The Cynical Hypocrisy of the International Community

"Relatively many people survived, which for example barely happened in sites which didn't have such a forced labour component."

"[As testimony to the past purpose of Auschwitz, maintaining the death camp as a memorial site has its value]: You have the gate [Arbeit Macht Frei], you have the wagon [transport]. You have the incredibly long railway platform which leads to the former crematoria and gas chambers."

Thomas Van de Putte, scholar specializing in Holocaust memory, King's College London

"I saw thousands of tortured people whom the Red Army had saved -- people so thin that they swayed like branches in the wind, people whose ages one could not possibly guess."

Boris Polevoy, Pravda correspondent, eyewitness to Soviet liberation of Auschwitz Jan.27, 1945

"This is the anniversary of liberation. We remember the victims, but we also celebrate freedom."

"It is hard to imagine the presence of Russia, which clearly does not understand the value of freedom."

Auschwitz Museum director Piotr Cywinski

The entrance gate to the former Nazi German concentration and extermination camp Auschwitz pictured on January 10.    Kacper Pempel/Reuters

 

The world is set to mark the 80th anniversary of the most dreadful mass atrocity that a country at war designed in an orgy of hatred against an ethnic population drawn from the countries of Europe whose citizenry included millions of diaspora Jews forced in antiquity from their ancestral homeland for exile abroad by a Roman occupation of the holy land that implacably put down an insurrection of Judean origin in a paroxysm of violence that millennia later was replicated with more modern and equally savage technological means of broader dimensions.

It is highly doubtful that Romans of the period felt it incumbent upon themselves to harvest the hair, skeletal remains, attire, gold dental fillings, marriage rings, to enrich themselves and produce stuffing for pillows, the production of soap from the remains of their victims as Nazi Germany felt disposed to do. The slaughter of children, women and men of all ages may be a casualty of war anywhere at any time when civilian populations bear the brunt of conflict that uproots and victimizes them in loss of home, necessities of life and life itself, but Nazi Germany brought its obsession with the extermination of Jews to a fine art.

This photo provided by Paris' Holocaust Memorial shows a German soldier shooting a Ukrainian Jew during a mass execution in Vinnytsia, Ukraine, sometime between 1941 and 1943. This image is titled "The last Jew in Vinnitsa", the text that was written on the back of the photograph, which was found in a photo album belonging to a German soldier

 

It took an orgy of mass dementia to organize round-ups, persuade populations that a nest of vipers lived amongst them that German authorities prepared to save them from, infesting those non-Jewish citizens with a suspicion and loathing of Jews they had lived among for centuries to convince them that the goal of extermination would make for a more refined, pure society once the presence of Jews was eliminated. People adapted nicely and deliberately turned their faces away from the putrid agonies of exclusion and humiliation their fellow Jewish citizens suffered, glad when they suddenly vanished into slave labour camps since out of sight, out of mind was a great relief,

Now, generations after the Holocaust for most people inhabiting our familiar world the memory of mass annihilation is beyond faint and growing fainter. Just as the thousands of Jews who managed miraculously to survive have grown old and are growing older, their witness status soon to fade itself, in and out of history. To be sure, others besides Jews died; political prisoners, Poles, Roma, Sinti, Soviet prisoners of war, homosexuals, but it was Europe's Jews that comprised the target focus.

 

This year, on the 80th anniversary memorializing the Holocaust, an estimated 50 survivors are expected to be present, and they will speak to the world once again of their loss, their ordeal, their endurance, their unforgettable memories. Two-thirds of the Jews of Europe perished in that orgy of hate and demonic destruction of human life. They were murdered in the death camps established all over Europe, places like Treblinka, Majdanek, Stutthof, Auschwitz, Buchenwald, Dachau, Mauthausen and Bergen-Belsen among a plethora of others. 

There were survivors at Auschwitz for the simple reason that though it was a death camp it also was a labour camp. Where those who survived the journey to Auschwitz in crowded train transports were separated on arrival into groups deemed sufficiently healthy to work, the others directed to groups who would enter the 'shower rooms' where they were gassed to death with Zyklon B, their remnants cremated in giant furnaces, their ashes belched out of massive chimneys to nurture the surrounding soil.

Presidents, royalty, ambassadors, politicians, rabbis and priests will be among those in attendance to memorialize the fixation of a nation and a continent on the destruction of a tiny ethnic/cultural/religious group that had lived among them for  generations, enriching those countries with their presence as artists, scientists, teachers, factory workers, lawyers, doctors, justices, soldiers, entertainment figures, industrialists, bankers and journalists, bakers and cobblers.

 

The royalty, presidents, ambassadors, politicians and priests of the time who failed to exert their moral outrage over the persecution, then the demonization, then the isolation, then the ghettoization, then the imprisonment and finally the murder of six million Jews were in a very real sense complicit with the perpetrators of the vast act of genocide. Their present day counterparts are in a very real sense not much different than those during the Holocaust who couldn't be moved to make an effort at prevention and deterrence.

The rising tide of antisemitism which bears such an uncanny resemblance to that of the 1930s and 1940s and the growing calls of accusations against a tiny Jewish state established in its ancestral geography to restore pride in Judaic heritage but above all to give strength to the cry of "Never Again!" by its pledge to protect and guide Jews into the future is once again under existential threat. Collegial nations of the West, supporters of the Jewish state, have managed to remain on the sidelines once again, leaving Israel and Jews to their own defense.

The ruins of the sprawling Birkenau site stretch far into the distance

"Auschwitz. Not long ago. Not far away"

"I had no idea where we were. It was unreal and beyond my imagination."

"After being tattooed [133628] and inducted as a prisoner and losing my identity, I thought this was hell on Earth, from which I had little or no hope of getting out. I was in total despair."

"Only my father's presence gave me some hope."

