500 Days of Captivity - Bring Them Home
Yechiel (Michael) Leiter, Israel’s new ambassador to the United States, speaking at Washington Hebrew Congregation and praying for the release of all hostages. It’s been 500 days.
-
Hostages taken into Gaza: 251
-
Hostages remaining in Gaza: 73, including 3 taken before Oct. 7, 2023
-
Hostages in Gaza believed to be dead: 36, including one from before Oct. 7, 2023
The Diaries of Friedrich Kellner
The second and final volume of the biography of Adolf Hitler by German historian Volker Ullrich is entitled Hitler: Downfall: 1939-1945. Roger Abrams, writing in the New York Journal of Books, calls Ullrich’s work “a remarkable treatise on the malevolence of power in modern times.”
Early in the volume, Ullrich commends the diaries of Friedrich Kellner. Kellner was a court official in the western German town of Laubach who had no special access to wartime information. Kellner was repulsed by the Nazi regime and kept detailed diaries based on what he read in the German press and by talking to people. He hoped his diaries would be a warning to future generations about blind faith.
Ullrich explains1 that Kellner’s diaries “show that it was entirely possible for normal people in small-town Germany to see through the lies of Nazi propaganda and learn of things like the ‘euthanasia’ murders of patients in psychiatric institutions and the mass executions carried out in occupied parts of eastern Europe.”
The Kellner diaries were published in 2011 in German and now are available in English. The diaries are also the subject of a touching 2007 TV documentary on YouTube created by Kellner’s American grandson.
Understanding the Magnitude of the Holocaust
The emphasis on deportations to death camps, particularly from western Europe and particularly to Auschwitz, overshadows the benighted experience of Jews in Polish ghettos. Yet the number of Jews incarcerated in the ghettos of Warsaw and Lodz in 1940–1 exceeds the combined Jewish populations in France, Belgium and the Netherlands at the same time. More Jews died in Warsaw than were deported from France to the killing sites of eastern Europe. More Jews were shot within walking distance of their homes in Kiev on 29–30 September 1941 than were forced to endure the horrendous five-day journey in box-cars from transit camps in Belgium to death camps in Poland. Yet one of the most typical Holocaust memorials is a freight car mounted on a segment of rail track.
Cesarani, David (2016-11-07T22:58:59.000). Final Solution: The Fate of the Jews 1933-1949 . St. Martin’s Press. Kindle Edition (footnote omitted)
George Will: Holocaust Museum Showcases Lessons for Today
George Will writing in The Washington Post on the 25th anniversary of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington:
Nothing — nothing — is unthinkable, and political institutions by themselves provide no permanent safety from barbarism, which permanently lurks beneath civilization’s thin, brittle crust.
This is why the Holocaust is the dark sun into which this democracy should peer.
The Need for a Jewish State
Theodor Herzl wrote in 1896, more than 40 years before the Holocaust:
My happier co-religionists will not believe me till Jew-baiting teaches them the truth; for the longer Anti-Semitism lies in abeyance the more fiercely will it break out.
Herzl, Theodor, Der Judenstaat. English, Location 873. Kindle Edition.
Herzl envisioned the founding of a future independent Jewish state during the 20th century. He argued that the best way to avoid antisemitism in Europe was to create this independent Jewish state.
Hitler’s Last Direct Order
Roberts, Andrew. The Storm of War (p. 553). HarperCollins e-books. Kindle Edition (footnote omitted):
The last direct order to be personally signed by Hitler in the bunker was transmitted to Field Marshal Ferdinand Schörner at 04.50 on 24 April [1945]. Now in private hands, the original reads:
“I shall remain in Berlin, so as to play a part, in honourable fashion, in the decisive battle for Germany, and to set a good example to all the rest. I believe that in this way I shall be rendering Germany the best service. For the rest, every effort must be made to win the struggle for Berlin. You can therefore help decisively, by pushing northwards as early as possible.With kind regards, Yours, Adolf Hitler”
The signature, in red pencil, looks remarkably normal, considering the circumstances.
