The hate of the Nazis for all who were not Aryan was so great that even in the last months of the war, they still set up a new concentration camp.
The camp, near the city of Ludwigslust, was a subcamp of the Neuengamme concentration camp. The SS had established Wöbbelin in early February 1945 to house concentration camp prisoners whom the SS had evacuated from other camps to prevent their liberation by the Allies. At its height, Wöbbelin held some 5,000 inmates, many of whom were suffering from starvation and disease.
On 2 May 1945, the camp was liberated by US troops, These are some of the testimonies.
Living conditions in the camp, when the U.S. 8th Infantry and the 82nd Airborne arrived were deplorable. There was little food or water and some prisoners had resorted to cannibalism. When the units arrived, they found about 1,000 inmates dead in the camp. In the aftermath, the U.S. Army ordered the townspeople in Ludwigslust to visit the camp and bury the dead
James Megellas, was among the first soldiers to enter the Wöbbelin camp. He was 28 at the time and wrote about his experiences in his book ‘All the Way to Berlin: A Paratrooper at War in Europe.’
“I was not prepared mentally to deal with the horror of the camp,” Inside, he said he found “two hundred twisted, nude bodies of skin and bone piled four to five feet high.” In the corner of the room was a pile of clothes taken off the bodies for reuse. Individual forms were almost indistinguishable. There could not have been a body more than sixty pounds,”
In another building, Megellas found living prisoners.
“Most were lying on the dirt floor or propped against the sides of the building too weak to get up. With sunken eyes and skin taut, they looked like skeletons.”
On May 7, 1945, the 82nd Airborne Division conducted a funeral service in Ludwigslust for 200 inmates. Engineers dug the graves, and citizens of Ludwigslust buried each one in parachute silk, Megellas said.
A chaplain from the 82nd delivered the following eulogy:
“The crimes here committed in the name of the German people and by their acquiescence were minor compared to those to be found in concentration camps elsewhere in Germany. Here there were no gas chambers, no crematoria; these men of Holland, Russia, Poland, Czechoslovakia and France were simply allowed to starve to death. Within four miles of your comfortable homes, 4,000 men were forced to live like animals, deprived even of the food you would give to your dogs.”
Megellas said he will never forget what he saw at Wöbbelin. The incident reinforced why he and his men fought the war.
“We stood there and we realized that it was to destroy the monstrosity that the Nazis had created.”
In accordance with a policy mandated by General Dwight D. Eisenhower, the Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces, the U.S. Army in Ludwigslust ordered “all atrocity victims to be buried in a public place” with crosses placed at the graves of Christians and Stars of David on the Jewish graves, along with a stone monument to commemorate the dead.
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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 few lines are as follows: What’s the use of killing and fighting? What’s the use of any war? Oh, did history still did not show us, nothing is worth dying for.
As the title suggests, the song deals with war and the hate it creates, or rather war created by hate. I could give examples of so many wars, but I am focusing on the war, which had an unprecedented level of hate, and the period before it, World War II.
Below are some examples of the hate that triggered the Holocaust, and pictures of the Holocaust itself.
Nazi Propaganda Used in Education
A Jewish woman concealing her face sits on a park bench marked “For Jews Only,” 1938, Austria
In the early 1930s, Jewish hatred had spread to countries outside of Germany
Newspaper clipping with a pre-war caricature from the Dutch Press, but taken from the French satirical newspaper Le Canard Enchaîné. The caption translates as, “The Berlin Chief Rabbi speaks with full independence and freedom on the radio” The article issued in 1933 or 1934 indicates that the world knew the fate of the German Jews several years before the war.
The Holocaust
12 April 1945—Dwight D. Eisenhower, Omar Bradley, and George Patton were given a tour of the Ohrdruf Concentration Camp. Here they were visiting a burial pit containing the charred remains of prisoners.
April 12, 1945—Dwight D. Eisenhower views the charred bodies of prisoners at Ohrdruf.
23 April 1945—Tattoo that was part of a man’s body. It was removed by Nazi SS men and then used as a decoration on the wall of their quarters at Buchenwald Concentration Camp.
