Accepted As Jews Who Play Sports

"We wanted to show that we're still here -- that we're accepted, that we weren't ended in 1933."

"I've been there from the first day. I never imagined that we -- as a Jewish team -- would ever be playing a Cup game against a Bundesliga team. So for us, and for me personally, it's a huge joy."

"I have many German friends, Christian friends. I never speak about it. Perhaps his father or grandfather was in the SS, for me everything is open."

"It was 80 years ago. It's past. Now, we try to be accepted as Jews."

Marian Wajselfisz, co-founder, Makkabi Berlin 

"This is something we're extremely proud of. We're here and whoever is ready to play for us, and is also open to playing for a club with Jewish origins and some sort of Jewish culture, we're absolutely happy to integrate people into our teams."

Makkabi Berlin Board Member Michael Koblenz

"Sometimes I feel tired, but when I see the kids, I forget about the tiredness, I'm happy."

"It doesn't matter about religion, or what you are. It's not important."

"The only important thing is that you like to come and play football."

Senegalese defender Papa Alpha Diop, 36-year-old Muslim

The Makkabi Berlin team pose for a photo before a practice match, in Berlin, July 26, 2023. (AP Photo/Ciaran Fahey)

 

In 1898 the Bar Kochba Berlin sports team was founded for the specific purpose of promoting participation in sports for Jews living in Germany. At its peak there were over 40,000 club members. Jewish athletes were forced to play in separate competitions when National Socialist Party (NAZIs) came to power. By 1938 they were banned outright from playing as a Jewish team. And needless to say before long, Jewish players of any sport were banned from playing altogether.

Makkabi Berlin, founded in 1970 as a successor to Bar Kochba Berlin by Holocaust survivors who wanted to revive the tradition of Jewish team sports, lost its 1971 match played in Berlin in a score of 15-1. That was then. Today, Makkabi represents the first Jewish club to play in the season-long tournament for 64 of Germany's best professional and amateur football clubs in the German Cup.

Back in 1935 when the annual competition was initiated under fascist Germany, Jews were forbidden from being involved. Now, fifth-tier Makkabi will be playing against top-tier Wolfsburg. Marian Wajsefisz, one of Makkabi Berlin's co-founders, survived the Holocaust along with his immediate family members, thanks to a Polish couple who gave them haven, hiding them for close to two years in the cellar of their home.

 

Makkabi Berlin co-founder Marian Wajselfisz points to the date below an old photo of the team during an interview with The Associated Press, in Berlin, July 26, 2023. (AP Photo/Ciaran Fahey)

 

Other Makkabi clubs exist in Germany -- Munich, Frankfurt and Dusseldorf -- as well as other Jewish sports and social clubs worldwide. With its 550 members teams are fielded in a number of sports by the Berlin club, that includes basketball and volleyball. There is no mistaking the identity of the Makkabi Berlin club; its mission as a Jewish club remains central to its identity, featuring the Star of David on its crest. Membership, however, is open.

The soccer team has welcomed players with a number of religious faiths, from fifteen countries. Membership includes Jews, Muslims and Christians. Papa Alpha Diop joined the Makkabi Berlin 2017, a Muslim from Senegal. He has taken on duties above his team activities, overseeing the club's youth wing, coaching its under-ten team where children as young as five are able to join its activities.

The Wolfsburg team Makkabi is competing against on Sunday won the German Cup in 2015. It competes in the Bundesliga against teams such as Bayern Munich. Makkabi qualified for this year's German Cup through its win of the Berlin Cup in June for the first time, earning promotion to the fifth tier through winning the Berlin league last season. 

The normal sports ground for Makkabi is named after former national team player Julius Hirsch, whose grandson was invited to the match. His grandfather fought for Germany in the First World War. Julius Hirsch won club championships with Karlsruher FV and Furth, playing for Germany at the 1912 Olympics. The final chapter of his life excised his loyalty to Germany and his war heroism. His reward was delivered at Auschwitz, where he was murdered because he was Jewish.

