In truth, one concentration camp is no different from another.  If there were any significant differences between Dachau and Auschwitz, it had to be the numbers who never walked out of the camps.  But a death is a death; it doesn’t make it less painful for me just because the numbers are fewer in Dachau.

My first thought was to scoff at this, but then I realized that this blogger is right.  The significant difference between Dachau and Auschwitz is the numbers.  The first report, released by the American liberators, gave the number of deaths at Dachau as 238,000, while the first estimate of the number of deaths at Auschwitz, given by the Soviet liberators, was 4 million.

“But a death is a death,” as this blogger correctly noted.  There was one big typhus epidemic at Dachau which started in December 1944 and quickly got out of control.  There were two typhus epidemics at Auschwitz, but when the Soviet liberators arrived, there was no epidemic in progress.   How many of the deaths at Dachau and Auschwitz were caused by typhus?

My fellow wordpress blogger wrote:

The pathway led to entrance of Dachau Concentration Camp Memorial Site and I was really dragging my feet, dreading what was to come as I approached closer and closer to the site.  Without having any part of the site in sight, I was already feeling my heart grow heavier by the second.  It wasn’t going to be easy…

And it wasn’t.  Truth is, there isn’t much to be seen that will really evoke strong emotions in one, but I’ve already long established the fact that my fertile imagination is probably the single major bane of my existence.

This is the difference between other bloggers and myself.  I approach everything with an analytical mind, not with emotion.  I’m like the character named Sheldon on The Big Bang Theory TV series — I have no emotions when comes to visiting historical sites.

The first time that I visited Dachau in 1997, the entrance to the camp was through a hole in the fence on the east side, as shown in the photo below.

Entrance to Dachau Memorial Site before 2003

The original Museum at Dachau, which was shown to visitors from 1965 until 2003, had very large dramatic photos, like the one below.

Large photo in original Dachau Museum

There have been a lot of changes at the Dachau Memorial Site over the years.  It seems to me that the Site now panders to tourists who want to have an emotional experience when they visit.

Regarding the death statistics at Dachau, a sign that was put up outside the crematorium in 1945 said, “This area is being retained as a shrine to the 238,000 individuals who were cremated here. Please don’t destroy.” Since there were also 5,380 dead prisoners at Dachau whose bodies were buried on Leitenberg hill before the camp was liberated, this would mean that the death toll at Dachau was over 243,000. Since the total number of registered inmates at the main Dachau camp was 206,206, according to the camp records, this means that the US military claimed that there were 37,000 more deaths than the number of prisoners who were registered. Yet, there were almost 32,000 cheering survivors who greeted the American liberators.

Later, a new sign was placed at the crematorium by Phillip Auerbach, a Jewish concentration camp survivor, who had been appointed the Bavarian Commissioner for Racial, Religious and Political Persecutees and the Commissioner for Restitution. This sign read “In the years from 1933 to 1945, 238,756 people were cremated here.” The Rev. Martin Niemöller, a former prisoner at Dachau, saw this sign in November 1945 and was very upset by the high number of alleged deaths in the camp.

There were 31,951 deaths at the main Dachau camp during the 12 years that the camp was in existence, according to a report made by the International Tracing Service at Arolson, Germany in 1977. The Tracing Service is part of the International Red Cross. This report was based on death records meticulously kept by the Nazis.

Today, visitors to Dachau are told that the total number of deaths was 41,000, adding another 10,000 deaths to the official number.

Paul Berben, a prisoner in the camp, wrote a book entitled “Dachau, the Official History 1933 – 1945,” in which he stated that 2,888 prisoners had died at Dachau in January 1945, 3,977 prisoners had died in February, 3,668 had died in March and 2,625 had died in April, for a total of 13,158 in the first four months of 1945.  (Paul Berben’s book is no longer the official history of Dachau.)

In the month of May 1945, an additional 2,226 Dachau prisoners died after the camp was liberated, in spite of the excellent care given to them by American military doctors. There were 196 more deaths in June before the typhus epidemic was finally stopped by the use of DDT and the vaccination of all the prisoners.

At the American Military Tribunal held at the Dachau camp in November 1945, the prosecution stated that 161, 939 prisoners had been processed through Dachau between 1940 and 1945 and that over 25,000 of them had died. According to the figures in Paul Berben’s book, the exact number of prisoners who died at Dachau during this period was 27,839.

