History
General history issues, although a lot will be about WW2
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Something that always fascinated me (for lack of a better word) about Hitler was the double standards he applied. As the leader of his country, he always portrayed himself as someone with principles. However, he broke those principles—time and time again. Hitler hated smoking and had been a smoker himself but had stopped at a…
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I look at the picture of Jacob de Mesquita and I ask myself “How was this possible?” How was it possible that this baby was selected to be send to the gas chambers? Was there not one person among the Auschwitz staff members who thought that this was wrong? Was there no one who saw…
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The above photograph is of a plaque that hangs over a house in The Hague. It was the residence of Mies Wahlbeehm, where she hid a great number of Jews. The one thing that captured my attention was the words at the top of the plaque, “De herrinering aan de doden is voor hen een…
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So many people think that the Holocaust started in 1939 or 1940, but the fact is it started years before that. In 1933 already it had become clear what the Nazis were planing to do, although the Jews were targeted already before that they weren’t the main focus as of yet.On July 14 1933 the…
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If there is one thing that Anne Frank’s diary teaches us ,it’s the importance of context. If you take her diary out of context it probably is quite a boring book. But if you leave it in the context and the time it was written in it becomes a powerful story of daily life and…
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There were many evil men in the SS, some appeared to have more joy in their evil deeds than others. Otto Moll was arrested on April 29, 1945, when the US Army liberated Dachau. Before his role in Dachau, he had several positions in Auschwitz and Auschwitz Birkenau. He was in charge of the crematoria…
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Many people assume there was no resistance in Germany against the Nazi regime, and to be honest, there wasn’t much. Nevertheless, some were relentless in trying to end that regime. There were dozens of assassination attempts on the life of Hitler. The most famous was the 20 July plot. Some of those involved in that…
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Generally, I don’t care for colourized photographs, especially not those from the Holocaust. However, I did come across a few striking depictions of that dark era. A former prisoner holds a human bone from a large pile of other bones from the Buchenwald concentration camp’s crematory. 1945. An emaciated 18-year-old female Russian prisoner stares into…
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Adolf Hitler often displayed toddler-like behaviour. If he didn’t get his way or if someone did something he didn’t like, he would throw a tantrum. In 1935, the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to Carl von Ossietzky(pictured above). He was a German pacifist. He was awarded the prize for something which happened before Hitler came…
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Lynn is a psychotherapist and clinical social worker. She is the daughter of two Holocaust survivors. In the interview, we discuss the mental impact her parents’ ordeal had on her and also how that translated into her work as a psychotherapist. She was voted The Best Therapist of 2008 by the Main Line Times newspaper in Pennsylvania,…
History of Sorts 
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