"The popularity, visibility and success of Jewish sports clubs symbolizes the growth of established Jewish life in Germany and the world", was a statement issued by the World Jewish Congress, "delighted and proud" to acknowledge Makkabi's sporting achievements.

Volkswagen owns the Wolfsburg team, the very auto manufacturer that Hitler was so proud of, 'the people's auto', and which used forced labour in its manufacturing during World War II; Jewish slave labour. German antisemitism went underground for quite a while, following the war's end and the full revelations of Nazi Germany's annihilation of Europe's Jewish population. But it has seen a resurgence.

 

Makkabi Berlin coach Wolfgang Sandhowe instructs his players before a practice match, in Berlin, Wednesday, July 26, 2023. When Makkabi Berlin takes the field on Sunday Aug. 13, 2023, the soccer club founded by Holocaust survivors will become the first Jewish team to play in the German Cup. (AP Photo/Ciaran Fahey)

"If anyone has any problem with us or has any antisemitic background, we're open to discuss, we're open to inform."

"But we don't want to hide and just be in the victim's role. We want to be active."

"And I  think that's also a huge part of the success."

Makkabi captain Doron Bruck

An Epic Odyssey

Cantor Moshe Kraus

"I sang it, and unbelievable, he [Commandant Josef Kramer, the Beast of Belsen] cried. I couldn’t believe it, he can cry."

"That murderer, that nothing–I don’t have the words—‘murderer’ is a compliment for him. For him, killing a person was like killing a fly."

"If he was going for a walk and saw a Jew, he would shoot him. He would go to see if the bullet hit right in the middle [of the forehead]. And if it wasn’t in the middle, he said a very nasty word."

"When they hanged him, I cried. He saved my life. And I can’t forgive [myself] till today why I cried."

Moshe Kraus, Holocaust survivor, Cantor

The first of nine children born in Uzhhorord, then a border town in Czechoslovakia, now part of Ukraine, his parents were Hasidic Jews. When he was all of eight years old, one Saturday Moshe raised his voice to sing Shabbat songs with the men in his village. "My amazing alto singing voice had been discovered", he remarked of the silence that followed his singing, he wrote in his autobiography, The Life of Moshele Der Zinger: How Singing Saved My Life.

 

The Jews of eastern Europe soon became aware of a "wunderkind" among them as he began travelling widely to sing on Shabbat and to give concerts. At age 18 he was hired as the chief cantor of Sighet, a Hungarian town with five synagogues. In his choir another young man sang with whom he would become lifelong friends; Peace activist and novelist, Holocaust survivor and Nobel Peace Prize winner Elie Wiesel. At 19 Cantor Kraus was appointed chief cantor of Budapest.

 

Moshe Kraus had received professional training at the Vienna Conservatory where he happened to be on November 1938 during Kristallnacht, the pogrom that launched Nazi Germany's agenda of murderous Jewish persecution that would ultimately result in the genocidal annihilation of six million of Europe's Jewish population. He witnessed Vienna's main synagogue in flames. 

 

At the start of the Second World War, Jews were deported even as rumours began circulating that Jews were being slaughtered by the Nazis. He was deported in 1943 for slave labour in a Serbian copper mine, the Bor Labour camp. He spent nine months of labour there before he was sent to a coal-mining camp in southwestern Poland, Katowice. He was next shipped to Bergen-Belsen in northern Germany.

 

In Bergen-Belsen he became prisoner A855. There, at age 21, already experienced widely throughout Europe as a highly regarded cantor, he sang to his fellow prisoners to try to raise their spirits, to produce a diversion from the misery that life had become -- however briefly a relief from the reality of starvation, disease and death. His repertoire turned to popular Jewish songs of the day. "I began to go from barrack to barrack, singing, singing, singing", he explained. 

 

A 2017 file photo of Moshe Kraus, a well-known cantor in the Jewish community in Ottawa. Photo by Wayne Cuddington /Postmedia

 

He spoke six languages, among them German. When his performances reached the ears of the camp commandant, SS Capt. Josef Kramer, he was brought before the man who demanded to know whether he could sing in German. Responding that he was familiar with the songs of a popular Austro-Hungarian tenor, Cantor Kraus sang two of Joseph Schmidt's songs. "Would you believe it? This murderer -- he could kill a man like nothing -- he cried!"

