“Arbeit macht Frei” slogan hi-jacked by Holocaust historians

The infamous “Arbeit Macht Frei” slogan that was put on the gates into some of the concentration camps during World War II has now become an icon of the Holocaust — even though this motto had nothing whatsoever to do with the genocide of the Jews.   The slogan is in the news again because the Swedish guy who confessed to instigating the theft of the sign at Auschwitz last year was sentenced on Dec. 30, 2010 to 32 months in a Swedish prison.

Here is a quote from one of the news articles about the case:

“For Holocaust survivors, the theft at Auschwitz was not just about stealing a sign but about stealing our collective memory and pain,” the American Gathering of Holocaust Survivors and their Descendants said in an e-mailed statement.   

The Diary of Anne Frank

As everyone probably knows by now, Anne Frank was a young Jewish girl who spent 25 months cooped up in an annex behind her father’s factory building in Amsterdam, hiding from the Nazis during World War II.  She died during a typhus epidemic at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, less than a year after the hiding place was discovered; her body was unceremoniously thrown into a mass grave, along with the bodies of 35,000 others who had died in only two months during the epidemic.

If Anne Frank had survived World War II, she would probably have been the first author to become a billionaire, instead of J.K. Rowling, the woman who wrote the Harry Potter books.