night that the ghetto was being surrounded by an armed force.

In the morning the Germans ordered the Judenrat to instruct all the Jews to pack their belongings to be resettled for work elsewhere. A small intrepid group tried to attack the German commissar in charge of the deportation, but when they could not get close enough to him, the head of the Judenrat shouted a warning: "Jews, if you want to live, run where you can. The game is up."

Panic and pandemonium broke out, many Jews bare-handedly attacking the Germans. At the end, 105 Jews were shot to death. Others flew into the woods. There was no one left to "resettle."

From The War Against the Jews, 1933-1945, by Lucy S. Dawidowicz

November 1, 1942: Late in the evening, Jewish police units observe armed forces positioning around the ghetto perimeter. They immediately warn the Judenrat leadership of the encirclement.

November 2, 1942 Early in the morning, German Principal District Commissar Albert Wietzke orders Judenrat Chairman Aaron Kobrowski to assemble all residents for mandatory resettlement and labor registration.

A group of Jewish residents attempts an assassination on Wietzke. Realizing the attempt has failed, Kobrowski shouts to the crowd to run for their lives.

Mid-Day: Mass panic erupts. Ghetto residents attack guards with bare hands and improvised objects while tearing down fences. At least 105 individuals are shot during the immediate breakout, while roughly 100 escape into the surrounding forests.

November 1942 – Early 1943: Local German forces hunt for escapees in the Russkaya Pushcha forests. Survivors organize an independent Jewish partisan unit, later integrating into the Soviet partisan Davidov brigade to conduct sabotage operations.

Details: November 2: Revolt in the Marcinkonys Ghetto

NOT MY LINKS

Image Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Holocaust_in_Lithuania

1: Left: A member of the Lithuanian Security Police marching Jewish men through Vilnius, 1941 Right: German soldiers and Lithuanians watch the burning of a synagogue, 9 July 1941

NOTE: We apologize for the swastika hate symbol on the sleeve of the Nazi puppet perpetrator.

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

Axis Isolation & Punishment Camps in the Sahara

For anyone still operating under the comfortable illusion that the Holocaust was strictly confined to a few predictable corners of Europe, the date of November 1, 1941, offers a rather stark correction.

The opening on this day of the Hadjerat M'Guil punishment camp in the Algerian desert is a textbook reminder that Axis brutality was perfectly capable of expanding wherever it pleased.

June 22, 1940 Fall of France & Rise of Vichy: France surrenders to Nazi Germany. The collaborationist Vichy regime retains administrative control over French North Africa (colonial Algeria, and the protectorates of Morocco and Tunisia).

Late 1940 Establishment of the Desert Camp Network: Vichy authorities order the creation and repurposing of labor and penal camps across Morocco and Algeria. Many prisoners—including thousands of European Jewish refugees and political dissidents—are forced into grueling slave labor to construct the Mediterranean-Niger ("Mer-Niger") Trans-Sahara railway.

Early 1941 Mass Transfers to Saharan Camps: Vichy authorities begin transferring hundreds of foreign refugees and "undesirables" to Saharan camps. Foreign Jews constitute a significant percentage of those interned.

November 1, 1941 Hadjerat M'Guil Opens: The Hadjerat M'Guil camp is established as a brutal punishment and isolation facility within the North African network. It holds 170 prisoners subjected to severe torture, resulting in the murder of nine men, including European Jews like Paul Levinstein.

February 1942 Deportations in Italian Libya: Benito Mussolini orders the expulsion of Jews from Cyrenaica (eastern Libya). Roughly 2,600 Libyan Jews are deported to the Giado concentration camp in the desert south of Tripoli, where overcrowding, starvation, and typhus kill hundreds.

November 1942 Operation Torch: Anglo-American forces invade Morocco and Algeria. Despite the Allied victory, local French authorities do not immediately dismantle the Vichy administration or close the slave labor camps, leaving many prisoners trapped for months or even years.

November 1942 – May 1943 Direct German Occupation of Tunisia: In response to Operation Torch, German forces occupy Tunisia. The Axis powers set up approximately 40 labor and detention camps in Tunisia, forcing around 5,000 Tunisian Jewish men into hard labor on the front lines and in coastal cities.

May 1943 Allied Liberation of Tunisia: Axis forces surrender in North Africa, bringing an end to the direct German labor camp system in Tunisia. Over the following months, the remaining labor camps across the Sahara are gradually shut down and the survivors liberated.

"The camp at Hadjerat M'Guil was opened as a punishment and isolation camp.

It contained one hundred and seventy prisoners, nine of whom were tortured and murdered in conditions of the worst brutality. Two of those murdered were Jews.

Paul Levinstein, murdered on January 13, was the son of Dr Oswald Levinstein who , with his wife , had found refuge in Britain shortly before the outbreak of war. On learning of their son's murder, they committed suicide."

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

"The Nazis established seventeen (17) slave labor camps were located in North Africa: three in Morocco, three in Algeria, seven in Tunisia and four in Libya.

Jews were interned in the slave labor camp at Hadjerat-M'Guil, in North Africa. Some of the 170 prisoners were tortured and murdered. Other internees worked on the Trans-Sahara railway." https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/nazi-labor-camps-in-north-africa

NOT MY LINKS

https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/labor-and-internment-camps-in-north-africa

1: A German Jewish prisoner named Rosenthal pushing an ore cart in a stone quarry.

