One might be forgiven for thinking the photograph above is of a Nazi train deporting victims to the East. However, that is not the case—it is an image of deported Polish families to Siberia as part of the Soviet Union’s relocation plan in 1941.
I believe that the USSR, particularly Russia) received too much credit for their part as the Allied troops. People seem to have forgotten that between 1 September 1939 and 22 June 1941, the Soviets were fighting with the Nazis, and there laid the foundation for the Holocaust together with the Nazis.
The USSR also murdered en mass—not only their enemies but also their people. Citizens who were not in line with the Soviet communist view would end up in Gulags. Just as with the Nazis, it didn’t take a lot for the Soviets to find an excuse to put people away.
The Gulags were Soviet labour camps and accompanying detention and transit camps and prisons from the 1920s to the mid-1950s. The word GULAG was born as an acronym. It stood for Glavnoe Upravlenie Lagerei (which translates into English as Main Camp Administration).
Two factors drove Stalin to expand the Gulag prisons at a merciless pace. The first was the Soviet Union’s desperate need to industrialize. The other force at work was Stalin’s Great Purge, sometimes called the Great Terror. It was a crackdown on all forms of dissent (real and imagined) across the Soviet Union. After the invasion by Nazi Germany of Poland, which marked the start of World War II in Europe, the Soviet Union invaded and annexed eastern parts of the Second Polish Republic. In 1940, the Soviet Union occupied Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Bessarabia (now the Republic of Moldova) and Bukovina. According to some estimates, hundreds of thousands of Polish citizens and inhabitants of the other annexed lands, regardless of their ethnic origin, were arrested and sent to the Gulag camps.
The dead bodies of political prisoners, murdered by the secret police, lie inside a prison camp. Tarnopil, Ukraine. July 10, 1941.
By 1936, the Gulag held a total of 5,000,000 prisoners, a number that probably was equal to or exceeded every subsequent year until Stalin died in 1953.
Prisoners in the Gulag could survive for many years with a constant stream of prisoners released. However, in terms of numbers, far more people suffered in the Gulag than in the Nazi camps. The types of suffering were different, although women, housed in separate barracks, were often mistreated worse than male prisoners.
They were often the victims of rape and violence at the hands of both inmates and guards. Many reported the most effective survival strategy was to take a “prison husband” someone who would exchange protection or rations for sexual favours.
If a woman had children, she would have to divide her rations to feed them, often as little as 140 grams of bread per day.
However, for some of the female prisoners, simply being allowed to keep their children was a blessing; many of the children in gulags were shipped off to distant orphanages. Often these mothers could never find their children after leaving the camps.
Sometimes, the Gulag authorities released pregnant women and women with young children in special amnesties.
Men at work on the Koylma Highway.
The route would come to be known as the “Road of Bones” because the skeletons of the men who died building it were used in its foundation.
Fast forward to 2024, and although with a different name, the Gulags are still in Siberia
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I had the privilege today to interview Hans Knoop.
Hans Knoop is a Dutch journalist who was best known for the role he played in the unmasking and arrest of the war criminal Pieter Menten. Knoop was born during the Second World War to Jewish parents in hiding. Knoop grew up in Amsterdam. In 1963, Knoop started his journalistic career as a reporter at De Telegraaf. For this newspaper he would repeatedly write about the Weinreb affair. Later he was a correspondent in Brussels and Tel Aviv, also for the AVRO. From 1968 to 1971 he was editor-in-chief of the Nieuw Israëlietisch Weekblad.
From 1974 to October 1977, Hans Knoop was editor-in-chief of the opinion weekly Accent. The Menten case took place at that time. Knoop managed to discover material that was incriminating for Menten and continued to report the case in the news. After Menten fled the country, Knoop tracked him down in Switzerland.
Menten was involved in the massacre of Polish professors in Lviv and the robbery of their property. According to witnesses, he helped shoot as many members of the offending family in Galicia, then turned on other Jews in the area. It is believed that Menten personally oversaw the execution of as many as 200 Jews.
He had an estate in Waterford, in Ireland. After his release from Dutch jail in 1985. he was denied entry to Ireland by the then minister of Justice, Michael Noonan, a Limerick man.
Hans Knoop’s story is currently on Apple TV and Amazon Prime TV as “The Menten Files” and in some regions as “The Body Collector” on Netflix
Anna (also known as) Ans van Dijk, was a collaborator of Jewish descent. The Germans arrested Van Dijk while he was in hiding on April 25, 1943. After she agreed to work for the SD, Van Dijk was released. It is estimated that approximately seven hundred people had been arrested—because of her actions. Van Dijk is the last Dutch woman sentenced to death and whose death sentence was [actually] carried out. The execution took place on January 14, 1948.
I am not judging Ans because none of us have been in that situation, and no one can say with certainty what they would have done had they been in that situation. The reason why I brought up the execution of Ans is to indicate that this was not the last bit of Holocaust history in the Netherlands. Some Jews, after the war, were still being persecuted.
