Europe
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In the corner, worn and scuffed, it lay,A silent witness to a world gone gray.Its leather cracked, its latches weak,It held the echoes no voice could speak. Ingrid de Vries, a child so small,Born in Amsterdam, one crisp fall.Her laughter danced in the autumn air,A fleeting joy—beyond despair. Her suitcase—packed with careful hands,By those who…
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The title might sound very cold and calculated but the fact is in order to facilitate the mass deportation the Nazis applied very efficient and sophisticated supply chain management principles. In commerce, supply chain management (SCM), the management of the flow of goods and services,however they were the same principles used during the Holocaust. Crucial to this was the involvement…
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Nowadays we take it for granted that we can conduct in peaceful protest, as a means to highlight our grievances. However in Nazi occupied Amsterdam during World War 2 any form of protest could be and would be considered an act of resistance which could lead to being jailed and even death. On August 5,1940…
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Amon Göth’s granddaughter, Jennifer Teege, wrote a book titled, My Grandfather Would Have Shot Me. I don’t think that would be the case. In my opinion, Jennifer would not have been conceived had her grandfather been alive. Göth was relatively unknown until Stephen Spielberg’s film Schindler’s List. His brutality was unhinged. I wrote about Göth…
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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…
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In the fall of 1944, South Limburg was liberated by American troops. Many young men subsequently volunteered for the Domestic Forces to contribute to the liberation of the Netherlands after years of occupation. Among them were veterans Cor van Wageningen (1918–2013) and Frits Faro (1921–2012). In the fall of 1944, they were assigned as guards…
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Like in Germany, the Holocaust in the Netherlands didn’t start with the mass murder of Jews—it was a gradual process. It started with a number of measures to initially humiliate the Dutch Jews. Summer 1942SD agents check the identity cards of Jewish citizens on the Nieuwezijds Voorburgwal, in Amsterdam. At the beginning of January 1941,…
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Margard (Marga) Kaufmann, born in Gronau, Germany 10 November 1928. Murdered in Auschwitz on 3 September 1943, reached the age of 14 years. Marga’s parents were married in 1923 in Gronau, where her mother, Adele, had taken over her grandmother’s grocery store in 1918. Marga never knew her grandparents, Zilversmit. Her mother had four brothers,…
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When we hear the stories of Berlin wall, we don’t often realize that basically the dimensions weren’t that great, and it is often forgotten that it was actually West Berlin that was surrounded by the wall and not East Berlin. The height of the wall was 3.6 Metres (11.8ft). On August 13 1961 the works…
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