Jacob was born on October 19,1934 in Amsterdam. He was the youngest child and only son of Rachel Morpurgo-Kijl and Abraham Morpurgo. He had 2 siblings, sisters Carla Celina Morpurgo and Vogelina Morpurgo.
This family was just a regular family, the Father Abraham, was a draper by trade. Mother Rachel is what they call nowadays a stay at home mum, or home maker.
On May 9,1941 Jacob was issued with a passport, which was valid for 2 years, until May 9,1943.
I don’t know the exact date but at some stage Jacob and his family traveled to Belgium. This must have been after his passport had expired. But that would not have mattered because he didn’t ravel there for his holidays. The Morpurgo family was send to the transit camp Mechelen in Belgium. The last day they were there was April 3,1944, because the following day they were all deported to Auschwitz on transport 24. Jacob, his mother and two sisters were murdered upon arrival on April 7,1944.
Abraham was deported to Mauthausen at some point, where he was murdered on February 1,1945. He reached the age of 43. There is a tradition in the Netherlands when a man reaches the age of 50, they say he has seen Abraham. This Abraham never got to celebrate that birthday.
Rachel Morpurgo-Kijl. born in Amsterdam, 21 July 1895. Murdered in Auschwitz, 7 April 1944. Reached the age of 48 years
Vogelina Morpurgo , Born in Amsterdam, 19 February 1925.Murdered in Auschwitz, 7 April 1944.Reached the age of 19 years.
Carla Celina Morpurgo, born in Amsterdam, 4 November 1930.Murdered in Auschwitz, 7 April 1944.Reached the age of 13 years. She had been a student at the Joods Lyceum in Amsterdam.
Vogeltje Morpurgo-van Engel, was the Mother of Abrham, and the Grandmother of Jacob,Vogelina and Carla. She was also on the same transport from Mechelen to Auschwitz and was murdered also on April 7,1944. She reached the age of 68. Her name means little bird.
On April 7,194, thirteen Dutch Jewish citizens were murdered in Auschwitz. Sic were from the same family.
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The Ghetto Fighters’ House – Itzhak Katzenelson Holocaust and Jewish Resistance Heritage Museum– known as the “House” – is not only the first Holocaust museum in the world but also the first of its kind to be founded by Holocaust survivors. Since its establishment in 1949, the museum tells the story of the Holocaust during World War II, emphasizing the bravery, spiritual triumph and the incredible ability of Holocaust survivors and the fighters of the revolt to rebuild their lives in a new country about which they had dreamed – the State of Israel.
Last Sunday I had the privilege to attend a zoom session organized by the Ghetto Fighters’ House . The session was about Austrian Cinema during the Nazi Regime. It was very interesting and intriguing. One thing that I hadn’t been aware of was that Jewish actors were already banned to play in Austrian movies before the ‘Anscluss’
December 15th marks the 61st anniversary of Adolf Eichmann’s death sentence. I am not going too much in the history of Eichmann, there is not that much I can add to the narrative.
On December 11–12, 1961, Eichmann was convicted of crimes against the Jewish people, crimes against humanity, war crimes, and membership in a criminal organization. He was sentenced to death on December 15.
His defense was basically that he had only been following orders.
During World War I, Eichmann’s family moved from Germany to Linz, Austria. His pre-Nazi life was rather ordinary. He worked as a traveling salesman in Oberösterreich (Upper Austria) for an oil company but lost his job during the Great Depression. He had actually attended Kaiser Franz Joseph Staatsoberrealschule (state secondary school) in Linz. A certain Adolf Hitler had been a student in that same school 17 years prior.
Eichmann joined the Nazi Party in April 1932 in Linz, Austria and rose quickly through the party hierarchy. In November 1932 he became a member of Heinrich Himmler’s SS, When in 1939 Himmler formed the Reich Security Central Office, Eichmann was transferred to its section on Jewish affairs in Berlin. Up to then that section was headed by Leopold von Mildenstein. It was that same Leopold von Mildenstein who had invited Eichmann to join him.
In 1933 von Mildenstein visited British Mandatory Palestine and met with local Jews. His signature was recently discovered in a Jerusalem guestbook.
Mildenstein had been a supporter and an advocate for the relocation of Jews to the British Mandate up to 1936. He was replaced by Adolf Eichmann, who eventually helped orchestrate the mass-murder of Jews as the “final solution.”