This YouTube video focuses on Ferdinand Schörner.
Expanding our Understanding of the Holocaust
Dan Stone’s 2024 important book entitled The Holocaust: An Unfinished History documents and explains that the images of concentration camps and gas chambers do not tell the whole story of the Holocaust. The majority of those murdered did not die in gas chambers. Although this is not a new discovery, Stone explains it well:
The images of the Holocaust which still dominate the collective memory are those from the liberation of the camps, especially of Belsen, Buchenwald and Dachau. But Jews were only in those camps in Germany in large numbers because of the ‘death marches’. As the Red Army approached from the east, Himmler’s order that camp inmates should not fall alive into enemy hands resulted in the bizarre phenomenon of the camp evacuations, or ‘death marches’. Here the concentration camp and Germany became synonymous as the inmates passed through just about every small locality in Central Europe, especially across Silesia, Thuringia, Bohemia and Bavaria. The complicity of the population at large was assured, and claims, commonly heard after the war, that ‘no one knew’ became impossible to defend. More importantly, the marchers were killed in huge numbers, such that perhaps a third of the more than 714,000 concentration camp inmates as of January 1945 were dead by the end of the war. They died of exhaustion or were shot on the route and buried, often in unmarked graves, by the roadside where they fell or in local cemeteries.
Thus, although camps such as Belsen and Dachau had not been created to house Jews and, up until late 1944, had hardly been associated with the Holocaust at all (apart from in the training of camp guards, in the case of Dachau), by 1945 these camps were effectively functioning as death camps. This is especially so in the case of Belsen, where the British, on the surrender of the camp on 15 April, found some 60,000 dying inmates. The horror of Belsen remains a scar on the world’s conscience, and the sources from that moment remain painful to read, see and hear.
Stone, Dan. The Holocaust: An Unfinished History (pp. xl-xli). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition (footnote omitted).
Dan Stone is Professor of Modern History and Director of the Holocaust Research Institute at Royal Holloway, University of London.
Google Calendar no longer shows Holocaust Remembrance Day and Jewish American Heritage Month
Google Calendar has removed International Holocaust Remembrance Day and Jewish American Heritage Month from its default display in the United States, part of a broader removal of cultural and ethnic observances from the app.
International Youth Meeting Dachau Starts July 26th
The International Youth Meeting Dachau (IYM) was funded in 1983 as Internationale Jugendbegegnung Dachau (IJB Dachau). Since then, every year young people from all over the world get together. They search for answers concerning questions of the past, the present and the future. Participants will be able to meet eyewitnesses or their descendants, visit historical places and engage in workshops about historic and current forms of nationalism, exclusion and discrimination of minorities.
The meeting is scheduled for July 26th – August 8th, 2025. Applications are open now.
President Joe Biden delivers remarks at U.S. Holocaust Memorial Days of Remembrance Ceremony
May 7, 2024 at the U.S. Capitol:
The full text is available on the White House website.
My favorite quote from President Biden’s speech:
To the Jewish community, I want you to know I see your fear, your hurt, and your pain.
Let me reassure you, as your President, you are not alone. You belong. You always have, and you always will.
And my commitment to the safety of the Jewish people, the security of Israel, and its right to exist as an independent Jewish state is ironclad, even when we disagree.
A Jewish Photographer Documented Nazi Deportation of Jews
Unique and chilling images of one of the first deportations of German Jews from their homes during World War II have been published for the first time by a Berlin-based international research project.
The set of 13 pictures — discovered by chance in an archive in Dresden by historian Steffen Heidrich — were taken clandestinely. They are believed to be the only ones chronicling a deportation captured by a Jewish photographer.
The photos show hundreds of Jewish men and women — from elderly people in wheelchairs to young children grasping their parents’ hands — being rounded up and herded into a beer garden in Breslau, Silesia, on November 21, 1941.
