Inge Auerbacher

“We must speak out against evil and injustice.

Let us build bridges of understanding and love

to join mankind in every land.  My hope, my

wish, and prayer is for every child to grow up

in peace without hunger and prejudice.”

From “I am a Star”, published by Penguin Putnam, Inc.

January 9, 2010.  Inge Auerbacher was the Jewish child born in Kippenheim, a village in South-Western Germany located at the foot of the Black Forest, close to the borders of France and Switzerland.  She was the only child of Berthold and Regina Auerbacher (nee’ Lauchheimer).  Both of her parents came from observant Jewish families who had lived for many generations in Germany.

Inge’s father was a soldier in the German Army during WWI.  He was wounded badly and consequently awarded the Iron Cross for service to his country.  Inge’s father was a textile merchant and the family owned a large home in Kippenheim.

Christians and Jews lived peacefully together until the massive riot against the Jews in Germany and Austria on November 9-10, 1938.  Inge was only three years old, but her memories of Kristallnacht (Night of Broken Glass) are still vivid.  Her maternal Grandparents had come to visit.  They lived a few hundred miles away in Jebenhausen, an even smaller village than Kippenheim.  Her Grandfather was arrested in the synagogue while saying his morning prayers.  Her father, grandfather and other Jewish males over the age of sixteen were sent to Dachau concentration camp.  Every window in their house was broken.  They had to hide in their backyard shed to save themselves from the rioting mob.  Their beloved synagogue was severely damaged.  Miraculously, both men were released from Dachau after a few weeks.  They had both been treated very badly.

Inge’s family sold their house, and moved in with her grandparents in Jebenhausen in 1939.  Here, Inge had many Christian friends.  Her grandfather soon died of a broken heart both spiritually and physically.  He was bitterly disappointed in the country he loved.

Inge was only allowed to attend a Jewish school located a train-ride away in Stuttgart.  She was forced to wear a yellow Star of David as a six year-old child.  Her school career ended after six months when the transports to the “East” began.

All doors to the free world had been shut.  There was no way to escape.  The Holocaust was in full swing by the end of 1941.  Her grandmother and other members of her family were sent to Riga in Latvia, where death by shooting awaited them.  Others were sent to Poland never to be heard of again.

Inge and her parents were deported in August, 1942.  She was seven years old, the youngest in a transport of about twelve hundred people.  The destination was the Terezin (Theresienstadt) concentration camp in Czechoslovakia.  She arrived clutching her beloved doll, Marlene.

Terezin was selected by the Nazis as a transit camp before inmates were to be deported to the killing center further East, like Auschwitz.  It consisted of large brick barracks, underground cells and broken down houses.  It was sealed off from the outside world by high walls, wooden fences and barbed wire.  Inge’s life in Terezin was a nightmare.  Death, fear and hunger were her constant companions.  She saw most of her friends sent to the gas chamber in Auschwitz.  She contracted serious illnesses and spent months in the so-called hospital.  She was in Terezin when the International Red Cross came to inspect the camp.  Inge also remembers when the children’s opera “Brundibar” was performed.

Between 1941-1945, a total of 140,000 people were shipped to Terezin.  88,000 were sent primarily to the gas chambers in Auschwitz, and 35,000 died of malnutrition and disease in Terezin.  Of the 15,000 children imprisoned in Terezin, Inge is among the one percent that survived.

After three long years, liberation came by the Soviet Army on May 8, 1945.  Inge was 10 years old at the time.  Miraculously, Inge and both her parents survived.  Marlene, Inge’s beloved doll also made it through the terrible times.  After a short stay in a Displaced Persons’ camp in Stuttgart, they returned to Jebenhausen.  They learned that at least thirteen close relatives were slaughtered by the Nazis as well as many more of her extended family.

Inge and her parents immigrated to America in May, 1946.  Inge was stricken with a deadly disease caused by years of malnutrition in the concentration camp.  She was hospitalized for two years, and fought a valiant battle for many years to regain her strength.  Although she had lost many years of schooling, she graduated with honors from Bushwick High School in Brooklyn, New York after only three years in 1953.  She completed a college degree (BS in Chemistry) in 1958, and continued with post-graduate work in Biochemistry.  Inge worked for over 38 years as a chemist with prominent scientists in research and clinical work.

Inge’s hobby is writing.  More than 50 of her poems and numerous articles have been published.  She was silent about her war experiences until 1981, when she wrote the lyrics “We shall Never Forget.”  The music was written by her Christian friend, Rosalie Commentucci-O’Hara.  This was the only original song presented at the first “World Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors” in Jerusalem in 1981.  More of her lyrics have been set to music by James Donefeld, Barney Bragin and Cantor Sol Zim.  Some have been recorded.

Inge has been lecturing on the Holocaust since 1981, and has spoken to thousands of people in the USA, Canada and Germany.  She is fluent in German and English.  Her audiences consist of school children, college students and adults of any ethnic background.  She has appeared on many radio and television programs both in the USA and abroad.  Prize-winning documentary films have been made about her, which have been shown in the USA and all over the world.

