John Kasich paraphrases the Rev. Martin Niemöller in an attack on Donald Trump

I wrote a previous blog post about the Rev. Martin Niemöller and his famous saying which goes like this, as quoted in the news article:

“First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out — Because I was not a Socialist. Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out — Because I was not a Trade Unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out — Because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me — and there was no one left to speak for me.”

The following quote is from the news article written by Marc A. Thiessen:

Begin quote:

Donald Trump speaks to supporters at a Nov. 28 campaign rally in Sarasota, Fla. (Steve Nesius/Associated Press)
By Marc A. Thiessen November 30 at 11:17 AM

Remember how Hillary Clinton compared her GOP opponents to the Nazis, declaring that Republicans wanted to “go and literally pull [illegal immigrants] out of their homes and their workplaces” and “round them up” and put them in “boxcars”? Her comment was outrageous, but it was par for the course. After all, Clinton had earlier compared GOP presidential candidates to terrorists .

It’s terrible for a Democrat to compare Republicans to the Nazis. But for a sitting GOP governor seeking his party’s nomination to do it is beyond the pale.

Yet that is precisely what John Kasich has done in a new Web ad attacking Donald Trump. The Kasich ad (ironically titled “Trump’s Dangerous Rhetoric”) declares: “You might not care if Donald Trump says Muslims must register with their government because you’re not one. And you might not care if Donald Trump says he’s going to round up all the Hispanic immigrants, because you’re not one. And you might not care if Donald Trump says it’s okay to rough up black protesters, because you’re not one. And you might not care if Donald Trump wants to suppress journalists, because you’re not one. But think about this: If he keeps going, and he actually becomes president, he might just get around to you. And you better hope there’s someone left to help you.”

If that language sounds familiar, it is intentionally paraphrasing German Lutheran pastor Martin Niemöller’s famous poem following World War II: “First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out — Because I was not a Socialist. Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out — Because I was not a Trade Unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out — Because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me — and there was no one left to speak for me.”

Keep in mind that Niemöller — a survivor of the Dachau concentration camp — was talking about the German people’s responsibility for the Holocaust. When Niemöller said “they came for the Jews,” he meant to take them to the gas chamber. As the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum explains on its Web site, “his point was that Germans . . . had been complicit through their silence in the Nazi imprisonment, persecution, and murder of millions of people.”

John Kasich ‘Trump’s Dangerous Rhetoric’ | Campaign 2016
The presidential campaign for Gov. John Kasich (R-Ohio) put out a new ad lashing out directly at fellow Republican candidate Donald Trump with a harsher tone than any other candidate has taken thus far. (John Kasich)

And Kasich thought it was appropriate to use that analogy to describe Donald Trump?

Kasich’s ad is not only offensive, it is misleading. It states Trump is going to “round up all the Hispanic immigrants.” No, he isn’t. Trump says he’s going to deport illegal immigrants. You may agree or disagree with what Trump proposes, but there’s a big difference between deporting people who are here illegally and “rounding up” everyone of a particular ethnicity. And let’s not forget: Trump says he’s going to let them all back in. As Trump put it in an interview , “I would get people out and then have an expedited way of getting them back into the country so they can be legal. . . . A lot of these people are helping us . . . I want to move ’em out, and we’re going to move ’em back in and let them be legal.”

That’s hardly the Final Solution.

The Kasich ad also falsely declared that Trump wants to “suppress journalists” while showing video of his security guards removing Univision anchor Jorge Ramos from a press conference. Ramos was removed for disrupting the press conference, and Trump later invited him back and answered his questions once he agreed to wait his turn to speak. That hardly counts as “suppression.”

The ad also backfires. It is intended to highlight the troubling things that Trump has been saying, but it is so over the top, so outrageous, that even people who might not particularly support Trump will recoil from it. Trump should be called out for his recent comment that a Black Lives Matter protester who disrupted one of his events “should have been roughed up.’ In the United States, no one deserves to get “roughed up” for exercising their First Amendment Rights. And his answer when asked by a reporter if we should keep a “database” of Muslims in America — “I would certainly implement that, absolutely” — was repulsive.