The US Seventh Army report stated that an estimated 229,000 prisoners had been processed at Dachau since the camp opened on March 22, 1933 including around 7,000 who had arrived in the last three weeks of April, 1945. The camp records showed that 206,206 prisoners had been registered in the camp in the 12 years that Dachau was a concentration camp, but in the chaos of the last days before the camp was liberated, some prisoners were not registered.

The death statistics at Auschwitz have also been downgraded, from an initial estimate of 4 million down to 1.1 million, including 900,000 Jewish deaths.  Auschwitz was a transit camp, as well as an extermination camp.  The Jews who were sent to the gas chamber were not registered and neither were the prisoners who were sent to another camp, after arriving at Auschwitz.  The train records have never been found, so it is impossible to know the total number of people who arrived at Auschwitz and the total number of prisoners who were gassed.

Ruins of Krema II gas chamber at Auschwitz II, aka Birkenau

Early morning photo of the ruins of Krema III at Birkenau

The Germans marched 60,000 prisoners out of the three camps in the Auschwitz complex on January 18, 1945.  They came back twice, on January 20th and again on January 26th, to blow up the gas chambers in order to destroy the evidence.  

The photo below was taken in 1998. It shows a sculpture in the administration building in the main Auschwitz camp.

1998 photo of sculpture in main Auschwitz camp

International Monument at Birkenau is between Krem II and Krema III gas chambers

Women's camp at Birkenau, built by Russian POWs

Steam cabinets for disinfecting clothes at Auschwitz-Birkenau

Ruins of a brick stove in a barracks at Birkenau

Sign warns of danger from fences at main Auschwitz camp

Place where roll call was held at main Auschwitz camp; sentry box and camp kitchen in background

1998 photo of door through which victims entered the gas chamber in the main camp

Ruins of Krema II at Auschwitz-Birkenau

Building which housed the theater at the main Auschwitz camp

Inside a barracks building at Birkenau

Gate into Birkenau camp, known as The Gate of Death

Kitchen at Auschwitz main camp, 2005 photo

The back side of Block 11 at the Auschwitz main camp

View of gas chamber in main Auschwitz camp, looking toward the entrance door for the victims

Ruins of Krema III at Birkenau shows entrance for SS men in center of photo

British archaeologist destroys Holocaust deniers’ argument with mass grave find at Treblinka

The lead of the story is this quote:  “A British forensic archaeologist has unearthed fresh evidence to prove the existence of mass graves at the Nazi death camp Treblinka – scuppering the claims of Holocaust deniers who say it was merely a transit camp.”

I had a third-grade teacher who taught me to look up every word, that I didn’t know the meaning of, in the dictionary.  So I went directly to an online dictionary and learned that “scuppering” can be used to mean destroy or ruin.  I think a better word might be “demolish.”  But have the arguments of the Holocaust deniers been “scuppered?”  I don’t think so.

The spot where Jews disembarked from the trains to Treblinka

A lot of good comments about this subject have been posted on my previous blog about the “fresh evidence” at Treblinka here.

This article in the Mail Online states that “a lack of physical evidence in the area has been exploited by Holocaust deniers.”  The whole article seems to me to be gloating over the scuppering of Holocaust deniers, instead of just giving the facts, as a newspaper article should. 

Kalman Taigman is mentioned in the Mail Online article as “Survivor Kalman Taigman”  I googled Kalman Taigman and learned that there is a documentary about him and another survivor.

This quote is from a website that gives a synopsis of  the documentary:

The journey of 88 year old Samuel Wilinberg and Kalman Taigman two complete opposite personalities who happen to be the last two survivors of the Treblinka death camp. The film follows the two men as they walk back on the grounds from which they fled 68 years ago. For the first time they go back together possibly for their last visit there. Together they re-live, reminisce, laugh, cry, and even sing the Treblinka anthem. Kalman lost his mother in Treblinka, Samuel lost his two sisters. “God wasn’t present in Treblinka” they both agree on while they are there.

The Mail Online article ends with this quote:

Beginning in March 1942, the SS implemented Sonderaktion 1005 to cover up the murder of millions of people during Aktion Reinhard.