He was henceforth to return on Sundays to sing, and in exchange Cantor Kraus was rewarded with scraps of food, a situation that he credited with saving his life, allowing him to survive the deadly Bergen-Belsen. Even so, conditions at the camp by early 1945 rapidly deteriorated as prisoners from other camps were moved west to Bergen-Belsen. Little food was available and soon typhus, dysentery and tuberculosis spread.

By the time British forces liberated Bergen-Belson on April 15, 1945, Cantor Kraus weighed 77 pounds. He remembers a British soldier picking him up, shouting, "Victory! Victory!" And then he woke up in a hospital. Following his recovery he went to work for a Jewish relief organization, returned to Bucharest to search for his family where he found that his father, mother and five of his siblings had perished. He moved to British-mandate Palestine, joined the Israeli army, and learned to assemble and disassemble tanks.

He also was invited to become the Israel Defense Forces first chief cantor for the next four years. From there he sang at major synagogues in Antwerp, Johannesburg, Mexico City and Ottawa. In his travels he gave concerts in places from Glasgow to Istanbul, Miami to Leningrad. An extraordinary man who lived an extraordinary life in extraordinary times. 

 

His life ended on May 29, at age 100, when he died in Ottawa where he was cantor at the city's oldest synagogue, Congregation Beth Shalom, and where he and his wife Rivka had lived since 1975.

Moshe Kraus, a survivor of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp during the Second World War, stands outside the Bergen-Belsen Memorial before it was officially opened in October 2007. Photo by NIGEL TREBLIN /AFP/Getty Images

 

Moving Holocaust Survivors From Line of Fire

"They told me Germany was my best option. I told them, 'I hope you're right'."

"That first time, I was a child, with my mother as my protector." 

"Now, I've felt so alone. It is a terrible experience, a painful one."

"I wasn't afraid of Germany. I just could not stop thinking: 'Papa died in that war. My cousins died in that war."

Galina Ploschenko, 88, Holocaust survivor, Ukraine Evacuee to Hanover, Germany

 

"I understand the pain of these people, I know who they are."

"These scenes, these stories now -- in a way, it's like life is going full circle."

Pini Miretski, leader, medical evacuation team, Joint Distribution Committee, Jerusalem 

:I feel a kind of hopelessness because it does feel like history repeats itself."

"Today's war has ended any negative emotions I felt toward Germany."

Vlaldimir Peskov, 87, evacuated from Zaporizhyhia, Ukraine

Holocaust survivor Raisa Valiushkevych journeyed 72 hours to flee the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Image: Thomson Reuters/REUTERS/Timm Reichert

 

The Joint Distribution Committee is a humanitarian organization with a long history of evacuations, beginning with the smuggling of Jews out of Europe during World War 11. Its volunteers, for the last two decades have been engaged in reviving Jewish life in former Soviet countries, including Ukraine. The American Joint Distribution Committee has joined resources with the Jewish Claims Conference to rescue Holocaust survivors from Ukraine and bring them to safety, away from the conflict zone.

The Jewish Claims Conference saw its founding with the purpose of negotiating Holocaust restitutions with the government of Germany. It maintains a list of survivors used to distribute pensions and health care, normally. It now identifies people for the purpose of evacuation. Why Germany? ask many of those they propose to move out of Ukraine to calmer precincts where care for the elderly can be established. "One of them told us: I won't be evacuated to Germany. I do want to be evacuated -- but not to Germany", explained Rudiger Mahlo of the Claims Conference.

Mr. Mahler would explain to those hesitant or adamant about not moving to Germany: Germany, because it makes sense under these conditions. Germany, because it isn't the Germany of the Holocaust. And it is easily approached by ambulance through Poland when evacuating people from Ukraine. There is a well endowed medical system, a large population of Russian-speaking people, and his organization enjoys a close working relationship with government officials there.