Yet when Kasich compares Trump to Hitler — and uses misleading statements to do so — what Trump says is overshadowed. Kasich calls Trump “divisive and insulting,” yet he manages to be even more divisive and more insulting than Trump himself. That’s quite an achievement.

Kasich’s ad achieves a political trifecta: It is offensive, inaccurate and ineffective. Here’s a little advice for Kasich, Hillary Clinton and any other candidate who wants to follow them down into the fever swamp of Nazi analogies: Don’t.

End quote

My photo below shows the protestant church at Dachau.

My photo of the Protestant Church at Dachau

The Church, which is shown in the photo above, was dedicated on April 30, 1967 at a ceremony at which a speech was made by the Rev. Martin Niemöller, one of the most famous prisoners in the Dachau camp.

In his capacity as the leader of Germany, Hitler had issued an order that German Jewish converts to the Christian faith were forbidden to be ordained as priests or ministers.

Hitler had united all Protestant denominations into one church with himself as the head of the Church.

The Rev. Niemöller was one of the founders of the Confessional Church which defied Hitler’s orders. He was put on trial and convicted of treason.

After being sentenced to time served while he was awaiting trial, the Rev. Niemöller was sent first to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp and later to Dachau because he continued to defy Hitler’s orders.

The Church of Reconciliation, which is shown in the photo above, was designed by Helmut Striffler, a German architect from Mannheim, after he won a competition among seven architects for the best proposed plan.

According to Striffler, his design is intended to make a statement against the Nazi obsession with order and tradition. Striffler specified that his church should be surrounded by gravel and built of unfinished concrete. In other words, he designed an ugly church which was the exact opposite of what Hitler admired.

Another view of the modern church at Dachau

Holocaust survivor who ate grass between the rails on the train tracks to Auschwitz

Today, I read a story about Holocaust survivors, which you can read in full here.

The following quote is from the news story:

One woman was packed into a boxcar bound for Auschwitz. So crowded, no one could sit down. People began to starve. The woman, who was a girl then, was extraordinarily tall, with very long arms. There was a hole in the boxcar floor. When the train would stop, she was able to reach her long arms down through the hole and pull up handfuls of grass.

That’s how she survived.

By eating grass.

Railroad tracks usually don’t have grass growing between the rails

This story caught my attention because, as a child, I lived in a house near the railroad tracks that went through my town. I used to put pennies on the track, so that the trains would flatten them.  This was probably a dangerous thing to do, since this might have derailed a train.  But nothing happened, and here I am today, writing a blog.

From my childhood experience, I know that grass does not grow in the middle of the tracks, as long as there are trains traveling on the tracks.  When the tracks are no longer being used, there might be some grass growing between the rails.

I took this photo of some abandoned tracks going into the SS camp at Dachau

 

Another photo which I took of the same tracks at Dachau

This quote is from the same news article:

World War II ended 70 years ago; children who survived the Holocaust are now in their 80s, adults in their 90s. Nearly 140,000 survivors live in the U.S.

In 15 years, most survivors will be dead.

That’s why Pregulman — who graduated from McCallie School, splits his time between Memphis and Denver, is the son of Merv and Helen Pregulman and grandson of Garrison and Goldie Siskin, founders of Siskin Children’s Institute — began his portrait project, taking survivor photographs as an act of memory and honor.

“To be sure they are not forgotten,” he said.

I believe that stories like this do more harm than good for the Holocaust industry.

 

Do HET tours do more harm than good?

My 2005 photo of a door, into the alleged Auschwitz gas chamber, that is now closed

The door into the Auschwitz gas chamber, shown in the photo above, was the door that I entered on my first visit to Auschwitz in 1998.  That door is no longer used as the tourist entrance.

In today’s news, I read about another student tour of Auschwitz here.

This quote is from the news article:

Since 1999, more than 27,000 students and teachers have taken part in the Holocaust Educational Trust’s Lessons from Auschwitz Project.

Organisers say it is based on the premise that hearing is not like seeing.

The project aims to clearly highlight what can happen if prejudice and racism become acceptable.