Jewish Amsterdamers, who returned from the death camps after the Second World War, were followed by the security services for years. The Domestic Security Service (BVD), the predecessor of the AIVD, saw the Jews as extremists and a potential danger to democracy.
In Vienna in 1954, the International Auschwitz Committee was founded. This committee encouraged survivors in European countries to establish chapters in their own countries. Following the Auschwitz Commemoration Committee in 1956, they founded the Dutch Auschwitz Committee [NAC]. The initiators of this foundation were Annetje Fels-Kupferschmidt, Eva and Jacques Furth, Rody and Louis Corper, David and Elly Geens, Manus and Saar Neter, and J. Alvares Vega. The NAC organized annual commemorations on January 27th.
Some of these survivors were spied on until 1980 by the Dutch security services. During the Cold War, the main concern for the Dutch government and all other Western nations was communism. Some Dutch Auschwitz committees were members of or had links to, the CPN-Communist Party Netherlands.
The Dutch newspaper ‘Het Parool’ discovered this story and published it in December 2023. The AIVD*, Dutch Secret Service, issued the following statement in relation to the article:
“Het Parool today published an article about the activities of the BVD in the investigation into members of the National Auschwitz Committee. The BVD did not view Holocaust survivors as extremists or a danger to democracy.
The BVD conducted research into communism during the Cold War. That was the biggest threat to national security at the time. Possible research into persons associated with the National Auschwitz Committee can be seen in that light.
It has already been reported in various sources that the NAC is a shell organization of the CPN. This also emerged in a 1999 NIOD report EHRI—Dutch Auschwitz Committee, and a BVD piece previously revealed on the Argus Foundation site. This showed that there was a suspicion that the National Auschwitz Committee was a front organization of the Communist Party of the Netherlands (CPN). Lou de Jong also warned about this in 1968, as evidenced by an article in the Historisch Nieuwsblad of May 2, 2023.”
According to the Parool investigation, the security service spied on board members of the Auschwitz Committee and followed the committee everywhere, including on commemorative trips to concentration camps. In addition, an informant on the committee—reported everything that happened within the organization to the security service.
It emerged that the members of the Dutch Auschwitz Committee were under surveillance in 1952—four years before the committee existed. Below is the translated text of a part of a report sent on July 24, 1952, to the Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Internal Affairs.
“I hereby, have the honor to report the following to Your Excellency The Auschwitz commemoration, which was announced with much fuss, took place on June 15, 1952, after being postponed several times. It took peaceful course. About 2,500 people paraded past an urn, which was in an auditorium laid out, the 5th secretary of the Committee” entombed the Auschwitz Urn , approximately 2,500 marched past the urn before a hundred thousand guests, including the Polish envoy and the leaders of the C.P.N., gave a speech in which he described the commemoration as “…an admonition against the unscrupulous forces, those who have survived from that dark chapter of world history and those who could threaten to do this again. Man up against those unscrupulous forces who remain from that dark chapter of world history, and who could threaten us again with this evil. stand up against the perpetrators and—what cannot be concealed when we want to remain serious, also against the guilty ones.”
Buried in a grave donated by the municipality of Amsterdam at the Nieuwe Oosterbegraafplaats. Apparently the G.P.H at the last minute withdrew the slogan to turn the commemoration into a demonstration against fascism.* It may be recalled that the statements made in this regard by the general secretary of the C.P.N. during his May 1 speech in Amsterdam.
To His Excellency the Deputy Prime Minister Minister without Portfolio Ministry of Internal Affairs In copy to; His Excellency the prime minister Square 1813 no. 4 in The Hague
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People sometimes tell me that the pictures of the piles of corpses, in the concentration camps are the most disturbing ones from the Holocaust.
However, I am not in total agreement because I found the photo above much more disturbing. It shows the cause of the Holocaust. Hitler understood for the Nazi ideology to work and he needed the youth. They had to be indoctrinated at a young age. The two boys in the photo above, I reckon, are about age three or so.
I often hear people say, “Love will conquer hate.” That is not really true, though—there is a thin line between love and hate, and it is easy to cross that line given the right circumstances and environment.
Education is the key to the battle of hate. However, education must not be confused with teaching. Teaching is only a small part of education. Children (and some adults) need to be educated—not only by teachers, trainers or coaches—but also by parents, grandparents and family.
The photograph above was taken in 1931—when membership in the Hitler Youth wasn’t compulsory. I don’t know who the parents were, but I can envisage that maybe they weren’t engrossed in the Nazi messages. Perhaps they only liked some of the elements initially.