The bodies of former prisoners were piled outside the crematorium at the newly liberated Dachau concentration camp. Dachau, Germany, April-May 1945. —US Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of Marcy Haupsman
A survivor stokes smouldering human remains in a still-lit crematorium oven. Dachau, Germany, 29 April—1 May 1945. —US Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of Merle Spiegel
Corpses lie in one of the open railcars of the Dachau death train. The Dachau death train consisted of nearly forty cars containing the bodies of between two and three thousand prisoners transported to Dachau in the last days of the war.
What is of great concern and worry to me is that this hate has not gone away. It was dormant for a short time, but that monster called hate is waking up again. We can still stop it, as it’s not too late yet.
I am passionate about my site and I know you all like reading my blogs. I have been doing this at no cost and will continue to do so. All I ask is for a voluntary donation of $2, however if you are not in a position to do so I can fully understand, maybe next time then. Thank you.
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When I see young people being very passionate about something that has a political undertone, I always wonder who is really behind that.
The Nazis understood that for them to successfully implement their racial ideas and policies, they would have to indoctrinate the youth. Hitler had a very strong viewpoint on education. The only teacher he liked at secondary school was his history teacher Leopold Potsch.
Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf (1925): “Dr. Leopold Potsch, my professor at the Realschule in Linz, embodied this requirement to an ideal degree. This old gentleman’s manner was as kind as it was determined, his dazzling eloquence not only held us spellbound but carried us away. Even today I think back with gentle emotion on this gray-haired man who, by the fire of his narratives, sometimes made us forget the present; who, as if by enchantment, carried us into past times and, out of the millennial veils of mist, molded dry historical memories into a living reality. On such occasions, we sat there, often aflame with enthusiasm, and sometimes even moved to tears. What made our good fortune all the greater was that this teacher knew how to illuminate the past by examples from the present, and how the past draws inferences for the present. As a result, he had more understanding than anyone else for all the daily problems which then held us breathless. He used our budding nationalistic fanaticism as a means of educating us, frequently appealing to our sense of national honor. By this alone he was able to discipline us little ruffians more easily than would have been possible by any other means. This teacher made history my favorite subject. And indeed, though he had no such intention, it was then that I became a little revolutionary. For who could have studied German history under such a teacher without becoming an enemy of the state which, through its ruling house, exerted so disastrous an influence on the destinies of the nation? And who could retain his loyalty to a dynasty which in past and present betrayed the needs of the German people again and again for shameless private advantage?”
Leopold Poetsch began his history teaching career in Maribor and later moved to Linz. He held strong nationalist opinions on the subject and believed that all ethnic Germans should be united by a single government. He also held strong racist views and told his pupils that Jews and Slavs were members of “inferior races”. However in later years took some distance from his former pupil, and considered Hitler an enemy of Austria.
The Nazis went to great extents on teaching the German youth to be proud of their race through biology teaching, the National Socialist Teachers League (NSLB) in particular taught in schools that they should be proud of their race and not to race mix.
Race biology was meant to encourage the Germans to maintain their racial purity, the NSLB stressed that as early as primary schools Germans have to work on only the Nordic racial element of the German Volk (people) again and again and have to contrast this with the racial differences that foreign peoples such as the Jews represent.
Every institution was infused with National Socialist ideology and infiltrated by Nazi personnel in chief positions. Schools were no exception.
Schools and universities were to:
indoctrinate young people into the racial ideas of Nazism and make children loyal to Hitler – this was in effect a form of brainwashing; train girls to be good Aryan wives and mothers, and prepare boys to be effective soldiers.
Make young people “swift as a greyhound, as tough as leather, and as hard as Krupp steel”. All teachers had to join the Nazi Teachers’ Association, which vetted them for political and racial suitability. By 1939, 97 percent of teachers belonged to it.
Jewish teachers were fired.
Teachers had to go to summer school so they could teach Nazi ideas effectively. Pupils were encouraged to inform the authorities if teachers did not teach and support Nazi ideas.