There (sic) actions were so comprehensive that ever since the end of the Second World War, Holocaust deniers have used the site as evidence of misinformation about Nazi genocide.

They claim the site was merely a transit camp – a myth now debunked by the latest discoveries of mass graves.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2087735/British-archaeologist-discovers-fresh-evidence-mass-graves-World-War-Two-death-camp-Treblinka.html#ixzz1kagOqr69

Memorial stones for the Jews who were sent to Treblinka from Poland and Czechoslovakia

The photo below shows the stone for the city of Sandomierz which is in the section that is farthest from the memorial tombstone. Note the many small stones that have no names. They represent the many villages in Poland where all Jewish life was extinguished in the Holocaust.

Memorial stones for the Jews who were sent to Treblinka

ONE-FIFTH of young Germans have never heard of Auschwitz, survey reveals

Does this mean one-fifth of young “ethnic Germans” (Volksdeutsche) have never heard of Auschwitz, or does it mean one-fifth of all young citizens of Germany have never heard of Auschwitz?

It is hard for me to believe that anyone in Germany has never heard of Auschwitz  — unless they are recent immigrants from Africa or the Middle East.  Did the people asking the survey question pronounce the word Auschwitz correctly? If the surveyers used the British or the American pronunciation of the word, the ethnic Germans might not have known what they were talking about.

According to the article in the Mail Online, “Twenty one per cent of people aged between 18 and 30 quizzed about the most notorious Nazi extermination camp had not heard of it, the survey revealed.”   How was the question posed:  Did the survey people ask “What was the most notorious Nazi extermination camp?”  

Any doubts about the existence of mass graves at the Treblinka death camp in Poland are being laid to rest by the first survey of the site using tools that see below the ground, writes forensic archaeologist Caroline Sturdy Colls.

The most important part of the article is this quote:

A 1946 report by investigators into German crimes in Poland found “a cellar passage with the protruding remains of burnt posts, the foundations of the administration building and the old well” and here and there “the remains of burnt fence posts, pieces of barbed wire, and short sections of paved road”.

Bone fragments can still be seen on the surface of the ground, especially after rain”

They also discovered human remains as they dug into the ground, and on the surface “large quantities of ashes mixed with sand, among which are numerous human bones”.

Despite this, in a later statement they said they had discovered no mass graves.

The section on Treblinka in the German Crimes in Poland. Volume I. Published by the Central Commission for Investigation of German Crimes in Poland. Warsaw, 1946 can be read in full here.

At the very end of the Treblinka section of the report of the Central Commission is this quote:

The eradication of all traces of the crime by wholesale burning of corpses began after Himmler’s visit in the early spring of 1943 and lasted till the Warsaw Rising, or even later. The camp was finally closed in November, 1943.

During the investigation when the ground was levelled, no collective graves were found, and this together with the evidence given by the witnesses leads to the conclusion that almost all the remains were burnt; the German authorities having had plenty of time to do it since the camp was closed. The site of the camp was ploughed over and sown, and on it Ukrainians were settled. They fled, however, on the approach of the Red Army.

Now the mass graves, that the Polish Central Commission for Investigation of German Crimes in Poland was unable to find in 1945, have been found.  And it was the BBC that reported it.  The very first report of the gas chambers where Jews were being gassed was made by the BBC in 1942.

For another opinion, watch this video:

On page 19, Levi wrote this about his arrival at Auschwitz on a transport train:  “A vast platform appeared before us, lit up by reflectors.”  This is a reference to the Judenrampe, which was a large train platform, near the Birkenau camp, which was used from 1942 to May 1944. The Judenrampe was torn down when the train tracks were extended inside the Birkenau death camp, so that the prisoners could be brought to a spot within a few feet of the gas chambers in Krema II and Krema III.  (God forbid that the Jews should have to walk to the gas chambers.)

Levi’s description of his arrival at Monowitz begins on page 22:

The journey [to Monowitz from the Judenrampe] did not last more than twenty minutes.  Then the lorry [truck] stopped and we saw a large door, and above it a sign, brightly illuminated (its memory still strikes me in my dreams): Arbeit Macht Frei, work gives freedom.

We climb down, they make us enter an enormous empty room that is poorly heated.

