The Holocaust Journal (Lest We Forget) - Germany 1944 (I)

[Photo: Brutalizing a Polish Jew - Just for fun.]


Germany 1944 (I)

Auschwitz. May 24, 1944: Two thousand Jews arrived at this death camp from Hungary. One of those Jews, a young boy, had the number A-7713, tattooed on his left arm. He was from Sighet, a Romanian town, under Hungarian control. His name was Elie Wiesel.

Wiesel survived Auschwitz and went on to become one of the world's great writers. "At Auschwitz," said Wiesel, "not only man died, but also the idea of man....It was its own heart the world incinerated at Auschwitz."

In 1986, Wiesel received the Nobel Peace Prize.

August 4, 1944: Anne Frank and her family were betrayed and arrested by the SD (Security Police). One month later, on September 4, the Franks, along with over 1,000 other prisoners, were forced to board the last Auschwitz-bound train from Westerbork.

Upon arrival at Auschwitz, 549 of the Jews were gassed immediately. Anne Frank was somehow spared and sent to Bergen-Belsen, a concentration camp inside Germany. She died from typhus in March of 1945.

While the Allied forces advanced upon the Germans during 1944, and gassing operations at Auschwitz were slowing down, over 600,000 European Jews were murdered because they were Jews!

Other highlights from 1944: At the I.G. Farben synthetic-rubber and oil plant at Auschwitz, a worker could expect to live 3-4 months. In the coal mines, life expectancy was one month.

King Gustav of Sweden and Pope Pius XII pressure Hungary to stop deporting Jews.

A judge, Raphael Lemkin, writes a book called Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, where he tells of how the Nazis ruled and termed in barbarism. He is the one who coined the word, genocide, from the Greek "genos," which means nation or people, and cide, which means to kill.

* January 10 - Professor Victor Basch and his wife are murdered near Lyons, France, in retaliation for the killing of a French collaborator by the French resistance.

* January 12 - The Gestapo arrest Frau Hanna Solf, the widow of the former German ambassador to Tokyo, and her daughter four months after attending a resistance tea party. Both Frau Solf and her daughter were part of the anti-Nazi German resistance. The tea party had included a Gestapo spy.

* January 22 - President Roosevelt is pressured to create the War Refugee Board.

* January 25 - The governor-general of Occupied Poland, Hans Frank, writes in his diary that out of 3,400,000 Jews in 1941, only some 100,000 remain under his control.

* February 20-25 - U.S. air forces battle German flyers and the U.S. establishes air superiority over Western Europe.

* March 1944 - The Nazis move into Hungary. Oskar Schindler's kitchen-untensil factory is near by and Schindler works constantly to keep his employees from being arrested and deported.

* March 5 - Max Jacob, 60, a Catholic is made to wear the Yellow Star. He dies of pneumonia at Drancy, France. Jacob was a godson of Pablo Picasso.

* March 6 - Emanuel Ringelblum, a historian and Warsaw Ghetto archivist, is captured by the Gestapo in the "Aryan" part of Warsaw. He and his family are tortured and killed.

* March 7 - Anne Frank notes that "he who has courage and faith will never perish in misery!" She was so very, very wrong!

* March 14-April 2 - the Nazis sweep Greece for Jews hiding on the mainland to deport them to Auschwitz.

* March 19 - Hungary cedes to German authority. 725,000 Jews in jeapordy. The SS begins the deportation process.

* March 22 - About 100 Jews escape a camp in Belorussia and leave behind an explosive charge that kills 10 SS guards. Most of these Jews avoid capture and join a resistance group.

* March23 - A Jewish partisan in Poland blows up a German military train carrying armored cars.

* March 24 - President Roosevelt sends a warning that all those guilty of war crimes will be punished.

* April 1944 - The German priest, Max Josef Metzger, who had pled for a new German government in 1942, is executed at Brandenburg, Germany.

To be continued...