There were even so-called Bride Schools. The Reich Bride Schools (German: Reichsbräuteschule) were institutions established in Nazi Germany in the late 1930s. They were created to train young women to be “perfect Nazi brides”, indoctrinated in Nazi ideology and educated in housekeeping skills. The fiancées of prominent SS members and senior Nazi Party officials (and later a wider range of German women) were taught skills including cooking, child care, ironing, and to how to polish their husbands’ uniforms and daggers. They were required to swear oaths of loyalty to Adolf Hitler, to pledge to raise their children as Nazis, and to marry in what the Nazis alleged to be ceremonies based on the pre-Christian model.
The bride schools were a collaboration between Gertrud Scholtz-Klink and SS chief Heinrich Himmler, who was obsessed with German superiority over all races and the need for a “strong family life to create a strong, pure nation”.
Gertrud Scholtz-Klink
Regulations dictated that young women would be taught ‘washing, cooking, childcare and home design’ before they could walk up the aisle with the men who would staff death camps and rule conquered lands with an iron fist.
They were also instructed in social niceties – such as how to hold conversations at cocktail parties – and how to bring up their children worshipping not God or Jesus Christ, but Hitler. Although several bride schools were established in locations across Germany, the demands of the Second World War made it impossible for the Nazis to realize their ideal of women as being exclusively homebound.
Nazi racial policy did not always include degrading Jews but had to always maintain the importance of German blood and the Aryan race. This was often connected to the blood and soil ideology.
Whilst the young Germans were being taught about the importance of one’s blood, at the same time they were being taught about the dangers that the Jews represent in Germany and the necessary living space in the East, in particular Russia.
Novels portrayed the Germans as uniquely endowed and possessors of a unique destiny. The segregation of races was said to be natural, just as separate species did not come together in nature.
Der Giftpilz was a piece of antisemitic Nazi propaganda published as a children’s book by Julius Streicher in 1938. The title is German for “the poisonous mushroom/toadstool”.
The book explains that the Talmud discourages Jews from performing manual labor and encourages them to engage in trade instead; that it teaches Jews that non-Jews are meant to be slaves and asks Jews to enslave the non-Jewish population; and that Talmudic law allows Jews to cheat non-Jews. The book was sometimes used in German schools.
The indoctrination, or rather brainwashing, also happened in third-level education, in the Universities. On May 10, 1933 student groups at universities across Germany carried out a series of book burnings of works that the students and leading Nazi party members associated with an “un-German spirit.” Enthusiastic crowds witnessed the burning of books by Brecht, Einstein, Freud, Mann, and Remarque, among many other well-known intellectuals, scientists, and cultural figures, many of whom were Jewish. The largest of these book bonfires occurred in Berlin, where an estimated 40,000 people gathered to hear a speech by the propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, in which he pronounced that “Jewish intellectualism is dead”
The information in this post comes from a great number of sources. The reason why I did this article is to warn people. There are groups out there at the moment who are manipulating young people, to be foot soldiers for their political ideas. We need to check who is behind some of these movements, some of them have a noble veneer, but if you scratch the surface you might discover there is a different agenda behind it.
Of course, the vast majority of young people are decent human beings.
I am passionate about my site and I know you all like reading my blogs. I have been doing this at no cost and will continue to do so. All I ask is for a voluntary donation of $2, however if you are not in a position to do so I can fully understand, maybe next time then. Thank you.
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I don’t think I have to tell anyone who Elie Wiesel is, but for those who don’t know him, I’ll provide a brief overview.
Elie Wiesel was born in Sighet (in Transylvania, now a part of Romania, but part of Hungary between 1940 and 1945) on 30 September 1928 and grew up in a Chassidic (and thus Orthodox Jewish) family.
After the Nazis had occupied Hungary in 1944, the Wiesel family was deported to the Auschwitz extermination camp. Elie Wiesel’s mother and younger sister were murdered in the gas chamber there. In 1945, Elie and his father were sent on to Buchenwald, where his father died of starvation and dysentery. Seventeen-year-old Elie was still alive when American soldiers opened the camp.
Elie is the 7th on the 2 row of bunkbeds, I believe
After World War II, Wiesel became a journalist, prolific author, professor, and human rights activist. He was a Distinguished Professor of Judaic Studies at the City University of New York (1972–1976). In 1976, he became the Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities at Boston University, where he also held the title of University Professor. During the 1982–83 academic year, Wiesel was the first Henry Luce Visiting Scholar in the Humanities and Social Thought at Yale University.
