August 2024
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The Holocaust refers to the systematic, state-sponsored persecution and mass murder of six million Jews and millions of others by Nazi Germany and its collaborators in the years before and during World War II. I want to focus on one element of state-sponsored persecution in this blog, the Aryanization. The Aryanization of Jewish properties was
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Victor Capesius was a Romanian-German pharmacist who played a significant and notorious role during World War II as an SS officer and the chief pharmacist at Auschwitz Concentration Camp. Born on February 7, 1907, in Reussmarkt, Transylvania (then part of Austria-Hungary, now Romania), Capesius studied pharmacy in Cluj-Napoca and Vienna, later working for Bayer, a
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I often hear the argument, “Why did the Jews not simply leave Germany when Hitler got to power?” It was just not as simple as that. Many German and Austrian Jews saw themselves as German or Austrian first, and they considered themselves to be part of society. Why would they leave their homes and their
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Two truly legendary musicians are connected by the date of August 16. Robert Johnson died on August 16, 1938. Elvis Presley died on August 19, 1977. Both men had a lasting impact on music. Robert Johnson: The Myth, the Man, and the Music Robert Johnson, often hailed as the “King of the Delta Blues,” is
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There are thousands of unclaimed insurance policies for Holocaust victims and survivors. I will be focusing on the Dutch situation, but I am sure this will apply elsewhere, as well. In 1997, the Supervisory Committee on the Investigation of WW II Assets, or the “Scholten Commission” for short, named after its chairman, W. Scholten, was
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On this day 19 years ago, I escorted my wife to the maternity hospital in Limerick. Our beautiful baby girl was born that day. Although I did not like James Blunt’s song “You’re Beautiful” prior to that moment, when it played on the radio in the maternity hospital room at the exact second she was
History of Sorts 