However, the NSDAP was well funded and were able to facilitate childcare through means of holiday camps, after school activities, etc. What parent would not sign up to that? The mistake many Germans made in the late 1920s and early 1930s, they didn’t question this generosity. They may have seen that Hitler and his cronies weren’t the nicest of people, but they put food on the table and looked after the kids. So they were willing to turn a blind eye. At the start even the Nazi propaganda appeared to be reasonably harmless, it echoed what many people thought, albeit without foundation.
It wasn’t only the Nazi supporters who benefited from this generosity, at least not at the start.
Another question people often ask me is, “What political movement was responsible for the Holocaust?” The honest answer is all of them. Yes, it is true the communist were anti-NSDAP, but on the other hand, the Nazis struck a deal with the USSR just before the war. The USSR was the communist country in Europe at the time. People accepted how things were going because it suited them. When it no longer suited their lifestyles, they started to ask questions. By then, it was too late. In 1936, the Hitler Youth movement had reached five million members. Five million young minds were indoctrinated into an evil ideology that snuck in as a gradual virus.
So why is there a lesson to be learned for the near future? For starters—I suggest reading the book, A Village in the Third Reich: How Ordinary Lives Were Transformed by the Rise of Fascism by Julia Boyd and Angelika Patal. All you have to do is to change the decade from the 1920s to the 2020s.
Parents nowadays have their children following different ideologies without asking the question, “Who is behind these ideas?” I am not saying that every ideology a child is exposed to is menacing—the majority are probably good. However, I see more ideas sneaking into the mainstream and our youth should be questioning them—but very few are doing so. Critical thinking seems to have disappeared from our schools and universities. In case you wonder what the consequence of that will be…
In 2023, there appears to be an upsurge of people having a photograph of a political leader as their profile picture on social media. This is the 21st-century equivalent of having an image of a political leader hanging in the living room. (Like so many did in the past with pictures of Mao Zedong, Joseph Stalin, Fidel Castro and Adolf Hitler.) This has never ever been a good idea in history. All you are doing is telling your children that you worship someone who doesn’t have their best interest at heart and you are willing to follow them blindly.
The Holocaust happened in the past but could effortlessly occur again. What scares me is that the foundation of the next Holocaust has already been laid.
The Buchenwald Trial was a war crime trial conducted by the United States Army as a court-martial in Dachau, then part of the American occupation zone. It took place from 11 April to 14 August 1947.
On 14 August 1947, the Buchenwald main trial United States of America vs. Josias Prince of Waldeck et al. ended. All 31 accused were found guilty of war crimes in the Buchenwald Concentration Camp and its satellite camps—22 were sentenced to death. Ilse Koch, the only woman in the dock, received a life sentence. Former prisoners accused her of being particularly sadistic. However, because she was pregnant when the verdict was announced—the court waived the death penalty.
Ilse Koch wasn’t only considered sadistic by the Buchenwald prisoners but also by the Nazis. On 17 August 1944, SS judge Konrad Morgen formally charged Ilse’s husband, Karl Koch, with the “embezzlement and concealing of funds and goods in an amount of at least 200,000 RM,” and the “premeditated murder” of three inmates, ostensibly to prevent them from giving evidence to the SS investigatory commission. Ilse was charged with the “habitual receiving of stolen goods, and taking for her benefit at least 25,000 RM…” While Ilse Koch was acquitted at the subsequent SS trial in December 1944, Konrad Morgen described her as “a hussy who rode on horseback in sexy underwear in front of the prisoners and then noted down for punishment the numbers of those who looked at her.”
Aside from Ilse Koch, most of the accused were members of the former camp staff, but also the Higher SS and Police Leader (HSSPF) Josias zu Waldeck und Pyrmont, who was responsible for the Buchenwald concentration camp. In addition, the camp commandant Hermann Pister and members of the commandant’s staff.