For any further information on Elie Wiesel, I will give you an assignment. We live in an era where nearly any information you want to get is at the reach of your fingertips. Do some research on Elie Wiesel on the internet or go into a library and find one of his books.
The title of this post is a quote from Elie Wiesel of an interview he had with Georg Klein, a fellow Holocaust survivor, in 1986. The clip below is appropriately titled “The world is not learning anything.”
It shames me to admit that Elie was so right, the world isn’t learning from its mistakes and history.
On this day, his birthday, I hope we all pause for a moment and contemplate what world we want to live in. Do we want hate to rule once more? Or do we want love to conquer? I know what I want.
Leaving you with some of Elie’s quotes: The opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference. The opposite of art is not ugliness, it’s indifference. The opposite of faith is not heresy, it’s indifference. And the opposite of life is not death, it’s indifference.
Human suffering anywhere concerns men and women everywhere.
We must take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented. Sometimes we must interfere. When human lives are endangered, when human dignity is in jeopardy, national borders and sensitivities become irrelevant. Wherever men and women are persecuted because of their race, religion, or political views, that place must—at that moment—become the centre of the universe.
When you look at the picture you might think that it is an innocent portrayal , of a street somewhere in the Netherlands.
A typical Dutch scene. Someone cycling, two bikes parked against a sign. What could be hateful here?
It is actually the sign itself that has a message of hate. It says “Jews not wanted” or “Jews not desired” . Above the sign there is another one, it gives us the name of the town ‘de Bilt’ . This is not just any town in the Netherlands, it is one of the most affluent towns in the country, it has been for centuries. It was the birthplace of Joan Gideon Loten, a prominent member of the Dutch East India Company .It was also the birthplace of Johan Beyen a politician, who helped create the European Economic Community. During World War II, he was, in addition to his position at Unilever, financial advisor to the Dutch government in exile in London. In 1944, he played an important role during the Bretton Woods conference where the foundations were laid for the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. From 1946, he was the Dutch representative in the board of the World Bank and from 1948 also in that of the IMF.
The town is also where one of America’s wealthiest families originated from , the Vanderbilt family.
So a very influential town. No one in the town had to fear any hardships or job losses caused by Jews, yet this was one the lies spread by the Nazis.
The hateful rhetoric was based on nothing. Of course the sign, as many other signs, were put up on order by the Nazis, but there was little or no resistance by the population to put up them up.
The Holocaust didn’t happen overnight it was a gradual process.
De Bilt is and was also the home of the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute (KNMI) since 1854. One of the institutes employees was Kittie Koperberg.
Kitty was fired from her job at the KNMI on November 21,1940 because she was Jewish. Even if she hadn’t been fired it was made very clear that she was no longer welcome in De Bilt. Like so many other Jews, Kittie was sent to Westerbork from there she was put on a transport to Sobibor on May 11,1943. When she arrived in Sobibor on the 14th of May she was murdered.
It is easy for me to judge in retrospect, however I don’t feel like it is a judgement but a critical analysis of the history of a dark era of the country I was born in. If we can’t be critical about our past we can never be critical about the present or the future. We will not learn from the mistakes that were made.
I know some people will jump on this blog to criticize the Dutch. But this will more then likely be done by people who live in one of the countries, that are currently white washing their mistakes, actively revising the history and distort it to suit their current narrative.
The hate against the Jews didn’t only exist in Germany but all over Europe.
The millions of victims of the Holocaust, and those who survived deserve better then that.
I am passionate about my site and I know you all like reading my blogs. I have been doing this at no cost and will continue to do so. All I ask is for a voluntary donation of $2, however if you are not in a position to do so I can fully understand, maybe next time then. Thank you.
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Hate is never good, it clouds judgement and mind. I am not only saying this to those who read this but more so to myself.
I have written so many pieces about World War II, and although for all the horrors, I have always been careful to place the blame on the Nazis and not on the Germans. The fact that my country was occupied by the Germans, and I learned early in life that my Grandfather was killed by them, I grew up hearing the evil Germans from my family, so it is no wonder I developed a distaste for the Germans.