The photographer is believed to be Albert Hadda (1892-1975). Hadda was married to a non-Jew and therefore escaped deportation for a time. It is thought that he had access to the area of the city where the victims were taken to be deported; a section that was sealed off to the general public. Hadda survived the Groß-Rosen concentration camp, and after living in Israel for a time returned to Germany. He died in Frankfurt am Main in 1975 and was buried in the Jewish cemetery in Stockholm, where Hadda’s daughter lived.
Switzerland and Dachau
Germany’s National Socialist (Nazi) government and Switzerland had substantial ties. Switzerland’s contribution to the construction of the Dachau concentration camp near Munich is not well known.
Before WWII, Extroc, SA, a Swiss state-subsidized timber company built the Dachau concentration camp, under a contract for 13 million Swiss francs. The contract was negotiated by Colonel Henri Guisan, the son of the later Swiss Commander-in-Chief Henri Guisan (1874–1960) and a Swiss national hero. The Swiss Colonel was in turn connected to Hans Wilhelm Eggen, an SS captain who bought timber in Switzerland for the Waffen SS. This was the wood used to construct Dachau. Dachau was the first regular concentration camp established by the Nazi government.1
According to a now declassified CIA report, Eggen often went to “Switzerland under cover of a delivery agent for wooden barracks.” Eggen was a friend of Heinrich Himmler, Reichsführer of the SS. In Nazi Germany, the SS controlled the German police forces and the concentration camp system.
See, Roberts, Andrew, The Storm of War (p. 113). HarperCollins e-books. Kindle Edition; Goñi, Uki, The Real Odessa: How Perón Brought the Nazi War Criminals to Argentina (p. 170). Granta Books. Kindle Edition.
What It’s Like to be Visually Jewish at Yale
Bret Stephens writing in The New York Times:
Netanel Crispe, from Danby, Vt., is a 21-year-old junior studying American history at Yale. He is also, to his knowledge, the university’s only Hasidic undergraduate. When he chose Yale, he told me this week, he was “looking for an institution that asserted its position in terms of maintaining and protecting free expression while not backing down on its principal values.”
It hasn’t worked out that way.
On Saturday evening he and his friend Sahar Tartak, a Yale sophomore and an Orthodox Jew, paid a visit to the university’s Beinecke Plaza, where pro-Palestinian demonstrators had set up an encampment.
“I was wearing my black hat; I was very identifiably Jewish,” Crispe said. “I was yelled at, harassed, pushed and shoved numerous times. Every time I tried to take a step someone confronted me inches from my face, telling me not to move.” Tartak said she was hit in the left eye by a Palestinian flag held by a demonstrator. She ended up in the hospital, luckily without permanent injury. “Thank God, there was a small sphere at the end of the pole,” she told me.
Holocaust Museum Calls on American Colleges and Universities to Protect Jewish Students following Eruption of Antisemitism
The shocking eruption of antisemitism on many American college and university campuses is unacceptable and university and all other appropriate authorities must take greater action to protect Jewish students. Demonstrators at Columbia University calling for Jews to return to Poland — where three million Jewish men, women, and children were murdered by the Nazis and their collaborators — is an outrageous insult to Holocaust memory, a failure to appreciate its lessons, and an act of dangerous antisemitism.
America is hardly the Third Reich, but the Holocaust teaches the dangers of pervasive societal antisemitism, and awareness of this history must guide our actions in the present. Nazi ideology was official state policy, but it found a receptive audience on university campuses based on well established contempt towards Jews.
The CIA and Nazi War Criminals
The Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act established the Nazi War Criminal Records Interagency Working Group to locate, identify, inventory, recommend for declassification, and make available to the public at the National Archives and Records Administration, all classified Nazi war criminal records of the United States.
