Germany
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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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Max Planck, was a German theoretical physicist whose discovery of energy quanta won him the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1918.He had foreseen that the Nazi regimes racial law would have consequences for science in Germany. An immediate consequence upon passage of the law was that it produced both quantitative and qualitative losses to the…
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At their annual rally held in Nuremberg on September 15, 1935 Nazi party leaders announced, after the Reichstag had adopted them, new laws that institutionalized many of the racial theories underpinning Nazi ideology. The so-called Nuremberg Laws, signed by Hitler and several other Nazi officials, were the cornerstone of the legalized persecution of Jews in…
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I was reminiscing on TV shows I watched as a kid in the Netherlands. One of my favourite shows was a series called “Q&Q”. It was about 2 teenage detectives. The boys named Aristides Quarles and Wilbur Quant accidentally snap a photo of a dead body in the woods. After finding the place where the…
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Today marks the 81st anniversary of the start of the siege of Leningrad. The Siege of Leningrad was one of the deadliest and most destructive sieges in the history of the world – quite possibly the deadliest ever. It would last for 872 days, and there would be more than a million Soviet civilian casualties,…
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This is not the famous composer Joseph Strauss as a young man. This is actually another young man called Josef Strauss. Technically he never became a man because he was murdered in Auschwitz on August 17,1942. He was aged 17. Unlike his famous name bearer there is very little known about Josef, yet from the…
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Late in the morning of 4 August 1944, Dutch police entered the Secret Annexe and arrested the Frank family, the van Pels family, Fritz Pfeffer, Johannes Kleiman and Victor Kugler (who worked at Opetka). Otto Frank was the managing director of Opetka, and they had helped to hide the residents. On 8 August 1944, after several days…
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The plan of the Nazis was to eradicate anyone who they deemed not worthy. This didn’t mean only killing but also ensuring that not one person, who the Nazis considered subhuman, would be born. On July 14,1933 the Nazi regime fulfilled the long-held dreams of eugenics proponents by enacting the Law for the Prevention of…
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Education is the key to a better world and to end ignorance and racism. However if education does not include an element of critical thinking, it is open to abuse and it can be used to indoctrinate young impressionable minds, or any impressionable mind really. This blog will refer to the education in the Third…
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I always take the approach to explain things so that a child can understand them, not because I am condescending, but because I know that if a child understands it, everyone else should. How would you explain the Nazi ideology to a child, though? Especially during the 1933–1945 years. How would you explain the removal…