Schindler’s List — the movie

Photos of the place where Schindler’s List was filmed

Courtyard in Kazimierz used for movie location

In 1993, when Stephen Spielberg made a movie out of a novel called “Schindler’s Ark,” written by Australian author Thomas Keneally, he needed an authentic Jewish quarter for the scenes depicting the Jewish ghetto of Podgorze in Krakow. He chose the Kazimierz district of Krakow because this area had not changed since the 1940s, while Podgorze had been partially rebuilt with modern buildings.

Schindler’s List tells the story of how Oskar Schindler, an ethnic German industrialist from the Sudetenland in what is now the Czech Republic, saved 1098 Jews from the misery of having to work at the Nazi forced labor camp at Plaszow, by employing them in his factory in the Zablocie district of Krakow.

Schindler’s factory became a sub-camp in the Nazi concentration camp system; the Jewish prisoners lived in barracks which Schindler built for them on the grounds of his factory.

Instead of paying wages to the Jews, Schindler paid less than normal wages to the WVHA (SS Economic Office in Oranienburg) for their labor. Although Schindler didn’t mistreat his Jewish workers, he did profit from their slave labor. Initially, he was motivated by the desire for money, not by a desire to save the Jews.

The photo above shows the balconies in the courtyard from where the suitcases were thrown down in the scene in Spielberg’s movie in which the Podgorze Ghetto is liquidated.

According to my tour guide, a courtyard such as this is typical of the way living space was traditionally arranged in the old Jewish quarters of Polish cities.

Since the fall of Communism in Poland in 1989, Kazimierz has been revived as a Jewish community, and it has also become a popular tourist attraction with special tours of the places where the movie was filmed.

In October 1998, I took a guided tour of Kazimierz and took some photographs of the places where Schindler’s List was filmed.

One of the most memorable passages in the novel Schindler’s List is the one where Mrs. Dresner hides under a stairwell when the Nazis come to round up the Jews in the Ghetto in June 1942, to take them to the Belzec extermination camp.

According to the book, after this roundup in which many of the Jews escaped, the Jewish Combat Organization (ZOB), a group of resistance fighters, bombed the Cyganeria Restaurant and killed 7 German SS soldiers. Next, the SS-only Bagatella Cinema was bombed in Krakow.

In the next few months the ZOB sank German patrol boats on the Vistula, fire-bombed German military garages in Krakow and derailed a German army train, besides forging papers and passports for Jews to pass as Aryans.

In the movie, the date of the scene where Mrs. Dresner hides has been changed to the day of the liquidation of the ghetto on March 13, 1943.

The photograph below shows the stairway used in the scene in which Mrs. Dresner hides from the Jewish police who were helping the Germans to round up the Jews for “transportation to the East,” a euphemism for taking them to the alleged gas chambers.

Stairs where Mrs. Dresner hid in the story of Schindler’s List

The guided tour that I took in 1998 was called “Schindler’s Steps”.  From Krakow, the tour entered Kazimierz on Jozefa street and the first thing we saw was the courtyard, which links Jozefa street with Meiselsa street, and the stairwell where the hiding scene in Schindler’s List was filmed.

Mrs. Dresner hid under the stairwell, pictured above, after a neighbor allowed her daughter, but not her, to hide behind a false wall in an apartment. Mrs. Dresner was the aunt of Genia, the little girl in red, in the movie.

In the movie, the Nazis went through the Podgorze ghetto, room by room, and tore down walls as they looked for Jews who were hiding. While they are searching for Jews, a German soldier stops to play the piano. The Nazis loved classical music and this is a reference to the Jewish saying that the Nazis literally put down their violins in order to kill the Jews.

Germany was the most civilized and advanced country in the world in the 1930s, which makes it all the harder to understand how the Nazis could have planned the deliberate genocide of the Jews.