In 1995, the National Security Archive posted the CIA’s secret documentary history of the U.S government’s relationship with General Reinhard Gehlen, the German army’s intelligence chief for the Eastern Front during World War II. At the end of the war, Gehlen established a close relationship with the U.S. and successfully maintained his intelligence network (it ultimately became the West German BND) even though he employed numerous former Nazis and known war criminals. The use of Gehlen’s group, according to the CIA history, Forging an Intelligence Partnership: CIA and the Origins of the BND, 1945-49, was a “double edged sword” that “boosted the Warsaw Pact’s propaganda efforts” and “suffered devastating penetrations by the KGB.” [See Volume 1: Introduction, p. xxix]
The declassified “SECRET RelGER” two-volume history was compiled by CIA historian Kevin Ruffner and presented in 1999 by CIA Deputy Director for Operations Jack Downing to the German intelligence service (Bundesnachrichtendienst) in remembrance of “the new and close ties” formed during post-war Germany to mark the fiftieth year of CIA-West German cooperation. This history was declassified in 2002 as a result of the work of The Nazi War Crimes and Japanese Imperial Government Records Interagency Working Group (IWG) and contains 97 key documents from various agencies.
The full posting is available here.
Antisemitism: ‘We will never be done with it’
Jean Cassou (1897-1986) quoted in Sapir Journal:
An antisemite will always, in the course of his argument, turn to assure you that he is not an antisemite, but that he is against the Jews; another that he is not against the Jews, but that he is an antisemite; another that he is neither anti-Jewish nor an antisemite, but anti-Zionist; another that he is neither anti-Jewish, nor an antisemite, nor anti-Zionist, but anti-Israeli. He will swear to you that he condemns the crematory ovens but that he would like the complete destruction of Israel. See, we will never be done with it.
X’s Lawsuit Against Anti-Hate Research Group Dismissed
X sued the Center for Countering Digital Hate in July in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California after the organization published several articles that claimed its researchers had discovered a rise in hate speech on the platform following Elon Musk’s takeover. X said that the group’s research was harming its business by scaring away advertisers, costing it millions of dollars.
On March 25, 2024, U.S. District Judge Charles R. Breyer in California dismissed X’s lawsuit:
Sometimes it is unclear what is driving a litigation, and only by reading between the lines of a complaint can one attempt to surmise a plaintiff’s true purpose. Other times, a complaint is so unabashedly and vociferously about one thing that there can be no mistaking that purpose. This case represents the latter circumstance. This case is about punishing the Defendants for their speech.
Imran Ahmed is the founder and CEO of the Center for Countering Digital Hate. Ahmed started the Center after seeing the rise of antisemitism on the left in the United Kingdom and the murder of his colleague, Jo Cox MP, by a white supremacist, who had been radicalized in part online, during the EU Referendum in 2016. He holds an MA in Social and Political Sciences from the University of Cambridge. Imran lives in Washington DC, and tweets at @Imi_Ahmed.
Steven Spielberg, Honored by USC Shoah Foundation, Cautions Against Rise of Extremism
On March 25, 2024, Steven Spielberg, the winner of three Academy Awards, was honored by the University of Southern California, 30 years after founding the school’s Shoah Foundation and releasing the landmark Holocaust film “Schindler’s List.”
Spielberg denounced the “rise of extremist views” and called for people to use “the power of empathy” against antisemitism or anti-Muslim hate. He also spoke out on behalf of both those killed by Hamas terrorists on Oct. 7 and innocent women and children killed in Gaza.
“We can rage against the heinous acts committed by the terrorists of Oct. 7 and also decry the killing of innocent women and children in Gaza,” the filmmaker and Shoah Foundation founder said as he accepted the University of Southern California’s highest honor, the University Medallion. “This makes us a unique force for good in the world. And here’s why we are here today to celebrate the work of the Shoah Foundation, which is more crucial now than it even was in 1994.”
Anti-Semitism: Zurich attacker radicalized in Tunisia and online
SWI:
The 15-year-old Swiss national with a Tunisian immigrant background is in custody until further notice. On the evening of March 2, he attacked a 50-year-old Jewish man with a knife and seriously injured him. In a video in Arabic, the teenager declared his allegiance to Islamic State (IS).