The photo below was included in the news article.  It shows the students as they are ready to enter the gas chamber in the main Auschwitz camp, through today’s tourist entrance.

Students entering the “gas chamber” in main  Auschwitz camp

What were the students told about the room that they were about to enter?  Were they told that the Jews were forced to take off their clothes outside, and then enter through a door where they could see the ovens in which their bodies would be burned after they were gassed?

My photo of the gas chamber building which the students are about to enter

My 2005 photo of the view of the ovens at Auschwitz

The students are led to believe that the Jews walked through the door shown in the photo above, as they entered the gas chamber. After going through the door, shown in the photo, the Jews allegedly walked into the crematorium on their right, where they were gassed with Zyklon-B pellets thrown through large holes in the roof.

Entrance to the Auschwitz gas chamber is through the oven room on the left

Anyone with half a brain in his or her head can see that the so-called gas chamber in the main Auschwitz camp was not a gas chamber. In my humble opinion, British students should not be taken on tours of Auschwitz and told lies.  Let them study both sides of the Holocaust on their own, and make up their own minds.

Anne Frank’s family in Amsterdam was denied entry into the USA

Anne Frank at age 13

My blog post today is a comment on a news article which you can read in full here.

This is the headline of the article:

Anne Frank was a refugee who was denied asylum in U.S.

I know what my readers are saying:  “What are you complaining about now?”

My complaint is about this quote, which is from the article:

Among the countless Jews denied refuge in the United States were the Frank family of Amsterdam, as personal letters discovered in a New Jersey warehouse in 2007 revealed.

The “Frank family” did not live in Amsterdam.  At first, only Otto Frank left Germany and went to Amsterdam.

Otto Frank was a fugitive from justice because he, and his brother, had been convicted of bank fraud.  His brother managed to enter the United States in spite of his criminal conviction, but for some unknown reason Otto, the bank fraud criminal, was denied entry.  Shame on the USA:  all Jewish criminals should have been allowed in.

This quote is from the news article:

The United States even denied refuge to the most well-known Holocaust victim of all, the young Anne Frank, whose father’s desperate efforts to save his family were met with cold indifference.

Anne Frank was not denied refuge.  She was waiting until her father got settled in the USA before undertaking this journey herself.

What if Otto Frank had brought his family with him when he tried to enter the USA?  Would Anne have written her famous Diary?  I seriously doubt it.  She wrote her diary because she was cooped up in an attic and had nothing else to do.

Anne Frank was no saint.  If she had been in America during the war years, she would have been “lying, cheating and stealing” with the best of them.

The article continues with this quote:

By the end of the 1930s, Jews in Germany and Nazi-occupied Europe had long been outlawed—they were officially declared subhuman, stripped of their citizenship and their wealth, banned marrying or even having sex with Aryans, barred from owning land, blacklisted from many professions and subjected to countless other dehumanizing indignities, large and small. They were forced to wear badges and carry special identification. Boycotts and violence plagued Jewish-owned homes and businesses, which were soon stolen as Jews were rounded up and forced into segregated ghettos where the awaited what turned out to be Hitler’s “Final Solution to the Jewish Question.

My photo of the Anne Frank house

You can read about the Anne Frank house on my website at http://www.scrapbookpages.com/AnneFrank/AnneFrank02.html

 

10 year old girl on Schindler’s List was told that she was being marched into a gas chamber

Scene from the movie Schindler’s List

This quote is from a news article which you can read in full here:

Rena Finder, the youngest and last Holocaust survivor from Schindler’s list, shared these sentiments with me during an interview last year. Rena, at 10 years old, became an enemy of the state because she was Jewish. Alongside her mother, naked, bleeding and filled with terror, Rena was marched into what they were told was the gas chamber. The door was locked and the lights went out as the women screamed in horror waiting for the gas. She would die for the crime of being Jewish.

Unfortunately, the news article does not tell us how Rena was saved.  Was she actually in a shower room, as was shown in the movie Shindler’s List?

Rena was 10 years old. Children under the age of 15 were gassed at Auschwitz.  Why wasn’t she gassed?  Why was she bleeding? Sadly, the news article doesn’t tell us.