Nate Leipciger, 96, from Sosnowiec, Poland

 

"[The artifacts, augmented by survivors' recorded testimonies], are the traces of genocide, the remnants of a murdered people, and the material evidence of crimes against humanity."

"They are what remain despite the perpetrators' attempts to conceal their crimes."

Paul Salmon, curator, exhibit catalogue, "Auschwitz. Not long ago. Not far away" 

 

"It's not easy to go to a museum to learn about the particular story of Auschwitz, but sometimes the things that are more difficult are the ones that are more necessary."

"We knocked on many doors. I never got no for an answer."

 Luis Ferreiro, director, Musealia, Spain

 

"[The Royal Ontario Museum's mission is] to help people understand the past, make sense of the present, and come together to shape a shared future."

"[With the Auschwitz exhibit], we could not imagine an exhibition that more materially fulfilled our mission."

"[There is a deliberate attempt to avoid] gratuitous depictions of violence." 

Josh Basseches, museum director and CEO, ROM

Jews from Lubny, Ukraine, shortly before their murder by an Einsatzgruppe, 1941. This photo is one of the items in the exhibit Auschwitz: Not long ago. Not far away. Photo by Musealia

In 2008, Luis Ferreiro, director of his family's Spanish company Musealia, in mourning after the death of his 26-year-old bother, read psychotherapist and philosopher Viktor Frankl's book, Man's Search for Meaning. It gave him comfort. Viktor Frankl was a survivor of Auschwitz. It was there that his pregnant wife, parents and his brother perished in Nazi Germany's campaign to extinguish all Jewish life in Europe. The book's story of survival and finding purpose in life despite the worst possible circumstances, resonated with Mr. Ferreiro.

Although not a Jew, he took inspiration from the writer's message and decided to pursue "a moral necessity to do something. It was always about Auschwitz for me". He collaborated with the Auschwitz Museum and spent time tracking down other potential involvement in a long but rewarding process to showcase human survival in the most obscene, inhumane period of modern human history. His decision to dedicate himself to this project gave purpose to his own life, through his grief.

 

The end product of his research and organizing of an exhibit to feature the Auschwitz death camp during the years of the Holocaust, in the Second World War, opened in 2017 in Madrid. Since then the exhibit has toured in New York, Kansas City the Ronald Reagan Library in Simi Valley, Malmo, Sweden, and Boston. Between 1.4 and 2 million people have viewed the exhibit, according to Mr. Ferreiro's estimation. During his search for collaborators for his project, Mr. Ferreiro discovered Robert Jan van Pelt, professor at the University of Waterloo, among the world's leading experts on Auschwitz, who became the exhibit's chief curator.

At Birkenau, the largest of the nearly fifty sub-camps collectively known as Auschwitz, 96-year-old Toronto resident, Nate Leipciger, Holocaust survivor, who has over the years dedicated himself to educating the public about the Holocaust, had lost his mother and sister, murdered along with eight other members of his extended family. Their lives were taken in the gas chambers of Birkenau.

Of the Nazi death camps scattered throughout Europe, Auschwitz was the largest, most notorious and deadliest. At liberation, photographs of skeletal inmates in striped uniforms and dazed eyes, many too weak to rise from their serried bunks, were  seen worldwide as examples of the Nazi atrocities perpetrated against Europe's Jews in the slaughter of six million of Europe's Jewish communities. 

Details like crammed boxcars, crematoria, belching chimneys of human ash, barbed wire enclosures, a gate whose legend read "Arbeit Macht Frei" have become symbolic of the Holocaust. 1.3 million people were deported to Auschwitz in the four years of 1940 to 1944; 1.1 million were Jews. 900,000 were gassed soon after their arrival in packed rail boxcars. Others were used for slave labour until they died of exhaustion and malnutrition. Some 75,000 non-Jewish Poles, 21,000 Roma, 14,000 Soviet prisoners of war and up to 15,000 of other categories including criminals, homosexuals, Jehovah's Witnesses and "undesirables", were also murdered there.

On January 10, preceding the 80th anniversary of the camp's liberation on January 27 (annual International Holocaust Remembrance Day), the exhibit will open at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto. Over 500 original artifacts, along with hundreds of photographs, charts, drawings, correspondence and diagrams will be shown at the exhibit, most of them on loan from the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum, and from over 20 other institutions.

Among many other items are receptacles that once contained Zyklon B pellets. Belongings of newly-arrived prisoners of the time, are heaped within a large glass case, comprised of everyday common personal items such as shaving material, perfume bottles, eyeglasses, hair brushes, bowls and buttons. Personal property items of the victims were in such abundance they were stored within 30 barracks, referred to as "Kanada", a country imagined to be brimful of wealth.

 

During the Holocaust an estimated 1.5 million Jewish children were murdered or died of deprivation. At a time of steeply rising antisemitism all over the world, a time when knowledge of the Holocaust is fading, the exhibit strives to reawaken a disinterested world's memory and conscience. The exhibit will be on display until September 1. The ROM is its only Canadian destination. The museum has suspended an admission charge for Grades 6 - 12 students in organized school visits.

 

 

 

White-Washing the 14th Waffen SS Galicia

"I don't understand this upside-down universe where people here admire the Waffen SS and somehow that's OK."

"It doesn't embarrass the people at my university very much that they have a [group] that has been laundering Waffen SS reputations and funds for years now."