Those who balk at entering Germany even under the extreme emergency situation that the Russian invasion of Ukraine entails, have the option as well of flying to Israel. That option is available to those whose level of frailty would not hinder them from that mode of transport. Many of the elderly Holocaust survivors living in long-term care homes in Ukraine have no wish to leave the country, despite the conflict; it is their home.

A group of Jews, including a small boy, is escorted from the Warsaw Ghetto by German soldiers in this April 19, 1943 photo. The picture formed part of a report from SS Gen. Stroop to his Commanding Officer, and was introduced as evidence to the War Crimes trials in Nuremberg in 1945

 

Many of them have memories of Germany they have no wish to revive; desperately fleeing bombs. Hearing in hushed tones of massacres of Jews. Losing relatives. At that time they survived in the Soviet Union, and it was Soviet troops that liberated the Auschwitz concentration camp, one of the most notoriously infamous of the ring of work-, concentration- and death-camps established throughout Nazi-occupied Europe.

These are survivors of the most heinous, institutionalized genocidal 'Final Solution' whose family members perished in the hellfires of the Holocaust; they are elderly and they are physically fragile. And they have been plunged yet again into a psychic maelstrom of emotional dread. And now, to escape the inferno of another conflict with its incessant bombing, they are being evacuated to, of all places, the very country that planned to annihilate Europe's entire Jewish population.

Robbed of their families, of their childhood, of their expectation to live normal lives, being asked to trust that in Germany which once planned and carried out their mass annihilation through countless atrocities and the gas chambers and crematoria of Auschwitz, to trust that they would find care and concern for their well-being in Germany. That they must now flee the violence of the Russian military, in a gross reversal of their existential experiences.

The rescue mission was organized by Jewish groups to take Holocaust survivors out of Ukraine by ambulance. Galina Ploschenko was trapped in her bed in Dnipro, at a retirement center while artillery strikes clapped overhead and air raid sirens shrieked through the air. Nurses and other retirees who could manage to walk, relocated to the institution's basement for cover from the blasts, but she was unable to move, remaining in her third-floor room, bedridden. 

Alla Ilyinichna Sinelnikova (left), 90, and Sonya Leibovna Tartakovskaya, 83, were recently evacuated from Ukraine to Germany. Both are survivors of the Holocaust, and this is the second time they are fleeing war. "I never thought I would live to see such horror for the second time in my life," says Sinelnikova. "I thought it was in my past, all over and done with. And now we're reliving it." Esme Nicholson/NPR

To the present, roughly 80 of the most frail Holocaust survivors have been successfully evacuated. Ukraine is home to an estimated 10,000 Holocaust survivors. Up to 40 people can be taken out in a single evacuation. The most difficult part of the process is convincing the frail elderly with their haunting memories that Germany is now a safe place for them to be evacuated to. Now settled in Germany, Ms.Ploschenko states "nothing but love" for the country while still remembering "everything" about the war she survived.

Her memory includes her mother covering her with a scarf, winding it around her naked body. That among the countless Jews murdered, there was an aunt and two cousins, smothered in mobile gas wagons called "dushegubka"; soul-killers. Her father disappeared and was never heard from again after he left to fight with the Soviet army.  During the evacuations ambulances have been forced to return to checkpoints in response to conflict flare-ups On occasion ambulances were confiscated by the military, for their own wounded.

 

Three U.S. soldiers look at bodies stuffed into an oven in a crematorium in April of 1945. Photo taken in an unidentified concentration camp in Germany, at time of liberation by U.S. Army.

 

Pini Miretski, leader of the Joint Distribution Committee medical evacuation team has his own searing memories. His great-grandparents were murdered at Babyn Yar, a ravine near Kyiv where tens of thousands of Jews were stripped and shot with machine guns between 1931 and 1943, their bodies shoved into the ravine. Early on in the invasion Russian missiles struck the memorial to the Babyn Yar massacres.

Light After Darkness

"One of the things we're really keen to make people aware of in the new Holocaust Galleries is that this period is really important."

"Displaced persons' camps had the highest birthrate in all of Europe at the time. This small number of survivors were forced into this situation where they had nobody and nothing, and had to rebuild new lives. The wedding dress is a powerful illustration of that."