While at the Jewish affairs Department, Eichmann was assigned to study and prepare reports on the Zionist movement and various Jewish organisations. He even learned some Hebrew and Yiddish, gaining a reputation as a specialist in Zionist and Jewish matters.
So much has already been written about the crimes of Eichmann, I couldn’t possibly add anything to that story.
On May 23, 1960, Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion announced to the world that Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann had been captured and would stand trial in Israel. He was seized by Israeli agents in Argentina on May 11 and smuggled to Israel nine days later.
Eichmann had escaped to Argentina using the alias Ricardo Klement.
Juan Perón’s government had provided refuge for thousands of German and Croat war criminals. U.S. military intelligence reports indicated that Argentina and Germany began making arrangements to transport Nazis to Argentina as early as 1944. That year, reports accused Argentina of selling fake passports to Germans through their embassy in Lisbon and the Spanish government of providing stopover points for planes flying from Germany to Argentina. Air traffic between the two countries continued even after U.S. pressure forced Perón to declare war on the Axis in March 1945.
The one thing what amazes me though is that until the very end Eichmann could not see, or could not admit that he had anything wrong. He had written a latter in which he wrote “I was not a responsible leader, and as such do not feel myself guilty.”
Eichmann was hanged at a prison in Ramla hours later. The hanging, had been scheduled for midnight at the end of 31 May, but was slightly delayed and therefore took place a few minutes past midnight on 1 June 1962. The execution was attended by a small group of officials, four journalists and the Canadian clergyman William Lovell Hull, who had been Eichmann’s spiritual counselor while in prison. His last words were reported to be
“Long live Germany. Long live Argentina. Long live Austria. These are the three countries with which I have been most connected and which I will not forget. I greet my wife, my family and my friends. I am ready. We’ll meet again soon, as is the fate of all men. I die believing in God.”
Within hours after the execution he was cremated and his ashes were scattered in the Mediterranean Sea, outside Israeli territorial waters, by an Israeli Navy patrol boat.
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Below is a list of names of random people. They only had 3 things in common. They lived in the Netherlands at the time of arrest. They were Jewish. They were al murdered today 80 years ago in Mauthausen, only for the reason that they were Jewish.
Fritz Rothstein
Born in Breslau, 10 August 1921 –Murdered in Mauthausen, 10 October 1941
Mozes Swelheim
Born in Almelo, 20 January 1903 – Murdered in Mauthausen, 10 October 1941
Barend Salli Menko
Born in Delden, 17 July 1918 – Murdered in Mauthausen, 10 October 1941
Erich Reinsberg
Born in Hemer, 11 January 1909 –Murdered in Mauthausen, 10 October 1941
Salomon Zwaaf
Born in Amsterdam, 2 September 1908 – Murdered in Mauthausen, 10 October 1941
Ruben David Löwenstein
Born in Oldenzaal, 7 December 1909 –Murdered in Mauthausen, 10 October 1941
Arnold Groenteman
Born in Amsterdam, 29 April 1914 –Murdered in Mauthausen, 10 October 1941
Hans Richter
Born in Datteln, 5 April 1915 – Murdered in Mauthausen, 10 October 1941
Abram Szanowski
Born in Lodz, 28 July 1907 – Murdered in Mauthausen, 10 October 1941
Joseph Soesman van Haren
Born in Eindhoven, 25 March 1910 – Murdered in Mauthausen, 10 October 1941
Mendel Libfreund
Born in London, 6 February 1916 – Murdered in Mauthausen, 10 October 1941
Felix Franz Herbert Scheier
Born in Berlin 7 August 1920 – Murdered in Mauthausen, 10 October 1941
Theodoor Heijmans
Born in Groenlo 16 August 1898 – Murdered in Mauthausen, 10 October 1941
Julius ten Brink
Born in Denekamp, 23 June 1898 –Murdered in Mauthausen, 10 October 1941
Isidor van Engel
Born in Goor, 9 October 1903 – Murdered in Mauthausen, 10 October 1941
Louis Knegje
Born in Amsterdam, 4 July 1919 –Murdered in Mauthausen, 10 October 1941
No matter how you twist or turn it, when you are complicit to a crime, you are just as guilty as the perpetrator, and perhaps even more guilty because you were an enabler of that crime.