According to the novel, entitled “Schindler’s Ark,” around 4,000 Jews were found hiding in Podgorze during the liquidation of the ghetto and they were executed on the spot.

However, during the post war trial of Amon Goeth, the Commandant of the Plazow camp, the charges against him mentioned that 2,000 Jews were killed during the liquidation of the Podgorze ghetto.

The Jews who managed to escape from the ghetto joined the partisans of the Polish People’s Army, who were hiding in the forests of Niepolomice. Unlike the novel, the movie “Schindler’s List” does not mention the heroic Jewish resistance fighters, who managed to escape from the Nazis, and lived to fight as partisans throughout the war.

The Schindler’s Steps guided tour, which I took in October 1998, started in Krakow with Schindler’s modern apartment building at #7 Straszewskiego Street. From there, Schindler could look out his third floor windows and see the Planty, a narrow park all the way around Old Town Krakow which marks the area where the town walls once stood.

This apartment, in a very ordinary, ugly gray building, was given to Schindler by the Nazis after it was taken, without compensation, from the Jewish Nussbaum family.

Straszewskiego Street ends at Wawel, the limestone hill where the ancient royal palaces still stand. During the German occupation of Poland, Hans Frank, the governor of occupied Poland, which was called “the General Government,” lived on Wawel hill in the Castle originally built by King Kazimierz the Great, the founder of the separate city of Kazimierz. Schindler’s apartment in Krakow was north of the Kazimierz district and north of Wawel hill.

Street in Kazimierz before the Germans came

The next stop, on the tour that I took, was Schindler’s Enameled Pots and Pans Factory, on the south side of the river Vistula, at #4 Lipowa Street. Lipowa Street goes through Podgorze, and the factory is just east of the former ghetto and across the railroad tracks.

Enamelware was apparently widely used in Poland instead of pottery or china, judging by the large amounts of enameled dishes, that were brought to the concentration camps by the prisoners. It is now on display in the museums at Auschwitz and Majdanek.

Enamelware is the type of dishes that Americans associate with the Old West when cowboys ate the beans that they cooked over the campfire on metal plates coated with mottled gray enamel. The most popular color of enameled bowls, displayed in the museums in Poland, is a dull brick red. Enameled pots and pans, such as Schindler produced in his factory, were also popular in American kitchens up until the 1960s.

Oskar Schindler

Schindler obtained a contract with the Germans to supply mess kits and field kitchen pots to the German army. Schindler’s Krakow factory produced armaments as well as enamelware. The Enamelware part of the factory remained open until 1945 with 300 Polish non-Jewish workers.

When the Plaszow camp closed, Schindler moved the munitions part of his factory to Brünnlitz in what is now the Czech Republic.

The factory produced 45 mm anti-tank shells, but none of his shells were ever used because Schindler deliberately set his machines so that the calibration was incorrect, according to the movie “Schindler’s List.” Other sources claim that Schindler spent all the money that he made on his enamelware business to purchase shells on the black market which he then sold to the Nazis. By that time, his purpose was not to make money, but to save his Jewish workers, and thereby save himself from being indicted as a war criminal.

Thomas Keneally, the author of the novel “Schindler’s Ark,” who is a native of Australia, mentioned in the book that in 1944, an Australian plane was shot down by the Germans over Schindler’s factory; the plane was not trying to bomb his munitions factory, but was dropping supplies to the Jewish and Polish partisans in the forest east of Krakow, according to the author.

Schindler’s factory building was still being used for an electronics factory when I visited Krakow in 1998 and I only saw it from the street. The factory is an ordinary gray stucco three-story building with lots of windows, built right next to the sidewalk.

The architectural style of the building is what Americans would call Art Deco; in Poland in the 1940s, this style was called Modern. There is an iron gate at the entrance to the factory courtyard where Schindler built barracks for his workers.

The factory was named Deutsche Emailwaren Fabrick (German Enamelware Factory) and was called DEF for short.