However writing about the war and the Holocaust, and doing the research, has given me a more balanced view. Over the years I have to come to admit that not all Germans were bad and not all Dutch were good.
Karl-Heinz Rosch was a young German soldier during World War II who saved the lives of two Dutch children.
Three days after Rosch turned 18 on October 6 1944, the young German soldier, along with his platoon, was stationed on a farm in Goirle, near Tilburg in the Netherlands, when Allied forces fired on them. He was about to hide in the basement along with his comrades when he noticed that the two children of the farmer who owned the land seemed oblivious to the danger that was on them and continued to play in the courtyard.
He ran to them, took each in his arms and brought them into the safety of the basement. He again ran outside to position himself on the other side of the courtyard when a grenade hit him right at the spot where the children were earlier. Rosch was killed instantly.
“His corpse was completely torn apart, there were body parts everywhere,” according to one who witnessed the appalling scene.
As so oft before after the war, hypocrisy ruled. There were no issues channelling Nazi war criminals to the United States, United Kingdom and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, under the guise of Operation Paperclip and other similar operations. Where many of them received great jobs and even had awards named after them.
However, when it got to honour this young man, who saved two children and as a result, paid the ultimate price himself—it suddenly was a problem.
Rosch was a German soldier, and the enemy, therefore, his story was kept private after the war. The Dutch did not show any sympathy towards the German soldiers who had occupied their country during the war.
According to Herman van Rouwendaal, a former city councillor of the area, Karl-Heinz Rosch’s story was kept under wraps for 60 years, due to the fact that he was an enemy.
“Because he was just a damn Kraut,” were his exact words.
Even his parents and grandparents did not know how Rosch died. It was not until when the rescued children gave their testimonies that the story of the young German soldier’s sacrifice was made known to the public.
But in 2008, change in how the Dutch treated the Germans became palpable that then 76-year-old Rouwendaal, along with his friends, decided to make a push that would make amends to the one-of-a-kind, historical image.
“Some Dutch are caught in a black-and-white way of thinking. The Germans were all Nazis, the Dutch were all good. That there were also unsavoury characters among us, who for example betrayed Jews and robbed them, one does not like to hear,” he commented.
However, the monument honouring young German soldier Karl-Heinz Rosch was not put up without a fight.
Those who supported a memorial for Karl-Heinz Rosch were met with opposition in every way.
They had to stand against the argument that it was not right to make a statue for the enemy when the five men who came from Goirle, tied in stakes and were killed by German troops as a warning to resistance fighters did not have any memorial honouring their unreasonable deaths.
Then it was suggested to put up a monument for the five men next to the stakes which were preserved by the history museum in the locality and finally, put up Rosch’s statue nearby the five men’s monument. Through this, the two sides of the German occupation would be aptly represented – the all-too-common brutality and the scarcely evident show of humanity by some of the enemy soldiers.
However, after much discussion, the city council still turned down the making of Rosch’s monument saying that one in honour of a Wehrmacht soldier would still be “too socially sensitive”. Besides, they did not want to make Goirle a pilgrimage site for the German neo-Nazis. Not only was the state funding for the said statue refused, but the city council also refused to have the monument displayed in any public area—a resolution regarded wrong by many Dutch.
Being turned down by the government did not, however, dampen the desire of the monument’s supporters to see through to its success. They did a fundraising drive to have the needed funds for its erection.
Artist Riet van der Louw depicted Karl-Heinz Rosch as he was – a Wehrmacht soldier complete with the steel helmet many would instantly recognize and had come to hate. But it also showed the extent of compassion he extended to Jan and Toos Kilsdonk, the two children who were tucked in each of his arms as he carried them to safety.
“We will not be honouring the Wehrmacht, but rather the humanity of a young German soldier,” van Rouwendaal strongly pointed out during the drive for Karl-Heinz Rosch’s memorial.
On November 4, 2008, a bronze statue was erected on private property in Goirle in memory of Karl-Heinz Rosch. The statue is considered to be the only monument in the world to a German World War II soldier who was part of an occupying force.
