The Holocaust Journal (Lest We Forget) - Germany 1943 (I)

Germany 1943 (I)

By January, 1943, only 55,000 Jews (out of 400,000) remained in the Warsaw Ghetto. On January 9, Himmler visited the ghetto and ordered that another 8,000 Jews be deported to the death camps. When the Germans tried to carry out that order they were met with armed resistance by the ZOB [Jewish Fighting Organization].

Zivia Lubetkin, who helped found ZOB, survived the Holocaust and wrote of her experiences in a book, "In the Days of Destruction and Revolt." Lubetkin says that, although outnumbered, they fought back: "We ... actually witnessed the German conquerors of the world retreat in fright from a handful of young Jews equipped only with a few pistols and hand grenades."

But on the Passover eve, April 19, the Germans returned. About 700-750 Jewish fighters drove the Germans back using guns, grenades and "Molotov cocktails." The Germans then set fire to the ghetto. It was not until May 16, however, that the Germans were able to declare the ghetto no longer existed.

Lubetkin escaped through the sewer system to the "Aryan" side of Warsaw and lived to fight another day.

Jewish resistance sprang up in other camps and in other areas. Jews everywhere began to realize there was no escape, so they would resist until they were killed. Himmler, aware of this, decided to speed up the destruction of Jews in the Lublin area of Poland. On November 3, 1943, the Nazis corralled 42,000 Jews and shot them. One historian said this was "the single largest killing operation against Jews in the entire war." The Germans gave it the code name, "Erntefest," or "harvest festival."

In 1943, 400,000 Jews would be murdered by the Germans.

Also in 1943, Himmler is named Reich minister of the interior. Pope Pius XII says the only thing the Vatican can do is pray for those who are oppressed. The SS pays "designated prisoners" three cigarettes for hanging other prisoners. During the war, BMW made plane engines at a Dachau subcamp using slave labor. The United States, by now well aware of the scale of the Jewish massacres, still refuses to admit Jewish children to America.

* January 3 - The Polish president asks Pope Pius XII to publicly denounce the German killing of Jews. Pius says nothing about the Jews nor about persecuted Polish Catholics.

* January 4 - The SS orders all human hair shaved from Jewish heads in the concentration camps be sent to the firm of Alex Zink at Roth, Germany, for processing.

* January 14-24 - Churchill and Roosevelt meet at Casablanca to discuss an Allied invasion of Europe.

Roosevelt, however, suggests that the French government in North Africa discriminate against local Jews just as Hitler did in the 1930s. Roosevelt said that "the number of Jews engaged in the practice of the professions ... should be definitely limited to the percentage that the Jewish population in North Africa bears to the whole of the North African population." Additionally, Roosevelt said that keeping just a certain percentage of Jews in the professions "would further eliminate the specific and understandable complaints which the Germans bore toward the Jews in Germany..."

* January 17 - Bishop Konrad Grag von Preysing is the only Roman Catholic bishop in Germany actively opposing the Nazi regime.

* January 23 - Libya is liberated by the British.

* January 27 - The US Army Air Force (8th USAAF) launches the first America air raid on Germany.

* January 30 - Ernst Kaltenbrunner takes over for the late Reinhard Heydrich. He is just as evil, if not more so, than Heydrich.

* February 2 - The German 6th Army surrenders to the Soviets at Stalingrad.

* February 6 - In a report to Himmler of items taken from Jews at Auschwitz and other camps in the Lublin area: 155,000 women's coats, 132,000 men's shirts, over 6600 pounds of human hair.

* February 10 - Anti-Semites in the U.S. State Department send notice to the U.S. legation in Switzerland that the American consul should no longer send information about Jewish atrocities to private persons in the U.S.

Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau's staff calls the cable of Feb. 10 "the most vicious document we have ever read," designed "by diabolical men" and meant to hide information about the "Final Solution." They also said, "We don't shoot [Jews]. We let other people shoot them, and let them starve."

State Department employees involved in refugee policy were described as "an underground movement ... to let the Jews be killed."

* February 13 - The Romanian government offers ships to the Allies to transport 70,000 Jews to new areas. The offer is rejected by the U.S. and the British.

* February 22 - The Bulgarian government agrees to deport 20,000 Jews from Macedonia and Thrace. About 11,000 are actually deported.

* February 27 - Early March - After public protests by non-Jewish wives, Jewish men arrested in Berlin are released - Goebbels and Hitler are afraid of public disorder. One must raise the question as to what might have happened if large numbers of Germans had protested the persecution and killing of the Jews.

* March 1 - A huge "Stop Hitler Now" rally is held in Madison Square Garden in New York City.

* March 10 - The SS orders all Bulgarian Jews to be sent to Poland. The Bulgarian government resists and the Bulgarian Jews are saved.

* March 13 - Dissidents try to blow up Hitler with explosives hidden in brandy bottles on Hitler's private plane. The bottles do not blow.

* March 23 - The archbishop of Canterbury, William Temple, tells the House of Lords that England should get rid of all quotas on Jewish immigration into Britain.

By the spring of 1943, Nazi kill squads have murdered some 2 million Jews in Eastern Europe.

April - 1943 - Pope Pius XII says that Jews are "demanding and ungrateful." The Bermuda Conference, called to supposedly fix the refugee problem, ends up doing nothing. In fact, the U.S. and British representatives decided ahead of the conference to downplay Jewish atrocities. They just didn't give a damn!