Her most recent film: “The Olympic Doll” based on her book “I am A Star”, was especially made for middle school children as a lesson of tolerance.

Inge is the Author of the following best-selling and award-winning books:

~ “I am a Star” – Child of the Holocaust

~ “Beyond the Yellow Star to America”

~”Running Against the Wind”

~ “Finding Dr. Schatz” – The Discovery of Streptomycin & a Life It Saved

She has been awarded the following prestigious awards for her work teaching tolerance and human rights:

~ Ellis Island Medal of Honor – 1999

~ Louis E. Yavner Citizen Award – 1999

~ Doctor of Humane Letters honoris causa, Long Island University, 2005

Her hometown, Kippenheim has instituted the Inge Auerbacher Prize awarded to students and institutions promoting tolerance and human rights.

Source: http://www.ingeauerbacher.com/about.htm

Bernburg Euthanasia Center

Bernburg Psychiatric Home

February  8, 2010.  Dedicated to the victims of the Bernburg killing center.   A mental home with a capacity of 132 beds was founded in 1875 in Bernburg, near Magdeburg.  As a replacement for Brandenburg, in September 1940, a section of the complex was confiscated by the Gemeinnutzige Stiftung fur Anstaltspflege (Charitable Foundation for Institutional Care), one of the fake organizations set up to camouflage the euthanasia program commonly known as Aktion T4. From that time onwards, Bernburg mental home was divided into both a normal institution and a euthanasia killing site.

Within four weeks during October/November 1940, 80 square metres of the cellar in the former Mannerhaus 2 (Men’s House no. 2) were converted into a killing center.  The Brandenburg staff, including physician-in-chief, Dr. Irmfried Eberl, moved as a group to the new killing center.

Photographs from different angles of the Bernburg killing center

A small room disguised as a shower room was equipped with a peephole and the walls and floor tiled.  In this gas chamber measuring 14 square meters, 8,601 people were killed during Aktion T4. Another room was converted into a crematorium by installing two crematory ovens, with a third room utilized as a dissecting room, and a fourth as a mortuary.

The killing began on November 21, 1940, with 25 persons from the mental home at Neuruppin, which served as a Zwischenanstalt (Intermediate Home).  The extermination procedure at Bernburg was the same as in the other euthanasia killing centers.  The victims were first registered, then required to undress and hand over any valuables in their possession.

A superficial inspection of the victims occurred next, in order to see which plausible cause of death the Bernburg administration could pass on to the deceased relatives.  The victims were then photographed and led to the gas chamber.  After gassing, the corpses were cremated and urns filled with ashes.  No attempt was made to identify specific remains.  Finally, the urn containing a quantity of ashes, together with a falsified death certificate, was forwarded to the next-of-kin.

The above picture shows a model of the Bernburg Psychiatric Hospital.  Blue arrows indicate the route taken by patients on their way to the killing area, and the circled building contains the crematorium and gas chambers.  Dr. Kathe Leichte, a professor in the field of social sciences, was sent to the Ravensbruck concentration camp in 1940.  In 1942, she was gassed to death by the Gestapo at Bernburg Euthanasia Institute.

Victims were killed immediately.  Generally, large grey buses brought them to the home, although patients sometimes arrived by train.  After examination in one of several ground floor rooms, they were ushered to the basement in groups of 60-75, accompanied by “nurses.”  Those having distinctive physical features were marked with a red cross on their back by doctors.  After gassing, the two chamber doors remained closed for one hour, until the room had been ventilated.  Adjoining the gas chamber was the dissection room.

Dissection Table

After gassing, the corpses bearing the red cross were separated and were subjected to an autopsy.  The other bodies were cremated immediately by the stokers or “burners.”  T4 usually picked members of the SS to serve as stokers.  In Bernburg, there were seven SS stokers, and, for a short time, nine.

Under Sonderbehandlung 14f13 (Special Treatment 14f13), about 5,000 persons were killed in Bernburg between 1941 and April 1943.  These were Jews from the concentration camps Buchenwald, Flossenburg, Gros Rosen, Neuengamme, Ravensbruck, and Sachsenhausen.  As an example of how the system functioned, on January 19-20, 1942, about 214 prisoners were selected at Gros-Rosen and their questionnaires sent to T4 headquarters in Berlin, which then transmitted the list of selected prisoners to Bernburg.

On March 3rd, Bernburg requested the transfer of the 214 prisoners, and on March 6th, Gros-Rosen replied that the 125 prisoners who remained would be transferred on March 23rd (the other prisoners originally selected by then either having died or been deemed capable of working).

Gas Chamber Shower Head

The buildings not occupied by T4 continued to operate as a normal mental institution throughout the entire T4 and 14f13 period.  Following an order from the WVHA on April 27, 1943, the crematory ovens were dismantled and the T4 personnel transferred to Poland.