Josias Erbprinz zu Waldeck und Pyrmont: Life Imprisonment (Commuted to 20 Years Imprisonment) Ilse Koch: Life Imprisonment (Commuted to 4 Years Imprisonment) Hermann Pister: Death Sentence (Died In Prison on the 28 September 1948) SS Dr Hans Eisele: Death Sentence (Sentenced in Absentia) August Bender: 10 Years Imprisonment (Commuted to 3 Years Imprisonment) Kapo Hans Wolf: Death Sentence (Executed on the 19 November 1948) Werner Greunuss: Life Imprisonment (Commuted to 20 Years Imprisonment) Helmut Roscher: Death Sentence (Commuted to Life Imprisonment) Franz Zinecker: Life Imprisonment Phillip Grimm: Death Sentence (Commuted to Life Imprisonment) Hubart Krautwurst: Death Sentence (Executed on the 26 November 1948) Emil Pleissner: Death Sentence (Executed on the 26 November 1948) Albert Schwartz: Death Sentence (Commuted to Life Imprisonment) Hans Merbach: Death Sentence (Executed on the 14 January 1949) Friedrich Wilhelm: Death Sentence (Executed on the 26 November 1948) Hermann Hackmann: Death Sentence (Commuted to Life Imprisonment) Dr Edwin Katzenellenbogen: Life Imprisonment (Commuted to 12 Years Imprisonment) Wolfgang Otto: 15 Years Imprisonment Hans – Theodor Schmidt: Death Sentence (Executed on the 7 June 1951) Gustav Heigel: Death Sentence (Commuted to Life Imprisonment) Quido Reimer: Death Sentence (Commuted to Life Imprisonment) Richard Köhler: Death Sentence (Executed on the 26 November 1948) Max Schobert: Death Sentence (Executed on the 19 November 1948) Kapo Dr Arthur Dietzsch: 15 Years Imprisonment Hermann Helbig: Death Sentence (Executed on the 19 November 1948) Walter Wendt: 15 Years Imprisonment (Commuted to 5 Years Imprisonment) Hermann Grossmann: Death Sentence (Executed on the 19 November 1948) Peter Merker: Death Sentence (Commuted to 20 Years Imprisonment) Josef Kestel: Death Sentence (Executed on the 19 November 1948) Anton Bergmeier: Death Sentence (Commuted to Life Imprisonment) Otto Barnewald: Death Sentence (Commuted to Life Imprisonment)
Peter Zenkle, a former prisoner at Buchenwald, said the following about the camp, “The pigs in the SS stables received better feed than the inmates were fed.”
Leon Bass, an African-American soldier, described his experiences entering the Buchenwald concentration camp in April 1945.
“I was sent as part of a liaison group to see if we could arrange for a campsite for our unit. And we arrived in this place called Weimar and drove out to, what I found out now, was to be a concentration camp. And I didn’t know anything about concentration camps. So when the officer told us to follow him and get on the trucks, I did ask him…I said, ‘Where are we going?’ And he said, ‘We’re going to a concentration camp.’
I really was puzzled because I didn’t know a thing about that. No one had ever mentioned it in all the training I received. But on this day, in April 1945, I was going to have the shock of my life. Because I was going to walk through the gates of a concentration camp called Buchenwald. And you got to believe me when I tell you I wasn’t ready for that. I was totally unprepared for that kind of experience.
But you see, I can never, I can never forget that day because when I walked through that gate, I saw in front of me what I call the walking dead. I saw human beings, human beings that had been beaten, had been starved, they’d been tortured. They’d been denied everything, everything that would make anyone’s life livable.
They were standing in front of me and they were skin and bone. They had skeletal faces with deep-set eyes. Their heads had been clean-shaved, and they were standing there, and they were holding on to one another just to keep from falling. Many of them had sores on their bodies. And I can remember this so vividly, sores that came from malnutrition. One man held out his hands, and his fingers had webbed together with the scabs that had come from the sores brought on by the malnutrition.
Oh, my God, I’d seen nothing like this in all my life, nothing. But when they started to move, stumbling forward toward me, I backed away. Oh, I backed up and I stopped. And I said to myself, my God, my God, what is all this insanity? Who are these people? And furthermore, what have they done that was so terrible that would cause anybody to treat them like this? And you see, I didn’t know really, I didn’t know.
But there was this young man who spoke English and he began to tell us about Buchenwald. And he said that these people were Jews, they were Gypsies, they were Jehovah’s Witnesses, and there were some Catholics. There were trade unionists, communists, and homosexuals. Oh, he went on and on. He listed so many different groups that had been placed in the camp. And I knew, that in my judgment, the Nazis had placed them there because the Nazis were saying none of them were good enough, therefore, they were not fit to live. They could be terminated—murdered. Man, I couldn’t get a handle on this. This was beyond anything in my experience.
But I walked about the camp. I went to a place where the men would sleep—they called it a barrack—and I opened the door, I stepped back across the threshold, and I closed the door. But I could go no further. You see that odour, the stench, that comes from death and human waste—well, it was overpowering. It was awesome. I stood there and I was holding my breath all the time. I was holding my breath, and I was going to leave. I knew I couldn’t stay.
And so I turned, but before I could step away, I looked down. And there, on the bottom bunk near the door, was a man. Oh, he was an emaciated—that person. He was skin and bone. He was on a bed of filthy straw and rags. And he was trying so desperately to look at me with that skeletal face and those deep-set eyes, but he was so weak. You see, the man had been starved for so long, and it was a struggle for him just to look at me. But finally he did. He looked up at me and he said nothing. Nor did I. So now, I opened the door, stepped across the threshold, and closed the door.
I was going to walk away from that place but another man came by. He was– oh, he was skin and bone. And he stopped right there in front of me. He undid what was holding his trousers, he let them fall, he squatted down, and he began to defecate right in front of me. And I couldn’t believe this. Oh, he was so thin, it looked like the bones of his buttocks would come through the skin. But I stood there saying, no, no. You don’t do this in public. Where’s your dignity?