Hermann Stieve was Director of the Berlin Institute of Anatomy from 1935 to 1952, which was from the early days of the Third Reich until 7 years after the war.
His research on the female reproductive system is controversial, as some of his scientific insights derived from histological investigations on the genital organs of executed women. These investigations were made possible by the sharp increase in executions during the “Third Reich.” Stieve’s research was methodologically accurate and contributed significantly to contemporary scientific debates. Nevertheless, his use of the organs of execution victims, some of them resistance fighters, benefited from the Nazi justice system. He thus indirectly supported this system of injustice.
Charlotte Pommer , a young physician, who had been an assistant to Dr Stieve, reported after the war.
“On 22nd of December 1942 eleven men were hanged and five women decapitated. Fifteen minutes later they were laid out on the dissection tables in the anatomical institute. [She] lay on the first table, […] on the third table the big lifeless body of her husband […] I felt paralyzed and could hardly assist Professor Stieve, who – as always- carried out his scientific exploration with great care and uncommon diligence […] After the impressions of that night I resigned from my position”
Stieve wanted to study human organs. He was able to get some donated uteruses and ovaries from the bodies of accident victims, or from surgeons who had removed them. One of the best historical sources of organs for research, the bodies of executed criminals, had not been available during the early years of his research as the Weimar government made very minimal use of the death penalty, and did not execute any women. In a 1931 letter Stieve complained that it was difficult to get a set of ovaries from a healthy woman.
After the National Socialist regime came to power in January 1933, one of its first goals was the reorganization of the universities. Leadership of the universities was taken away from the individual German states and centralized within the Ministry of Education in Berlin, which was also responsible for the anatomical institutes. This included research funding, recruitment of faculty, and the professional society, the Anatomische Gesellschaft. In terms of the body procurement, the Ministry of Education shared this responsibility with the Ministry of Justice, when bodies from prisons and executions were concerned. All science was to be aligned with NS doctrine and to be utilized for war purposes.
Stieve, who had accepted a professorship at what is now Humboldt University of Berlin as well as the directorship of its anatomical institute, reached an agreement with administrators at Plötzensee Prison outside the city to accept all bodies of those shot, hanged or beheaded, many of them political prisoners. Others were “Polish and Russian slave laborers executed for such acts as socializing with German women,” according to Seidelman. Over the entire Nazi era that came to around 3,000 victims, many more bodies than Stieve needed for research purposes. It is alleged that during his research he claimed the corpses of 182 victims of the Nazi regime, 174 of whom were women at the age rank from 18 to 68, two thirds of victims were of German origin.
I just want to focus n 2 of his subjects.
Liane Berkowitz, a German resistance fighter and was most notable for being was a member of the Berlin-based pro-soviet resistance group that coalesced around Harro Schulze-Boysen, that was later called the Red Orchestra by the Abwehr. Arrested and sentenced to death, she was executed shortly after she gave birth to a daughter in custody.
The young mother was executed in Plötzensee Prison at 7.45 p.m on 5 August 1943, two days before her 19th birthday.
Liane’s daughter Irina was born on 12 April 1943 in the women’s prison on Barnimstraße.[The grandmother took care of the child from July 1943. As the Reichskriegsgericht pronounced the sentence recommendation when checking with Adolf Hitler to dismiss the pregnant Liane Berkowitz from prison, he expressly rejected any reprieve. The death sentence was confirmed by Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel and countersigned. Her body was delivered to Hermann Stieve to be dissected for research. Her final resting place is unknown. Her daughter Irina died on 16 October 1943 in hospital in Eberswalde under unclear circumstances.
Mildred “Mili” Elizabeth Fish-Harnack was an American literary historian, author, translator, and resistance fighter, born in Wisconsin. After marrying Arvid Harnack, she moved with him to Germany, where she began her career as an academic. Fish-Harnack spent a year at the University of Jena and the University of Giessen working on her doctoral thesis. At Giessen, she witnessed the beginnings of Nazism. In 1930, the couple moved to Berlin and Fish-Harnack became an assistant lecturer in English and American literature at the University of Berlin. In the early 1930s, the couple became increasingly interested in the Soviet communist system. Harnack established a writers’ group that studied the Soviet planned economy, and the couple were able to arrange a visit to the Soviet Union during August 1932 and by 1933 they were fully committed to Soviet ideology. Through contacts at the American embassy, Fish-Harnack became friends with Martha Dodd, who became a part of her salon where they discussed current affairs. In 1936, Fish-Harnack’s translation of Irving Stone’s biography of Vincent van Gogh, Lust for Life, was published.
