Latest news with #Einsatzgruppen
Times
02-05-2025
- Politics
- Times
Hitler gave first order for Holocaust, SS commander reveals
The mills of justice turned slowly for many of Nazi Germany's war criminals, but for Bruno Streckenbach they did not turn at all. From directing the SS death squads that massacred thousands across Poland in 1939 to deploying the Einsatzgruppen, who killed hundreds of thousands of Jews in the 'Holocaust by bullets', he had orchestrated some of the Third Reich's worst atrocities. Prosecutors tried to charge him with responsibility for at least a million murders but Streckenbach eluded every attempt to hold him to account and never spent so much as a day in a German prison after the war. In 1977, however, as he was dying from heart disease and throat cancer, Streckenbach wheezed out his life story over nearly four hours to
New York Times
22-02-2025
- Politics
- New York Times
He Fled the Nazis Before the War. He Came Back to Put His Country on Trial.
On a gray wintry day in December 1970, Willy Brandt, the first postwar Social Democratic chancellor of West Germany, fell to his knees at a Warsaw monument to the Jews who had fought there against the Nazis. His gesture has come to exemplify what the Germans resonantly call Vergangenheitsbewältigung, the striving to cope with the past. For all the shortcomings in this nationwide effort, most Germans today set an example of remorse that shames Turkish nationalist leaders equivocating about the Armenian genocide, or rightist Japanese politicians visiting the Yasukuni war shrine in Tokyo that honors Class A war criminals. Yet in the years after World War II, many Germans were in varying degrees unrepentant, nationalistic or self-justifying. Four years after the Allied military tribunal at Nuremberg for top Nazi leaders, only 38 percent of West Germans in the American-occupied zone approved of further trials for war criminals. How did so many Germans become contrite about the Nazi past? In his gripping and well-researched biography, 'The Prosecutor,' Jack Fairweather argues that the answer lies in part in the work of an irascible, honorable German Jewish lawyer named Fritz Bauer, who pressed the people of his country 'to face their complicity in the industrialized mass murder of Europe's Jews.' A bookish judge in Stuttgart under the Weimar Republic, Bauer was triply anathematized in Nazi Germany: He was Jewish, a Social Democratic foe of Nazism and a secretly gay man. He and his fellow Social Democrats were shaken by the readiness of establishment conservatives who 'went along with Hitler's desire to upend the democratic order.' Bauer was lucky to survive six terrifying months in the concentration camps, where he was repeatedly beaten. He emerged to find a police state where Jewish doctors could not practice and Jewish stores were boycotted, while Stuttgart's non-Jewish residents unconcernedly got on with their lives. As Christmas drew near, Fairweather writes, 'girls from the newly renamed Adolf Hitler School sang carols.' Bauer fled to Denmark in 1936 and then to Sweden in 1943, after a Danish rabbi warned that the occupying Germans were about to round up all the Jews in the country. Fairweather's book makes for an uncomfortable reminder of how many Germans supported the Third Reich. The legal ideal of individual criminal justice crumbled before the more than 250,000 Germans who had served in the SS, murdering at Auschwitz and the other death camps in German-controlled Poland, or as part of the mobile killing squads called the Einsatzgruppen; the indoctrinated soldiers of the German military who had backed up the Einsatzgruppen's massacres, shot Jews themselves or used Jews as slave labor, as well as killing vast numbers of Soviet prisoners of war and civilians; the bureaucrats and lawyers who had arranged the logistics of genocide; and the nearly 14 million Germans who had voted for the Nazis in July 1932, although Hitler's vicious hatred of Jews had been flaunted in 'Mein Kampf' and his fulminating speeches. Returning to Allied-occupied Germany in 1948, Bauer demanded at least a symbolic German reckoning with that widespread complicity. While some skeptics dismiss war crimes trials as a veiled tool of Western domination, Fairweather shows a quite different dynamic. In the early Cold War, the Western powers increasingly preferred to shelve war crimes prosecutions in order to fortify West Germany as an anti-Soviet bulwark. Far from justice being a foreign imposition, here German prosecutors pursued German trials for German crimes. In 1956, Bauer became the attorney general of West Germany's largest state and issued an arrest warrant for Adolf Eichmann, the fervid SS chieftain who had engineered the deportation of Jews from across Europe to the death camps. With good reason, Bauer worried that Nazis working in West Germany's government might alert Eichmann or scupper the investigation. The first head of West Germany's new foreign intelligence agency was Reinhard Gehlen, previously the Third Reich's chief of military intelligence for the eastern front in World War II. He knew where Eichmann had gone to ground in Argentina, but did not inform Bauer, instead putting the German prosecutor under surveillance. When Bauer unexpectedly got a tip from a Dachau survivor with Eichmann's address in Argentina, he did not dare ask the West German police to run it down. Instead he passed his