So the sign was on a DOOR, not a gate.  It was the door to an enormous empty ROOM, not the door into a camp.  Note that he not only saw the sign on the door, he also saw it in his dreams.

Denis Avey also mentioned an Arbeit Macht Frei sign at Monowitz in his book The Man Who Broke into Auschwitz. On page 140, Avey describes the scene when he entered the Monowitz prison camp:

It was still light when we passed through the gate and I saw the sign bearing the cruel promise ‘Arbeit Macht Frei’ — work sets you free.

I didn’t know that the irony of those words would scream across the decades. This was Auschwitz III–Monowitz.

Note that the sign that Denis Avey saw was on a GATE, not a door.

Rob Broomby co-wrote Denis Avey’s book.  On page 235, we learn that Rob questioned whether this sign was actually on the Monowitz gate.

This quote, written by Denis Avey, is from page 235 of the American edition of his book:

As Rob’s research continued it threw up some interesting questions about the nature of memory. He kept asking me if I was certain I had seen that Arbeit Macht Frei sign at the gates to Auschwitz III–Monowitz.  I was, but he said some experts had questioned it and nothing survives at the site today to testify one way or the other. The sign everyone knows these days is at the gates of the main camp, Auschwitz I. After more than sixty years it is that one which is emblazoned on the collective memory although many camps had them. Rob said the most influential account of life in the camp — that of survivor and writer Primo Levi — mentioned the sign at Auschwitz III more than once but the head of Research at Auschwitz wasn’t convinced.

So was there an Arbeit macht Frei sign at Monowitz or not?  I would say NOT.  Primo Levi saw the sign in his dreams, and Denis Avey read about it in Primo Levi’s book.  The Arbeit Macht Frei sign was used on the gates of the Nazi camps that were classified as Class I camps. Auschwitz I was a Class I camp and it had the sign.  Monowitz was a labor camp which probably did not have the sign.  I explained all this on a previous post which you can read here.

Famous photo taken in Buchenwald Barracks #56

Elie Wiesel claims to be the man in the circle

Is this the face of 16-year-old Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel? Or is this the face of a 40-year-old man?

Elie Wiesel wrote in Night that he got out of his hospital bed at the Monowitz camp in Auschwitz and joined the death march out of the camp on January 18, 1945.  He also wrote that he became sick three days after the liberation of Buchenwald on April 11, 1945 and was confined to a hospital bed for 2 weeks.  Did he also get out of his hospital bed and go over to barracks #56 to get into this famous picture?  Elie Wiesel was an orphan after his father died at Buchenwald, and he was allegedly in barracks #66, the orphan’s barracks, when the camp was liberated.

Black pilot shooting down a jet airplane

Before you get all upset by my use of the word “Negro,” it was pointed out in the movie that African-Americans preferred the term Negro over the term “colored” which was used by whites.  This is news to me.  I was 11 years old when this story was happening in 1944 and it is my opinion that both blacks and whites used the term “colored” which was pronounced “cull-ed.”  The word Negro was only used in a sentence which also had the word Caucasian.

The reason that I think that Red Tails will not be a big hit is because it will appeal to a very limited audience.  This is not a “date movie.”  Women will stay away from it in droves.

The basic premiss of the movie is that black people are superior to whites, but white racists in America would not allow them to fight in World War II until 1944 when black pilots were needed to win the war against the German racists.  There were other black soldiers who fought in World War II, but unlike the Tuskegee Airmen, they were commanded by white officers.  The movie is set in 1944, but filmed though a 2012 lens which shows that the African-Americans back then were no different from white people.

The movie has an all-male cast, except for one Italian girl who is the love interest in the movie.  “Lighting” spots her on a rooftop as he is flying over the pristine Italian countryside which shows no war damage.  She waves at him and he comes back later and knocks on her door.  He speaks no Italian and she speaks no English, but they manage to fall in love and get married.  Her Italian dialogue is not translated.  Only the German words in the movie have sub-titles.  What’s up with that?

The movie begins with a quote from a study done in 1925 which claimed that “blacks are inferior to whites.”  This is quickly followed by a disclaimer:  “Inspired by a true story.”  In other words, what you are about to see is not totally true, but we’re not going to tell you which part is not true. The title of the movie comes from the fact that the Tuskegee Airmen painted the tails of their planes bright red. The Me 262 jet planes are decorated with yellow paint.

