World War 2
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Last weekend I spent in Liverpool. The weather was fantastic and there was a great atmosphere. While I was walking around the docks, I came across these memorials, of service men of several countries, merchants sailors, and civilians who died in World War 2 and 1. I would like to share those memorials with you.
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German citizens benefited from Nazi policies by taking over jobs previously held by Jews, acquiring Jewish-owned businesses, and participating in furniture auctions held in the homes of Holocaust victims. Acknowledging the complicity of ordinary individuals in state-sponsored crimes is crucial, as it underscores the unsettling reality that no one is inherently immune to the allure…
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A small boy named Jacques Maurice Duizend was just a baby—a toddler. His last name is also a number, Thousand. That is the number of years the failed Austrian artist had envisaged his ‘Reich’ to last. To achieve that two-year-old children like Jacques Maurice Duizend had to be murdered. Jacques Maurice Duizend was born in…
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A member of Adolf Hitler’s extended family was among the victims of the Nazi regime’s campaign to exterminate the mentally ill, according to two historians. The woman, identified as “Aloisia V.”, was a great-grandchild of Hitler’s great-aunt, making her his second cousin once removed. She was related to him through the Schicklgruber side of his…
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Viktor Ullmann’s “Der Kaiser von Atlantis” (The Emperor of Atlantis) is a unique and poignant opera composed during World War II. During this time, Ullmann was imprisoned in the Theresienstadt Concentration Camp. Viktor Ullmann was born on January 1, 1898, in Teschen, Austrian Silesia (now Český Těšín in the Czech Republic). Both his parents were…
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When we reflect upon Jewish resistance during the Holocaust, the towering specter of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising understandably dominates collective memory. It has become the defining symbol of armed Jewish defiance against Nazi tyranny. Yet the history of resistance was never confined to Warsaw alone. Across occupied Poland—in cramped ghettos, isolated towns, and heavily fortified…
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++++++++++++++CAUTION: CONTAINS GRAPHIC IMAGES++++++++++++++++ When Dwight D. Eisenhower entered Ohrdruf Concentration Camp after it was liberated, he had the foresight to document the horrors he saw with his own eyes. Ohrdruf was liberated on 4 April 1945, by the 4th Armored Division, led by Brigadier General Joseph F. H. Cutrona, and the 89th Infantry Division.…
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The Netherlands is the country with the relatively highest number of Jewish victims in Western Europe. Of the 140,000 Jews, 107,000 were deported. Five thousand people returned from the camps, and approximately 20,000 survived in other ways, most of them in hiding. The persecution and murder of the Jews during the Second World War is…
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An often underappreciated phenomenon of the Second World War is the so-called medical resistance (artsenverzet): a rare and remarkably successful example of organized, effective, non-violent, and sustained resistance against Nazi occupation carried out by nearly an entire professional group. Within the broader context of the predominantly non-violent Dutch resistance movement, Medisch Contact (Medical Contact) emerged…
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Beneath the whispering coastal pine,Where sand and sorrow softly twine,They stood with courage, hearts held high,Though freedom’s cost was to defy. No trumpet sounded, no fanfare played,Just silent steps through dune and glade,Where tyrants feared the truth they bore,And stilled their voices evermore. But wind remembers, trees still weep,The dunes their vigil gently keep—And in…
History of Sorts 