The Holocaust Journal (Lest We Forget) - Germany 1945 (IV)

[Photo is of SS women at Bergen-Belsen]

June 1945 - Buchenwald has become a displaced-persons camp. Jews residing there establish Kibbutz Buchenwald, an agricultural training center to help young Jews make a go of communal life (kibbutz).

In the U.S., polls indicate that most American still think of Jews as a greater threat than either German or Japanese Americans.

* June 14 - The British arrest Joachim von Ribbentrop, the Nazi Foreign Minister.

* June 30 - July 14 - An exhibition of photos taken at the death camps is put together by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and the Washington Evening Star. Ninety thousand people view the exhibition in Boston and the midwest.

* July 25 - Kurt Gerstein, who headed the Waffen-SS Institute of Hygiene in Berlin, hangs himself in prison.

* July 30 - The Allied Control Council takes over the administration of Germany.

* August 1945 - The 22nd World Zionist Congress demands that Britain allow 100,000 Jewish refugees to enter Israel. Britain refuses and this leads to a violent uproar in Palestine.

* August 6 - The United States drops an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan.

* August 9 - The United States drops an atomic bomb on Nagasaki, Japan.

* August 11 - Anti-Jewish uprisings occur in Krakow, Poland.

* August 27 - The Allies interrogate Hermann Goring.

* September 2 - Japan surrenders. World War II is over.

* September 17 - November 17 - At Luneberg, Germany, 48 of the administrative staff at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp are put on trial. Eleven are sentenced to death and are executed, and 23 are put in prison.

* October 1945 - The founder of the so-called Confessing Church, Pastor Martin Niemoller, sets forth the "Stuttgart Confession of Guilt," which maintains that the German people are collectively guilty for the Hitler regime.

* October 10 - The NSDAP (Nazi party) is abolished.

* October 25 - Anti-Semitic Poles attack Jews in Sosnowiec.

* November 15 - December 14 - 44 of the Dachau administration are tried; 37 are sentenced to death.

* November 19 - Anti-Jewish riots erupt in Lublin, Poland.

* November 20 - The Nuremberg Trials of top Nazi war criminals begins.

* December 1945 - In Kosow-Lacki, Poland, Polish anti-Semites murder 11 Jews. In the U.S., a sociologist by name of Oliver Cox, says that "Christians in the United States regard the Jew as 'our irreconcilable enemy within the gates, the antithesis of our God, the disturber of our way of life and of our social aspirations.'"

* December 22 - The American Displaced Persons Act benefits Nazi war criminals by facilitating their immigration to the U.S. On the other hand, the act actually discriminates against Jews. As this bill is discussed in Congress, many government officials express the anti-Jewish feelings.

** 1945 - 1950 - Six million Jews are dead. Between 250,000 and 300,000 Jews survived German concentration camps. Another 1.6 million Jews not in concentration camps made it through alive. During these years many Jews immigrate to Palestine/Israel, to the U.S., to Canada, to Belgium and to other countries.

To be continued...