I wrote about the movie Schindler’s List on my website at http://www.scrapbookpages.com/Poland/Kazimierz/Kazimierz01C.html

 

Other people’s blogs

I am fresh out of ideas on what to blog about, so today I decided to check out the blogs written by other people.  I found an interesting blog at http://mygrandparentsholocaust.blogspot.com/

The title of this blog is My Grandparent’s Holocaust.

My blog has no title because I write about anything and everything, although mostly about the Holocaust.

The writing on the “My Grandparent’s Holocaust” blog is excellent.

The following quote from the blog, cited above, will illustrate what I mean by “excellent” writing:

Begin quote:

My Grandparents’ Holocaust

For years, my grandparents had kept the stories of their Holocaust a secret. However, I was determined to uncover the memories of their past. Since 2006 I began documenting their lives and writing a book of narrative nonfiction: My Grandparents’ Holocaust. This blog will feature excerpts from the book and related stories.

By nightfall, the train crawled out of the station.

“Chana. Esther. Mama,” Leon shouted in vain.

The sappy smell of pine combs curling off the winds from the river and the intoxicating aromas of acacia were masked in the cattle car by diarrhea. The locomotive was a dark and crowded tomb. Now and again the train stopped and the doors slid open. Gunfire exploded. The doors closed and the train crept forward again. Sometimes the doors would not open; the bullets entered through the openings above.

Leon slinked through the mass of bodies to the bars on the window. He reached down to his waist and carefully removed a long sliver of wire that he had worn like a belt. Leon coiled the wire around his left hand and slipped the wire through the barred window overhead. Wrapping it tightly around his other hand, he dragged the thin cord back and forth against one bar for hours.

The heat, even at night, was unbearable. Thirst poured through the wagon. Bodies slumped against one another. There was no room to fall. Even the dead stood.

Leon noticed that the wire cutting through his palms was also cutting through the cage; but the train was nearing Treblinka. The sobs and prayers intensified. Others buried faith right there in that cattle car.

Then the bar gave out.

He looked around the cattle car once more for his family, but the darkness consumed everything.

As quickly as his tired arms allowed, Leon tied the cord back around his waist, hoisted his frail frame up through the hole, and slithered halfway through the opening. Every vein in his arm pumped violently. His entire body shook. Draped from the window of the cattle car, ten feet from the moving ground, Leon felt unequipped to handle the fall. If the drop did not end his life, the machine gunner atop the roof could. But entering Treblinka was certain death. This moment, hanging from the cattle car like a blanket drying, he at least controlled. Leon inched the rest of his body through and in one motion launched himself from the cattle car, tumbling into the night over shards of ground.

In a Polish field somewhere between Otwock and Treblinka, Leon Lederman watched as the train crept toward the gas chambers with his mother, father, and four sisters inside.

Life had taken a new purpose—some way, there would be vengeance. There was no choice now but to return to Karczew. He was seventeen years of age.

End quote from another person’s blog

Train that took prisoners to Dachau appears to have narrow openings on the side of a boxcar

 

Famous photo of a Gypsy girl named Settela Steinbach on a train to Auschwitz

The photo above proves that there were small openings in the cattle cars that took the Jews to the death camps. But was Treblinka really a “death camp”?

I believe that Treblinka was a “transit camp.”  I blogged about Treblinka being a transit camp on this blog post:

Was Treblinka really a transit camp?

 

What is the true story of Kristallnacht?

Jews from Baden-Baden who were sent to Dachau after Kristallnacht

You can read the Jewish version of the Kristallnacht story at http://www.history.com/topics/kristallnacht

This is my non-Jewish version of the Kristallnacht story:

On the night of November 9th and 10th, known as “Kristallnacht, the windows in all of the Jewish stores were smashed and merchandise was thrown into the street. All of the Synagogues were burned. The name given by the Nazis to this destruction was Kristallnacht or Night of Broken Glass.

In November 1938, there were 10,911 Jews brought to Dachau, after they were taken into “protective custody” during Kristallnacht. Another 20,000 Jews were sent to either the Sachsenhausen camp or to the Buchenwald camp after Kristallnacht.