Karyn Ball, professor, Holocaust scholar, University of Alberta

Yaroslav Hunka, right, waits for the arrival of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in the House of Commons in Ottawa on Sept. 22. The University of Alberta is returning endowment funds from the family of Hunka, a Ukrainian man whose military service was linked to the Nazis.Patrick Doyle/The Canadian Press

After professors at University of Alberta lodged complaints that the University continues to engage in white-washing Nazi crimes, a panel scheduled to discuss the Waffen SS was quietly cancelled. A number of online discussions have been held at the university since an episode involving Ukrainian-Canadian veteran Yaroslav Hunka who served in the Waffen SS was invited to the House of Commons on September 22 on the occasion of Ukraine's Jewish President addressing Parliament. The-then Speaker of the House, ignorant of the Nazi connection, invited the man, characterizing him as a Ukrainian 'hero'.

Despite reality, speakers at the online discussions claim that the 14th Waffen SS Galicia was never involved in Nazi war crimes, attributing such claims to Russian disinformation. When, once again the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies at the university planned another online discussion for October 14, university professors launched yet another protest. Complaints were filed to the university's administration charging the CIUS in whitewashing Nazi collaborators and war crimes. 

The Hunka family had endowed the organized event with $30,000, before it was cancelled. The Waffen SS Galicia was involved in massacres of civilians during the Second World War, and used as well by the Nazis to crush an uprising in Slovakia. The university's vice-president of academics announced the Hunka family funding would be returned to them. "On behalf of the university, I want to express our commitment to address antisemitism in any of its manifestations, including the ways in which the Holocaust continues to resonate in the present", she stated.

Laurie Adkin, a political scientist at the university, called for an investigation of funding and activities of the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies. Recently an article in  media outlet Progress Report revealed that the university took money from Hunka, as well as from other Waffen SS members, accepting as well funds from the estate of Volodymyr Kubijovyc, a Nazi collaborator who founded Waffen SS Galicia, advocating for ethnic cleansing, for a Ukraine without Jews or Poles.

 

Monument to the people slaughtered by the 14th Waffen-SS at Huta Pienacka. Image via Stako

 

Another veteran of the Waffen SS Galicia division, Peter Savaryn, had served at the University of Alberta as chancellor from 1982 to 1986. He helped to fund the CIUS and had been awarded the Order of Canada in 1987. Among nationalist Ukrainian-Canadians, members of Waffen SS Galicia are viewed as heroes, reflecting their battles against Soviet forces, at that time in the war fighting the Nazis with the Allied coalition. Oakville, Ontario and Edmonton, Alberta both host monuments in honour of the Ukrainian SS troops.

There is a sharp distinction from that group to the 40,000 Ukrainian-Canadians who were members of Canada's military, fighting the Nazis, for whom no monuments have ever been erected in honour of their loyalty to democratic values and Canada. A 1980s study of war criminals in Canada found 600 former members of SS Galicia still resident in Canada. "The Division was an SS division and technically all of its officers and senior NCOs are liable for trial as war criminals", a 1948 British government report noted.

"The University of Alberta says it is reviewing other donations it has received after returning $30,000 from the family of Yaroslav Hunka, a Waffen SS veteran who got a standing ovation in Parliament during a visit by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky last month."

"The university is facing calls to return hundreds of thousands of dollars in endowments in the names of Ukrainians linked to the Waffen SS Galicia division, who were admitted to Canada after the Second World War. They include an endowment of about $430,000 in the name of Volodymyr Kubijovych, who played a key role in the SS unit’s establishment in 1943."

The Globe and Mail

Left image: Peter Savaryn (left standing) and Volodymyr Kubijovyč (center sitting) pictured here at the 1976 contract signing between the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies and Shevchenko Scientific Society of Europe to collaborate on the Encyclopedia of Ukraine. Right image: Volodymyr Kubijovyč (circled in red) gives a Nazi salute at the 14th Waffen-SS recruitment ceremony in 1943.

 

Righteous Among The Nations

"Why did Jozef and Wiktoria Ulma become martyrs for solidarity with the Jews? After their deaths, the Ulma family's Bible was discovered. The Good Samaritan passage was underlined in red ink. Jesus told that parable in response to the question: 'Who is my neighbour?' That question was put in response to Jesus teaching that the two great commandments were love of God and love of neighbour." 

"Jozef and Wiktoria Ulma applied that lesson in the most harrowing and heroic circumstances. They taught their children that their Catholic faith demanded their resistance, and invited them to sacrificial solidarity."

"That lesson was soon learned beyond their family home. Their story was known, preserved and treasured by their fellow villagers."

"In 1994, Yad Vashem, Israel's Holocaust remembrance centre, declared Jozef and Wiktoria Ulma to be 'righteous among the nations', the recognition granted to those who saved Jews during the Shoah."

"Since 2018, the anniversary of the murder of the Ulma and Goldman families has been declared in Poland as a 'National Day of Remembrance of Poles Who Saved Jews under German Occupation'."

Father Raymond J. de Souza, Academic, Priest, Journalist

This undated photo shows Polish farmer Jozef Ulma with his wife Wiktoria. The Ulmas were killed with their seven children by the Nazis in 1944 for having sheltered Jews during World War II. (Mateusz Szpytma, Deputy head of Poland's IPN history institute via AP)

 

A lifetime ago, almost 80 years past, on a farm in southeast Poland in a matter of stark, horrendous minutes pf savagery, 17 people were murdered in Nazi-occupied Markowa, Poland. All these years later, the Polish family central to the story of honouring and caring for others at risk of death, a ceremony took place of deep emotional and historical significance with the beatification of an entire family, signifying the penultimate step prior to canonization in the Catholic Church.

The war began in 1939 and by 1942 the Nazi regime prepared its Final Solution to the 'Jewish problem', the plan to organize the systemic murder of Jews in Europe, enlisting the aid of other ethnic groups that were occupied by Nazi forces, to volunteer for positions with SS divisions tasked to obliterate Jewish lives. There was no shortage of volunteers eager to join the killing battalions, but at the same time there were those among whom Jews had lived for countless generations who felt empathy for their neighbours.

