Buchenwald
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Life is only a sequence of events and accidents, often determined when and where you are born. When I was 15, as a young man in the 1980s in the Netherlands, my main interest was girls and trying to get beer. When Elie Wiesel was 15 and a young man in Romania (or then Hungary)…
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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…
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Ever since I was 13 or 14, I have played the guitar. Over the years, I have bought hundreds of songbooks. In one of those books, they put words to Beethoven’s 9th Symphony or more precisely, the bit commonly known as Ode to Joy. In the book, they renamed it, Hate is Mankind’s Worst Disease. The first…
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The picture is a still from a behind-the-scenes shot of the movie God’s Spy. The film was shot in Limerick and is now in the post-production stage. It tells the story of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Bonhoeffer was a German Lutheran pastor, theologian and anti-Nazi dissident who was a key founding member of the Confessing Church—a movement…
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Mail was allowed to be sent from the concentration camps under strict censorship. It had to be written in the German language and the number of lines was limited. Only simple information about health and daily life was allowed. The Blockführer had to read and sign the mail and then it went to the censorship…
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The number of Jews murdered during the Holocaust is estimated at six million. I have often argued that this number is higher. I have no data to back this up, but if you read the testimony of Hans Levy, you can’t help but wonder. Did they include the number of suicides in that number of…
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All of those men who liberated the camps throughout Europe never lost the memories of what they witnessed. Below are just some of their accounts. The Dachau concentration camp was liberated on April 29, 1945. Hilbert Margol (pictured above) and his twin brother, Howard. Two Jewish American soldiers were there and documented the tragedy. Hilbert…
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I have long given up on trying to understand the logic behind some of the Nazis actions. For example the mass murder of Doctors, the Nazis themselves could have used them for their own medical needs. Simon Blitz was born on June 28, 1907 in the Watergraafsmeer( The Watergraafsmeer is a polder in the Netherlands.…
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I am not a great believer in posting graphic images, but when it comes to the Holocaust there really is not always a way around it. The above picture was from Ohrdruf, shortly after its liberation. It is actually one of the least graphic photos. The Ohrdruf camp was a subcamp of the Buchenwald Concentration…
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I could have picked any name out of millions of victims to write about today. So why did I select Margot Frank-Cohen? No particular reason other than that she would have been 100 years old today. A few decades ago, it would have been utter nonsense to talk about someone’s 100th birthday. Hardly anyone would…
History of Sorts 