information to the Israelis and kept exhorting them to grab Eichmann — leading eventually to his abduction from Buenos Aires and his dramatic 1961 trial in an Israeli court in Jerusalem. As the German journalist Ronen Steinke argues in his own first-rate biography, Bauer's greatest achievement was a sprawling trial of some 20 German officers and functionaries at Auschwitz, held in a Frankfurt courtroom in the mid-60s. Bauer made a point of prosecuting not just senior camp leaders but also lower-ranked Germans, since every person operating the death camp contributed to mass murder. The most devastating testimony came from Auschwitz survivors, one of whom described the mortal terror of people in the gas chambers, some taking 10 or more minutes to die, struggling frantically, their corpses covered in blood from their noses and ears. An Austrian Jewish survivor recalled the words of a little boy who was to be gassed the next day: 'No, I'm not afraid. It's all so terrible here, it can only be better up there.' Fairweather writes that Bauer's story shows 'how the Holocaust came to define our collective sense of humanity.' Yet his book arrives as major political parties are working to stamp the memory of the Holocaust out of public consciousness. Last year, the immigrant-hating extremist party Alternative for Germany became the first far-right group to win a plurality in a state election since the fall of Nazi Germany. The party was led to victory by Björn Höcke, who has scorned the prominent Holocaust memorial in Berlin and said that Germany needs a '180-degree' turn in remembering its history. In 2023, the billionaire mogul Elon Musk endorsed as 'the actual truth' an antisemitic online post that blamed Jewish communities for pushing 'dialectical hatred against whites' and flooding Western countries with 'hordes of minorities'; earlier this year, he took time out from his new role as a powerful adviser to President Trump to tell an AfD rally by video that Germany has 'too much of a focus on past guilt.' Trump won his second term as president despite having dinner at his Florida estate with Kanye West, an outspoken antisemite, and Nick Fuentes, a white supremacist and Holocaust denier. Fairweather's book would be haunting to read at any time; it is especially bitter today.
New York Times
17-02-2025
- General
- New York Times
They Asked for Help to Escape the Nazis. Their Pleas Went Unanswered.
In late November 1939, when life for many Jews in Europe was dissolving, Jakob Aufrichtig in Paris penned a letter to the Committee for Jewish Refugees in Amsterdam. He was gravely concerned about his mother, Rachela, who was in her 50s and living alone in Vienna. German officials had ordered her to vacate her apartment, threatening to deport her to Dachau, a Nazi concentration camp, if she didn't. Aufrichtig asked the committee for its help in relocating her to the Netherlands. 'Although it is my greatest wish, I cannot bring her here,' Aufrichtig explained. 'I am totally desperate, and if I can't save my mother, I will take my own life. The frantic efforts of terrified Jews in Germany, Austria and other parts of Europe trying to escape persecution filled letter after letter that came in to the committee. Thousands of German Jews had already emigrated to the Netherlands, the closest safe neighboring country after Adolf Hitler's election as German Chancellor in 1933. Among them were Otto and Edith Frank, and their daughters, Margot and Anne Frank. But after May 1938, requests for entry to the Netherlands would be rejected because the country had already closed its borders to refugees. 'If you look at the results of this heartless policy, they are terrifying,' said Emile Schrijver, director of the National Holocaust Museum in Amsterdam. Aufrichtig's letter is one of some 200 anguished, and ultimately unsuccessful, requests for help that were found in an Amsterdam attic more than four decades ago by a Dutch-Israeli documentary filmmaker, Willy Lindwer. The letters depict a landscape of despair as the depths of Nazi depravity began to become clearer, but the options for escape had dwindled. Now several dozen of them are featured in a new book by Lindwer and the Dutch historian Aline Pennewaard, 'Ik weet me geen raad,' which translates to 'I'm at a Loss for What to Do,' published last month. Lindwer, an avid collector of war-era documents and Judaica, said the building where he found the bundle of letters was being cleared. He doesn't know how they came to be left in the attic. But when he opened one and started reading, he said, 'It was chilling, really moving.' Also familiar. Lindwer's parents, Jewish refugees from Ukraine, had arrived in the Netherlands in the early 1930s, leaving behind family members who would later be murdered by the Nazi mobile killing units, the Einsatzgruppen. Germany invaded the Netherlands in 1940, and the Holocaust would ultimately claim 75 percent of the Jews who lived there. But not Lindwer's parents, who went into hiding and survived. Lindwer didn't know exactly what to do with the letters when he found them, so he put them in a drawer, where they stayed for more than 40 years. When a new National Holocaust Museum opened in Amsterdam last year, he planned to donate the bundle. But first, he and Pennewaard, his longtime creative collaborator, decided to try to research what had happened to the letter writers and publish their stories in a book. Pennewaard was able to track down what happened to about 100 of the correspondents, and included 35 stories in the book. Most of the letters were written in German and sent to either the Jewish Community in Amsterdam (an official municipal group), or to the Committee for Jewish Refugees (a Jewish-run aid organization established in 1933). But by 1938, these groups could offer little hope, because the Dutch government cut off most paths to legal immigration. Hendrik Colijn, the country's prime minister, justified this decision by arguing that accepting Jewish refugees would increase antisemitism at home. 