Red Tails is about the all-black 332nd Fighter Squadron which was assigned to protect U.S. bombers on a bombing mission to Berlin in 1944.  Nothing is mentioned about Berlin already being bombed into a pile of rubble before 1944.  However, in 1944 Germany had Me 262 jet fighter planes in the air, so this bombing mission was different.  The Tuskegee Airmen were flying P51 planes.

Me 262 jet airplane

This movie is not about history; it is about the African-American heroes of World War II.  If this were a history movie, it would have been pointed out that the Germans delayed getting their jet planes into the air because Hitler disagreed with his generals about the best use of the jet planes.  Hitler wanted the Me 262 to be a bomber plane, not a fighter plane.  If the Germans had used the Me 262 as a fighter plane sooner, all the American planes would have been shot out of the sky and Germany would have had a better chance of winning the war.

The movie does not mention Herman Goering, the head of the Luftwaffe, the German air force.  According to this website,  “In the early part of the war, he remarked, “If Allied planes ever bomb Berlin, you can call me Meyer.” Later on [when] they did, escorted by P-51 Mustangs, he observed, “When I saw Mustangs over Berlin, I knew the jig was up.”   It was the Tuskegee Airmen who were flying those Mustangs.  

On the day that I saw the movie, about 90% of the people in the audience were African-American.  I did not see any young people in the audience.  It was mostly older men.  However, this is not an old folks movie: it is more like watching a video game. I have recently started watching The Big Bang Theory TV series, which is about a group of nerds who hang out together.  Red Tails is a movie that will appeal to young men like the cast of The Big Bang Theory.

In my humble opinion, George Lucas should have given more thought to what his target audience would be.  Instead, he made a movie that has very limited appeal.  It is like Star Wars for black people.

To me, one of the faults of the movie is the dialogue.  The actors appear to be trying to speak like black people in 1944, but they are not quite getting it right.  At one point, someone uses the expression “man-up.”  I never heard anyone say “man-up” until about a year ago.

I looked up the Tuskegee Airmen on Wikipedia and found this information:

In all, 996 pilots were trained in Tuskegee from 1941 to 1946, approximately 445 were deployed overseas, and 150 Airmen lost their lives in accidents or combat.[52] The casualty toll included 66 pilots killed in action or accidents, and 32 fallen into captivity as prisoners of war.[53]

The Tuskegee Airmen were credited by higher commands with the following accomplishments:

15,533 combat sorties, 1578 missions
112 German aircraft destroyed in the air, another 150 on the ground
950 railcars, trucks and other motor vehicles destroyed
One destroyer sunk
A good record of protecting U.S. bombers,[53] losing only 25 on hundreds of missions.[54]

Individual pilots of the 332nd Fighter Group also earned approximately 1000 awards and decorations. Their missions took them to Rome-Arno, Normandy, Rhineland, Romania, Northern and Southern France, and the American Theater Campaigns. The 332nd first saw combat in February 1944. Throughout various engagements over the course of the war, the 332nd was credited with destroying at least: 112 airborne enemy aircraft, 150 aircraft on the ground, over 600 train cars, over 40 barges/boats, and a German Navy destroyer. The destruction of the Navy destroyer was the first such accomplishment of its time.

So which part of the movie is not true?  My guess is that it is the part about a black pilot who was captured and sent to a POW camp where he is welcomed by the white POWs who are planning to escape by tunneling out of the camp.

In the scene where German soldiers are shown speaking to the POWs, the Germans are being very polite.  I think this portrayal is accurate.  I give George Lucas a few points for not showing a lot of German-hatred, although there is some hatred in his portrayal of the German pilots.

The pejorative term for a German pilot in the movie is “Jerry.”  I don’t think that was the term used in America.  The English called a German soldier a Jerry because the German helmets looked like a chamberpot.  The pejorative term for Germans in America was “kraut.”  Also, the term “Dutch” which was an incorrect pronounciation of the German word “Deutsch.”  There was a song that went:  “There’s the high land Dutch, and the low land Dutch, the Rotterdam Dutch and all the other damned Dutch…”

The black pilots call the German pilots “pretty boy.”  I think that this is a modern term.  However, this term is actually a compliment.  Those German guys were very handsome.  By using this term, it is implied that black men were jealous of white people because of their looks.  I detect that the script for the movie was written by a young person who was not familiar with the language used during World War II.  At one point, a white officer calls one of the black heroes “arrogant.”  The term that was used back then was “uppity.”
Update: Jan 22, 2012

A reader of this blog, who has his own blog here, provided a link to an article in the Jewish Journal  which tells about the Tuskegee Airmen and the refusal of the Allies to bomb Auschwitz during World War II.