"There are good reasons for them [traditional Holocaust displays] to be in the dark, which is that it feels appropriate to the nature of the subject."

"But the problem is that it also tacitly suggests that the Holocaust is something that happened in the shadows. We wanted to be really clear with visitors about the fact that these things happened in our world."

"We need to accept the fact that this didn't happen despite Western culture, it happened within it, and because of it."

James Bulgin, content leader, Holocaust Galleries, Imperial War Museums, London

Holocaust survivor Gena Turgel examines a Holocaust memorial board at Belfast city hall, ahead of speaking at the UK's main commemoration for National Holocaust Memorial Day.   Paul Faith - PA Images / PA Images via Getty Images

"She [her mother, Holocaust survivor Gena Turgel] would be ecstatic. When she was asked to have it [her mother's wedding dress] at the museum she thought it was unbelievable. She was incredibly proud that people would see it and realize that out of the horrors, something wonderful happened."

"He [her father] thought he was the luckiest man alive -- I remember him saying that. He would always bring her breakfast in bed on a tray. Even if he had to be up and get out to the office at 6 a.m. he would squeeze her orange juice and make sure that she had grapefruit, toast and a cup of tea."

"Because of the shock of going in there [Bergen-Belsen death camp] and seeing massed piles of bodies [he had to take sick leave]. And of course being a Jew, it made matters worse."

"My grandmother would always have to take to bed with her a flask of milk, a piece of bread and a few lumps of sugar. Every single night."

"She didn't want praise, she just wanted people to know and to understand what had happened to her family and to other families... And, with the anti-Semitism that's going on now, she would just say: 'Make sure it doesn't happen again'."

Bernice (Turgel) Kennet, United Kingdom

Gena and Norman married in Lübeck in October 1945, at a synagogue that had survived because the Nazis used it as a stable. Pictured on their wedding day

 

This woman is talking about her mother and her father. Her mother a survivor of the Holocaust; her father a member of the British military among those who had freed her mother, concentration camp survivor Gena Turgel, a Polish Jew who, six months after the end of the World War II and the liberation of concentration camp prisoners, at age 22 married the 24-year-old Jewish sergeant in the British Intelligence Corps, in a traditional Jewish marriage ceremony at a synagogue in Lubeck, Poland, in October of 1945.

 

The bride wore an elaborate ivory wedding dress. The dress designed with puff sleeves, its skirt decorated with gathered silk flounces, produced by a local tailor, the fabric that of a British Army parachute. The wedding made headlines in the British press, identifying Gena Turgel as the "Bride of Belsen". She was the youngest of nine children and had been through four Nazi death camps including Auschwitz. She survived Belsen by convincing the authorities she was a nurse. She worked at the camp's hospital, caring for 15-year-old Anne Frank, dying from typhus.

This is the dress that has been earmarked to become a feature in the new Holocaust Galleries, meant to aid in illustrating post-liberation history. The Imperial War Museum London is preparing to present the Holocaust in a wider context of the Second World War, differing from other Holocaust museums, in planning to present its exhibit halls in full light. Gena had written a memoir in 1987 which she titled "I Light a Candle", an echo seen in this year's Holocaust Memorial Day themed "Be a light in the darkness". Gena had declared "We will continue to do our bit for as long as we can, secure in the knowledge that others will continue to light a candle long after us."

Before she died at age 95 in 2018, Gena Turgel immersed herself in telling "the story that six million others cannot tell", in hundreds of talks about her personal experiences. Bernice recalls her father telling her that the smell of the camp "always lived with him". He had himself taken the notorious Josef Kramer, "Beast of Belsen" into custody, and he had mused that "Maybe it was fate, that a Jew should arrest one of the war's worst concentration camp guards". An experience that left him immediately ill enough to take sick leave, and one that would haunt him until his death in 1995.

Gena herself described the barracks of Plaszow concentration camp where her sister Miriam would sleep "on my left side, on my arm", before being shot. "From that moment to this" she said in 1995, "my left side has always felt chilly, as if a part of my flesh had been cut away." Her sister Hela died after having been injected with gasoline in a sadistic 'medical' experiment. Her mother Estera, forced to collect the wood to burn the bodies of her children, managed to survive. She lived with the Turgels in North London for 29 years, until her death, haunted by the fear of hunger.