'If we were to admit here an unlimited stream of fugitives from abroad,' he said in a speech to Parliament, 'the necessary consequence of this would be that the feeling in our own country with regard to the Jews would swing in an unfavorable way.' As the world dealt with the lingering effects of the Depression, the Netherlands was not alone in deciding against expanding refuge for Europe's Jews. In July 1938, President Franklin D. Roosevelt convened an international conference in Evian-les-Bains, France, with delegates from 32 nations, to discuss the refugee crisis. But few countries agreed to ease their immigration rules, and nearly all refused to admit more refugees. The U.S. quota for German and Austrians stayed fixed at around 27,000 a year, and the waiting list for entry visas reached 140,000 in 1938, according to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Lindwer said it's not hard to make a comparison between the difficulties faced by refugees in the 1930s, and those who are trying to escape persecution in their home countries today. 'This refugee problem is a problem of our times,' he said, 'and with the chaos we have in the world today, I'm afraid it will only get worse.' Despite the 1938 border closing, thousands of desperate letters continued to flood into the Netherlands. 'They all got an answer,' said Pennewaard, but it was usually a standard form letter, saying no aid was available. The plight of the writers can be read in the exclamation points. 'Extremely urgent case!!!' wrote Blima Bierzonski, on Dec. 13, 1938 seeking entry for herself and her 7-year-old daughter, Gerda. Her husband, Viktor, had left earlier that year for the United States, where they hoped to join him. But now the Nazis gave her just a few weeks to leave the country or be deported. Any stay in the Netherlands would be temporary, she promised. 'I will really not be a financial burden to anyone,' she said. Blocked from the Netherlands, she and Gerda fled to Belgium and moved from country to country for the next few years, finding no safe place, until Bierzonski was forced to leave her daughter with a family in Switzerland. They would not reunite again until 1946. One tragic tale that Pennewaard tracked concerned a 33-year-old father, Nathan Awrutin, from Berlin, who wrote begging for temporary entry. He only wanted to wait in Holland until his family received papers that would allow them to join his parents in Palestine. The German police had ordered his family to evacuate their home by Jan. 1, 1939, he said. But he, his wife, Hertha, and their 5-year-old son, Ronald, had nowhere else to go. 'We've tried every possible means to emigrate from Germany, but without any success,' he wrote. 'My family and I place all our hopes on you, because you are the only one who can help us. My wife and I aren't able to sleep at night, because we worry about what will become of us. I cannot provide for my family here, and my son has become malnourished.' Searching public records, Pennewaard found only a few documents about the Awrutins. The couple, she discovered had had a second son, Simon, born in 1942, but she could find no record of their whereabouts at that time. Then she scoured a list of people taken on a transport from Berlin to Auschwitz, the death camp. On the list, dated July 12, 1944, were all four members of the family. Hertha and her two sons were murdered on arrival in the gas chambers. Nathan was selected for 'work duty,' and had prisoner number 42921 tattooed on his arm. Nathan survived there until the Germans evacuated Auschwitz in January 1945, and made prisoners march to Natzweiler, a concentration camp, where he was forced to work until he died on Feb. 19, 1945. No photos or other documentation of the family Awrutin were preserved. Feige Bisseleches, a 76 year-old widow living in Vienna, had no better luck. 'I am totally alone,' she wrote in her letter, 'and now I have to leave my home where I've lived for 46 years because it has been given to strangers. I cannot stay here as a Jew. I am desperate and completely helpless. In view of my situation, I ask the committee to have mercy on me.' Bisseleches received no help. Two years later, she was deported to Theresienstadt, a Nazi concentration camp in the former Czechoslovakia, where she managed to survive 14 months until December 1942, when she was transferred to the camp's hospital and died. The Aufrichtigs were luckier. Although Aufrichtig's request to the Netherlands on behalf of his mother, Rachela, was denied, he kept reaching out to other countries Finally, she was granted a domestic worker's visa to Britain, and was allowed to enter the country as a housekeeper. Eventually, mother and son reunited in New York. Rachela lived to be 91. Her son's first letter had not saved her, but he kept writing.