Most of the Jews arrested after Kristallnacht were released within a few weeks after they promised to make arrangements to leave Germany.

Around 8,000 of the 30,000 Jews, who were taken into “protective custody,” were allowed to enter Great Britain without a visa and thousands more went to Shanghai, where no visa was required.

Altogether, more than 50,000 German Jews found safety in Britain before World War II started, including 10,000 Jewish children, who were sent on Kindertransports.

Walter Loeb, a German Jew, was arrested in Karlsruhe on Nov. 10, 1938 during Kristallnacht; he was 22 years old. According to a news article, he spent a year in the Dachau concentration camp before being released in 1939. He arrived in the United States in 1940, and later served in the U.S. Army

According to a news article by Noah Rosenberg, 19-year-old Werner Kleeman arrived at Dachau concentration camp on November 20, 1938, following his arrest during the Kristallnacht pogrom. In October 2009, almost 71 years later, Kleeman returned to Dachau for the first time. But, on this occasion, he was escorted to the gate by a friend and welcomed by the Dachau museum’s director, Gabriele Hammermann, who had cordially extended an invitation to Kleeman to visit and speak as a “memorial witness.”

In his article, Noah Rosenberg wrote that on Kleeman’s prior visit to Dachau, Kleeman said that he had “Nothing to eat, no clothes to wear, nothing to do but stand on the parade ground 12 to 16 hours a day in cold weather” and worry, as people were “dying all day long.”

Kleeman was released after spend 30 days at Dachau and came to America, courtesy of a distant Midwestern relative. On his return visit to Dachau, Kleeman spoke of his induction into the American Army, which sent him back to war-torn Europe, where he played a hand in Germany’s defeat, ultimately arresting the German officer who had thrown him into Dachau.

Rachel Zimbler’s father, an Austrian Jew in Vienna, who was arrested the day after Kristallnacht, managed to get out of Dachau after only 48 hours. A month later, on Dec. 10, her father put Rachel and her brother on a “kinder transport” which took the children to Holland.

A few of the Jews arrested after Kristallnacht remained in Dachau for as long as 3 years before they were released, as late as 1941, on the condition that they leave Germany immediately, according to Theodor Haas, a Dachau survivor who was among the Jews taken into “protective custody” on November 9, 1938.

 

I neglected to write about the anniversary of Kristallnacht this year

Today I read a news article about Kristallnacht here: http://www.algemeiner.com/2015/11/20/the-sounds-of-broken-glass-reflections-on-kristallnacht-and-israel/#

The photo shown below accompanies the news article

Damage done on Kristallnacht

November 9th is a very important date in history, which is commemorated each year by the Jews.  I have written several blog posts about Kristallnacht which you can read here: https://furtherglory.wordpress.com/tag/kristallnacht/

Strangely, the press never tells you about the reason why the Nazis perpetrated Kristallnacht.

I explained the reason for Kristallnacht in this previous blog post:  https://furtherglory.wordpress.com/2014/10/07/the-famous-jewish-boycott-of-german-goods-in-march-1933/

This quote is from the news article:

On Wednesday, Nov. 9, 1938, the Nazi SS paramilitary forces, aided by German civilians, unleashed a pogrom against the Jews of Berlin, Vienna, Prague, and cities across the heart of Europe. They dragged Torah scrolls through the streets; torched more than 1,000 synagogues; vandalized Jewish homes, businesses and cemeteries; and murdered nearly 100 Jews.

As fires raged and glass was shattered, local firefighters, policemen, and neighbors stood by and did nothing. During those two nights, as many as 30,000 Jewish men were arrested and deported to concentration camps. Those who were left were forced to wear a yellow star with the word “Jude” — Jew — sewn onto their clothing.

This pogrom specifically, and the Holocaust in general, could not have taken place without the preparation of hearts and minds of these people to tolerate the cruelty against their neighbors. Kristallnacht symbolized then, and now, how anti-Jewish legislation and antisemitic rhetoric lead to violence. It reminds us that the Holocaust began not with gas chambers, but with words. This lesson has important implications today.