This undated photo shows Polish farmer Jozef Ulma with his pregnant wife Wiktoria and their six children. (Mateusz Szpytma, Deputy head of Poland’s IPN history institute via AP)

 

The Ulma family was among the latter group, who strove to help their Jewish neighbours escape the fate in store for those for whom a genocide had been planned, even at risk of losing their own lives. To give any kind of assistance to Jews was to risk immediate death, well known in the greater population, but set aside as inconsequential by Jozef and Wiktoria Ulma, a farm family by no means well off, but prepared to absorb into their humble farmhouse eight Jews from two families, to give them shelter.

The Jewish neighbours of the Ulma family were accustomed to their children being playmates. Like any other rural community, neighbours knew one another. And Jozef and Witkoria also knew that Jews in their village were being rounded up and taken away. They decided to act, and in December of 1942 they took into their household an extended Jewish family. Saul Goldman and his four adult sons, Baruch, Mechel, Joachim and Moses, became a temporary part of the Ulma household.

But it didn't end there, the Ulmas soon welcomed two sisters, Golda Gruenfell and Lea Didnet, daughters of a relative of Saul Goldman's, along with Lea Didner's daughter, Reszia. The little household became crowded indeed. And the Ulma family with their own six children accepted that they would endure living in such crowded conditions in a house with two bedrooms and an attic. They viewed it as their neighbourly responsibility to house and feed not only their own family but eight others.

To complicate matters, Wiktoria was pregnant with her seventh child. They lived together, miraculously, for a year. Until the presence of Jews living in a Polish home was revealed to police by someone who felt it their duty to be an informer, knowing what the outcome would be. On March 24, 1944, the Nazis arrived to the humble farmhouse, lining up the Goldmans and the Ulmas. First the eight Jews were shot and killed in the presence of the Ulmas.

 

Soldiers stand guard at the flower-covered grave of the Ulma family, a couple with six small children, who were killed by the Germans in 1944 for sheltering eight Jews, who were also killed with the family, during remembrance ceremonies at the cemetery in Markowa, Poland, March 17, 2016. (AP Photo/Czarek Sokolowski)

 

The soldiers then turned to Jozef and Wiktoria Ulma, shooting and killing them in front of their screaming, horrified children. The children were soon silenced as Stanislawa, eight,  Barbara, seven, Wladyslaw, six, Franciszek, four, Antoni, three, and Maria, two followed their parents into death's dominion. And there was a seventh child -- for in the trauma that resulted before their deaths, Wiktoria had gone into labour.

Her seventh child was a little boy, discovered dead alongside his parents and six siblings. When all had been murdered, the Nazis set the house on fire, and celebrated a job well done. Later, on their departure, the neighbouring villagers arrived to exhume the bodies and bury them. 

At the beatification ceremony, the program included the chief rabbi of Poland, Michael Schudrich, attending in honour of the "Good Samaritans of Markowa". Prayers were to be offered at the cemetery where the Goldman family is buried.

Clergy at the beatification ceremony of the Ulma family, who were murdered by Nazis for sheltering Jews in Markowa in south-eastern Poland.   Reuters

Canada, a Harbour For Nazi War Criminals

"Canada has a really dark history with Nazis in Canada."

"There was a point in our history where it was easier to get in [immigrate to Canada] as a Nazi than it was as a Jewish person."

"I think that's a history we have to reconcile."

Immigration Minister Marc Miller 

"What little we know of their [SS members] war record is bad."

"We're still hoping to get rid of the less desirable Ukrainian PoWs either to Germany or to Canada."

British Home Office official Beryl Hughes, 1948

Ukrainians dressed in SS Galicia Division uniforms march past graves during a re-burial ceremony at the SS Galicia Division cemetery near the village of Chervone, Ukraine, in 2013. Photo by Efrem Lukatsky/AP/File

Documents compiled by a commission set up in the 1980s to scrutinize Canada's record in permitting members of the Nazi SS into Canada through government-sanctioned visas, including members of the Ukrainian collaborationist special ethnic SS-linked divisions meant to work with German SS units in

rounding up Jews in massive pogroms of shooting deaths -- part of the Holocaust's 'Final Solution', a priority with Nazi Germany while it was prosecuting World War I --, have never been made available for public scrutiny.

 

In the wake of a public scandal where a North Bay Ukrainian military veteran was invited to parliament to meet with visiting Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy who was to address the House of Commons, where the entire House inclusive of parliamentarians and diplomatic guests rose on the introduction of the 98-year-old, a former volunteer serving with a Ukrainian SS division, Jewish groups in Canada are now demanding the release of the documents, unredacted.

 

The 40-year-old report along with allied documents that contain details relating to Nazi war criminals residing in Canada remains in a 'secret' category. It represents a second portion of a 1986 government-commissioned report on Nazis who were permitted to enter and settle in Canada. Another 1986 report was heavily censored, one that examined how it was that Nazis were enabled to enter Canada to begin with, post World War Two. That commission was struck in the wake of years of Jewish groups urging the government to investigate and extradite Nazi war criminals known to be living in Canada.

Over 600 pages of the document finally obtained through the country's Access to Information law, was censored. B'nai Brith is now demanding the release of RCMP and Department of Justice files on Nazi war criminals in Canada. "We've run up against a brick wall", commented David Matas, counsel for the Jewish advocacy organization ... in view of the government's ongoing decision to withhold such records from public view. A ray of hope shimmered briefly when Canada's Immigration Minister Marc Miller allowed that the government might reconsider whether the records could be released.

Canada's track record, he commented pointedly, with Nazi criminals was notoriously poor. B'nai Brith pointed out in a submission to the House of Commons committee on Access to Information in February that the government's approach to Nazi war criminals reflected its "intentional harbouring of known Nazi war criminals" along with "deliberate inaction".