But you see, that was my hang-up. I was hung up on something called dignity when that man was merely trying to survive. He wanted to live. I didn’t know.”
In the decades that followed, the crimes committed in Buchenwald and Mittelbau-Dora were tried before courts in both Germanys and abroad. Yet even if some of these trials were quite sensational, most of the judicial inquiries were ultimately dropped without results.
Of the thousands of SS men and women overseers who had served in Buchenwald, Mittelbau-Dora and their subcamps, only a small fraction were brought to trial. The persons who had participated in the countless crimes against concentration camp inmates in the weeks before the end of the war were likewise almost never prosecuted.
A SS guard who abused prisoners was identified on 14 April 1945 by a former Soviet Buchenwald prisoner at Buchenwald.
The title is The 4 from Breda, but there are only 3 men pictured. There is a reason for that which I shall explain a bit later. After the Second World War, 241 Germans were tried in the Netherlands for war crimes. Among them, the quartet Willi Lages, Ferdinand aus der Fünten, Franz Fischer and Joseph Kotälla, also known as “The Four of Breda”—a nickname they get from their imprisonment in the Koepelgevangenis(Dome prison) in Breda, a city in the south of the Netherlands.
After the end of the German occupation of the Netherlands, they were initially sentenced to death. That sentence was commuted by pardon to life imprisonment. The cabinet was against the conversion of the death penalty, partly because Queen Juliana had conscientious objections to the execution of the death penalty, but it still granted a pardon. Minister of Justice Teun Struycken assumed this would lead to release after twenty years.
As I mentioned earlier. I would explain why there are only three men in the picture above.
Under the responsibility of Minister of Justice Ivo Samkalden, Lages was given a suspended sentence in 1966 because Dutch doctors believed he was terminally ill, which later turned out to be untrue. He never returned to the Netherlands. The German constitution prohibits the extradition of its own nationals. After an intestinal operation in West Germany, he lived in freedom for almost five years. He died on 2 April 1971.
After 1971, the four became three and were referred to as, The 3 of Breda.
Willi Lages functioned as an SS man for the SD in Amsterdam and was responsible for the registration of Jews. That role was crucial for who would or would not be deported to a concentration camp. It was proven that he was responsible for the execution of several members of the resistance, including Hannie Schaft.
Joseph Kotalla (pictured in the top photograph on the left) was the administrative head and deputy camp commander of Kamp Amersfoort and was known to be psychologically unbalanced. He was nicknamed the Executioner of Amersfoort because he pulled the trigger several times.
Ferdinand aus der Fünten (top photograph, middle person) was also an SS man involved in the deportations because he was partly responsible for the logistics. This pure-blooded SS man lived for persecuting Jews, his only passion, reportedly, which earned him the nickname, Judenfischer. He was initially stationed in Utrecht but later moved to The Hague, where he was involved in deportations.
Aus der Fünten had been in charge of the day-to-day management of the organization of the deportations of Jews to Westerbork in Amsterdam, and Fischer did the same work in The Hague. Lages was one step higher in the ranking and was the de facto boss of Aus der Fünten. As a passionate police officer who had started his career with the Secret State Police in Germany, he was also head of the Netherlands Security Police—involved in the fight against the resistance. Kotalla was not personally involved with the arrest and persecution of Jews and Resistance Fighters. His conviction was for his brutal behaviour as a guard in the Amersfoort Concentration Camp.
In the late 1960s, the then Minister of Justice, Carel Polak, wanted to release the three remaining prisoners. After the discussion and advice from the Supreme Court, he decided against it.
In 1972, emotional debates arose again. Minister of Justice Dries van Agt had hinted that he wanted to respond positively to a request for clemency for the Three from Breda, partly because the Supreme Court and the Special Criminal Chamber of the District Court of Amsterdam had now unanimously advised to grant clemency. The release was called off after a hearing advocated by Anneke Goudsmit (D’66-Democrats 66) and a fierce parliamentary debate on 29 February 1972 took place, partly under the influence of strong, emotional resistance from society, in particular from associations of war victims. Ultimately, the request for clemency was rejected after a motion passed by the Guardian in the House of Representatives.
That this goes down the wrong way with people can be seen from the threatening letters that Van Agt receives. The division in the country about clemency is also clearly visible in the 13-hour debate in the House of Representatives on the issue.
Van Agt had to deal with the strong emotions in society, especially those affected by war.
As a result, the Dutch citizens come to see Fischer, Aus der Fünten and Kotälla even more as a symbol of the evil done to them. Therefore, in their eyes, the remaining three should never be released.
Kotälla has been mentally ill throughout his imprisonment. In the summer of 1979, his health deteriorated considerably. He died on 31 July 1979 in the Breda Prison. He is the only one of The Four who never submitted a request for clemency, but always tried to be released through lawsuits.