Jewish workers at Schindler’s factory

Oscar Schindler’s factory was taken over by the Jewish Council in Krakow and the building then had a sign outside, just like the original sign, which says “Deutsche Emalia Fabrika – Oscar Schindler.” The factory is now included on the Schindler’s Steps tour; visitors can see the stairs that were used in the filming of the movie.

Schindler’s original office is at the top of the stairs and visitors may sit at his desk. The rest of the factory is off limits but visitors can look around the grounds. The factory interior was not used in the film, except for the stairs.

The photos below were contributed by Richard Stephenson, who took the Schindler’s Steps tour in December 2005.

The grounds of Oskar Schindler’s Factory in Krakow

Photo Credit: Richard Stephenson

Stairs in the factory were shown in Schindler’s List

Photo Credit: Richard Stephenson

Oskar Schindler’s real office was not shown in Schindler’s List

Photo Credit: Richard Stephenson

On my visit to Poland in 1998, I stayed at the Hotel Cracovia in Krakow which was owned by Orbis Travel Agency, the tour company that I used. Built in 1965, it was a first class, but inexpensive, hotel where tour groups from all over Europe stayed before visiting such places as Auschwitz, which is due west of Krakow.

Tours of Kazimierz and the site of the Plaszow labor camp can be arranged from the hotel, as well as private tours of the Auschwitz concentration camp.

 

Podgorze ghetto in Krakow

Books about Schindler’s List

New movie tells you what really happeed on 9-11

The following quote is from a movie review which you can read in full at:

https://www.movieinsider.com/m6073/horse-soldiers

Begin quote from movie review:

[The movie entitled] 12 Strong is set in the harrowing days following 9/11 when a U.S. Special Forces team, led by their new Captain, Mitch Nelson (Hemsworth), is chosen to be the first U.S. troops sent into Afghanistan for an extremely dangerous mission.

There, in the rugged mountains, they must convince Northern Alliance General Dostum (Negahban) to join forces with them to fight their common adversary: the Taliban and their Al Qaeda allies.

In addition to overcoming mutual distrust and a vast cultural divide, the Americans—accustomed to state-of-the-art warfare—must adopt the rudimentary tactics of the Afghani horse soldiers.

But despite their uneasy bond, the new allies face overwhelming odds: outnumbered and outgunned by a ruthless enemy that does not take prisoners.

End quote from movie review

So there you have it, at long last the true story of 9-11

Everything that you need to know about the movie entitled “Schindler’s List”

A scene from Schindler’s List – the Movie

The photo above shows a scene from the movie entitled Schindler’s List, in which Oskar Schindler is dictating, from memory, the names of his factory workers whom he wants to take with him to his new factory in Brünnlitz, near his home town in Moravia, which is now in the Czech Republic.

His factory manager, Itzhak Stern, a prisoner who works for Schindler, is typing the names.

When all the names are listed, Stern asked Schindler if he was buying the names from the camp Commandant Amon Goeth.  Schindler answers that the list is costing him a fortune.

The Nazis did not want to send Jewish prisoners to Moravia, which was part of the former country of Czechoslovakia, that had become a German mandate. Schindler had to resort to bribes in order to move the munitions part of his Krakow factory to Brünnlitz.

In the movie, Schindler then shows the list to Amon Goeth, who tells him that there is a clerical error: Helen Hirsch, a prisoner who works as a servant in Goeth’s villa, is on the list. Goeth tells Schindler that he wants to take Helen Hirsch with him back to Vienna after the war.

Schindler offers to play a game of cards with Goeth to win Helen’s freedom, suggesting that they play double or nothing. If Goeth wins, Oskar will give him 7,400 Zloty ($2,312.50) but if Goeth’s winning hand is a “natural,” Schindler will pay him 14,800 Zl ($4,625). If Schindler
wins, he can put Helen Hirsch on his list of prisoners to be transferred to his Brünnlitz camp.