This quote is from the article:

On the morning of Aug. 20, 1944, a group of 127 U.S. bombers called Flying Fortresses approached Auschwitz. They were escorted by 100 Mustang fighter planes. Most of the Mustangs were piloted by Tuskegee Airmen of the 332nd Fighter Group. The attacking force dropped more than one thousand 500-pound bombs on oil targets less than five miles from the gas chambers. Despite German anti-aircraft fire and a squadron of German fighter planes, none of the Mustangs were hit and only one of the U.S. planes was shot down. All of the units reported successfully hitting their targets. [...]

Even though there were additional U.S. bombing raids on German industrial sites in that region in the weeks and months to follow, the gas chambers and crematoria were never targeted.

The Roosevelt administration knew about the mass murder going on in Auschwitz, and even possessed diagrams of the camp that were prepared by two escapees. But when Jewish organizations asked the Roosevelt administration to order the bombing of the camp and the railways leading to it, the requests were rejected. U.S. officials claimed such raids were “impracticable” because they would require “considerable diversion” of planes needed for the war effort.

But the Tuskegee veterans know that claim was false. They were right there in the skies above Auschwitz. No “diversion” was necessary to drop a few bombs on the mass-murder machinery or the railways leading into the camp. Sadly, those orders were never given.

The decision to refrain from bombing Auschwitz was part of a broader policy by the Roosevelt administration to refrain from taking action to rescue Jews from the Nazis or provide havens for them. The U.S. did not want to deal with the burden of caring for large numbers of refugees. And its ally, Great Britain, would not open the doors to Palestine to the Jews, for fear of angering Arab opinion. The result was that the Allies failed to confront one of history’s most compelling moral challenges.

As far as I know, Elie Wiesel has never acknowledged that Carolyn Yeager has done extensive research and has proved that he lied under oath when he claimed that he has the number A-7713 tattooed on his arm.  I think that Elie should come clean and admit that he is a fraud.  I believe that all the little kids who have read his book Night would come to his defense and forgive him.

Elie Wiesel appears to be in good health, but he is at the age where he could leave this earth any day now.  He should ensure that his legacy is protected before that happens. Who knows what will happen if he dies before coming clean and asking for forgiveness.

I blame Oprah for this debacle. In 2005, Oprah selected the “memoir” of James Frey, entitled A Million Little Pieces as her book club selection. Some people questioned the truth of the book, and Oprah came to the defense of James Frey. Two weeks after defending Frey on the Larry King show, Oprah brought Frey back onto her show and confronted him in front of a live audience. Meanwhile Frey’s “memoir” had sold 2 million copies in the three-month window between Oprah’s announcement of its selection and her confrontation of Frey before a live audience. Oprah’s next book club selection was Elie Wiesel’s Night.  At that time, the book Night was classified as fiction on Elie Wiesel’s own website.  But when Oprah selected it for her Book Club, the book became a non-fictional account of Elie Wiesel’s true story of surviving Auschwitz and Buchenwald.

Another Holocaust survivor, Herman Rosenblat, went on Oprah’s show and told the story of how he met his wife when she threw apples over the fence to him (at the age of 9) while he was in a sub-camp of Buchenwald.  After the publicity that he received from the Oprah show, Rosenblat landed a book contract.  Rosenblat was on the Oprah show twice.  The second time that he was on, I watched the show, and the minute that it was over, I e-mailed Oprah that this story could not possibly be true.  I don’t think anyone paid any attention to my e-mail, but other people also told Oprah that the Rosenblat story was fiction and his book was never published, as far as I know.