Throughout his imprisonment, he feels that he has not been judged fairly by the Dutch constitutional state. He continues to fight for a review of his verdict, which never comes, until his death. “The Three” became “The Two of Breda.”
On July 5, 1988, on the initiative of banker and former resistance member Bib van Lanschot, nineteen prominent Dutch citizens pleaded in a letter to Prime Minister Ruud Lubbers and Minister of Justice Frits Korthals Altes for the immediate release of the remaining two. They were old and didn’t have long to live. The letter was handed over personally without publicity. In addition to Van Lanschot, the signatories included former resistance member Hans Teengs Gerritsen, former Prime Minister Piet de Jong, former Minister of Justice Samkalden (now Minister of State) and other previous opponents of early release.
On 27 January 1989, the remaining two were released at the instigation of Korthals Altes. He received permission for this from the House of Representatives through a PvdA motion that was rejected by 88 to 55 votes calling for it to be waived. Korthals Altes referred to the letter from the “group of nineteen” at the start of the parliamentary debates on the proposed release. The same day the motion was rejected, the two war criminals were put across the border as unwanted aliens near Venlo. Teengs Gerritsen would express regret about co-signing the letter shortly after the release.
The writer and survivor of the prisoner of war and concentration camp Bergen-Belsen Abel Herzberg also publicly pleaded for release. Herzberg was a criminal law expert and took a position completely opposite to that of many Dutch Jews at the time. He called the attitude of Jewish opponents for the release—full of “hate and retaliation,” stressing that revenge in such a way was pointless. Incidentally, Herzberg would later indicate that, after the last two of Breda were released, he also doubted his own position.
Aus der Fünten and Fischer both died shortly after their release.
To an extent, I can understand why they were released; releasing them on 27 January, I find it disgusting. I hope this was because of an oversight.
For a long time in Dutch historiography and discourse, the entirety of the Indonesian War of Independence was referred to by the euphemistic term politionele acties, as used by the government at the time. In the Netherlands, the prevailing impression was that there had only been two distinct, short-term police actions intended to restore Dutch authority over a rebellious overseas territory. This perspective disregards that between the arrival of Dutch troops in March 1946 and the cession of sovereignty in December 1949, a full-scale military occupation and a continuous counterinsurgency had taken place, involving 120,000 conscripts.
Some conscripts encountered something they would not have seen in the Netherlands. At this stage, the Netherlands was still quite Puritan, so public nudity was reasonably alien although it was part of the Indonesian culture.
The photographs are from an album named “Memories from the Tropics,” from conscript Corporal J. de Raad.
I have to admit, this was a welcome distraction from my usual heavy Holocaust pieces.
I came across this death notification of Jacob Rosenboom. The reason why it drew my attention was the date. Jacob died on 10 April 1968, the very day I was born. Then when I did more research, I discovered that Jacon had lived in my hometown of Geleen in the Netherlands.
The Rosenboom-Wolf family lived in Sittard from 1933 and in Geleen from 1936 to 1938. An Abraham Rosenbaum/Rosenboom had come to the Netherlands from Germany in the early nineteenth century and had settled in Zevenaar as a merchant. His grandson, (also named) Abraham, married Josina Wolf from Lith (near Oss) in 1895. From this son, Jacob Rosenboom was born in 1896 in Zevenaar. Jacob married his cousin Vrouwtje (which means little woman in Dutch) Wolf from Lith in 1918, also born in 1896. In Zevenaar, daughter Saartje was born in 1919, son Herman Abraham in 1920, then in Didam in 1922, daughter Josina Rebekka followed by son Levie Rosenboom in 1923. Jacob’s mother died in 1922, after which his father remarried.
The Rosenbooms were traditionally merchants by trade, but Jacob, like his uncle Nathan Rosenboom, started working in the mines in the south of the province of Limburg at a certain point.
Jacob and Vrouwtje and their four children lived in Hoensbroek in 1929, then in Brunssum and from May 1933 in Sittard. Jacob was then a carpenter by trade. In October 1936, they moved to Geleen Jacob worked in Geleen at the state mine Maurits.
The family moved back to Sittard in November 1938 at 5 Vouerweg. (The company Philips had a factory at Vouerweg, where I worked for ten years) Daughter Saartje worked as domestic help and lived (most of the time) in Amsterdam from November 1938 to July 1940 and in Arnhem from 1941-1942. During of the German invasion, Vrouwtje Rosenboom-Wolf and his daughter Josina stayed in Amsterdam for a few months. Saartje returned to Sittard in March 1942.
The family probably went into hiding in the spring of 1943 when something went wrong with daughter Saartje: she died in Heerlen on 28 October 1943, aged 24. I am a father of 3 children, and I would not know how I would feel if one of my children died. The only thing I can be sure of is that I’d be devastated.