In 1938, the couple began to resist Nazism. They became friends with Louise and Donald Heath, who was First Secretary at the embassy, and to whom Harnack passed economic intelligence from his position at the Reich Trade Ministry. By 1940, the couple came into contact with other anti-fascist resistance groups and cooperated with them. The most important of these was run by German air force officer Harro Schulze-Boysen. Like numerous groups in other parts of the world, the undercover political factions led by Harnack and Schulze-Boysen later developed into an espionage network that collaborated with Soviet intelligence. Fish-Harnack became a resistance fighter as a member of a Berlin anti-fascist espionage group, later called the Red Orchestra (Rote Kapelle) by the Abwehr. The couple were arrested in September 1942 and executed shortly after.
On 7 September 1942, the Harnacks were arrested by the Gestapo at the seaside village of Preila on the Curonian Spit.
Harnack was sentenced to death on 19 December after a four-day trial before the Reichskriegsgericht (“Reich Military Tribunal”), and was executed three days later at Plötzensee Prison in Berlin. Fish-Harnack was initially given six years in prison, but Adolf Hitler refused to endorse the sentence and ordered a new trial, which resulted in a death sentence on 16 January 1943.She was beheaded by guillotine on 16 February 1943. While she was imprisoned, She was the only American woman executed on the direct orders of Adolf Hitler.
After her execution, her body was released to Hermann Stieve to be dissected for his research into the effects of stress, such as awaiting execution, on the menstrual cycle. After he was finished, he gave what was left to a friend of hers, who had the remains buried in Berlin’s Zehlendorf Cemetery.
Unlike the research of Nazi scientists who became obsessed with racial typing and Aryan superiority, Stieve’s work didn’t end up in the dustbin of history. The tainted origins of this research, along with other studies and education that capitalized on the Nazi supply of human body parts—continue to haunt German and Austrian science, which is only now fully grappling with the implications. Some of the facts, amazingly, are still coming to light. And some German, Austrian, and Polish universities have yet to face up to the likely presence of the remains of Hitler’s victims, their cell and bone and tissue, in university collections that still exist today.
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above, you may just admire the men participating in physical exercise. You may even want to join them. But the picture is of concentration camp Mauthausen.
The Mauthausen main camp operated from the time of the Anschluss, when Austria was united with Nazi Germany on 8 August 1938, to 5 May 1945, at the end of the European theatre of Second World War. Starting with the camp at Mauthausen, the number of subcamps expanded over time and by the summer of 1940 Mauthausen and its subcamps had become one of the largest labour camp complexes in the German-controlled part of Europe.
Grueling and pointless physical exercise was one of the methods of wearing the inmates down. The group of prisoners in the picture above are forced to play “leap frog”.
After the outbreak of war, people from across Europe were deported to Mauthausen, which gradually developed into a system of several interconnected camps. During this phase, Mauthausen and Gusen were the concentration camps with the harshest imprisonment conditions and the highest mortality. Prisoners at the bottom of the camp hierarchy had barely any chance of surviving for long. Those who were ill or ‘useless’ to the SS were in constant danger of their lives. In 1941 the SS started to construct a gas chamber and other installations at Mauthausen for the systematic murder of large groups of people.
Undoubtedly there are a lot more who were murdered on September 30,1941 in Mauthausen, but below is the list of the Dutch Jews, or Jewish refugees from Germany who had fled to the Netheralnds.
Arthur Simon Serphos: Born in Enschede, 7 August 1890, murdered in Mauthausen, 30 September 1941.
Siegfried Cohen: Born in Hengelo , 2 August 1890, murdered in Mauthausen, 30 September 1941.
Kurt Stein: Siegfried Born in Berlin 16 March 1921, murdered in Mauthausen, 30 September 1941.
Franz Max Pollack: Born in Breslau, 19 February 1918, murdered in Mauthausen, 30 September 1941.
Theodoor Richard Moscow: Born in Amsterdam, 14 June 1918, murdered in Mauthausen, 30 September 1941.