Just consider this, less than a week before saved the 2 children and was killed, Karl Heinz had still been a child himself.
Many thanks to my friend Norman Stone for drawing my attention to the story.
I am passionate about my site and I know you all like reading my blogs. I have been doing this at no cost and will continue to do so. All I ask is for a voluntary donation of $2, however if you are not in a position to do so I can fully understand, maybe next time then. Thank you.
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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 physics community. Numerically, it has been estimated that a total of 1,145 university teachers, in all fields, were driven from their posts, which represented about 14% of the higher learning institutional staff members in 1932–1933.Out of 26 German nuclear physicists cited in the literature before 1933, 50% emigrated. Qualitatively, 11 physicists and four chemists who had won or would win the Nobel Prize emigrated from Germany shortly after Hitler came to power, most of them in 1933.These 15 scientists were: Hans Bethe, Felix Bloch, Max Born, Albert Einstein, James Franck, Heinrich Gerhard Kuhn, Peter Debye, Dennis Gabor, Fritz Haber, Gerhard Herzberg, Victor Hess, George de Hevesy, Erwin Schrödinger, Otto Stern, and Eugene Wigner. Britain and the United States were often the recipients of the talent which left Germany. The University of Göttingen had 45 dismissals from the staff of 1932–1933, for a loss of 19%.
Eight students, assistants, and colleagues of the Göttingen theoretical physicist Max Born left Europe after Hitler came to power and eventually found work on the Manhattan Project, thus helping the United States, Britain and Canada to develop the atomic bomb; they were Enrico Fermi,[50] James Franck, Maria Goeppert-Mayer, Robert Oppenheimer (who was American, but had studied under Born), Edward Teller, Victor Weisskopf, Eugene Wigner, and John von Neumann. Otto Robert Frisch, who with Rudolf Peierls first calculated the critical mass of U-235 needed for an explosive, was also a Jewish refugee.
Max Planck, the father of quantum theory, had been right in assessing the consequences of National Socialist policies. In 1933, Planck, as president of the Kaiser Wilhelm Gesellschaft (Kaiser Wilhelm Society), met with Adolf Hitler. During the meeting, Planck told Hitler that forcing Jewish scientists to emigrate would mutilate Germany and the benefits of their work would go to foreign countries. Hitler responded with a rant against Jews and Planck could only remain silent and then take his leave. The National Socialist regime would only come around to the same conclusion as Planck in the 6 July 1942 meeting regarding the future agenda of the Reichsforschungsrat (RFR, Reich Research Council), but by then it was too late.
Hans Geiger was a German physicist. He is best known as the co-inventor of the detector component of the Geiger counter and for the Geiger–Marsden experiment which discovered the atomic nucleus.
In 1925, Geiger accepted his first teaching position, which was at the University of Kiel, Germany. Here, he and Walther Müller improved the sensitivity, performance, and durability of the counter, and it became known as the “Geiger-Müller counter.” It could detect not only alpha particles but also beta particles (electrons) and ionizing photons. The counter was essentially in the same form as the modern counter.
In 1929, Geiger moved to the University of Tübingen (Germany), where he was named professor of physics and director of research at the Institute of Physics. In 1929, while at the Institute, Geiger made his first observations of a cosmic-ray shower. Geiger continued to investigate cosmic rays, artificial radioactivity, and nuclear fission after accepting a position in 1936 at the Technische Hochschule in Berlin, a position he held until his death. In 1937, with Otto Zeiller, Geiger used the counter to measure a cosmic-ray shower
Beginning in 1939, after the discovery of atomic fission, Geiger was a member of the Uranium Club, the German investigation of nuclear weapons during World War II. The group splintered in 1942 after its members came to believe (incorrectly, as it would later transpire) that nuclear weapons would not play a significant role in ending the war.
Although Geiger signed a petition against the Nazi government’s interference with universities, he provided no support to colleague Hans Bethe (winner of the 1967 Nobel Prize in Physics) when he was fired for being Jewish.
Politicization of the German academia under the Nazi regime had driven many physicists, engineers, and mathematicians out of Germany as early as 1933. Those of Jewish heritage who did not leave were quickly purged from German institutions, further thinning the ranks of academia. The politicization of the universities, along with the demands for manpower by the German armed forces (many scientists and technical personnel were conscripted, despite possessing technical and engineering skills), substantially reduced the number of able German physicists.
