Germany - 1942 (IV)Oswald Pohl was the SS general in charge of the Nazi Economic and Administrative Main Office. He controlled all slave labor and the disposition of Jewish possessions taken from those murdered in the death camps.
Pohl supervised construction of thousands of German concentration and extermination camps.
He was the one who decided what to do with hair cut off Jewish victims - the hair was used to make textiles. He also received the gold from Jewish teeth, rings, and eyeglass frames - these were sent to the national treasury.
Pohl did not get away. He was tried as a war criminal, was convicted and was hung on June 8, 1951.
October 1942 - In various places, some Jews resisted and some Jews escaped the Nazis, but the brutality and the killings continue. All Jewish property in Norway is confiscated. The British ambassador to the Vatican makes note in his diary that Pope Pius XII seldom denounces moral crimes. He writes that the Pope's "policy of silence ... must necessarily involve a renunciation of moral leadership."
At a small labor camp in Poland, a group of female non-Jewish prisoners beat, brutalize and kill several dozen Jewish women.
October 3 - Poland's ambassador to the Vatican spells out in detail to the Vatican how thousands of Jews have been gassed by the Nazis.
October 4 - German authorities order all Jews in German concentration camps be sent to Auschwitz for extermination.
The Sonderkommando was a special unit comprised of prisoners at Auschwitz chosen to handle the more unpleasant tasks, such as searching the dead for valuables, moving bodies to the crematoria, and cleaning the gas chambers.
Marie Vaillant-Couturier, a member of the French resistance imprisoned at Auschwitz, wrote the following:
"One night we were awakened by terrifying cries. And we discovered, on the following day, from the men working the Sonderkommando ... that on the preceding day, the gas supply having run out, they had thrown the children into the furnaces alive."
October 18 - Hitler orders that all captured Allied Special Operations Personnel be executed.
October 23 - The Battle of El Alamein begins in Egypt.
October 28 - The SS issues an order that socks and mittens taken from Jews be sent to SS families.
November 1942 - The Germans occupy southern France.
* November 1-6 - Over 170,000 Jews are killed in one week at Belzec, Auschwitz and Treblinka.
* November 2 - SS chief Heinrich Himmler approves a plan to set up a collection of Jewish skeletons and skull at the Strasbourg Anatomical Institute in France. The head of Germany's Ancestral Heritage Society requests 150 Jewish skeletons.
Allied forces at El Alamein, Egypt, rout General Erwin Rommel's troops.
November 8 - Allied Operation Torch landings occur on the Algerian coast. This inadvertently saves thousands of Jews from the death camps.
November 11 - Norwegian Protestant bishops in Oslo make a public protest re: the deportation of Norwegian Jews.
November 15 - A Parisian Jewish resistance group places two time-bombs in a window of a German barracks, killing several German soldiers eating breakfast. The bombs were carried by Jewish women.
November 19 - The Soviets counterattack near Stalingrad.
December 2 - Jews all over the free world hold a day of prayer and fasting for European Jews.
December 7 - A U.S. State Department official, G. Robert Borden Reams, a so-called "expert" on the Jews suggests the U.S. government remain silent regarding the Holocaust.
December 8 - Rabbi Steven Wise and other Jewish leaders meet with President Roosevelt to discuss the plight of European Jews.
December 9 - "The Christian Century," a U.S. Protestant magazine, attacks Rabbi Wise, saying he has lied about the Holocaust and even if he hasn't he should shut up about it.
December 17 - Under great pressure from many groups, the Allied countries "officially condemn the Nazis 'bestial policy of cold-blooded extermination,' and swear to punish those responsible. Several anti-Semitic U.S. State Department officials try to block this condemnation. There is no mention of Jews in this or future declarations.
The media in the U.S. fails to publicize or discuss the Holocaust.
December 18 - The British ambassador to the Vatican again comments that the silence of the pope is "highly damning."
December 28 - Dr. Carl Clauberg initiates sterilization experiments on Jewish women at Auschwitz.
December 30 - Pope Pius XII says that he thinks the atrocity stories about Jews are exaggerations "for the purposes of propaganda."
December 31 - By this date, two million Jews have been murdered by the Germans in the death camps. Hundreds of thousands more have been murdered by various German military and police units.
The speed and efficacy by which the Nazis were able to identify, locate, arrest, and transport Jews to the extermination camps was due to the assistance of the American company, International Business Machines (IBM)!
1 comment:
It was not only IBM, but Ford and American banks, including Prescott Bush's Bank. No one cared enough about the fate of the Jews to do anything to help them.
Eventually the Nazis learned how to efficiently kill over 11 million people! Had the world paid attention to the plight of the Jews, maybe 5 million non Jews would have been saved. We will never know and I wonder if there are many monuments to those five million.
How sad that no religon has resolved how to handle such terrible events.
Bob Poris
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