Gena Turgel is greeted by the Queen at a Buckingham Palace garden party in May 2015. Photograph: WPA/Getty

The Third Reich Rail Component Enabling the Holocaust

"I blame the railway company for knowingly transporting Jews to the concentration camps and for killing those Jews there in a terrible way."

"I cannot give up because this hurts me every day. Every day I have to think about this and it hurts me. And I want the pain to finally pass."

"I want recognition from them and recognition always comes with an allowance."

Salo Muller, 84, surviving child of Dutch-Jewish Holocaust victims

"The Dutch Jews transported by the Deutsche Reichsbahm have simply been forgotten."

"The state is a hundred percent shareholders in the railways. Germany's moral responsibility always remains."

Axel Hagedorn, Muller lawyer

Snow-covered personal effects of those deported to the Auschwitz concentration camp litter the train tracks leading to the camp's entrance, in an image from around 1945

The German rail system during the Holocaust years of the Second World War ran over a hundred 'Final Solution' trains from the Netherlands to extermination camps such as Auschwitz and Sobibor. As indeed they did from every country of Nazi-occupied Europe, in a massive drive to exterminate European Jews from their countries of origin to satisfy the vision of a 'Judenrein' world. Henrich Himmler, Nazi SS chief in 1943 pleaded for more trains to enable the rapid transport of Jews to slave labour and death camps.

The sole Nazi representing the German train network to be charged was then-rail boss Albert Ganzenmuller, in 1973. On his first court day he suffered a heart attack, adjudged then medically unfit to stand trial. He lived until 1996 with no legal consequences for his role in transporting millions of Jews to their death. Lawyer Hagedorn, on behalf of his client, Salo Muller, has written to German Chancellor Angela Merkel to remind her that history records but does not forgive.

Jews deported from Warsaw Ghetto    US Holocaust Memorial Museum

The heirs of German wartime railways, he wrote, have a moral and clear legal obligation to recognize their predecessors' role in the slaughter of millions of Jews, Sinti and Roma, homosexuals and political dissenters, among others. The Nederlandse Spoorwegen Dutch railway company apologized for its part in the conveyance of Dutch Jews to death camps last year, after Mr. Muller successfully sued them. They paid 50 million euros in compensation, divided among survivors and their families.

Clearly, the German railway company that did the bidding of the Third Reich in its campaign to annihilate European Jewry has an obligation to acknowledge its role in the signal crime of the 20th Century. Salo Muller's parents wee transported by train from Amsterdam to Auschwitz when he was a child. He has lived with that reality all his life, tormented by visions of how his parents suffered and how they perished, all the while knowing that their fate had been shared by millions of other Jews.

Jews loading onto trains at the Umschlagplatz in Warsaw  Wikipedia  

Hie success in holding the Netherlands rail company accountable for their complicity with the Nazi occupation has spurred him to go on to demand that the German rail company admit its own responsibility in uncountable Jewish lives being forfeited to the Final Solution that produced the Holocaust. There are close to 500 Dutch survivors and approximately 5,500 next of kin, all of whom await recognition, admission of responsibility on the part of the German rail company, and accompanying reparations.

The Deutsche Reichbahn operated German railways during the Second World War, transporting about 107,000 Dutch Jews to concentration camps. The company profited to the amount of 15 million euros (in today's approximate currency accounts). During that fearful time in Jewish history, the victims themselves were charged to fund their own travel costs, which took them to their death.

Mr. Muller had been a physiotherapist with the Ajax Dutch soccer club before he embarked on this campaign.

