Poland
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A few years ago, on the 22nd of June 2016, to be precise I wrote a blog titled “Holocaust and Humour.” I received loads of criticism for it. The thing I found extraordinary the criticism didn’t come from people who read the blog, but only from people who read the title. I didn’t mean to…
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I was going to write an article about Ursula Gerson, who was murdered in Auschwitz on September 6, 1944, at the age of 8. But then I saw there were more Dutch Jewish children and Jewish refugees, who fled Germany and Austria with their parents, who were murdered that day. Duifje Gans was murdered in…
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The Nazi regime targeted many groups that it considered threatening or undesirable. Among these groups were the Esperanto speakers, whose linguistic and ideological aspirations for global unity stood in direct opposition to the Nazi vision of Aryan racial superiority and rigid nationalism. The persecution of Esperanto speakers was motivated by a combination of anti-Semitism, hostility…
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Queen Wilhelmina was Queen of the Netherlands from 1890 until her abdication in 1948. She reigned for nearly 58 years, longer than any other Dutch monarch. Her reign saw both World War I, although the Netherlands was neutral during World War I and World War II, as well as the Dutch economic crisis of 1933.…
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On the night of August 31, 1939, a German radio station in the small town of Gleiwitz (now Gliwice, Poland) became the stage for one of the most infamous false-flag operations in modern history. Known as the Gleiwitz incident, this orchestrated event was part of a broader Nazi propaganda effort to fabricate a justification for…
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On 24 August 1942, six hundred Jews from Limburg received a summons from the Dutch police, municipal police, or a local constable. They were all under the age of sixty and were ordered to report the following day at the assembly point near the public school on Professor Pieter Willemsstraat in Maastricht. Only half of…
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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…
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The one thing I can be sure of after posting this blog is that my contact details will be checked a lot, especially by the likes of the “‘Polish League Against Defamation,” and will probably be followed with threats. Unfortunately, there are groups in Poland who will go to great lengths to get any bit…
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The photograph above is of Gezina de Leeuwe-de Jong with her four children. I presume the photo was taken by her husband and the father of the children, Louis de Leeuw. I reckon that’s why he is not in the picture. He was a son of Barend de Leeuwe and Sientje van Minden. He married…
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Eva was born on 1 January 1924, in Oleszyce, Poland, a small community where over half of the people were Jews. She had seven siblings, and she was the oldest. Her father, was a wealthy merchant and head of the Oleszyce Jewish community. He had an international business that distributed religious articles, including Torahs and…
History of Sorts 