In his book entitled “Oskar Schindler,” David Crowe wrote that this scene was pure fiction.

According to Crowe, Oskar Schindler had no role in preparing the famous list, other than giving SS-Hauptscharführer Franz Josef Müller some general guidelines for the type of workers he wanted on the list. Amon Göth had been arrested by the SS on September 13, 1944 and was in prison in Breslau when the list was being prepared.

David Crowe wrote that the person responsible for the preparation of Schindler’s List was Marcel Goldberg, a corrupt Jewish prisoner, who was a member of the Ordnungdienst, the Jewish police force in the camp. Goldberg was the assistant of SS-Hauptscharführer Franz Josef Müller, the SS man responsible for the transport lists.

Only about one third of the Jews on the list had previously worked in Schindler’s factory in Krakow. The novel, “Schindler’s Ark” tells about how Goldberg accepted bribes from the prisoners who wanted on the list.

In his book “Oskar Schindler,” David Crowe wrote: “… watch how Steven Spielberg traces the story of Marcel Goldberg, the real author of Schindler’s List, in his film. He begins in the early part of the film with Goldberg sitting near Leopold “Poldek” Page and other Jewish black marketeers in Krakow’s Marjacki Bazylika (church) as Oskar Schindler tries to interest them in doing business with a German.

What follows throughout the rest of the film is the subtle tale of Goldberg’s gradual moral degeneration. Schindler, for example, gives Itzhak Stern first a lighter, then a cigarette case, and finally a watch to bribe Goldberg to send more Jews to his factory from Plaszow.”

Commandant Amon Goeth had two Jewish housemaids who lived in the basement of his villa: Helen Hirsch and Helen Sternlicht. Helen Hirsch is now Helen Horowitz and Helen Sternlicht is now Helen Jonas, formerly Helen Rosenzweig.

According to David Crowe’s book, Goeth differentiated between the two Helens by calling Helen Hirsch by the nickname Lena and renaming Helen Sternlicht with the name Susanna. In the movie, the two Helens are a composite of the two real life Helens, although both appear together briefly in one scene.

Helen Hirsch moved to Israel after World War II ended, and became part of the close-knit circle of the “Schindler Jews” in Israel who provided the information that became the basis for Thomas Keneally’s novel Schindler’s Ark and Steven Spielberg’s movie Schindler’s List.

According to author David Crowe, Helen Hirsch was the older of the two Jewish maids who worked for Goeth. She had originally worked in the camp’s Jewish kitchen and was chosen by her superior, Leon Myer, to work for Goeth.

Myer took several weeks to acquaint her with the commandant’s personal likes and dislikes. Initially, Helen lived in a special barracks for Jewish workers, but eventually moved into the maid’s quarters in the cold, damp cellar of Goeth’s villa.

Living with Goeth, she said after the war, “was almost like living under the gallows twenty-four hours a day.”

David Crowe wrote that Helen Hirsch Horowitz told Martin Gosch and Howard Koch in 1964 that “insofar as she was concerned, he (Goeth) had made some attempts physically and sexually upon her.” Gosch and Koch decided not to put this in the film script because “she might be accused even today of having acceded to his physical demands in order to preserve her life, and this does not happen to be true.”

The story that is told in the movie about how Amon Goeth chose his housemaid is actually closer to the story of how Helen Sternlicht was selected by Goeth.

According to David Crowe’s book, the true story is as follows:

When the Germans began the construction of Plaszow in late 1942, Helen Sternlicht’s mother, Lola, and one of her older sisters, Sydel (Sydonia), were sent there to work. As the Krakow ghetto was being liquidated, Helen Sternlicht decided to try to sneak into Plaszow because she did not have the blue Kennkarte which was necessary for identification. Helen had already learned about the death trains to Belzec and was desperate to join her sister and mother at Plaszow. She hid in a milk wagon going to Plaszow but was discovered by the driver just before he arrived at the camp. She managed to escape his grasp and made it into the camp, where she was given a job cleaning barracks. One day while she was cleaning windows, Amon Goeth walked in and said, “I want this girl in my house. If she is smart enough to clean windows in the sunshine, I want her.”