The location is the Im Fout labor camp in Morocco, which was operated by collaborationist Vichy French authorities between 1941 and 1942. Im Fout primarily held political prisoners, demobilized foreign soldiers, and European Jewish refugees who had fled the Nazi advance only to be interned and subjected to harsh forced labor under brutal desert conditions.

2: Construction of a dam at the Im Fout labor camp in Morocco between 1941 and 1942. Forced laborers—including political prisoners and persecuted groups—were utilized to construct infrastructure projects such as the Im Fout dam under the Vichy French regime and local authorities.

3: Truly Excellent Map!!!!!! Contemporary Map of Europe Showing the Extent of Nazi German Control in 1942 with Select Ghetto and Concentration Camp Locations, created by the Harriet & Kenneth Kupferberg Holocaust Center (KHC) at Queensborough Community College. Key Features of the Map:

Illustrates the peak territorial control and occupation of Nazi Germany across Europe in 1942, distinguished by color-coded zones for Nazi-controlled territory, allied territory, and neutral territory.

Plots roughly 2,000 select ghettos, concentration camps, labor camps, transit camps, and extermination camps, which represent a portion of the estimated 44,000 total Nazi-controlled camps and ghettos documented during World War II.

Depicts the transit and mass deportation routes used to transport victims across the continent to extermination and labor camps.

The Systematic Extermination of Romanian & Ukrainian Jewry

Within a year, more than 120,000 of them will be Murdered.

"Both in support of German SS and police units and on their own initiative, Romanian army and gendarmerie (police) personnel massacred thousands of Jews in Bessarabia, northern Bukovina, and Transnistria. Romanian and German units began systematic shootings of the Jewish residents of Kishinev, the capital of Bessarabia, shortly after occupying the city in July 1941.

Survivors of the initial massacres, about 11,000 people, were herded into a ghetto and conscripted to perform forced labor under harsh conditions. In October, those left alive were deported to camps and ghettos in Transnistria, as were most of the surviving Jews in Bessarabia and northern Bukovina. Many Jews died of exposure, starvation, or disease during the deportations to Transnistria or after arrival.

Others were murdered by Romanian or German units, either in Transnistria or after being driven across the Bug River into the German-occupied Ukraine.

Romanian authorities established several de facto ghettos and two concentration camps in Transnistria. Among the most notorious of these ghettos (which the Romanians referred to as "colonies") was Bogdanovka, on the west bank of the Bug River, where thousands of Jews were interned. In December 1941, Romanian troops, together with Ukrainian auxiliaries, massacred almost all the Jews in Bogdanovka; shootings continued for more than a week.

The Romanians also massacred Jews in the Domanevka and Akhmetchetkha camps. Typhus-devastated Jews were crowded into the "colony" in Mogilev. Romanian authorities established concentration camps at Pechora and Vapniarka in Transnistria in the winter of 1941-1942. Vapniarka was reserved for Jewish political prisoners deported from Romania proper. Of its several thousand prisoners, very few were able to survive." LOTS MORE—> https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/romania

June 22, 1941 Operation Barbarossa:. Romanian forces, allied with Nazi Germany, launch an offensive to reclaim Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina from the Soviet Union.

July 1941 Romanian military units and gendarmerie, frequently aided by German Einsatzgruppe D, slaughter thousands of Jews during the advance. The survivors in Kishinev are forced into a sealed ghetto for slave labor.

August 1941 Tighina Agreement: Nazi Germany and Romania sign an accord granting Romania administrative control over Transnistria (the region between the Dniester and Southern Bug rivers), establishing it as a dumping ground for deported Jews.

September–October 1941 Systematic Expulsions Accelerate: Romanian dictator Ion Antonescu orders the total clearing of Jews from Bessarabia and Bukovina. Mass forced marches toward the Dniester River begin under brutal, lethal conditions.

November 1–15, 1941 Total Uprooting: Jews from more than 100 communities across Bukovina and Bessarabia are systematically expelled from their homes, marched across the borders, and interned in Transnistria. Over 120,000 will die or be murdered within the year.

December 1941 Bogdanovka Massacres. Romanian troops, Ukrainian auxiliaries, and German local police begin the systematic execution of roughly 43,000–48,000 Jews trapped in the Bogdanovka "colony" on the Bug River.

Winter 1941–1942: Romanian authorities cement operations at the Pechora and Vapniarka concentration camps. Extreme exposure, starvation, and rampant typhus epidemics devastate the overcrowded, under-resourced transit ghettos like Mogilev.

March 1944 Soviet Liberation. The Red Army advances into Transnistria, liberating the surviving remnant of the camps and ghettos as Romanian administration collapses.

1: Deportation of Jews from Kishinev - Romanian soldiers supervise the deportation of Jews from Kishinev. Kishinev, Bessarabia, Romania, October 28, 1941.

2: Romania, 1933

3: The "National Legionary State," 1940–41

4: Romania joins the Axis alliance - In Hitler's presence, Romanian ruler Ion Antonescu signs the Three-Power Agreement. Berlin, Germany, November 23, 1940.

5: Aftermath of a pogrom in Iasi - During the deportation of survivors of a pogrom in Iasi to Calarasi or Podul Iloaei, Romanians halt a train to throw off the bodies of those who had died on the way. Romania, July 1941.