Germany 1942 (III)In the month of August, 1942, when most people should be vacationing -- enjoying the mountains or the beaches -- the Nazis murdered 400,000 Jews.
The U.S., Britain, and Germany agree to cooperate in the feeding of 2 1/2 million starving Greek civilians. The English send 35,000 tons of food per month after the Germans agree not to confiscate it. This feeding costs the Allies $30 million per annum.
The Allies do not, however, do anything to help the Jews in Europe!
August 1-12 - 81,000 Polish Jews are sent from Warsaw to the Treblinka death camp.
August 3 - Emanuel Ringelblum, a resident of the Warsaw ghetto, wrote a diary detailing life in the ghetto. On this date, the first part of the diary, hidden in ten tin cans and milk cans, is secretly buried by a Warsaw schoolteacher, Israel Lichtenstein.
August 4 - Jews are deported from Belgium for the first time. Throughout the country, however, non-Jewish families hide 25,000 Jews.
August 5 - In Radom, Poland, 600 elderly Jews along with young children are shot by the SS.
This daily slaughter will continue all through the rest of 1942, in every city and every country where the Germans have a presence.
August 8 - Edith Stein, a Catholic nun, is gassed at Auschwitz.
August 9 - 180 Jews of Mir, Belorussia, escape to the forests. Jews kill six German and Ukranian policemen at Kremenetes, Ukraine. A group of Jewish partisans capture and execute 44 German policemen at Derechin, Belorussia.
* August 10 - 30 - 50,000 Jews at Belzec are murdered. Swiss authorities refuse entry to 10,000 Jews on the grounds that Switzerland can accept only "political" refugees, not "racial" refugees. These 10,000 go to their deaths.
* August 13 - 27 - US and British officials decide to keep secret Riegner's cable outlining Nazi plans for the Holocaust.
[Often Jewish children were hidden inside Roman Catholic monasteries and convents. Too often, though, these children were refused unless they converted to Christianity. Father Bruno, a Belgian priest, risked his life to save several Jewish children.]
* August 28 - Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, president of the World Jewish Congress, finally receives Reigner's cable. He decides to keep it quiet until he can verify the information. In Paris, Catholic priests who have helped Jews are arrested.
* August 30 - French Bishop Pierre-Marie Theas writes to his parishes that all human beings are God's creation, Jews as well as Christians, and that all people deserve respect from governments and individuals.
Late summer of 1942 - An SS officer by name of Kurt Gertsein goes to the German papal nuncio to tell what he knows of the mass gassing of the Jews. He is turned away.
A Jewish congressman from New York, Emanuel Celler, proposes a bill to allow French Jews about to be deported to the East to immigrate to the U.S. The bill is killed by the House Committe on Immigration.
In France, as Jews are being deported to their deaths, the Vichy Minister of Information reminds the press they need to recall "the true teaching of Saint Thomas and the Popes ... the general and traditional teaching of the Catholic Church about the Jewish problem."
* September 12 - The German Sixth Army and Fourth Panzer Army arrived at Stalingrad, Russia.
* September 22 - French Protestant pastor Marc Boegner protests Jewish deportation and offers to have Jewish children adopted. Vichy France Premier Laval says the children must all leave France.
The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Hajj Amin al-Husseini, was a rabid anti-Semite. After leading attacks against the British and Jews in Palestine and Iraq, he fled to Berlin. Hitler promised Husseini that when he conquered the Middle East, he would kill all the Jews. After the war, Husseini escaped a trial and was feted for years in Middle Eastern capitals.
* September 26 and 28 - German railway officials gather in Berlin to discuss obtaining more trains and track upgrades. With IBM's help they can send more Jews to death camps more quickly.
More tomorrow...
1 comment:
I think that even the most obtuse amongst us, will see that the fate of the Jews was not worth doing much about. They simply were expendable! Years later, we heard and read pious sentiments about how terrible the Holocaust was. I lived thru those years and did know that terrible things were being done to Jews! A very small few tried to write about it and a few tried to report it. They were either not believed or ignored. People do not want to believe that such horrors were ignored but they were! It was a colossal failure of morals by the entire world! The religous leaders all over the world were silent or went along!
Bob Poris
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