The rest of the family survived the war. Apart from the loss of Saartje, there were more victims in the family. In 1942, Vrouwtjes’s brother Herman Wolf was deported from Sittard with his wife and two sons and gassed in Auschwitz. Jacob’s sister Regina Koppel-Rosenboom, a young widow, had been murdered in Sobibor, together with her daughter. Jacob’s father, age 74, died in Zevenaar in January 1943; Jacob’s stepmother survived the war.
After the liberation in 1945, the five surviving family members returned to the Vouerweg in Sittard. Not much later, they lived at 45 Resedastraat. After the war, Jacob worked for some time at the Julia mine in Eygelshoven. They moved to Eindhoven soon afterwards.
The sons left home and married within a few years. Herman Abraham became a draftsman at the SBB, a nitrogen fixation company. It also has significance to me. Some employees died during the war, either because they had been in resistance or due to a bombing by the RAF in 1943, where the RAF had mistaken Geleen for Aachen in Germany. A monument was erected, for these men, in the street where I grew up. I passed it by many times without giving it a second glance.
Herman Abraham married Lena Offenbach in 1952 and moved to Amsterdam with her in 1959. He passed away in 2015.
Josina Rebekka was a shop assistant until her marriage in 1953 to the divorced Amsterdam tailor Tobias Lavino. She then left for Amsterdam. They had two children. Josina passed away in 2009. Levie Rosenboom became a miner and married Neeltje Groot in 1950. They had two children in Sittard and moved to Boxtel in 1957. Levie died in 2003 in Boxtel.
After Jacob and Vrouwtje celebrated their 40th wedding anniversary in Sittard in 1958, they followed their daughter and eldest son to Amsterdam in November 1959, where Jacob died on April 101968 and Vrouwtje in 1980.
Amazingly, all of this originated and in my hometown in an area I am very familiar with, and I never knew until today.
Joosje Asser is de dochter van Eli Asser, tekstschrijver en journalist Joosje’s moeder is Eefje Croiset.
Na de bevrijding werd Eli Asser journalist. Hij werkte voor het Haagsch Dagblad en het weekblad Vrij Nederland. Zijn doorbraak als tekstschrijver kwam in 1953 bij de VARA, waarvoor hij de komische radiostrip Mimosa (later Mimoza, MInisterie van MOeilijke ZAken genoemd) schreef. Dit programma, met in de hoofdrollen Ko van Dijk, Johan Kaart en Conny Stuart en de special effects van het geluidenwonder Jan Oradi, was bijzonder populair.
Later schreef Eli Asser reclameteksten. Daarnaast maakte hij onder andere komedies voor de KRO en de AVRO. Nationale roem verwierf hij met de komedieseries die in de jaren 1969-1972 werden uitgezonden door de KRO:
‘t Schaep met de 5 pooten Citroentje met suiker]] Hij schreef ook de liedteksten voor deze twee series, zoals Het zal je kind maar wezen, op muziek gezet door Harry Bannink en vertolkt door Adèle Bloemendaal. Met haar en Leen Jongewaard werkte hij ook aan theatershows. In 1979 maakte hij een musicalversie van het klassieke toneelstuk Potasch & Perlemoer.
Half april 1942 kreeg Eli Asser een oproep om geïnterneerd te worden in een van de Nederlandse werkkampen. Aan deze Arbeitseinsatz wist hij te ontsnappen door legaal te gaan werken als leerling-verpleger in de Joodse psychiatrische inrichting Het Apeldoornsche Bosch,waar alle niet-Joodse medewerkers op last van de Duitse bezetter ontslagen waren. Enkele maanden later kreeg ook zijn vriendin Eefje Croiset er een baan, als schoonmaakster. Op 20 januari 1943, op de avond vóór patiënten en personeelsleden door de bezetter werden gedeporteerd, vluchtte Asser samen met Croiset terug naar Amsterdam. Beiden zaten de rest van de oorlog op verschillende plekken ondergedoken. Beiden overleven ze de oorlog maar de rest van de famile is vermoord.Eli en Eefje beginnen daarom hun eigen familie.
Nadat Eefje de eerste levenstekens van Joosje reeds in een plakboek hadvastlegde, begon Eli over haar te schrijven. En wel zo:: “Joosje, die in de krant Vaselientje heet, is nu 3 maanden oud. Zij ontwikkelt zich in rap tempo. Zij ontdekt haar handjes, slaat tegen de rammelaar, oefent zich in kraaien en ontdekt ook heel andere stemmogelijkheden. Vooral als haar iets niet zint, laat zij dat duidelijk horen. Zij laat zich ook al aan twee vingers optrekken tot zithouding en nog meer van dat soort baby bezigheden. Alleen vraag ik (mijn vader dus) mij af wat er toch in dat kleine hoofdje omgaat? Ja dat is een vraag, die niemand kan beantwoorden Maar moet je net mijn vader hebben, die weet daar wel raad mee. Hij hoeft alleen maar zijn fantasierijke pen in te zetten en ja hoor Baby Vaselientje begint te vertellen, wat zij zoal van de dagelijkse gang van zaken vind. En eenmaal begonnen met praten is er ook geen houden meer aan. Alles en iedereen wordt door Vaselientje kritisch beschouwd, waarbij zij vooral de absurditeit van de situatie onder de loep neemt en mensen in het algemeen nogal eigenaardig vindt. En eerlijk is eerlijk- dat is in al die jaren geen spat veranderd. Is getekend Vaselientje alias Joosje Asser” 75 jaar na dato wordt ‘Vaselientje: Dagboek van een baby’ opnieuw uitgebracht, Een positief verhaal in donkere tijden.