Salving a Collective Conscience

"It is all correct. [Albert] Reimann senior and Reimann junior were guilty ... they belonged in jail."
"In the 2000s, the Reimann children started reading and browsing their father's documents. At the beginning of 2014 we decided: we want to know more."
"That's why we signed a contract with economics historian Professor Paul Erker of the University of Munich."
"When Professor Erker reported, we were speechless. We were ashamed and white as the wall. There is nothing to gloss over."
"These crimes are disgusting."
Peter Harf, managing partner, Reimann's investment firm JAB Holding Company

Adolf Hitler harnessed the might of German industry in 1939-1945 Getty

"The funds being provided through the Alfred Landecker Foundation will make a significant difference in the lives of so many who deserve so much. Elderly, poor Holocaust survivors need food, medicine and heat in the winter. These funds will enable thousands of survivors to live in dignity."
Julius Berman, president, Claims Conference

"This [donation] marks a significant step for the Alfred Landecker Foundation and our ambition of researching and remembering the atrocities of the Holocaust, as well as providing humanitarian assistance for survivors of the Holocaust and former forced labor in World War II."
David Kamenetzky, chair, Alfred Landecker Foundation

Another German industry with vast holdings all over the world has 'suddenly discovered' that the family patriarch and his son were eager and helpful Nazi collaborators, identifying as Aryan, a superior race that placed them well above concerns of human rights for those considered not merely subordinate by birth to the master race, but justifying their use as slave labourers. This is the Reimann family, whose enterprising Nazi past appears to have slipped by the notice of current family members who have suddenly developed a conscience.

Their mea culpa has resulted in a very successful bid to buy forgiveness for their predecessors' lack of humanity. There it is in full show with a $7.3 million donation to help survivors of the Holocaust. This spontaneous gift of contrition came into being once the Reimann family's links to the Hitler regime became public knowledge. The donation is to be given to the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany which disseminates financial support for services and care to Holocaust survivors.

So what is the amount of the wealth garnered by this family, owners of Krispy Kreme Doughnuts, Panera Bread, Pret A Manger, Keurig Green Mountain and scores of other popular and vastly remunerative enterprises? The family firm which took advantage of a bonanza of slave labour in the National Socialist halcyon years of 1939 - 1945, now has a value of $48.5 billion. Put that in perspective with the conscience-donation of $7.3 million; a mere pittance, an amount so feeble meant to represent an admission of atrocious collaboration in denying the humanity of the enslaved as to be outright pathetic and insulting.

Back in March of 2019, the general public in Germany was made aware through Bild am Sonntag newspaper that had access to revelatory documents enabling them to publish a series of discoveries about the Reimann family's past.The revelations were not entirely out of the blue, since the family had long been linked with an association to the National Socialist Party. Bild, however, divulged many incriminatory and interesting details.

Round- up of random civilians for forced labour, 1941

Albert Reimann senior and his son were party members, having joined the Nazi party in 1931 as loyal supporters. The company was proud to fly swastikas at its factories, celebrating its discernment at linking itself with Hitler's National Socialists as all good Aryans would be expected to do. Eastern Europe handily supplied female slaves for the family's factories. One-third of the firm's workforce was represented by forced labour. No doubt German workers resented and abused them as well for taking good jobs from Germans.

Many of the laborers died of exhaustion, mistreatment and malnutrition. Millions were brought to Germany from a dozen countries of German occupation. Among them mostly Jews but countless other as well. Reimann junior wrote to Heinrich Himmler in 1937 proudly stating his family was a "purely Aryan family business that is over 100 years old", committed indisputably to "race theory".

Arrested by the Allies post-war but briefly, they were released and permitted to continue to control their family enterprise. The family claims never to have discussed anything that occurred in the past, but decided finally to investigate what conceivably did dwell in the family past. To that end, after the Bild revelations, the managing partner of the investment firm JAB, part of the Reimann holdings, commissioned research of its own. Which, in the final analysis matched the information that Bild's documents provided for publication.

Albert Reimann Sr, built his fortune on a platform os slave labour. Archive

The family is doubtless satisfied that it has remedied its founding ancestors' errors in judgement. With which they had nothing whatever in common, nor responsibility for. That their vast fortune resulted from the prudence in employing slave labour upon whom tortuous conditions were imposed with predictable results, is merely an irrelevance of history. So that pathetic pittance that is being doled out to charities whose role it is to gather whatever donations they may,  to help support Jewish survivors of the master plan to genocide certainly clears their collective conscience.