In 1949, the nurse Anna Maria L. stated that it was still possible to see benches in the basement on which the victims had waited for their “shower”, as well as the sprinklers in the gas chamber and the dissecting table.  During the construction works for the memorial in 1988/89, the peephole in the gas chamber wall and the gas chamber door were uncovered.

Dr. Irmfried Eberl

Eberl was arrested, but evaded trial by committing suicide in February 1948.  He had been succeeded by Dr. Heinrich Bunke, who was succeeded in turn, by Dr. Kurt Borm.  Only 42 staff appear to have worked at Bernburg during gassing operations, and of that number, at least 20 were clerks and secretaries solely occupied with office work.  Some members of the Bernburg staff were tried and sentenced, but most were never brought to justice.

Source: The Holocaust Research Project

http://www.holocaustresearchproject.org/euthan/bernberg.html

http://www.bing.com/images/search?q=Bernburg+Psychiatric+hospital…=http%3A%2F%2Fdarwinismssocialweapon.com%2Fimages%2Fbernburg1.jpg

Homosexuals: Victims of the Nazi Era

February 7, 2010.

Homosexuals: Victims of the Nazi Era

As part of the Nazi’s attempt to purify German society and propagate an ‘Aryan master race,’ they condemned homosexuals as ’socially aberrant.’  Soon after taking office on January 30, 1933, Hitler banned all homosexual and lesbian organization.  Brown-shirted storm troopers raided the institutions and gathering places of homosexuals.  Greatly weakened and driven underground, this subculture had flourished in the relative freedom of the 1920s, in the pubs and cafes of Berlin, Hamburg, Munich, Bremen, and other cities.

On May 6, 1933, Nazis ransacked the “Institute for Sexual Science” in Berlin.  Four days later as part of large public burnings of books viewed as “un-German”, thousands of books plundered from the Institute’s library were thrown into a huge bonfire.  The institute was founded in 1919 by Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld (1868-1935).  It sponsored research and discussion on marital problems, sexually transmitted diseases, and laws relating to sexual offenses, abortion, and homosexuality.  The author of many work, Hirschfeld, himself a homosexual, led efforts for three decades to reform laws criminalizing homosexuality.  In 1933 Hirschfeld happened to be in France, where he remained until his death.

In 1934, a special Gestapo (Secret State Police) division on homosexuals was set up.  One of its first acts was to order the police “pink lists” from all over Germany.  The police had been compiling these lists of suspected homosexual men since 1900.  On September 1, 1935, a harsher, amended version of Paragraph 175 of the Criminal Code, originally framed in 1871, went into effect, punishing a broad range of “lewd and lascivious” behaviour between men.  In 1936, Nazi leader Heinrich Himmler created a Reich Central Office for the Combating of Homosexuality and Abortion: Special Office (II S), a subdepartment of Executive Department II of the Gestapo.  The linking of homosexuality and abortion reflected the Nazi regimes population policies to promote a higher birthrate of its “Aryan” population.  On this subject, Himmler spoke in Bad Tolz on February 18, 1937, before a group of high-ranking SS officers on the dangers both of homosexuality and abortion posed to the German birthrate.

Under the revised Paragraph 175 and the creation of Special Office II S, the number of prosecutions increased sharply, peaking in the years 1937-1939.  Half of all convictions for homosexual activity under the Nazi regime occurred during these years.  The police stepped up raids on homosexual meeting places, seized address books of arrested men to find additional suspects, and created networks of informers to compile lists of names and make arrests.

It is estimated 1.2 million men were homosexuals in Germany in 1928.  Between 1933-45, an estimated 100,000 men were arrested as homosexuals, and of these, some 50,000 officially defined homosexuals were sentenced.  Most of these men spent time in regular prisons, and an estimated 5,000 to 15,000 of the total sentenced were incarcerated in concentration camps.

How many of these 5,000 to 15,000 ‘175ers’ perished in the concentration camps will probably never be known.  Historical research to date has been very limited.  One leading scholar Ruediger Lautmann, believes that the death rate for ‘175ers’ in the camps may have  been as high as sixty percent.

All prisoners of the camps wore marks of various colors and shapes, which allowed guards and camp functionaries to identify them by category.  The uniforms of those sentenced as homosexuals bore various identifying marks, including a large black dot and a large ‘175′ drawn on the back of the jacket.  Later a pink triangular patch (rosa Winkel) appeared.

Conditions in the camps were generally harsh for all inmates, many of whom died from hunger, disease, exhaustion, exposure to the cold, and brutal treatment.  Many survivors have testified that men with pink triangles were often treated particularly severely by guards and inmates alike, because of the widespread biases against homosexuals.

As was true with other prisoner categories, some homosexuals were also victims of cruel medical experiments, including castration.  At Buchenwald concentration camp, SS physician Dr. Carl Vaernet performed operations designed to convert men to heterosexuals: the surgical insertion of a capsule which released the male hormone testosterone.  Such procedures reflected the desire by Himmler and others to find a medical solution to homosexuality.