I know some Polish people will vehemently deny that this ever happened, but it did. It is a shame there are people who still insist on whitewashing history because it serves no one, and the truth always comes out. We can only stop these crimes from happening again, when we learn from the past. It should not be seen as a judgement but as education.
On Thursday, 4 July 1946, a group of Kielce residents, with the participation of militiamen and soldiers, massacred several Jews who survived the Holocaust and were living in the building at 7/9 Planty Street. The spark that initiated the outbreak of violence was a rumour about the ritual murder of Christian children.
A few days earlier, on 1 July, a 9-year-old Polish boy named Henryk Błaszczyk had gone missing from his home in Kielce, Poland, a city of 50,000 in Southeastern Poland. Henryk Blaszczyk left his home in Kielce without informing his parents. When he returned on 3 July, the boy told his parents and the police, in an effort to avoid punishment for wandering off, that he had been kidnapped and hidden by a man in the basement of the local Jewish Committee building at 7 Planty Street.
The building belonged to the Jewish Committee, which housed many Jewish institutions and was home to up to 180 Jews. It did not have a basement. Most of the residents were refugees, having survived the horrors of the death camps that decimated more than 90 per cent of the Polish Jewish population. After the war, refugees returned to their homeland with the desire they could leave the past behind them. They had no idea they were about to become (again) the target of anti-Semitic aggression—this time from the Polish neighbours they lived alongside.
The Civic Militia and soldiers then forcibly broke into the building only to discover that there were no abducted children as claimed. The inhabitants of the house, who had proper permits to bear arms for self-defence, were ordered to surrender their weaponry and give up valuables. Someone (not clear who) started firing a weapon. Civic Militia and the KBW opened fire, killing and wounding some people in the building. In response, shots were fired from the Jewish side, killing two or three non-Jewish Poles, including a Civic Militia officer. The head of the local Jewish Committee, Dr Seweryn Kahane, was fatally wounded while telephoning the Kielce Office of Public Security for help. Several local priests attempted to enter the building but were not allowed entry by militia officers—who vowed to control the situation.
Ewa Szuchman, a resident of the house on Planty Street, said: “After the police took away the weapons, the crowd broke into the Kibbutz (on the second floor), and policemen started shooting at the Jews first. They killed one and wounded several others.”
Albert Grynbaum, another inhabitant of the Jewish house who was on the first floor, said: “The soldiers went up to the second floor. Several minutes later, two Jews came to me and told me that the soldiers were killing Jews and looting their property. It was then that I heard shots. After the shooting on the second floor, shots were heard from the street and inside the building.”
That day, Jewish men and women were stoned, robbed, beaten with rifles, stabbed with bayonets, and hurled into a river (that flowed nearby). Yet, while other Kielce residents walked by, no one did a thing to stop it until noon. That was when a second group of soldiers went to break up the crowd and evacuate the wounded and dead. In the afternoon, a group of metal workers ran toward the building, armed with iron bars and other weapons. The residents of 7 Planty were relieved; they thought these men had come to help. Instead, the metal workers began brutally attacking and killing those still alive inside the building.
By day’s end, civilians, soldiers and police had killed 42 Jews and injured 40 others. Two non-Jewish Poles died as well, killed either by Jewish residents inside the building or fellow non-Jewish Poles for offering aid to the Jewish victims.
Three days after the pogrom, surviving Jews and residents buried the victims in a mass grave in the Jewish cemetery. Government authorities ordered military units and residents to attend the funeral to respect the victims. Although the government executed nine attackers on 14 July, following a hasty judicial investigation, the Kielce Pogrom sparked intense fear in the already traumatized postwar Polish Jewish community.
Most of these people, if not all, had survived the Holocaust, just to be murdered by their neighbours because of a lie of a boy.
In the years that followed, the Kielce pogrom, like many atrocities committed or abetted by Poles during the war, was taboo.
This pogrom happened 14 months after the war in Europe, and there was no involvement by Nazi Germany. I have heard excuses like the crimes were not committed by Polish people but by communists. as if they were not Polish. I address these issues not to judge because all European countries have dark pages in their history, but if we ignore them, it will happen again and again.
History of Sorts 
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