BBC News
27-01-2025
- Politics
- BBC News
How Auschwitz become di centre of Nazi Holocaust
Na 80 years ago wey Soviet troops liberate di Nazi death camp for Auschwitz-Birkenau, and some of di last survivors go join some world leaders on 27 January to commemorate di 1.1 million pipo wey dem be murder for dia. Di remaining survivors dey mostly in dia 90s now and dis fit be di last year any of dem fit attend. In just over four-and-a-half years, Nazi Germany bin systematically murder at least 1.1 million pipo for Auschwitz, wey dem bin build for di south of occupied Poland near di town of Oswiecim. Auschwitz bin dey for di centre of di Nazi campaign to wipe out Europe Jewish population, and almost one million of di pipo wey bin die for dia na Jews. Among di odas wey lose dia lives na Poles, Roman and Russian prisoners of war. By di time di Red Army bin cautiously enta Auschwitz on 27 January 1945, only about 7,000 prisoners bin remain. Tens of thousands of odas already bin dey forced to leave by trecking on "death marches" as di Nazis bin return to di west. Italian prisoner Primo Levi bin dey lie down for camp hospital wit scarlet fever wen di Soviet liberators bin land. Di men bin look dem "strangely wit embarrassed looks as dia body dey fail, for dia battered huts and few of us wey still dey alive", im go later write for im Holocaust memoir The Truce. "Dem no greet us, dem no even smile; dem look oppressed not only by compassion but by... di feeling of guilt say such a crime dey exist." "We bin see lean, tortured, impoverished pipo," na wetin soja Ivan Martynushkin tok about liberating di death camp, external. "We fit tell from dia eyes say dem bin dey happy as dem save dem from dis hell." Wetin be di Holocaust? Wen di Nazis bin enta power for Germany in 1933 dem start to strip Jewish pipo of all dia property, freedoms and rights under di law. After di German invasion and occupation of Poland in 1939, di Nazis bin start to deport Jewish pipo from di Third Reich to parts of Poland, wia dem bin create ghettos to separate dem from di rest of di population. In 1941, during di German invasion of di USSR, di Nazis start dia campaign of extermination in seriously. Nazis bin tok about dia invasion as a race war between Germany and Jewish pipo, as well as di Slavic population and di Roma. Groups of German sojas wey dem bin call Einsatzgruppen bin set out across newly conquered lands for Eastern Europe to massacre civilians. By di end of 1941, dem bin kill 500,000 pipo, and by 1945 dem murder about two million - 1.3 million na Jewish pipo. Behind di lines, Nazi commanders bin dey experiment (test) ways to kill plenti pipo at once. Dem bin dey fear say to shoot pipo too dey stressful for dia sojas, and so, dem bin come up wit more efficient means of murder. Dem bin use gas vans as experiment to kill mentally disabled pipo for Poland as early as 1939. Dem pump fumes wey dey poisonous into compartments wey dem lock to suffocate di pipo inside. By di winter of 1941, di Nazis bin construct dia first gas chamber and crematorium (wia dem dey burn deadi body) for Auschwitz. Nazi leaders bin meet for January 1942 for di Wannsee Conference to coordinate di industrial slaughter - wetin dem bin cal a "final solution to di Jewish question" - dem kill di entire European Jewish population, 11 million pipo by extermination and forced labour. Wetin Auschwitz be bifor? Bifor, Auschwitz na originally one Polish army barracks for southern Poland. Nazi Germany bin invade and occupy Poland for September 1939, and by May 1940 dem turn di site into jail for political prisoners. Di Nazi officer wey dem bin make commandant of di concentration camp, Rudolf Höss, bring di motto Arbeit Macht Frei - works sets you free - from anoda camp wia im bin work, for Dachau in Germany. Dat infamous lie still dey for dia till now, above di entrance to di camp wey pipo kon sabi as Auschwitz I. As di war and di Holocaust bin progress, di Nazi regime bin expand di site well-well. Di first pipo wey dem use gas on na a group of Polish and Soviet prisoners in September 1941. Work start on a new camp, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, di following month. Dis come becom di site of di huge gas chambers wia dem bin murder hundreds of thousands