Norbert Abrahamssohn: Born in Hamburg, 21 September 1916, murdered in Mauthausen, 30 September 1941.
Heinz Wittenberg: Born in Breslau, 29 August 1922, murdered in Mauthausen, 30 September 1941.
Horst Kokoski: Born in Berlin 13 June 1921, murdered in Mauthausen, 30 September 1941.
David Kaufmann: Born in Oldenzaal 22 November 1918(11 days after WWI), murdered in Mauthausen September 30 1941
Fred Samuel Fuchs: Born in Frankfurt am Main, 23 October 1922, murdered in Mauthausen, 30 September 1941.
None of these men committed a crime or did anything which would warrant a death penalty, yet they were murdered by an evil regime based on hate.
I am passionate about my site and I know you all like reading my blogs. I have been doing this at no cost and will continue to do so. All I ask is for a voluntary donation of $2, however if you are not in a position to do so I can fully understand, maybe next time then. Thank you.
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If there is one type of music I hate with a passion it is Schlager Musik. Or German sweet and sentimental ballads. Yet here I am writing about one of the main perpetrators, sorry performers.
The only reason why I write about him is because he was one of my favourite singers, At my father’s funeral Freddy Quinn’s song “Junge komm bald wieder” was played.
One thing I didn’t realize is that Freddy Quinn was half Irish. I always thought his surname was his artist name, well it still is but it is also the surname of his father. I don’t know if my dad knew about Freddy’s Irish father, I am sure he would have liked that fact.
His early years were spent in Vienna. Freddy Quinn was born on September 27,1931 as Manfred Nidl either Vienna, Niederfladnitz (Lower Austria) or Pula (Croatia), depending on the source; his parents were Austrian journalist Edith Nidl and Irish merchant Johann Quinn. As a child, he lived in Vienna and went to primary school in the 8th district.
Through his mother’s second marriage to Rudolf Anatol Freiherr von Petz, Quinn adopted the name Nidl-Petz.
At the end of World War II, as part of a refugee group, Freddy encountered American troops in Bohemia. Due to his fluent English, the 14-year-old succeeded in pretending to be of American nationality. He was subsequently sent to the US in May 1945 with a military transport. On Ellis Island, he learned that his father had already died in 1943 in a car accident. The boy was immediately sent back to Europe and, before returning to his mother in Vienna, was stranded for a whole year in Antwerp in a children’s home, where he learned to speak French and Dutch.
In the 1950s he eventually cast anchor in Hamburg and started his extraordinary career in the music industry, cultivating the ‘authentic’ character of the singing sailor whose true home is the sea and who always yearns for faraway places. Legend has it that his first songs were released under the name Freddy because no one at the pressing plant knew how to spell his last name.
Starting in the late 1950s, Quinn also acted in several movies, frequently cast as the seafaring loner. Titles include Freddy, the Guitar and the Sea (1959), Freddy unter fremden Sternen (1959), Freddy and the Song of the South Pacific (1962), and Homesick for St. Pauli (1963). Subsequently, Quinn also performed on the stage in such diverse roles as Prince Orlofsky in Die Fledermaus, the king in The King and I, and Lord Fancourt Babberly in Charley’s Aunt.
Quinn was also an accomplished circus performer who stunned television audiences as a tightrope walker, performing live and without a safety net. On another occasion, which was also televised, he rode a lion inside a circus cage while the lion was balancing atop a moving surface.
Freddy will be celebrating his 90th birthday today in Hamburg.
I am passionate about my site and I know you all like reading my blogs. I have been doing this at no cost and will continue to do so. All I ask is for a voluntary donation of $2, however if you are not in a position to do so I can fully understand, maybe next time then. Thank you.
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I could have done a piece on any of the millions of victims of the Holocaust. The reason why I picked Kurt Jozef Rudolf Rosenthal, is because he was murdered today 80 years ago.
His story is still important today because he was a refugee, trying to find a better future but he found death instead.
He was born in Arnsberg, Germany , on 12 May 1922.He was murdered in Mauthausen, 25 July 1941.
His life was interrupted in many ways. When he was 14 he decided to flee Germany. His Parents had already done so and fled to Zurich in Switzerland. Young Kurt decided to go to the Netherlands, I presume because it was quite near. Why his parents didn’t take him with them to Zurich I don’t know.