The vast majority of homosexual victims were males.  Lesbians were not subjected to systematic persecution.  While lesbian bars were closed, few women are believed to have been arrested.  Paragraph 175 did not mention female homosexuality.  Lesbianism was seen by many Nazi officials as alien to the nature of the Aryan woman.  In some cases, the police arrested lesbians as “asocials” or “prostitutes.”  One woman, Henny Schermann, was arrested in 1940 in Frankfurt and was labeled “licentious Lesbian” on her mug shot.  But, she was also a “stateless Jew,” sufficient cause for deportation.  Among the Jewish inmates at Ravensbruck concentration camp selected for extermination, she was gassed in the Bernburg psychiatric hospital, a “euthanasia” killing center in Germany, in 1942.

Homosexuality outside Germany (and incorporated Austria and other annexed territories) was not a subject generally addressed in Nazi ideology or policy.  The concern focused in the impact of homosexuality on the strength and birthrate of the Aryan population.  During the war years, 1939 to 1945, the Nazis did not generally instigate drives against homosexuality in German-occupied countries.

Consequently, the vast majority of homosexuals arrested under Paragraph 175, were Germans or Austrians.  Unlike Jews, men arrested as homosexuals were not systematically deported to Nazi-established ghettos in eastern Europe.  Nor were they transported in mass groups of homosexual prisoners to Nazi extermination camps in Poland.

Gay & Lesbian Holocaust Memorial, Sydney Australia.

It should be noted that Nazi authorities sometimes used the charge of homosexuality to discredit and undermine their political opponents.  Charges of homosexuality among the SA (Storm trooper) leadership figured prominently among justifications for the bloody purge of SA chief Ernst Rohm in June 1934.  Nazi leader Hermann Goring used trumped-up accusations of homosexual improprieties to unseat army supreme commander Von Fritsch, an opponent of Hitler’s military policy, in early 1938.  Finally, a 1935 propaganda campaign and two show trials in 1936 and 1937 alleging rampant homosexuality in the priesthood, attempted to undercut the power of the Roman Catholic Church in Germany, an institution which many Nazi officials considered their most potential enemy.

A Memorial to the Gay Victims of Nazi Germany

Amsterdam

After the war, homosexual concentration camp prisoners were not acknowledged as victims of Nazi persecution, and reparations were refused.  Under the Allied Military Government of Germany, some homosexuals were forced to serve out their terms of imprisonment, regardless of the time spent in concentration camps.  The 1935 version of Paragraph 175 remained in effect in the Federal Republic (West Germany) until 1969, so that well after liberation, homosexuals continued to fear arrest and incarceration.

Amsterdam, Netherlands

Research on Nazi persecution of homosexuals was impeded by the criminalization and social stigmatization of homosexuals in Europe and the United States in the decades following the Holocaust.  Most survivors were afraid or ashamed to tell their stories.  Recently, especially in Germany, new research findings on these “forgotten victims” have been published, and some survivors have broken their silence to give testimony.

Source: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

http://www.ushmm.org/education/resource/hms/homosx.php

http://www.ushmm.holocaust-trc.org/homosx.htm

The Night of the Long Knives

The Night of the Long Knives

February 6, 2010.  The Night of the Long Knives, in June 1934 saw the wiping out of the SA’s leadership and others who angered Hitler in the recent past in Nazi Germany.  After this date, the SS lead by Heinrich Himmler was to become far more powerful in Nazi Germany.

For all the power the Enabling Act gave Hitler, he still felt threatened by some of the Nazi Party.  He was also worried that the regular army had not given an oath of allegiance.  Hitler knew that the army hierarchy held him in disdain as he was ‘only’ a corporal in their eyes.  The Night of the Long Knives not only removed the SA leaders but also got Hitler the army’s oath that he so needed.

By the summer of 1934, the SA’s numbers had swollen to 2 million men.  They were under the control of Ernst Rohm, a loyal follower of Hitler since the early days of the Nazi Party.  The SA had given the Nazi’s an iron fist with which to disrupt other political parties meetings before January 1933.  To all intents, they were the enforcers of the Nazi Party and there is no evidence that Rohm was ever planning anything against Hitler.

Ernst Julius Rohm, (Munich November 28, 1887 – July 2, 1934), was a homosexual Germany army officer and Nazi leader.  He was a co-founder of the Sturmabteilung (assault battalion), the Nazi Party militia, and later was SA commander.  In 1934, he was executed on Hitler’s orders.

However, Rohm had made enemies within the Nazi Party.  Himmler, Goering and Goebbels were angered by the power he had gained and convinced Hitler that this was a threat to his position.

Hitler & Rohm

By June 1934, the regular army hierarchy also saw the SA as a threat to their authority.  The SA outnumbered the army by 1934 and Rohm had openly spoken about taking over the regular army by absorbing it into the SA.  Such talk alarmed the army’s leaders.