All is not lost.  Oprah no longer has a talk show, but she could go on some other talk show (I like the Dr. Drew show) and apologize to Elie Wiesel for enticing him to change the status of his book to non-fiction.  Night is a great piece of literature and Elie Wiesel is a Holocaust icon.  None of that would change if Elie Wiesel would just come clean and tell the truth.  He would be admired even more for telling the truth.  Keep in mind that nothing bad happened to Herman Rosenblat.

Actually, the persecution of the Jews in Germany, and in other countries in Europe, had already been going on way back in the 13th century.  On June 25, 1298, in the German city of Rothenburg ob der Tauber, ordinary citizens of the city committed mass murder, killing and burning their Jewish neighbors.

Memorial in Rothenburg ob der Tauber shows Jews being engulfed by flames

The photo above shows part of the Jewish memorial in Rothenburg ob der Tauber, which has a sculpture that shows the Jews being engulfed by flames. The inscription on the memorial says that the Jews were burned in a fire ignited by the inhabitants of the city.  Apparently, the Jews had sought refuge at the Castle, but were attacked there by an angry mob; it is not exactly clear to me whether the Jews were killed and then burned, or burned alive.

Jews had been living in Rothenburg since 1180.  You can read about the famous Rabbi Meir ben Baruch of Rothenburg ob der Tauber here.  So what happened in June 1298 that got the Germans so riled up? 

The story goes that, in 1298, after more than fifty years of peaceful co-existence between the Jews and the Germans in Rothenburg, there was a series of uprisings in Germany that were led by an “impoverished nobleman” named Rindfliesh, who was from the city of Röttingen.

According to my tour guide, Rindfleish started rumors about Jewish ritual murder and the desecration of Christian consecrated communion hosts because he was unable to pay back a loan from a Jewish money lender. Rindfleish instigated riots in 146 communities in Franconia between 1296 and 1298, including his own city of Röttingen where 21 Jews were killed on April 20, 1298. In nearby Nürnberg, there were 728 Jews killed in 1298 in what is today called the “Rindfleish persecutions.”

Memorial for the murdered Jews of Rothenburg

Only two years after the Holocaust of 1298, the Jews returned to Rothenburg ob der Tauber, but there were more uprisings in 1336, 1338, and 1342 in which the Jews were murdered or driven from the city. In 1348, the Jews were murdered or driven out of Rothenburg ob der Tauber again because of accusations that they had started an epidemic of the Bubonic Plague by throwing diseased bodies into the city wells. In 1349, Jews were burned at the stake in an attack that was organized by a congregation in a Catholic church. There were similar attacks on the Jews in Nürnberg and Frankfurt.  The Jews who were driven out of Germany went to Poland, which welcomed them.

The words on the Jewish memorial at Rothenburg

One might ask why the Jews kept returning to Rothenburg ob der Tauber when it was clear that their lives were in danger there. In those years, the Jews were persecuted everywhere in Europe and they were eventually expelled from every country, starting with England in the year 1290 when King Edward I ordered all the Jews to leave, after an accusation of ritual murder. At that time, Germany was a collection of states, loosely connected with each other in the Holy Roman Empire, but without a strong federal government which could have officially expelled the Jews from every city and state. After each uprising in Rothenburg and other places in Europe, the citizens eventually allowed the Jews to return because they had to rely on Jewish money lenders when they needed to borrow money, since this occupation was forbidden to Christians.

The persecution of the Jews in Europe continued and in 1511, the Jews in Rothenburg ob der Tauber were forced to wear a yellow badge on their clothing to identify themselves as Jews. The Jews were finally driven out of the city for good in 1520, at which time Christians were allowed to become money lenders. In 1871, the German states were united into one country and the Jews were given the same civil rights as other citizens; in 1875 a new Jewish community was established by 8 families who moved to Rothenburg ob der Tauber.

In 1933 when Adolf Hitler came to power, the persecution of the Jews in Germany began again. On October 10, 1938, the last 17 Jews in Rothenburg were driven out of the city by the local citizens; their fate is unknown.

The photo below was taken in the Jewish Museum in Berlin. The first thing that visitors see in the exhibit area upstairs in the Museum is this painting of a Catholic who was canonized a saint after being murdered in the 13th century in England. The text explains that this person was allegedly killed in a “ritual murder” and the Jews were accused of the crime. Allegations of this kind, which the Jews deny, are referred to today as “blood libel.”

Painting in the Jewish Museum in Berlin