The German nuclear weapons program (German: Uranprojekt; informally known as the Uranverein; English: Uranium Club) was an unsuccessful scientific effort led by Germany to research and develop atomic weapons during World War II. It was mainly unsuccessful because of the immigration, purge and murder of so many brilliant scientists. The scientists that remained and worked in the Uranium Club weren’t brilliant enough to figure out that their work was leaked to foreign intelligence agencies.
From April through December of 1945, ten of Nazi Germany’s greatest nuclear physicists were detained by Allied military and intelligence services in a kind of gilded cage at Farm Hall, an English country manor near Cambridge. The physicists knew the Reich had failed to develop an atomic bomb, and they soon learned, from a BBC radio report on August 6, that the Allies had succeeded in their own efforts to create such a weapon. But what they did not know was that many of their meetings and private conversations were being monitored and recorded by British agents.
Just imagine what could have happened if Hitler did not have such a hate for the Jews. His own hate lost him the war.
I am passionate about my site and I know you all like reading my blogs. I have been doing this at no cost and will continue to do so. All I ask is for a voluntary donation of $2, however if you are not in a position to do so I can fully understand, maybe next time then. Thank you.
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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 Reich, but it also comes with a warning. Nowadays there is education on the far right and far left without any critical thinking being encouraged. There is a great danger in this.
From the 1920s onwards, the Nazi Party targeted German children as a special target audience for its propaganda messages. These messages emphasized that the Party was a movement of youth: dynamic, resilient, forward-looking, and hopeful.
Millions of German youngsters were won over to Nazism in the classroom and through extracurricular activities. In January 1933, the Hitler Youth had approximately 100,000 members, but by the end of the year this figure had increased to more than 2 million. By 1937 membership in the Hitler Youth increased to 5.4 million before it became mandatory in 1939. The German authorities then prohibited or dissolved competing youth organizations.
Soon after the Enabling Act of 1933 had been passed, Jewish teachers and professors were dismissed from German schools and universities. By April 1933, there were no Jewish teachers remaining in schools attended by ‘Aryan’ students, a racial term used by the Nazis to describe the Germanic peoples.
All teachers had to join the Nazi Teachers’ Association, which vetted them for political and racial suitability. By 1939, 97 per cent of teachers belonged to it. Teachers had to go to summer school so they could teach Nazi ideas effectively. Pupils were encouraged to inform the authorities if teachers did not teach and support Nazi ideas.
In the educational system, Jewish children regularly experienced ridicule, from both their peers and teachers. For example, Jewish children would be sent to the back of the classroom to reiterate to the non-Jewish German children the notion that they were inferior to them. Additionally, “teachers would begin to pick out Jewish students in classrooms to use as examples during biology lessons about racial impurity. Jewish children would be told to stand at the front of the class, whilst teachers pointed to their eyes, ears, nose, mouth, and hair, comparing these to characteristics on Nazi propaganda sheets”. Eventually, the Jewish children were completely segregated from the non-Jewish German children in schools.
The lines on the blackboard ,on the picture above translate to “The Jew is our greatest enemy! Beware of the Jew” While 2 Jewish students stand next to the black board.
Textbooks were rewritten, especially in history and biology, to promote Germany’s ‘greatness’, Aryan ‘supremacy’ and anti-Semitism. Children’s Stories and Textbooks were used as Propaganda tools. Young people were even encouraged to act as propagandists for the Third Reich.
Additionally, after-school activities and weekend trips were regularly sponsored by the Hitler Youth and the League of German Girls. These activities often acted as recruitment meetings for the participating school children. The Hitler Youth combined sports and physical outdoor activities with Nazi ideologies. Likewise, the League of German Girls emphasized collective athletics such as rhythmic gymnastics, which “German health authorities deemed less strenuous to the female body and better geared to preparing them for motherhood”. This was also used for public display. Authorities wanted these sports and activities to encourage “young men and women to abandon their individuality in favor of the goals of the Aryan collective”.