By the summer of 1934, Hitler had decided that Rohm was a ‘threat’ and he made a pact with the army.  If Rohm and the other SA leaders were removed, the rank and file SA men would come under the control of the army, but the army would have to swear an oath of loyalty to Hitler.  The army agreed and Rohm’s fate was sealed.

On the night of June 29th – June 30th 1934, units of the SS arrested the leaders of the SA and other political opponents.  Men such as Gregor Strasser, von Schleicher and von Bredow, were arrested and none of them had any connection with Rohm.  The arrests carried on for two more nights.

Seventy-seven men were executed on charges of treason though historians tend to think the figure is higher.  The SA was brought to heel and placed under the command of the army.  Hitler received an oath of allegiance from all those who served in the army.  Rohm was shot.  Others were bludgeoned to death.

The first time the public officially knew about the event was on July 13th 1934, when Hitler told the Reichstag that met in Kroll Opera House, Berlin, that for the duration of the arrests – that he and he alone was the judge in Germany and that the SS carried out his orders.  From that time on, the SS became a feared force in Nazi Germany, lead by Heinrich Himmler.  The efficiency with which the SS had carried out its orders greatly impressed Hitler and Himmler was to acquire huge power within Nazi Germany.

It was during this speech that Hitler gave the purge its name: Night of the Long Knives (a phrase from a popular Nazi song).  Hitler claimed that 61 had been executed, while 13 had been shot resisting arrest and three had committed suicide.  Others have argued as many as 400 people were killed during the purge.  In his speech, Hitler explained why he had not relied on the courts to deal with the conspirators: “In this hour, I was responsible for the fate of the German people, and thereby, I became the supreme judge of the German people.  I gave the order to shoot the ringleaders in this treason.”

They Salute with both hands now (David Low)

The Night of the Long Knives was the turning point in the history of Hitler’s Germany.  Hitler had made it clear that he was the supreme ruler of Germany who had the right to be judge and jury, and had the power to decide whether people lived or died.

In memory of  the victims of Hitler’s war…

Source: http://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/night_of_the_long_knives.htm

http://www.whale.to/b/rohm_h.html

Mario Finzi

Mario Finzi

Born Bologna, Italy, 1913

February 5, 2010.  Mario was the only child of a Jewish couple who were secondary school teachers in Bologna.  Like many Italian Jews, his family was well-integrated into Italian society.  Even though Fascist leader Benito Mussolini came to power in 1922, Jews in Italy continued to live in safety.  Mario played piano as a hobby.  When he finished high school in Bologna, Mario went on to study law.

1933-39: In 1938, Mario began practicing law in Milan.  But later that year, Mussolini’s government issued “racial” laws that prevented Mario from continuing to practice.  Mario moved to Paris and began a new career as a pianist.  In August 1939, he returned to Italy to renew his visa.  On September 1, while he was there, Germany invaded Poland and two days later France declared war on Germany.  Mario was detained in Italy.

1940-1944: Mario worked in Bologna with a Jewish service agency, helping refugees.  In July 1943, Mussolini was overthrown and German forces occupied Italy.  The Jews in Bologna were sent to a  German transit camp at Fossoli di Carpi.  For some, the destination of the transports out of Fossoli di Carpie was not a secret – “Auschwitz” had been written in chalk on one of the railway cars.

Bologna, Italy

In March 1944, Mario was deported to Auschwitz.  In Auschwitz, Mario threw himself on the high-tension wire that surrounded the camp.  He left behind a message for his parents, asking their forgiveness.  Mario was 31 years old.

Source: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/idcard.php?lang=en&Moduleld=10006246

Commandants in the Dachau Camp

SS Men on the Staff of the Dachau Camp in 1934

January 4, 2010.  Today’s blog is dedicated to the victims at Dachau that suffered such atrocities  in the hands of the Commandants of the Dachau camp.

The photograph above show six of the SS men on the staff at Dachau in 1934.  Theodor Eicke, who became the second Commandant at Dachau in 1933, is the second man from the left in the back row.

When the Dachau camp was first opened on March 22, 1933, the guards were police officers with the Munich police, but after only a few weeks, SS soldiers were assigned to guard duty in the camp.

The first Commandant of Dachau was SS Standartenfuhrer Hilmar Wackerle, who began using that title on April 19, 1933.  Wackerle was instructed by Heinrich Himmler, the head of the SS and the acting Police Chief of Munich, to draw up a set of rules for discipline in the camp.  His rules were extremely harsh and a number of prisoners died after being punished.

The deaths in the Dachau camp came to the attention of the Munich prosecutor after Sophie Handschuch made a formal complaint in 1933, demanding to know the true cause of death of her son who had been an inmate at Dachau.  Other prisoners who died in the early days of the camp were: Dr. Rudolf Benario, Fritz Dressel, Sepp Gotz, Ernst Goldmann, Arthur and Erwin Kahn.  Karl Lehrburger and Wilhelm Aron, both Jewish, also died as a result of harsh treatment in the Dachau camp.  Herbert Hunglinge committed suicide to escape the unbearable conditions in the camp.