And that historical puzzle has now been resurrected since MPs in the House of Commons a week ago honoured a Canadian-Ukrainian who had served in a Nazi SS division. Two standing ovations from those present were awarded Yaroslav Hunka, sparking outrage on social media, prompting the resignation of the House of Commons Speaker Anthony Rota on whose invitation to the man living in North Bay, arrived at the House of Commons, with no one apparently aware, despite that House security and Canadian intelligence services were to have scrutinized the man's background prior to his entrance.

 

Yaroslav Hunka, right, waits for the arrival of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in the House of Commons in Ottawa last Friday. Photo by Patrick Doyle /The Canadian Press

 

The now-98-year-old had volunteered to fight with the 14th Waffen-SS Division Galicia, a Nazi military unit recruiting Ukrainians to fight alongside German SS groups, and more to the point, help in the extermination of Europe's Jews. Poland, along with Jewish groups denounced the infamous division, citing its role in killing civilians in grouped massacres during the war. Poland, in fact has petitioned Canada for the man's extradition as a war criminal.

Large numbers of SS soldiers and other Nazi collaborators from eastern Europe settled after the war in Canada. Jewish refugee-survivors who had also come to Canada, spoke in shocked whispers to one another when they recognized on the streets of Toronto, German SS members they had last seen in the ghettos and death camps. Many of the records sought have links to the 1986 war crimes commission that was led by Justice Jules Deschenes.

The International Military Tribunal had declared the SS a criminal organization, including units of the Waffen SS, like the Galicia division that Yaroslav Hunka had fought with. There are nationalist Ukrainian-Canadians today, who view the 14th Waffen Division as heroic for battling Soviet forces who at that time were allies with the US, Canada and Britain after Russia was invaded by Germany despite Russia having begun the war as part of the Axis group.

The release in Britain in 2005 of documents from British archives outlined concerns relating to the members of SS Galicia along with intentions to ship them to Canada. "The Division was an SS division and technically all of its officers and senior NCOs are liable for trial as war criminals", noted one report for the British government. In another report dated 1948 there were discussions on sending SS members to Canada. And they did.

Nazi Germany's 1936 Olympics, Anaesthesizing the World Community of Sports

"In 1924 Adolf Hitler warned "blood desecration" and "defilement of the race" represented "original sin". The deleterious effects of "racial cross-breeding" was condemned in his book Mein Kampf. "Every animal mates only with a member of the same species ... The titmouse seeks the titmouse,the wolf the she-wolf, etc."

"Hitler's race theory was his belief in the biological superiority of the Aryan race and he vowed to end what he believed to be the harmful contamination of Aryan blood and maintain its purity."

"For Hitler, the worst violation of blood occurred in the mating between Jews and Aryans. The 1935 "Law for the Protection of German Blood" made sexual intercourse between Aryan and non-Aryan a crime."
"By 1945 race defilement was punishable by execution."

The Holocaust Chronicle

Games of the XI Olympiad   Getty Images

Back in 1932, the year before Adolf Hitler assumed power as Chancellor of Germany, the International Olympic Committee awarded the 1936 Games to Berlin, as the venue for the summer competition. Bavaria would host the Winter Olympics in Garmisch-Partenkirchen. No one at the IOC appeared to foresee that it would be a Nazi Germany that would host those games. At play was the Olympics; idealism of uniting the world's people through a sport festival. 

An international ideal fundamentally opposed to the racist and antisemitic nationalism of Nazi Germany. 

And while the IOC did consider moving the Games to another venue, Hitler offered concessions to maintain the original invitation for Germany to host the events. He foresaw the Olympics playing out in Germany as a public relations boon for the Third Reich. And indeed, the 1936 Olympics gave a huge assist to Nazi Germany's Final Solution, in the final analysis. 

International attendees to the Games were hugely impressed by the grand Opening Ceremonies and by the release of 20,000 birds soaring skyward, trailing coloured ribbons. The illusion was that the Nazis weren't the villains they were made out to be. Throughout the Olympics antisemitism was soft-pedalled, despite that German Jews, including Jewish athletes had faced severe discrimination.

 

1936 Olympic Games, Berlin, Germany,  Getty Images

 

Banned from sports clubs and athletic facilities where they had once been members, separate and inferior facilities were thought more than enough to serve the interests of inferior Jewish athletes. Gretl Bergmann, world-class high jumper (a Jew), matched the German women's record; five feet, three inches during the training period before the 1936 Summer Olympics. She received a letter from the German Olympic Committee criticizing her performances for being erratic; informing her she had not been chosen as a member of Germany's Olympic track and field team.

It was the summer of 1936; German Jews lost their citizenship rights; their businesses were boycotted,their professional lives restricted. Jews were excluded from public facilities, prohibited from marrying non-Jews. As anti-Jewish policies were expanded, German physical fitness and athletic prowess was recognized as a vehicle for building nationalism, for fostering racial purity and for spurring military preparedness.  Which led to opportunity for Jews to be given places in the 1936 Olympic team eliminated.

The IOC was placated by Reich officials who permitted one Jewish athlete to compete for Germany; Helene Mayer who had competed for Germany in two previous Olympiads. Half Jewish, she was tall and blonde, fitting the prototypical Aryan image. In the women's foil competition she received the Olympic silver medal; film coverage of that day shows her giving the stiff-armed Nazi salute; if a Jew could do that, Germany wasn't such a bad place for them, after all.

 

1936 Olympic Games, Germany, Javelin Throw   Getty Images

 

Prior to the Games' opening, several countries including the United States and Soviet Union urged a boycott of Olympic competition in Germany. The Nazi regime gave image-improving concessions -- some involving taking down vicious anti-Jewish signs proliferating along German highways, towns and city boundaries, on streets and at stores: "Jews are not wanted in this place", and "The Jew is our misfortune".