In 1934, a Quaker school was set up in Eerde (Ommen town),in the Netherlands . A few young German Jewish refugees attended the school, where they were educated for a farming life in Israel. Kurt Jozef Rudolf Rosenthal was one of them, he registered on September 3,1936.
In 1940 Kurt felt unsafe in Eerde and moved to Amsterdam, at that stage his Parents had already moved there. They were reunited again as a family.
Kurt managed to raise enough money to get a Visa for the USA, however he would have to travel through Germany for it. I don’t know why he didn’t but I can only imagine that he thought he would not survive that journey. He would more then likely be right in that assumption. During the early Nazi occupation of the Netherlands, things had not changed all that much for the Jews. So Kurt probably still felt safe enough.
Kurt never left for the US. On June 11,1941, he was picked up together with 310 other men. He ended up in Schoorl transit camp, originally a Dutch army camp from 1939 to 1940), but was converted to a Nazi concentration camp (1940–1941) near the village of Schoorl in the Netherlands.
From Schoorl, Kurt was deported to Mauthausen. Austria on June 26,1941. Where He was murdered nearly a month later, on July 25,1941.
Aside from the fact he was murdered there are a few things that disturb me in his story. First of all, why did he have to raise money to get a Visa. At that stage it must have been clear to the US authorities what the Nazis were about and what they were doing. Visa should have been provided at no costs.
Why was there no Dutch family who could have looked after a 14 year old refugee.
I don’t know what happened to his parents but I can only assume they were also murdered.
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A few weeks ago, I discovered a Jewish Cemetery in Limerick. It was across from a landmark pub in the city calledthe The Hurlers Pub. There was a small laneway across from Hurlers leading to the small cemetery.
One of the graves was of Simon Gewurz. He was originally from Bratislava in Slovakia and moved to Limerick, where he died in 1944. I recently found out that he was the last Rabbi in Limerick.
In 1938, he conducted the funeral service of Elsa Reininger.
Elsa’s story was a tragic one. She had fled Austria after Hitler annexed the country. Reininger was her maiden name, and later to Hofler when she married Berisch Hofler, a Polish Jew. The couple had one daughter, Margarete.
Austria was annexed into the Third Reich on 13 March 1938. The day after German troops entered Austrian territory, it became the so-called Anschluss. The Nazis were greeted by cheering Austrians with Nazi salutes and Nazi flags. A published law declared Austria, now one of the lands of the German Empire, and named Ostmark. On 10 April in Austria, a plebiscite was held and it was not a secret ballot. According to official Reich data, with 99.08% of the population voting, the Anschluss was approved by 99.75%.
Almost immediately, attacks were carried out on the Austrian Jewish community in an attempt to compel them to leave the country. They were beaten up, forced to sell their businesses, scrub footpaths and clean public toilets on their hands and knees.
Shortly after the Anschluss, the Hoflers left Austria. It is not clear how they were able to leave the country. Both Elsa and her husband ended up in Limerick, Ireland. Their daughter Margarete had married a widower, Gaskel Kaitcer, in the United Kingdom. Gaskel had family in Limerick, the Tobin family, so the couple decided to move to Limerick. Margarete soon found work as a violinist in one of Limerick’s cinemas.
In September 1938, Berisch visited his daughter and stayed as a lodger with Gaskel’s cousin, Annie Tobin and her husband at 18 Newenham Street. Elsa followed in October 1938. Elsa had arrived in Limerick from England, where her passport was stamped for a 48 hours stay, basically a short-term visa.
The experiences she witnessed in Austria had really disturbed Elsa. Her nerves were shattered from what she had seen and experienced in Vienna and the possibility that she might have to return there. She spoke continuously to the Tobins about Hitler. She suffered from depression. On 27 October 1938, she booked a room at the Crescent Hotel. There she took a gun from her handbag, and as she lay on the bed, she put it to her head and pulled the trigger, killing herself, aged 57. No one heard the shot. Around 8 o’clock, Berish Hofler went to his daughter’s house and was distressed that he didn’t find his wife. At 23:30, Margarete went to the Garda (Police) station and reported her mother missing. The body was found shortly after midnight. The Gardai (Irish Police) notified the family. In the early hours of Friday morning of the 28th. The Fire Brigade ambulance arrived and brought the body to the morgue at Barrington’s Hospital on Georges Quay. As it was the eve of the Jewish sabbath, the family were anxious to have the remains buried. Mr Nathaniel Fine made arrangements for the burial at Griffins Funeral Home on Lower Gerald Griffin Street. As the body was about to be removed, the Gardai intervened and had the deceased returned to the morgue. After a post-mortem examination on the Saturday, permission for the burial was given again. On Sunday morning, 30 October, a Griffins’ motor hearse went to Barrington’s Hospital, collected the coffin and drove to the Jewish Cemetery in Kilmurry where, in the presence of Berisch Hofler, Margarete Kaitcer and her husband Gaskel and the last serving Jewish Rabbi of Limerick, Simon Gewurz, the remains of Elsa Reininger were laid to rest in an unmarked grave.