After an investigation by the Munich police, Wackerle was charged with murder for the deaths of Louis Schloss on May 16, Leonard Hausmann on May 17, Dr. Alfred Strauss on May 24, and Sebastian Nefzger on May 25.  Dr. Strauss and Louis Schloss were both Jewish.  Because of the criminal charges, Himmler was forced to relieve Wackerle of his command, as of June 25, 1933.  The charges against Wackerle were later dropped, but he was dismissed from his job as Commandant and sent to fight on the Eastern front, where he was killed in action.  Wackerle was replaced by Theodor Eicke who became the new Commandant.  Eicke was also killed in action after he was transferred to the Easter front.

In June 1934, Eicke was given the title of Inspector General and the authority to approve all punishments in all camps.  His promotion was a reward for accepting the assignment to execute Ernst Rohm, the Commander of the Storm Troopers, after Rohm refused Hitler’s order to kill himself.  Rohm was openly homosexual and Eicke was also rumored to be a homosexual.

SS Oberfuhrer Heinrich Deubel replaced Eicke as the Commandant of Dachau, but was dismissed after a few months for being too lenient with the prisoners.  Deubel was replaced by SS Standartenfuhrer Hermann Baranowski.

SS Oberfuhrer Hans Loritz was the 5th Commandant of Dachau, replacing Baranowski.  Loritz is shown below in a photo of a poster in the Dachau Museum.  After he was captured by the Allies, he committed suicide before he could be put on trial.

Photo of Hans Loritz in Dachau Museum

SS Hauptsturmfuhrer Alexander Piorkowski was the 6th Commandant of Dachau, replacing Hans Loritz.  Piorkowski was dismissed for being too harsh and was expelled from the Nazi party because of his cruelty to the prisoners.  Piorkowski was executed by the Allies after being convicted by an American Military Tribunal at Dachau.

Dachau Commandant’s house is on the right

SS Obersturmbannfuhrer Martin Gottfried Weiss replaced Piorkowski.  He was the 7th Commandant of Cachau.  Weiss was put on trial by an American Military Tribunal at Dachau in November 1945.  He was convicted and was later hanged at the Landsberg am Lech prison.  Many of the prisoners testified on his behalf.  Although Weiss was not charged with any specific atrocity, he was convicted of participating in a “common plan” to commit war crimes.

The photo below shows Martin Gottfried Weiss standing in the courtroom at Dachau as he is identified by Dr. Franz Blaha, a Czech political prisoner who made a sworn affidavit on May 3, 1945, in which he accused the Dachau staff of killing prisoners in the gas chamber at Dachau.

Martin Weiss is the man standing on the right

Martin Weiss was hanged at Landsberg am Lech prison

The last of the 8 Commandants of Dachau was Wilhelm Eduard Weiter, who replaced Martin Gottfried Weiss on November 1, 1943.

On April 26, 1945, Weiter left the Dachau camp with a transport of prisoner.  Martin Gottfried Weiss had been brought back to the Dachau camp in 1945 when the Muhldorf subcamp, where he was the commander, was evacuated.  As the highest ranking SS officer at Dachau, Weiss took over as Commandant after Weiter left the camp.  Weiter committed suicide on May 6, 1945 at Schloss Itter, a subcamp of Dachau, according to the Dachau Museum.

Source: http://www.scrapbookpages.com/Dachauscrapbook/KZDachau/DachauLife2.html

Betje Jakobs

Betje Jakobs

Born Zwolle, Netherlands

April 1, 1920

February 3, 2010.  Betje and her sister Saartje were born to Jewish parents in the town of Zwolle in the Netherlands’ north central province of Overijssel.  Betje was known affectionately as “Bep” to her friends.  The Jakobs family owned a successful sporting goods store.

1933-39: As a young girl, Betje enjoyed playing the piano, knitting and tennis.  At age 16, while still in secondary school, she began to date Maurits Wijnberg, a boy two years her senior, whose family owned Zwolle’s Hotel Wijnberg.

1940-42: The Germans invaded the Netherlands in May 1940.  Two years later, on August 4, 1942, Betje and Maurits were married.  Betje could not officially move in with her new husband due to Nazi edicts that forbade Jews to change their address.  She therefore continued to live with her parents.  That same year, the Nazis confiscated the Wijnbergs’ hotel, and Maurits and his family were forced to move into a shack.  Betje visited her husband and in-laws every day.  She and Mrs. Wijnberg often sat together knitting and discussing books.

On October 12, 1942, Betje was deported to Auschwitz, where she perished.  She was 22 years old.