Antisemitic signs along the highways that led to competition sites were seen by Count Henri Faillet-Latour, the Belgian president of the IOC as he travelled to the Winter Games opening. Demanding to see Hitler, he informed him such practices were unacceptable. Hitler argued Olympic protocol could not override concerns of paramount importance within Germany, but ordered the signs removed when he was threatened with cancellation of the Games.

Forty-nine countries sent teams to the Nazi Olympics including the United States where the boycott movement failed. Leni Riefenstahl and her film crews captured the pageantry and athletic competition; her film Olympia won first prize at the 1938 Venice film festival. Jesse Owens representing the United States won four gold-medal performances, hailed by critics of the Nazi regime who felt the victories refuted Hitler's claim of white superiority.

 

American runner Jesse Owens, Getty Images

 

The German team won more medals than any other nation's teams. Hitler played the part of world statesman and honoured national leader. Foreign visitors were largely persuaded that the Third Reich's intentions were as peaceful as its economic revival was efficient, its goals benign, its culture healthy and vigorous. For after all, ten Jewish athletes won medals at the 1936 Olympics. In reality, Victor Perez, a French Jews, the world's flyweight boxing champion was murdered at Auschwitz.

Lilli Henoch, world record holder in the shot put and discus was murdered and buried in a mass grave near Riga, Latvia. A Hungarian fencer, Attila Petschauer who won a silver medal in the 1928 Olympics, froze to death in a Nazi labour camp. Alfred Flatow, a German Jew and winner of three gold medals and one silver in gymnastics in Athen's 1896 games died in the Theresienstadt camp, Czechoslovakia. 

1936 Olympics, Germany   Getty Images

The Holocaust Recalled ... Nuremberg Prosecutor Benjamin Ferencz

Benjamin B. Ferencz. / Getty Images file

"Today the world lost a leader in the quest for justice for victims of genocide and related crimes."

"We mourn the death of Ben Ferencz -- the last Nuremberg war crimes prosecutor. At age 27, with no prior trial experience, he secured guilty verdicts against 22 Nazis."

U.S. Holocaust Museum

 

"It is with sorrow and with hope that we here disclose the deliberate slaughter of more than a million innocent and defenceless men, women, and children."

"This was the tragic fulfillment of a program of intolerance and arrogance. Vengeance is not our goal, nor do we seek merely a just retribution."

"We ask this court to affirm by international penal action man's right to live in peace and dignity regardless of his race or creed."

"The case we present is a plea of humanity to law."

Benjamin Ferencz, last surviving prosecutor, Nuremberg trials, 1947

One of Nazi Germany's most infamous war criminals, Hermann Goring, was among those that underwent trial at Nuremberg, in 1947, in Germany. The man chosen to represent the U.S. was Harvard educated, a lawyer of only 27 years of age, when he served as a prosecutor in a series of trials for crimes against humanity. The last surviving prosecutor and a longtime champion of international criminal law, Benjamin Ferencz died at age 103, at an assisted living facility in Florida, on Friday.

 

For decades following the trials, Mr. Ferencz advocated for the creation of an International Criminal Court. An international tribunal was established with headquarters in The Hague, Netherlands. Mr. Ferencz's philanthropy aided greatly in the memorialization of the Holocaust with the establishment of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, in Washington. 

 

He was motivated by the passion of his compassion, by hearing time and again at the trials in Nuremberg, the phrase 'Nicht Schuldig" from Nazi death squad perpetrators refusing to feel themselves guilty of atrocities. They were loyal Germans, merely following official orders.

 

Einsatzgruppen   Death by Bullets

 

Benjamin Ferencz carried a monumental burden when he became chief prosecutor for the United States in the trial of 22 German officers who led mobile paramilitary killing squads, called Einsatzgruppen, part of the notorious death-head Nazi SS. It was the assigned task of the squads to carry out mass killings targeting Jews, Roma and homosexuals among others, mostly civilian populations, throughout German-occupied Europe. These death squads alone were responsible for over a million deaths.

Nazi Germany did not rely on death camps and their gas chambers alone in the annihilation of six million Jews. The campaign to cleanse the world of sub-humans included political dissenters, Jehovah's Witnesses, mentally and physically challenged people and other groups considered trash by the Nazis. All the defendants prosecuted by Benjamin Ferencz were convicted. Among them thirteen received death sentences.

 

Nuremberg Trials   The National WWII Museum, U.S.

 

 

The Agony of Haunting History

"Never in human history was there a campaign like the one the Nazis and their accomplices conducted to annihilate the Jewish people."

"Never in history was a state responsible, as Nazi Germany was responsible, for the loss of all semblance of humanity, for the erasure of all mercy, for the pursuit of the worldwide obliteration, with such awful cruelty, of an entire people."

"I shall never forget how he [his father former Israeli President Isaac Herzog] described to me the horrors he witnessed. The stench. The human skeletons in striped pajamas, the piles of corpses, the destruction, the hell on Earth."

"The partnership between Israel and Germany has achieved global renown, and we must continue deepening and cultivating it for the benefit of a brilliant future not only for our countries but for the whole of humanity."

Israeli President Isaac Herzog, addressing the Bundestag

Israeli President Isaac Herzog delivers his speech at the German parliament Bundestag at the Reichstag building in Berlin, Germany, Sept. 6, 2022.

"It took a long time for the Germans to understand that they themselves were also liberated at that time, namely from their murderous ideology and an inhuman dictatorship."

"The fact that we Germans were able to live in freedom and democracy again, at least in the
West, is due not least to the allied liberators."