What occurred on those nights in November was about more than broken glass. It was a warning. The rise of Nazi Germany had ushered in a new dark era of inhumanity and barbarity. The day after Kristallnacht, The New York Times declared, “No man can look on the scenes witnessed yesterday without shame for the degradation of his species.” Time magazine proclaimed, “The civilized world stands revolted by a bloody pogrom against a defenseless people.” And yet, the rest of the world did heartbreakingly little to stop what was already unfolding for European Jewry.

I did a search on Kristallnacht to make sure that I remembered the story correctly.  I found this at http://www.history.com/topics/kristallnacht

On November 9 to November 10, 1938, in an incident known as “Kristallnacht”, Nazis in Germany torched synagogues, vandalized Jewish homes, schools and businesses and killed close to 100 Jews. In the aftermath of Kristallnacht, also called the “Night of Broken Glass,” some 30,000 Jewish men were arrested and sent to Nazi concentration camps. German Jews had been subjected to repressive policies since 1933, when Nazi Party leader Adolf Hitler (1889-1945) became chancellor of Germany. However, prior to Kristallnacht, these Nazi policies had been primarily nonviolent. After Kristallnacht, conditions for German Jews grew increasingly worse. During World War II (1939-45), Hitler and the Nazis implemented their so-called “Final Solution” to the what they referred to as the “Jewish problem,” and carried out the systematic murder of some 6 million European Jews in what came to be known as the Holocaust.

Bad Nazis! They turned on the Jews for no reason and the result was the Holocaust.  Once again — read why the Nazis turned on the Jews:  https://furtherglory.wordpress.com/2014/10/07/the-famous-jewish-boycott-of-german-goods-in-march-1933/

This quote is from the news article:

Remembering Kristallnacht means understanding that the demonization of a people leads to the dehumanization of a people, and finally, to the destruction of a people. Remembering Kristallnacht means ensuring that, in the face of evil against fellow human beings, it is never acceptable for silence to be an option, indifference a strategy, or “never again” a mere slogan.

Finally, remembering Kristallnacht means deciding whether we will be remembered by our descendants as protectors of peace and human rights, or as bystanders to the most grievous crimes against our humanity. We must all ask ourselves whether we are doing enough to raise our voices and take action against the increasing violence around the world that is fueled by hatred.

When will the Jews learn that treating the goyim like scum has consequences?

Nov. 20th, the anniversay of the start of the Nuremberg trial

My photo of the Nuremberg Palace of Justice where the war crimes trials were held

Today is the 70ieth anniversary of the Nuremberg IMT, and you can read a news article about it here.

The headline of the news article is this:

How the Nuremberg Trial Bore Witness to the Nazis’ Worst Crimes

On the 70th anniversary of the world’s most famous trial, the prosecutors’ wise approach still offers a lesson for us.

What is the lesson that the Nuremberg Trial offers to us?

The lesson is this:  If you lose a war, you are a war criminal.  If you win a war, you put the enemy’s top men on trial as war criminals.

SS Major General Jurgen Sroop watches housing blocks burn during Warsaw Ghetto uprising

The photo above is at the top of the news article. What does this have to do with anything?

A better photo would be the one below which shows the building where the trials were held.

The building where the Nuremberg war crimes trials were held

This quote is from the news article:

American chief prosecutor Robert H. Jackson (also a U.S. Supreme Court justice) worried that “unless record was made … future generations would not believe how horrible the truth was.”

Jackson’s team shared his concern. As another American prosecutor, Robert Storey, later wrote, “The purpose of the Nuremberg trial was not merely, or even principally, to convict the leaders of Nazi Germany … Of far greater importance, it seemed to me from the outset, was the making of a record of the Hitler regime which would withstand the test of history.” Indeed, evidence offered at Nuremberg laid the foundation for much of what we know about the Holocaust, including the details of industrial-scale murder at Auschwitz and the now iconic statistic of 6 million Jewish dead.