Source: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/idcard.php?lang=en&Moduleld=10006346

Susan Strauss

Susan Strauss

Born Vacha, Germany

January 9, 1926

February 2, 2010.  Susan grew up in Vacha, a small Thuringian town where her family had lived for more than 400 years.  Her father, Herman, owned a general store and her mother, Bertha, took care of the home and children.  Susan had a younger sister Brunhilde.  The Strausses were one of about 25-30 Jewish families living in Vacha.

1933-39: Soon after the Nazis took power, many of Susan’s friends stopped playing with her.  In 1938, she was forced to leave the public school.  That November, the Nazis unleashed a wave of pogroms throughout Germany known as Kristallnacht (“The Night of Broken Glass”).  In Vacha, local party members damaged the family store and imprisoned her father in the Buchenwald concentration camp.  He was released after four weeks on the condition that he quickly emigrate.  In 1939, he fled to Belgium.  Susan, her mother, grandmother, and sister moved to Berlin, where there was a large Jewish community.

1940-44: During the war, Susan was conscriped for forced labor and produced radio receivers for submarines.  Her father reached the United States in 1940, but was unable to get his family out of Germany.  In January 1942, Susan and her family were deported to Riga ghetto in occupied Latvia.  Upon arrival, her grandmother, Jettchen, was taken to the nearby forests and killed.  Susan, her mother, and sister were placed in forced labor in the ghetto and at the Kaiserwald concentration camp.  In the fall of 1944, as the Soviet army approached, they were deported to the Stutthof camp.  From Stutthof, Susan was transferred to the subcamp of Sophienwalde, where the prisoners were forced to pave roads.

German forces occupied Riga in early July 1941.  Here, war damage to Riga’s city hall is evidenced by blackened areas around the building’s windows.  Riga, Latvia, August 1941.

RIGA

From 1918 to 1940, Riga was the capital of independent Latvia.  Before World War II, about 40,000 Jews lived in Riga, representing slightly more than 10 percent of the city’s population.  The community had a well-developed network of Hebrew and Yiddish schools, as well as a lively Jewish cultural life.  Jews were integrated into most aspects of life in Riga and even sat on the city council.  In August 1940, the Soviet Union annexed Latvia, and Riga became the capital of the Latvian SSR.  German forces occupied Riga in early July 1941.  Thereafter, Riga became the capital of the Reich Commissariat Ostland, a German civilian administration.

German Einsatzgruppen (mobile killing units), together with Latvian auxiliaries, shot several thousand Jews shortly after German forces entered the city.  In mid-August, the Germans ordered the establishment of a ghetto in the southeastern area of the city.  The ghetto was sealed in October 1941, imprisoning some 30,000 Jews.  In late November and early December of 1941, the Germans announced that they intended to settle the majority of ghetto inhabitants “further east.”  On November 30 and December 8-9, at least 26,000 Riga Jews were shot by German killing squads and their Latvian auxiliaries in the Rumbula Forest, five miles southeast of Riga, along the Riga-Dvinsk railway and the Riga-Salaspils road.

A sign, in both German and Latvian, warning that people attempting to cross the fence or to contact inhabitants of the Riga ghetto will be shot.  Riga, Latvia, 1941-1943.

The surviving 4,000-5,000 Jews were incarcerated in an area of the ghetto known as the “small” or “Latvian” ghetto.  The Germans also deported some 20,000 Jews from Germany, Austria, and the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia to Riga.  The section of the ghetto where these foreign Jews were imprisoned was called the “big” or “German” ghetto, established as a separate entity from the Latvian” ghetto.  A transport of 1,000 Jews from the German Reich shared the fate of the murdered Riga Jews.  Most of the remaining German Jews deported to Riga were also killed in the Rumbula Forest.

Several hundred Jews in the Riga ghetto organized resistance activities against the Germans.  Small groups sought to escape from the ghetto and join partisans in the surrounding forests.  In October 1942, German police discovered a small band of members of the Jewish underground outside the ghetto.  In reprisal for partisan activities, the Germans seized and killed more than 100 people from the ghetto, and executed almost all Jewish policemen on suspicion of participating in resistance activities.

In the summer of 1943, the Germans deported some ghetto inhabitants to the Kaiserwald concentration camp, which had been established in March in the north of the city.  Others were deported to Kaiserwald subcamps nearby.  The Germans destroyed the ghetto in December 1943, and deported the last Jews to Kaiserwald.  The surviving Jews in Latvia, from the destroyed ghettos of Riga, Liepaja, and Dvinsk, were concentrated in Kaiserwald and its subcamps.

In 1944, in an attempt to destroy evidence of mass murder, the Germans forced prisoners to reopen mass graves in Rumbula and burn the bodies.  Once the work was completed, the Germans then killed these prisoners.  In the summer of 1944, the Germans murdered thousands of Jews then held in Kaiserwald and its subcamps.  Those remaining alive were later deported to Stutthof concentration camp in Germany.

On October 13, 1944, the Soviet army liberated Riga.  Almost all of Riga’s Jews had been murdered by the Nazis.