Elsa was just one of the thousands that were so overwhelmed by the evil they had witnessed, that they felt they could not continue to live. These are often forgotten Holocaust victims, because they are not registered as such.
I am passionate about my site and I know you all like reading my blogs. I have been doing this at no cost and will continue to do so. All I ask is for a voluntary donation of $2, however if you are not in a position to do so I can fully understand, maybe next time then. Thank you.
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-The question “Would You Go Back to 1889 and kill baby Hitler?” was once posed by The New York Times Magazine. 42 % of the people answered “Yes”. Jeb Bush, younger brother of former US President George W. Bush, answered this question with “Hell yeah, I would, You gotta step up, man”
I do believe many people would agree with that sentiment, and I have to admit I probably would too. However the fact is that time travel maybe possible in theory, practically and realistically it is not.
When it comes to Adolf Hitler there are a few other facts, aside from the most obvious one that he probably was the most evil man who ever lived, there are some lesser known facts.
For starters technically he wasn’t actually called Adolf Hitler, his real name should have been Adolf Schicklgruber.
Hitler’s dad , Alois Hitler Sr. was the illegitimate son of Maria Anna Schicklgruber, there was never a mention of a Father on the birth certificate. Maria Anna Schicklgruber did marry a Johann Georg Hiedler, when Alois Sr, was 5 years old. This means young Alois got the surname “Hiedler”. Alois was then made legitimate and his baptismal record amended by a priest to register Johann Georg Hiedler as Alois’s father. It is vague what happened next but for some reason, probably due to a spelling or clerical error the name was recorded as Hitler for both Alois and his stepfather.
Adolf Hitler was born on April 20 ,1889. To be honest I am not going to write about him in this blog. I have already done so in other blogs. However in a local newspaper his birthdate was dated as the 22nd of April. Again this is probably a typo, and I presume that data verification wasn’t a top priority in a rural Austrian town in 1889. The newspaper listed all births from April 19 to April 26, 1889.
It is probably a well known fact that he was born in Austria, in a small town called Braunau am Inn. But it is probably less known that his birthplace is still in that town, causing them a few issues because it has become a bit of a shrine for Neo Nazis. At the time of Hitler’s birth, the building was a modest guest house, where Hitler’s parents rented rooms in connection with his father’s job as a minor customs official at the nearby Austrian–German border. The Hitler family lived in the building only until Adolf was three years old.
In April 1989, (two weeks before the centenary of Hitler’s birth) a memorial was placed directly in front of the house on public ground. The stone for the memorial came from a quarry on the grounds of the former Mauthausen Concentration Camp, near Linz, Austria. The inscription on the memorial reads.
“For Peace, Freedom and Democracy. Never Again Fascism. Millions of Dead Warn [us]”.
Many in the town want the building to be demolished but to me that is like burying history. Just because you destroy a building doesn’t mean he wasn’t born there. History needs to be accepted in all its forms, even when it is uncomfortable.
What many people don’t realize is hat Hitler only became German citizen in February 1932, which was only a few months prior to July 1932 presidential election, Hitler was a candidate in that election.
Six years later in 1938 Hitler annexed his native Austria. He was welcomed by most Austrians as a leader and hero, even in his Birthplace.
Hitler though wasn’t a hero, far from it, what always puzzles me though is how did a man like that become so powerful and even a cult figure. His policies were based on vague promises and distorted truths.
But then when I look around the world now and up to recent , there were and there are still leaders who seem to have mirrored themselves on Hitler, well at least to an extend
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History of Sorts 
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