[Photo shows Jewish children used in medical experiments][Material for the Holocaust Journal comes mostly from The Holocaust Chronicle, Publications International, Ltd., 2003. It is available from Amazon.com, $24.95. Barnes & Noble usually has copies available for $19.98].
“I saw many internees cling to their human dignity to the very end. The Nazis succeeding in degrading them physically, but they could not debase them morally. Because of these few, I have not entirely lost my faith in mankind. If, even in the jungle of Birkenau, all were not necessarily inhuman to their fellowman, then there is hope indeed.” - Olga Lengyel, Five Chimneys: The Story of Auschwitz
Germany 1944 (II)
By 1944, Hermann Goring, at one time a very important Nazi, had become addicted to heroin. He had also grown very fat – over 300 pounds. His influence diminished as his addiction and weight grew. Toward the end of the war, Hitler refused to even meet with him.
* April 4 – The U.S. takes photos of Auschwitz from the air.
* April 8 – This was the first night of Passover. A Polish rabbi who has just arrived at Auschwitz grabs a SS trooper and excoriates him for his crimes. The rabbi says the Jews will live eternally while the Nazis will be destroyed.
* April 10 – Alfred Wetzler, 26, and Rudolf Vrba, 19, Jews from Slovakia, escape from Auschwitz. Later they give the Allies the first eyewitness accounts of the “Final Solution,” and they warn the Nazis intend to kill all Hungarian Jews. Also on this date, the Russian Army takes Odessa in the Ukraine.
* April 13 – Fifteen hundred Jews are deported from Drancy, France, to Auschwitz. One survivor of this group is Simone Jacob, 16. As an adult he will become France’s minister of health and later, in 1979, the president of the European Parliament.
* May 1944 – Mass deportations of Jews from Hungary begins. Between May 15 – July 9, 1944, over 430,000 Jews are deported to Auschwitz. Sometimes over 100 people are crammed into one boxcar, with one water bucket for drinking and one water bucket for waste. Many people go insane and many others commit suicide as the trains travel through the countryside.
* May 19 – Joel Brand, a Hungarian Jew, is sent to Turkey with a proposal from Adolf Eichmann for the Allies. Eichmann suggests a trade: 10,000 trucks for 1 million Eastern European Jews. Brand is arrested by the British and taken to see Lord Moyne, the resident minister of state in the Middle East, who asks, “What shall I do with those million Jews.”
* Late May 1944 – An SS trooper who has fallen in love with a Jewish girl, hides her from the gas chambers. They are discovered and both are executed.
* May 31 – SS Brigadier General Edmund Veesenmayer reports to Berlin that 204,312 Jews have been deported from Hungary.
* June 1 – Although the US has 55,000 unused slots from Occupied Europe, FDR decides that only 1,000 Jews may enter the country.
* June 2 – Itzhak Gruenbaum, president of the Rescue Committee of the Jewish Agency asks that the Allies bomb the rail lines leading to Auschwitz. Although Allied bombers fly over these rail lines, the rail lines that carry Jews are never bombed.
* June 4 – Rome is liberated by the Allies.
* June 6 – DDay. The Allies land on the beaches of Normandy, France as the liberation of Europe begins.
* June 10 – Germans kill 642 residents of Oradour-sur-Glane, a French village in retaliation for the murder of an SS officer by a resistance fighter. The men are machine-gunned and the women and children are burned alive in a church.
* June 24 – The US Military Air Operations says it is not practical to bomb the rail lines to Auschwitz because that would divert men and supplies from “decisive operations” currently underway elsewhere.
* June 14 – Pope Pius XII, via telegram, asks the regent of Hungary to stop the deportations. He doesn’t mention the word, Jew.
* June 28 – The Russian army approaches a concentration camp at near Minsk, Belorussia. SS troops take over as guards and all surviving prisoners—Jews and non-Jewish Russians—are put into a barracks which is then set on fire. Some prisoners exit the building but are shot.
“Around us, everyone was weeping. Someone began to recite the Kaddish, the prayer for the dead. I do not know if it has ever happened before, in the long history of the Jews, that people have ever recited the prayer for the dead for themselves.” -- Elie Wiesel, writing of what he experienced as a young man leaving the transport train at Auschwitz.
To be continued…
1 comment:
“June 1 – Although the US has 55,000 unused slots from Occupied Europe, FDR decides that only 1,000 Jews may enter the country.”
…and he was a hero to American Jews of my generation! The bias of famous people of those times was known and approved by large numbers of influential people. Many schools, industries, neighborhoods, etc were restricted so that Jews could not enter or if they did, it was limited in number. Ask your parents or grandparents about the open anti Semitism of the US and other nations when they were growing up. I lived it, so I remember.
Bob Poris
Post a Comment