End quote

The entire Nuremberg trial was captured on film and shown to the world on TV. Newsreel films showed the city of Nürnberg as a pile of rubble, which had not yet been cleared when the trial started; the bodies of 20,000 German civilians were still buried under the destroyed buildings as the German war criminals were brought into the courtroom of the Palace of Justice.

Bombed church in Nuremberg and weekly market place

The Palace of Justice had suffered some damage in the Allied bombing of Nürnberg, but it had been restored by the forced labor of the conquered Germans before the trial began.

It was at the Nuremberg trials that the whole world learned for the first time about the German atrocities, including all the gory details of the medical experiments on prisoners, the shrunken heads, the soap made from human fat, the leather goods made from the skin of concentration camp prisoners, and the gas chambers which accounted for the majority of the deaths at Auschwitz and Majdanek, where the Russians testified that not less than 4 million people had died in the Auschwitz complex and another 1.5 million had died at the Majdanek camp.

Today, the figures given for these deaths is 1.1 million deaths at Auschwitz and 78,000 at Majdanek, including 59,000 Jews.

Another bombed church in Nuremberg where war crimes trials were held

The horror films of the Allied liberation of the Nazi concentration camps at Bergen-Belsen, Buchenwald and Dachau were shown at the trial, to the defendants and to the public. An American-made documentary film, which showed all the graphic details of the gas pipes and control wheels which regulated the flow of poison gas through the shower heads of the Dachau gas chamber, was shown in the courtroom on November 29, 1945.

The German military and economic leaders were visibly stunned by this proof of a gas chamber at Dachau, and claimed that they were seeing and hearing about this unprecedented atrocity for the first time. The American public was horrified that such a thing could have taken place in the civilized world.

Today, tourists are not allowed to see the gas pipes and control wheels that were shown in the courtroom at Nuremberg. Instead, they are shown bins on the outside wall of the gas chamber which were allegedly used to put the poison gas pellets into the room.

The Nuremberg IMT was more than just a trial. It was a graphic presentation to the entire world that the Allies had fought “the Good War” against the evil Nazis.

The charges at the Nuremberg main trial were based on the rules contained in Control Council Law No. 10 which stated the four categories of crimes, as follows:

CONTROL COUNCIL
Law No. 10

[…]

Article II

1. Each of the following acts is recognized as a crime:

(a) Crimes against Peace. Initiation of invasions of other countries and
wars of aggression in violation of international laws and treaties,
including but not limited to planning, preparation, initiation or waging
a war of aggression, or a war of violation of international treaties,
agreements or assurances, or participation in a common plan or
conspiracy for the accomplishment of any of the foregoing.

(b) War Crimes. Atrocities or offenses against persons or property
constituting violations of the laws or customs of war, including but not
limited to, murder, ill treatment or deportation to slave labour or for
any other purpose, of civilian population from occupied territory,
murder or ill treatment of prisoners of war or persons on the seas,
killing of hostages, plunder of public or private property, wanton
destruction of cities, towns or villages, or devastation not justified
by military necessity.

End quote

Here is a transcript of narration in film shown at Nuremberg Trial in which Dachau gas chamber is described:

Document PS-2430: Nazi Concentration and Prisoner-of-War Camps: A Documentary Motion Picture, film shown at the Nuremberg Trial, 29 November 1945, IMT, XXX, p. 470:

“Dachau- factory of horrors. [ … ] Hanging in orderly rows were the clothes of prisoners who had been suffocated in the lethal gas chamber. They had been persuaded to remove their clothing under the pretext of taking a shower for which towels and soap were provided. This is the Brausebad — the showerbath. Inside the showerbath — the gas vents. On the ceiling — the dummy shower heads. In the engineers room — the intake and outlet pipes. Push buttons to control inflow and outtake of gas. A hand-valve to regulate pressure. Cyanide powder was used to generate the lethal smoke. From the gas chamber, the bodies were removed to the crematory.”

The film that was shown at the Nuremberg IMT can be seen on the web site of the United States Holocaust Memorial Musuem. A 22-minute movie shown in the Museum at the Dachau Memorial Site contains some footage from this film.