When Plaszow was being closed in the fall of 1944, Oskar Schindler requested that Helen Sternlicht and her sister, Anna, be put on the female “Schindler’s List.”

In his book “Oskar Schindler,” David Crowe wrote that Helen Sternlicht never mentioned sexual advances toward her from Goeth.

The sex scenes in the movie Schindler’s List involved Helen Hirsch, as shown in this YouTube video.

The following quote is from the book “Oskar Schindler,” by David Crowe:

Mietek Pemper told me that Goeth, who had liver and kidney problems, was not attracted to women. In fact, he found the idea that Goeth was somehow sexually attracted to Helen Hirsch Horowitz pure “baloney.” She was not, he added, “Miss Krakow or Miss Poland.” Helen Rosenzweig added that Goeth was also a diabetic who drank heavily. He believed firmly in Nazi racial laws and would not have had relations with a Jew. This does not contradict Helen Hirsch’s claim that Goeth tried to sexually abuse her when he was drunk. However, the idea, as depicted in Steven Spielberg’s film, that Goeth was somehow infatuated with Helen Hirsch and even toyed with the idea of kissing her is totally fictitious.

In February 2009, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum did a series of interviews with Holocaust survivors called Voices on Antisemitism. As part of this project, Helen Sternlicht Jonas was interviewed by Aleisa Fishman.

The following quote is the words of Helen Sternlicht Jonas in her interview with Aleisa Fishman:

When I arrived in Camp Plaszow, I was assigned to clean barracks. At the third day, a tall SS walked in the room, and he was Amon Goeth. At the time, I didn’t know who he was. But he looked around and he said to the woman that was in charge of us to send me to his house. And I really didn’t know what a brutal man he is, but he was a madman. He was a madman. He always, from the balcony he watched the camp, and he’s standing with the little machine gun through the window. He said, “You see those dumb heads? They’re standing, doing nothing.” He says, “I’m going to shoot.” And you could hear shooting like hell. And I could hear him whistling a happy tune, like he did so well. And this face with such satisfaction! I can’t forget that. The dreams after so many years he’s chasing me, I’m hiding. Because I lived in constant fear, constant fear, just looking at him. He was barbaric.

Amon Goeth with his rifle on the balcony of his villa

The most famous scenes in Schindler’s List show Commandant Amon Goeth shooting prisoners in the camp from the balcony of his villa. The photo above shows the real life Amon Goeth.

The photo below is a still photo from the movie entitled Schindler’s List. In the movie, the balcony of Goeth’s house is only a few yards from the camp. Visitors to Goeth’s villa today can see that the house was behind a hill and the camp was not visible from the balcony.

Amon Goeth shooting from his balcony in the movie Schindler’s List

In 1943, SS Judge Georg Konrad Morgen of the Haupt Amt Gericht (SS-HAG) was given an assignment to investigate and prosecute corruption and unauthorized murder at the Buchenwald concentration camp. His next assignment was to investigate the Plaszow camp.

As a result of his investigation, which involved interviewing the prisoners, Amon Goeth was arrested by the Central Office of the SS Judiciary and imprisoned.

Goeth was charged with stealing from the warehouses and factories at Plaszow, but not with shooting prisoners from the balcony of his home.

Amon Goeth at the Plaszow camp

In the photo above, taken at the Plaszow camp, Commandant Amon Goeth is shown on his white horse. The groom for Goeth’s horse was 14-year-old Irwin Gotfried, who managed to survive the Holocaust.

After the war, Gotfried emigrated to the San Francisco bay area where he lived in a community that included 2,000 other Holocaust survivors.

