Holocaust
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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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Anyone familiar with my blog knows that the murder of children during the Holocaust touches me deeply. I know one of the excuses for murdering children was to avoid that they would take revenge. It always puzzled me. The only reason why you’d want to kill someone to avoid revenge is because—you knew what you…
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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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Karl Amadeus Hartmann was born on 2 August 1905 in Munich and came into contact with art and music at an early stage. He studied trombone and composition at the Staatliche Akademie der Tonkunst in Munich from 1924 to 1929. He hated Nazism and Hitler and anything that ranked extreme socialism and communism. A fellow…
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The 1936 Olympic summer games are a well-documented event. However, the 1936 Winter Olympics was not commonly discussed, yet it was just as controversial and steeped in propaganda as the summer games. From February 6 to February 16, 1936, Germany hosted the Winter Olympics at Garmisch-Partenkirchen in the Bavarian Alps. It was held six months…
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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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The lives of Jewish lives weren’t just the things they did, but also the things they owned. During the Holocaust, the majority of Dutch Jews weren’t only murdered—but their possessions were also stolen or destroyed. During World War II, the Nazis quickly moved to remove Jews from economic life in the Netherlands. Salomon David Nathans…
History of Sorts 