Holocaust
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On 5 March 1933, the Nazi Party won nearly 44 per cent of the vote, which gave them 288 seats in the Reichstag. Hitler formed a coalition with the National Party (8 per cent). The Communist Party won 81 seats. There were 44,685.764 entitled to vote. The voter turnout was 88.74%. The Invalid votes were…
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I have been accused before of focusing on the involvement of the Dutch during the Holocaust too much. But I do believe, if you want to be critical of others, you have to look at your own first. Like in Germany, the mistreatment and eventual murder of Jews in the Netherlands started as a gradual…
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The one thing I always fear when I do these blogs about World War II and the Holocaust is what I will discover about my family. Thus far, there is no indication that any of them collaborated with the Nazis, but I have a big family, and even now, in 2023, there is still new…
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The news of the 22 February 1941 raid of 427 Amsterdam Jews made a deep impression on the Amsterdam population. Out of solidarity with fellow-Jewish citizens and resentment of the Nazis’ actions in the capitol, a general strike, was announced for 25 February 1941. The call, which came from several members of the illegally operating…
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Rosette Levie was deported to Sobibor in June 1943 from Vught via Westerbork on the so-called children’s transport She was born in Amsterdam on 24 February 1938. She was murdered in Sobibor on 11 June 1943 at age five. Dear Rosette, you never made it to your first school day. You were denied your first…
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The photograph above is of Wim Henneicke, a bounty hunter and collaborator. His wasn’t driven by hate or by a warped sense of nationalism but by greed. Wim Henneicke was part of a group called “Colonne Henneicke.” The Colonne Henneicke, officially the Hausraterfassungsstelle, was a group of Dutch collaborators who were active as bounty hunters…
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We all know who Anne Frank is, as her diary is one of the most famous books ever published. But the story of her sister Margot is often overlooked. Margot Betti Frank was born in Frankfurt am Main on 16 February 1926. Margot also kept a diary but that was never found. But we do…
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Below is a press cutting from the 1928 Amsterdam Olympic Games. “Everything was taken care of down to the last detail. Nice practice material—not too heavy—logically composed, neatly executed in class, wonderful order and leadership, in one word sublime. …The jury was also enthusiastic and awarded the Kleerekoper corps a total score of 316.75 points,…
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The title is Holocaust Tattoos, but it was only in Auschwitz that the new arrivals selected for work would receive a tattoo. As a rule, they were tattooed on their left forearm to display, in dark blue/ black ink, the camp serial number assigned to them. The Nazis recorded more than 400,000 serial numbers at Auschwitz.…
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Ever since I was 13 or 14, I have played the guitar. Over the years, I have bought hundreds of songbooks. In one of those books, they put words to Beethoven’s 9th Symphony or more precisely, the bit commonly known as Ode to Joy. In the book, they renamed it, Hate is Mankind’s Worst Disease. The first…
History of Sorts 