The Nazis tried to create a global ‘brand’ for the NSDAP. For this they would also children from the Hitler Youth and the League of German Girls. They would even go as far as China. The picture below was taken in China in 1935.
The Nazis started in 1933 to introduce their education curriculum. Six years before they started WWII. Six years of creating young willing followers of the Nazi ideology. All of this did not start on the battlefield but in the classrooms. Creating a feeling or sense of belonging to a cause is a powerful and seductive tool.
As I said at the start of the blog, education is key to fight ignorance and racism. But if not done in a proper way and without any critical thinking incorporated in the curriculum, it will do the opposite and create ignorance and racism.
There is a trend in education at the moment where something doesn’t suit a certain narrative it gets cancelled or ridiculed. Especially in reference to history. This is the way the Nazis got a hook into education.
So this is a warning to all educators, unless you are eager to let something like the holocaust again, allow your students to absorb all aspects of history, good and bad. Don’t cancel things that don’t suit you but look at the bigger picture.
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The title is the translation of a line of a Dutch song called ‘Blauw’ or “Blue”. I was listening to it in my car yesterday, while I was on my way to the Covid 19 vaccination centre.
That particular line stuck with me. That is exactly what I go through every time I do an article about the very young Holocaust victims. Seeing them, or rather seeing a picture of them, only takes a second but the thought last forever. I don’t how may seconds I have seen pictures of children, all I know there faces stay with me
The picture above is of Rolf Dirk Ullmann, he was born on March 31,1943 in Westerbork, the Netherlands and was murdered in Auschwitz on October 8,1944. He was only about 18 months old.
He was first transported to Theresienstadt on January 20,1944. On October 6,1944, he was transported to Auschwitz. He arrived on October 8, he was murdered.
His first and last steps he took, were in a concentration camp. His first words, if any, were uttered in a concentration camp. He got his first and his last feed in a concentration camp. All he ever knew was captivity and hate from those who put him there.
His mother Edith Ullmann-Fleischmann was born in Ebeslbach, Bavaria, Germany on October 31,1912. I don’t know for sure but I reckon she escaped Germany when the Nazis took power. More then likely she would have ended up in Westerbork, which was a refugee centre for Jews who escaped Germany and Austria prior to the outbreak of World War 2.
She ended up in Westerbork again during the war. This time it was a concentration camp, a so called transit camp. Here she gave birth to her son, Rolf Dirk Ullmann.
Edith also had a daughter, Ellen Wilhelmina Ullmann. She was born in the Netherlands on September 15,1939 in the town of Oud-Beijerland, which translates in to Old Bavarialand.
Ellen Wilhelmina was also murdered in Auschwitz on October 8,1944. Only a few weeks after her 5th birthday.
Edith Ullmann-Fleischmann was murdered on October 9, 1944 , a day after her children, In Auschwitz Birkenau. I don’t know why she was murdered a day later. I can also imagine after seeing her children being murdered, she gave up the will to live. As a parent I can fully understand that.
These 3 innocent souls are just a few of the 6 million Jews killed during the holocaust. Six million seconds, 1.666.66 hours or 69.44 days. But as the title said already, to me seeing every picture takes a second, the thoughts will last forever.
It is up to all of us to NEVER EVER let there be another Holocaust.
Where some see shoes, I see a father desperately comforting his daughter telling her everything will be fine, where he knows it won’t be fine ever again.
Where some see shoes, I see missed opportunities of getting to know the people who wore them.
Where some see shoes, I see the sad face of a little boy who is just so exhausted after a train journey. Not a luxurious journey on the way to visit his grandparents or on a short vacation. A train journey packed with so many others, strangers, like cattle, Deprived from food and water.
Where some see shoes, I see an old woman who only celebrated her 99th birthday last week, but has now been killed in a gas chamber.
Where some see shoes, I see a teacher, a musician, an artist, a Doctor, a home maker, a cleaning lady, a garbage man, a lover, a poet, a child.
I see more than shoes. I see lives destroyed. futures disrupted, potential unfulfilled all because of hate.
I see more than shoes, I also see an opportunity for prayer and meditation any way of showing love to their souls wherever they may be now.
History of Sorts 
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