In an article in the San Francisco Chronicle on May 16, 2005, staff writer Charles Burress wrote the following:

“That was me in the movie,” Gotfried said, referring to a scene from “Schindler’s List,” where the young groom is shot and killed by the commander. In real life, Gotfried was not shot and lived to become president of AGI Shower Door and Mirror Co. in Redwood City.

In the movie scene, where Gotfried is shot by Amon Goeth, Spielberg deviated from the real life story in order to make a point that is essential to the theme of the movie: Oskar Schindler was an exception. For the most part, the Nazis were depraved degenerates who were incapable of changing their ways.

In a key scene in Schindler’s List, Oskar Schindler attempts to teach Goeth that he would have “real power” if he would choose to pardon prisoners for minor infractions instead of summarily executing them. Goeth tries this suggestion, and even practices his pardon demeanor in a mirror, but he cannot overcome his intrinsic evilness. He pardons his 14-year-old groom when his work performance does not meet his standards, but then shoots him in the back with his high-powered rifle.

In the movie Schindler’s List, the Germans are always portrayed as not only brutal, but stupid and inept. There is a famous scene where three German SS officers attempt to execute a Jew, but their pistols won’t fire.

The German Luger pistol was highly prized by Allied soldiers in both World War I and World War II; thousands of them were taken from dead or captured German soldiers because the Luger was considered the best pistol in the world. This scene attempts to show that even the best that the Germans could do wasn’t good enough.

Remember that Schindler’s List is a fictional story, based on a fictional novel entitled Schindler’s Ark; it is neither objective nor true history.

 

The new TV show entitled “Young Sheldon” is finally out, and it is a dud

The problem with this new TV show is that I had already seen it, bit by bit, in the ads that have played day and night for six months, before the show was finally shown on TV.

I think that the TV show was filmed over a period of time, maybe 6 months or so, and Young Sheldon does not appear to be the same age in all of the scenes of the show, which are purported to have been taken during the same time period.

In one of the scenes that were shown, before the TV show was released, Sheldon has two front teeth. In the TV show, there are no teeth in sight, except for one scene.

I would suggest, in the future, that an entire TV show should not be shown, bit by bit, before it is released months later.

I can relate to this show because, as a young girl, I was very advanced for my age. I had a brother who was 18 months older than I was. Because he was a bad little boy, my brother was kicked out of school when he was in the first grade.

My mother had to teach my brother at home, after he was kicked out of school, and I was allowed to listen in, so I had learned to read before I went to school. Then I was kicked out of school because I was too smart; my brother had been kicked out because he was too stupid.

I am now 84 and hopefully schools have changed now, so that children of different levels are taught in separate classrooms.

July 20, 1944 Valkyrie — the bomb plot against Hitler

On July 20th, 1944 there was a famous assignation attempt against Adolf Hitler.

The five minute video clip above, which is from a Tom Cruz movie, is a fairly accurate reenactment of the incident.  Many people have objected to the casting of Tom Cruz, in the role of the much taller Claus Schenk, Graf von Stauffenberg, but Tom Cruz looks remarkably like Claus Schenk.

There is virtually nothing in Valkyrie, the movie, which shows what ordinary life was like in Germany in July 1944. There are no extras playing the part of a German Fräulein wearing a dirndl; no Germans drinking beer and singing in a beer garden. There is nothing to indicate that the action is taking place in Germany.

Another movie, Revolutionary Road, which was released around the same time, is authentic 1950s America, right down to the smallest detail.

The only scene in Valkyrie that comes close to showing Germany, as it was in 1943, is when Stauffenberg goes to Hitler’s home called the Berghof to get his signature on a document.

We see the famous picture window that looks out on the Bavarian Alps. Hitler’s henchmen are gathered around him at the Berghof and Albert Speer can be identified: there is a bit player who bears a resemblance to him.

The Berghof and surroundings were bombed by the RAF right before the end of the war on April 25, 1945 — it was done out of spite: the area was of no strategic importance at that point.