German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier

There are those whose heritage is that of knowing and living within the period of the Second World War and the Holocaust who will remain forever haunted by the spectre of Jews transported from all over Europe to Nazi concentration camps, slave-labour camps, and death camps where Jews were industrially murdered, augmented by campaigns in European towns and villages where locals gave enthusiastic assistance to Nazi SS troops in ridding their towns and villages of the presence of their Jewish neighbours.

 

Primary Image: Prisoners in barracks at the Buchenwald concentration camp. (National Archives and Records Administration, 208-AA-206K-31.)

This older generation would never seek to set foot on German soil. Knowing full well from documented narratives and well-published documentary evidence that German citizens were not ignorant of the fate of Europe's Jews. They had been well prepared to accept the necessity of obliterating the menace of the Jewish existence among them. Jews who plotted to assume control of news, banking, industry, academia for the end of ruling the world economy. All the while their fascist government was doing just that. 

Jews, wearing yellow stars humbly walking the streets of cities where once they were proud citizens of superior repute, enhancing the cultural life of society, excelling in the arts and sciences, advancing the future of humanity. And a campaign of vilification and humiliation reduced those proud citizens to subhuman status, to be scorned and reviled. Setting the stage of the systematic industrial-scale annihilation that would follow.

How does a nation, proud of its long history of civilized cultural superiority in literature and the arts, music and science, reduce itself to the status of organized butchery of Jews? Why in good faith, would any Jew alive today want to visit with the Germany whose focus on destroying Jewish lives made it a pariah for such a short period of history? Well, nations like Israel do what they view they must, to survive, finding support and 'friends' wherever it can. Practical purpose dominates the issue. 

 

"I bring no forgiveness and no forgetting", said President Herzog in his address to the lower  house.

Israel's current president's father before him also a president of Israel, was among the liberators of the concentration camp of Bergen-Belsen in April of 1945. Chaim Herzog was a military officer in the British Armed Forces. Following his son's address to the German parliament this week both presidents and their wives arrived at Berlin's Memorial to the Murdered Jews comprised of a field of 2,700 concrete slabs not far from the Brandenburg Gate.

 

Herzog's father was the first Israeli president to visit Germany after the war in 1987

 

Later, they visited the former concentration camp, Bergen-Belsen, for a tour of the memorial site where they met with survivors and German high school students. Over 52,000 mostly Jewish prisoners died at Bergen-Belsen. Over 19,000 prisoners of war comprised mostly of soldiers from the Soviet Union, died at the PoW camp adjacent. 

Menachem Rosensaft with the World Jewish Congress, son of Bergen-Belsen survivors was born at the displaced persons camp close to the Bergen-Belsen camp. The last stop for the Israeli president was a trip from Berlin to Munich to participate in the 50-year anniversary ceremony honouring the 11 Israeli athletes murdered at the 1972 Olympic Games by Palestinian terrorists. 

"Both presidents made clear that the remembrance of the evil perpetrated at Bergen-Belsen must be a guidepost for the future of both nations."

"For Herzog especially the visit was clearly a personal pilgrimage that was rooted in his father's experience in liberating the camp."

Menachem Rosensaft, general counsel, World Jewish Congress

Nazi Germany, Fatah, Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad

"If we want to go over the past, go ahead ... I have fifty slaughters that Israel committed ... 50 massacres, 50 holocausts."

"And until today, every day we have more killed by the IDF [Israeli military] by Israel."

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas

"I am disgusted by the outrageous remarks made by Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas."

"For us Germans in particular, any relativization of the singularity of the Holocaust is intolerable and unacceptable."

"I condemn any attempt to deny the crimes of the Holocaust."

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz

"[Mahmoud Abbas spoke a] monstrous lie."

"Six million Jews were murdered in the Holocaust, including one and a half million Jewish children."

"History will never forgive him."

Israeli Prime Minister Yair Lapid

The press conference ended without comment from Scholz (right) in the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust remarks- from Abbas (left)

 

On a trip to Germany, the Palestinian Authority president shared a news conference with his host, Chancellor Scholz. A discussion between the two men was recorded live and a question was posed to Abbas by a reporter, enquiring whether the PA leader was prepared to apologize on the 50th anniversary of the Munich Massacre when eleven Jewish Olympians were murdered by a branch of Abbas's own Fatah movement.

Germany has much to answer for. It will never be forgotten that Nazi Germany orchestrated a precise, wide-ranging institutional scheme to annihilate all of Europe's Jews. The stage was set before the process of the Holocaust began by pernicious slander to convince Jew-haters everywhere that they had good reason for their antipathy toward Jews for they were subhuman scum of the Earth and the world should be rid of them.

The kind of propaganda that has its reflection in very fact, in the Palestinian vendetta against Israel, that a Zionist horde returning to its ancestral roots to reclaim its four thousand-year-old homeland had criminally prevented Arabs originally from Egypt and Jordan from declaring the land their possession, taking the ancient descriptive of Judeans as Palestinians, as their own.

Abbas bridled at the question, launching into one of his predictable tirades usually restricted to an Arab-speaking audience. Perhaps reasoning that in the very Europe where Jews were systematically murdered his audience would be receptive to his 'genocidal' accusations of Israeli 'slaughter of Palestinians'. The very Palestinians that Abbas is so fond of inciting from childhood forward to a career of terrorism turning their antisemitism to the violent elimination of Jews; mimicking the Nazi ideology in fact.

Chancellor Scholz, taken by surprise may have been appalled at this lack of civil courtesy to say the least, but his immediate reaction left much to be desired. The very image of calm courtesy toward a guest, he said nothing in exchange. Until much, much later, when he saw fit to reject the tone, tenor and grievous slander emanating from the mind and lips of a Holocaust 'scholar' who achieved a doctorate from Moscow's-then Patrice Lamumba University for his argument that Zionists schemed with Hitler in the Holocaust.