bifor November 1944, and di crematoria wia dem burn dia bodies. Birkenau bin suppose to become di biggest of six Nazi death camps. Dem complete three odas, for Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka, in 1942. Di first transport of Jews to Auschwitz II-Birkenau na 999 women and girls from Slovakia in March 1942. Sharp-sharp deportations follow from France, and later di Netherlands and Belgium. By 1944, dem bin dey murder 12,000 Jews evriday. German chemicals company IG Farben bin build and operate one synthetic rubber factory for Auschwitz III-Monowitz. Oda private companies like Krupp and Siemens-Schuckert bin also run factories nearby, to use di prisoners as slave labour. Both Primo Levi and Nobel Prize winner Elie Wiesel bin survive Monowitz concentration camp. Wen Auschwitz bin eventually get freedom, e bin get more dan 40 camps and sub camps. How Auschwitz bin dey work? Dem bin pack pipo from all ova Europe into cattle wagons wey no get windows, toilets, seats or food, and transport dem to Auschwitz. Na for dia dem separate pipo wey fit work and dos wey dem go immediately kill. Dem order di pipo wey no fit work to go naked and sent dem to showers for "delousing" - a euphemism (term) wey dem dey use describe di gas chambers. Guards from di so-called "Hygienic Institute" go drop powerful Zyklon-B gas pellets into di sealed chambers, and wait for pipo to die. E bin dey take about 20 minutes. Di thick walls no go fit hide di screams of di pipo wey dey suffocate inside. Den Sonderkommandos - oda prisoners, usually Jews wey dem bin force to work for di guards or be killed - go remove artificial limbs, glasses, hair and teeth bifor dem go drag di corpses to di incinerators (wia dem burn waste materials). Dem go burty di ashes of di deadibodies or use dem as fertiliser. Dem go later carry properties of di pipo wey dem murder thru gas and di pipo wey dem send to work for sorting for one part of di camp known as "Canada" - dem name am like dat becos dem bin see Canada as a kontri of plenty. Who be di victims? SS guards bin try to hide dia crimes as Soviet troops bin close in, and try to destroy dia extensive prisoner records - wey make am hard to fully quantify di number of victims. Academic studies since agree say di total dey close to 1.3 million pipo wey land for at Auschwitz. About 1.1 million of dem died dere.. Jews from all across Nazi-controlled Europe make up di vast majority of di victims. Almost one million Jewish pipo na im dem bin murder for Auschwitz. One specific example na Hungary Jewish population. In di space of just two months, between May and July 1944, Hungary bin transport 420,000 of di 437,000 Jewish pipo dem bin send to Auschwitz. Dem bin send tens of thousands of Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz evri day. Dem bin kill three quarter of dem on arrival. Di German state for di Auschwitz complex bin also kill some 75,000 Polish civilians, 15,000 Soviet prisoners of war, 25,000 Roma and Sinti, as well as Jehovah's Witnesses, homosexuals and political prisoners. Wetin happun wen Auschwitz bin get liberation? German authorities bin give order make dem stop di gassing and dem begin destroy di gas chambers and crematoria in late 1944, as Soviet troops begin move westward. Dem bin ship di stockpile of stolen valuables for di Canada sector to Germany shortly afterwards. Becos dem bin dey determined to erase di evidence of dia crimes, di Nazis bin order 56,000 prisoners wey bin dey remian to march west to oda concentration camps, like Bergen-Belsen, Dachau and Sachsenhausen. Dem leave di ones wey dey sick, wey no fit waka behind; and anyone wey fall behind as dem dey march dey go, dem go kill am. Soviet forces see only a few thousand survivors wen dem bin enta di camp on 27 January 1945, along wit hundreds of thousands of clothes and several tonnes of human hair. Sojas later remember say dem bin try to convince some survivors say di Nazis done finally go. Elie Wiesel later tok for im speech to mark di 50th anniversary of di liberation, external say di Nazi crimes for Auschwitz "bin produce a mutation on a cosmic scale, wey dey affect man dreams and endeavours". "After Auschwitz, di human condition no longer be di same. After Auschwitz, notin go ever be di same."