The famous picture window before it was destroyed 

Hitler is accurately shown in the movie as a broken man, petting his dog, an Alsatian Sheppard. One bit of information that I didn’t know until I saw this movie, many years ago, is that Stauffenberg put in his glass eye whenever he was in the presence of Hitler. He obviously wanted Hitler to have a good opinion of him; in the scene at the Berghof, Hitler says that he wishes that all his Army officers were like Stauffenberg.

In the trailers for the movie, that were shown for weeks before the movie opened, there is a brief scene where someone kills a mosquito with the lit end of a cigarette. Undoubtedly, there were many people who thought that this was a cruel act committed by Hitler, but there was a German guard at Hitler’s Wolf’s Lair headquarters in East Prussia, who actually killed a mosquito on his arm with a lit cigarette.

The Wolf’s Lair was located on swampy ground and that’s why there were mosquitoes. This scene may have been included by the film makers before they learned that Hitler didn’t smoke. In any case, the scene is totally out of context and has no relevance to the movie plot.

On July 20, 1944, an attempt to assassinate Hitler, which had been planned for years by groups which included former political prisoners who had been released from Sachsenhausen, was made by Colonel Claus Schenk von Stauffenberg, an insider on Hitler’s staff. One of those involved in the planning was a former Sachsenhausen political prisoner, Julius Leber, a Social Democrat.

The plan was for the political prisoners at Sachsenhausen, including Schuschnigg and the trade union leader, Carl Vollmerhaus, to take over important positions in the German government after Hitler was dead.

According to Information Leaflet Number 20, which I obtained from the Sachsenhausen Memorial Site:

As one of the first measures for the “restoration of the supreme majesty of the law,” the conspirators wanted the concentration camps closed down. For this reason, the “immediate measures” of the July 20, 1944 plan included the occupation of the concentration camps, the arrest of the commandants and the disarming of the guards by the military. But this never happened.

The assassination attempt failed when someone moved the briefcase containing a bomb, which Col. von Stauffenberg had planted near Hitler’s feet. Von Stauffenberg had left the room before the time bomb went off, and had returned to Berlin where a group of high-ranking German army officers were planning to proclaim martial law, after the announcement of the death of Hitler, and take control of the government. The bomb went off, but Hitler survived the blast with only minor injuries.

According to the Information Leaflet, some of the conspirators arrested immediately after the assassination attempt are believed to have been taken to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, including Field Marshall Erwin von Witzleben.

Some of the conspirators who were seriously injured or sick, or who had tried to escape arrest by suicide or had become ill while imprisoned, were sent to the well-equipped infirmary barracks at Sachsenhausen where they were kept alive for further interrogations or until they could be put on trial in the People’s Court.

One of the conspirators who was brought to the Sachsenhausen infirmary with severe injuries was Colonel Siegfried Wagner, who had jumped out the window of his apartment in Potsdam on July 22, 1944 in an attempt to escape arrest; he died in the infirmary four days later.

Colonel Carl-Hans von Hardenberg, who was slated to become the head of the state of Berlin-Brandenberg after the takeover by the conspirators, was also taken to Sachsenhausen with severe injuries after he attempted suicide to escape arrest. He was one of the survivors of Sachsenhausen, thanks to a Communist fellow-prisoner, Flor Peeters, who took care of him.

Another conspirator, Lieutenant Colonel Hasso von Boehmer, was brought to the infirmary at Sachsenhausen, so that he could be kept alive long enough for the People’s Court in Potsdam to sentence him to death and execute him.

Only a few of the many conspirators, who were involved in the July 20th plot, were tried in the People’s Court; the others were sent directly to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp without a trial. Only a few of the many conspirators, who were involved in the July 20th plot, were tried in the People’s Court; the others were sent directly to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp without a trial.

