Holocaust
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On the morning of 7 November, a young Jewish man, Herschel Grynszpan, wrote a farewell postcard to his parents and put it in his pocket. Grynszpan went to a gun shop in the Rue du Faubourg St Martin, where he bought a 6.35mm revolver and a box of 25 bullets for 235 francs. They went…
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This is an element of the Holocaust which is often forgotten. There were dozens of Jewish labour camps in the Netherlands (as you can see, I did not say the occupied Netherlands). On 7 January 1942, the Jewish Council in Amsterdam was put under pressure and made responsible for supplying 1,402 Jewish unemployed people. Ultimately,…
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Today marks the 80th anniversary of Aktion Erntefest. (German: for Operation Harvest Festival) a mass murder by the SS conducted at the Majdanek concentration camp and its subcamps, Poniatowa and Trawniki. The purpose was to liquidate the remaining Polish Jews in the Lublin reservation and the Lublin Ghetto, including its entire slave-labour camp workforce. After…
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Before I go into the main story about Adriana Valkenburg, I have to explain something about prostitution in the Netherlands to put this into context. It has always been acceptable in the Netherlands. However, it was only in 1988 that prostitution was considered a legal profession—but in the year 2000, prostitution was legalized by the…
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The title, Last Letters—The Final Thoughts, doesn’t reflect entirely their reality. The letters that were sent or received were often checked and edited by the Nazis, especially the letters in the camps. The Red Cross distributed the posts. The words in the letters may not have always been the final thoughts, but they may have been…
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Jenny-Wanda Barkmann was known as “The Beautiful Spectre” and “Mad Jenny,” but neither nickname was accurate. Although she may have been beautiful or pleasing to the eyes (although not in my opinion), but this was just a thin veneer to cover her evilness, and she wasn’t mad—because I believe—she knew exactly what she was doing.…
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I have seen thousands of Holocaust pictures, but this one hit me right in the gut. It is not horrific. It is a little girl smiling, oblivious to the evil that is surrounding her. She is holding on to a signpost with a sign saying, Verboden voor Joden (Forbidden for Jews). The little girl is Hannelore…
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I have been doing posts about World War II and the Holocaust since 2016. When I started, I reckoned I’d have enough material to last for a year, two years tops. Seven years on, I am still finding new stories daily. Stories like that of Waldemar Hugh Nods. Waldemar Hugh Nods was born on 1…
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On 21 October 1944, all three of the Kober children were murdered in Auschwitz, together with their mother. Marianne Miriam Kober was born in Oss, the Netherlands, on 3 March 1930, and had reached the age of 14. Ruth Margarete Kober was born in Amsterdam on 9 March 1933, she was 11 years old. Michael…
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The picture above is one of the most iconic images of the Holocaust, For decades it was believed that the girl in the picture was Jewish. In December 1992, Dutch journalist Aad Wagenaar started to research her identity. By following the number on the outside of the wagon, number 10, 16 or 18, the description…
History of Sorts 