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Susan Strauss. Susan was liberated by the Soviet troops on March 10, 1945.  Her mother perished in the Thorn (Torun) labor camp and her sister at Stutthof.  After the war, Susan married Herman Taube (reference my previous Feburary 1, 2010 blog), and immigrated with her husband and family to the United States, where they joined her father.

Source: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/idcard.php?lang+en&Moduleld=10006220

http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/media_php?lang+en&Moduleld=10005463&Mediald=671/1861

Herman Taube

Herman Taube, Born February 2, 1918, Lodz, Poland

February 1, 2010.  Herman Taube was born in Lodz, Poland in 1918.  Orphaned at an early age, he was brought up by Mirle and Gershon Mandel, his grandparents.  Gershon ran a small shop that produced soap and candles.  Herman attended a yeshiva (school for study of the Torah) prior to WWII.  Gershon hoped his grandson would become a rabbi, but Herman instead began nursing in 1937.

Herman was called for duty as a medic in the Polish Army in August 1939.  Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, thus marking the start of WWII.  The Polish army was defeated within weeks of the blitzkrieg, (lightning war).  The Soviet Union occupied easter Poland according to the German-Soviet Pact on September 17, 1939.  Herman, along with the retreating Polish Army, was captured by the Soviet forces after crossing the Bug River.  While officers and those of higher rank were sent to Katyn and later executed, lower ranking soldiers were sent to Siberia, a harsh area of the Soviet Union where gulags (Soviet work camps) were located.

German forces invaded the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941.  Based on an agreement between the Soviet government and the Polish government in exile, all Polish citizens held in Soviet camps were to be released (in part, to create a Second Polish Army in exile).  Upon his release, Herman went to Uzbekistan to join the Second Polish Army.  He worked as a medic in Uzbekistan for two years until his unit moved to the eastern front.  In June 1944, Herman was injured when the ambulance he was riding in drove over a land mine.  After recuperating, Herman was sent to the headquarters of the Second Polish Army, newly stationed in Lublin, the former Lublin/Majdanek concentration camp.  Herman worked in the Majdanek hospital, caring for the liberated prisoners who were left behind when the retreating Nazis liquidated the camp.  Shortly thereafter, Herman was sent to work in a hospital in Pomerania where he worked until the end of the war.

After the war, Herman married Susan Strauss, a fellow survivor.  The two immigrated to the United States in 1947.  Herman is the author of more than twenty novels and books of poetry and has worked as a writer and journalist for over 60 years.  Herman and Susan live in the Washington, DC area, and volunteer at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Source: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

http://isurvived.org/Frameset_folder-2/-USHM8-Herman-html

Holocaust Survivor Basch to get Wallenberg Medal

January 31, 2010.

Holocaust survivor Basch to get Wallenberg Medal

One of the Holocaust survivors whose story was told in the Oscar-winning Best Documentary Feature “The Last Days”, will be awarded the 13th Wallenberg Medal in Rackham Auditorium.  Provost Paul N. Courant will confer the medal on Bill Basch, who then will deliver the Wallenberg Lecture.

“The Last Days” was produced in 1999 and chronicles the final days of the Jews of Hungary as they were rounded up by the Nazis in 1944.  Academy Award-winning director Steven Spielberg was executive producer of the film.

In the documentary, five Holocaust survivors, all Americans now, tell the story of their deportation to the camps, escapes from execution and eventual liberation.  The film takes them back to their hometowns and to the camps.  Basch took his son, Martin, to the place where he was interned.

Basch was the son of a grocer in a small Hungarian village and grew up in a loving family.  But by 1942, he had fled to Budapest, joined the Underground, and became one of a legion of young volunteers who risked their lives to deliver food and passports to the Jews living in Raoul Wallenberg’s safe houses.  Eventually, Basch was captured while trying to deliver a Schutzpass – an official-looking passport – type document created by Wallenberg that declared Budapest Jews were protected by the Royal Swedish Legation, a stall tactic until the Jews could be hidden.  Basch survived the horros of Buchenwald and Dachau, and describes Wallenberg as his hero.

Wallenberg was a Swedish citizen who graduated from the U-M College of Architecture in 1935.  In 1944, the Swedish Foreign Ministry sent Wallenberg on a rescue mission to Budapest, where his incomparable personal courage and ingenuity saved 100,000 Jewish lives, Courant said.

Here’s one example of the many Wallenberg Medals that have been awarded.

The Raoul Wallenberg Endowment was established in 1985 to commemorate him and to recognize those whose own courageous actions call to mind Wallenberg’s extraordinary accomplishments and values, Courant says.  Previous Wallenberg Medal recipients include: Nobel laureates Elie Wiesel, His Holiness the Dalai Lama, and Miep Gies, the woman who supported Anne Frank and her family in hiding.

Source: The Regents of the U of M

http://isurvived.org/Frameset_folder-2/-Basch_Bill.html