Randolph von Breidbach, a resistance fighter against the Nazis, was arrested in 1943 and tried by the Reich War Court; although he was found not guilty by the court, he was held in prison until February 1945 when he was transferred to the Sachsenhausen infirmary, where he stayed behind when the camp was evacuated two months later. He died on June 13, 1945 in Sachsenhausen and was buried in a mass grave behind the infirmary barracks.

On July 30, 1944, ten days after the assassination attempt by von Stauffenberg, Hitler ordered that the family members of von Stauffenberg be arrested as “kinship prisoners.” A total of 180 relatives, mostly wives and children, were arrested in August 1944 and imprisoned at Sachsenhausen in the special section of brick buildings located outside the prison enclosure, called the “Schuschnigg barracks.” This was where former Austrian Chancellor Schuschnigg was held, along with his wife and child, until he was transferred to Dachau in 1945.

 

Ich hatt’ einen Kameraden (Leni Riefenstahl version)

The film Triumph of the Will has a very good rendition of “Once I had a comrade”.  I have set this clip to start 34 minutes and 34 seconds into the movie.  If you click on the video, you can start at that point and hear the song.  The song is used dramatically as the back ground melody for this segment.  This segment begins with a few seconds of a German youth speaking.

https://furtherglory.wordpress.com/2017/07/05/ich-hatt-einen-kameraden/

I previously posted another version of this song on the link you that you can follow above.

Name that tune

Adolf Eichmann look-alike Ben Kingsley will star in new movie

Adolf Eichmann

Eichmann look alike Ben Kingsley

Ben Kingsley will play the part of Adolf Eichmann in a new movie entitled “Operation Finale”.  These two men definitely look very much alike, as you can see by looking at their photos above.

You can read all about this in the recent news article, to which I have linked below:

http://www.empireonline.com/people/oscar-isaac/ben-kingsley-operation-finale/

Begin quote from news article

Oscar Isaac is already producing and starring in Nazi-hunting thriller Operation Finale. Now his target has been cast, as Ben Kingsley will play Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann.

… It tells the story of a group of Israeli spies from Mossad who work to track down general Eichmann in 1960s Argentina so he can be brought to justice for his many crimes during World War II.

Isaac will be Peter Malkin, the operative who led the mission to find the man who was one of the main architects of the holocaust. Weitz should be starting the cameras rolling in the autumn.

End quote from news article

According to Wikipedia, Kingsley’s maternal grandfather was either Russian-Jewish or German-Jewish.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Kingsley#Early_life

According to my research, Kingsley’s mother Anna was the illegitimate daughter of an English woman.  A Jew impregnated Kingsley’s grand mother, on his mother’s side, and then abandoned both Kingsley’s mother and grandmother.

In other words, Kingsley’s mother was a half Jew.  But Kingsley was not a Jew according to Jewish law because his Jewish blood did not follow the matriarchal line.

This will be a very interesting movie, which I can’t wait to see!

The Chelmno camp is in the news

The following quote is from a news story which you can read in full at http://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/european-leaders-discuss-plight-of-child-victims-of-war-10647/

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The men [in the village] were rounded up and killed, and the women and 88 children of the village were gathered and sent to the Chelmno extermination camp, where they were gassed to death. Only a few children considered racially suitable for “Germanization” – the spreading of the German language and culture – survived, and were handed over to SS families.

To mark the anniversary, a Czech group came on pilgrimage to Rome last week. They met Pope Francis during his general audience May 31, and later had Mass with Vatican Secretary of State Cardinal Pietro Parolin, who offered the liturgy for children who are victims of armed conflicts. The group then participated in the half-day conference Thursday, followed by a Mass said by Cardinal Dominik Duka of Prague.

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D-Day landings began on this day: June 6, 1944

Footage dramatizing before dawn fighting, sunrise, and the first shore landings, on June 6th, 1944 as seen by paratroopers who had been dropped behind the lines into France.