End quote

This final quote is from the news article:

The Nuremberg court was precedent-setting in many ways, establishing that “following orders” was not a legitimate defense for criminal acts and that heads of state could be subject to prosecution. But the historical documentation established in that courtroom is no less important a legacy. In her dispatch from the trial, Rebecca West referred to Nuremberg as “the historic peep show.” Yes, this trial was carefully staged—though not for lurid voyeurism but instead as a cautionary confrontation with state-sponsored criminality and an unimpeachable record of its evils.

Breckinridge Long is back in the news and not in a good way

Photo of the Cover of The War Diary of Breckinridge Long

This morning, when I checked my blog statistics, as I always do, I found that the my previous blog post about Breckinridge Long had gotten the most hits.

I wondered why so many people were interested in Breckinridge Long, so I checked the news to find out what is going on.  I found this news article with this headline:

Anti-Syrian Muslim Refugee Rhetoric Mirrors Calls to Reject Jews During Nazi Era

Breckinridge Long

 

A photo similar to the one above is at the top of the news article. This photo allegedly shows Jewish men marching to the gas chamber at Auschwitz-Birkenau. Notice the train in the background; they have just gotten off a train.

This quote is from the beginning of the news article:

During the 1930s and early 1940s, the United States resisted accepting large numbers of Jewish refugees escaping the Nazi terror sweeping Europe, in large part because of fearmongering by a small but vocal crowd.

They claimed that the refugees were communist or anarchist infiltrators intent on spreading revolution; that refugees were part of a global Jewish-capitalist conspiracy to take control of the United States from the inside; that the refugees were either Nazis in disguise or under the influence of Nazi agents sent to commit acts of sabotage; and that Jewish refugees were out to steal American jobs.

Many rejected Jews simply because they weren’t Christian.

In recent days, similar arguments are being resurrected to reject Syrian refugees fleeing sectarian terrorists and civil war.

This is another quote from the same news article:

During congressional debate in 1940, John B. Trevor, a prominent Capitol Hill lobbyist, argued against a proposal to settle Jewish refugees in Alaska, claiming they would be potential enemies — and charging that Nazi persecution of the Jews had occurred “in very many cases … because of their beliefs in the Marxian philosophy.” Trevor had notably helped author the Immigration Act of 1924, a law designed to curb Jewish migration from Eastern Europe, in part because of anarchist Jewish Americans of Russian descent including Emma Goldman.

Rep. Jacob Thorkelson, a Republican from Montana, warned at the time that Jewish migrants were part of an “invisible government,” an organization he said was tied to the “communistic Jew” and to “Jewish international financiers.”

William Dudley Pelley, a leading anti-Semite and organizer of the “Silver Shirts” nationalist group, claimed that Jewish migration was part of a Jewish-Communist conspiracy to seize control of the United States. Pelley, whose organization routinely used anti-Semitic smears such as “Yidisher Refugees” and “Refugees Kikes,” attracted up to 50,000 to his organization by 1934.

In a previous blog post, I wrote the following about Otto Frank, the father of Anne Frank, who tried to escape the Nazis by coming to the United States, but he was denied entry because he had a criminal record (He had been convicted of cheating the customers of a bank that he owned.)

Begin Quote from previous blog post:

Anne Frank’s mother was an Orthodox Jew but her father was not very religious; he was not a  Zionist.  Besides that, the Franks didn’t qualify for the prisoner exchange camp at Bergen-Belsen because Otto Frank was a fugitive from justice.

In 1933, when Hitler came to power, Otto Frank was not in danger of being persecuted — he was in danger of being prosecuted.  That’s right, Otto Frank and his brother were both indicted for bank fraud in 1933, and were scheduled to be put on trial.  Otto Frank tried to get a visa to come to America, but was denied, so he escaped to Holland and entered the country illegally.  His family followed him a few months later.

Otto Frank had been preparing a hiding place for months, while he told everyone that the family was planning to escape to Switzerland. In July 1942, Margot Frank received a letter from the Zentralstelle für jüdische Auswanderung (Central Office for Jewish Emigration), ordering her to report to a work camp. The next day, the Frank family moved into the annex.