It took a day before Chancellor Scholz responded. It took a day before Abbas's retraction and correction explaining he had no intention to "deny the singularity of the Holocaust", "the most heinous crime in modern human history".  For him, a bit of house-cleaning, anxious to regain his credentials in the West as a champion of the Palestinian 'cause' which must be pursued in a manner different than his statements not meant for European ears of delicate temperament.

That filthy Jewish feet would not be permitted to desecrate the Noble Sanctuary, built atop the remains of the Temples of Solomon, the most sacred site in Judaism; that Jerusalem 'belongs' to 'Palestinians', a wholesale rejection of the presence of Jewish authority and custodianship of the holiest city in Judean history and heritage. 

Black September's hostage-taking and murder of the eleven Israeli athletes in 1972, a supreme act of terrorism and Arab revelling in the death of Jews is not an event that Abbas would feel obliged to apologize for, to regret, and any recriminations coming his way as a primary representative of the Palestinian movement to destroy Israel fail to take into account Abbas's proud penchant of doling out handsome rewards to Palestinian terrorists for slaughtering Jewish Israelis.

Israeli Rabbis indoctrinate the Jewish kids: 'Kill the Palestinian Children'. Palestinian 'expert' libels Israel. PMW

France's Betrayal of Its Jewish Citizens - Holocaust

"We will continue to teach against ignorance. We will continue to cry out against indifference. And we will fight, I promise you, at every dawn, because France's story is written by a combat of resistance and justice that will never be extinguished."

"We are not finished with antisemitism, and we must lucidly face that fact."

"It is showing itself on the walls of our cities [when they are vandalized with swastikas]. It is infiltrating social networks ... it inserts itself into debates on some TV shows."

"It showed itself in the complacency of certain political forces. It is prospering also through a new form of historic revisionism, even negationism."

"Let us repeat here with force, whether self-styled revisionist commentators like it or not."

French President Emmanuel Macron

"The policy, from 1942 onward, was to organize the murder of the Jews of Europe and therefore to organize the deportation of the Jews of France."

"Most of the time, the decisions were made by the Nazis ... but the management was French."

Jacques Fredj, director, Paris Shoah Memorial

Entrance to the Vel’ d’Hiv (the Winter Stadium, or Velodrome d'Hiver), where Jews were detained en-masse in preparation for their deportation to concentration camps in France.

 

Other French citizens ended up in concentration camps; committed French socialists who defied the Vichy government and their Nazi masters. In the camps they were in separate barracks from the majority camp occupants who were Jews. The French socialists bore difficult times, most of them managed to survive their ordeal. They empathized and pitied the Jews crammed into their barracks, the plight of the women and children, knowing well what that all-pervading odour both of fear and resignation and the stench of the smoke billowing out of the giant chimney signified.

 

Vivarais-Lignon, Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, in France in Feb. 2016.  Alamy Stock Photo

 

And there was a haven, in the mountains of southern France where Le Chambon residents harboured Jewish children, cared for them, hid them, nurtured them and brought them life and eventually even reunion with surviving family members. All at great risk to themselves, but determined to defy orders from the Nazis and from their own fascist Vichy government. Because of their activities, thousands of French Jewish children and Jewish children from other parts of Europe survived the war. They were Protestant French, surrounded by French Roman Catholics.

Jews living at a children's home in Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, France, with their director, Juliette Usach, 1941. The people of Le Chambon and surrounding villages hid nearly 5,000 people fleeing Nazi occupation.

French police were entirely complicit with their Nazi overmasters; what the Nazis decreed, the French police carried out under the collaborationist Vichy government. In July 1942, French police went  house to house rounding up French Jews. It took two days where 13,000 men, women and children, all French citizens, were assembled to be dispatched to Nazi death camps. The Vel d'Hiv raids will forever be a black mark against France in the Second World War.

Police herded 13,142 French citizens of Jewish extraction, among them, 4,115 children into the Winter Velodrome of Paris (Vel d'Hiv). Western Europe had no rival to this large roundup where children were separated from their families, very few of whom survived the terrifying episode whose purpose was genocidal intent. There is a monument now, erected at a garden where once the velodrome stood. It holds the names of those thousands of children inscribed for posterity, so they will not be forgotten. Only six of those thousands of children survived.

A memorial is pictured near a train car symbolizing the Drancy camp, at the Shoah memorial, July 12, 2022 in Drancy, outside Paris (AP Photo/Thomas Padilla)

 

Renowned Nazi Hunter Serge Klarsfeld spoke in the garden on Saturday, an "earth shaking testimony to the horrors lived by Jewish families", he said of the garden and its memorial, stressing the urgency of passing on memories in the wake of the last of the survivors passing away. The following day the French president visited a site south of Paris where police sent families following the Vel d'Hiv roundup until they were sent on further to the Nazi camps.

There, in Pithiviers, a new memorial site honouring those French Jews was inaugurated, with a plaque reading: "Let us never forget". The Shoah Memorial in the Paris suburb of Drancy hosted another ceremony. Drancy was home to a transit centre central to the deadly journey to Nazi camps for French Jews. Of the 76,000 Jews deported from France under the collaborators of Nazi Germany in France, most transited the Drancy camp.

And now, in present-day Europe, Jewish communities are concerned with rising antisemitism throughout Europe; in France and in Germany in particular over recent years. The nation's Interior Ministry reports a rise in antisemitic acts, adding that racist and anti-religious acts are on the increase overall, while Jews are disproportionately targeted. 

Following the Second World War, fifty years passed before French leadership officially acknowledged state involvement in the Holocaust. Then-President Jacques Chirac apologized for the role of French authorities in the Vel d'Hiv raids. As President Macron said on Sunday, none of France's Vichy wartime leaders "wanted to save Jews".

French policemen register foreign Jews in Pithiviers for their subsequent deportation, in May 1941.- (AFP)