Tag Archives: Post WWII

Pogroms

I had a chat a few days ago with a friend. We were talking about the Holocaust and we both agreed that the Germans, specifically the German Nazis, were the main instigators and culprits of the world’s biggest crime. Without them, there may not have been a Holocaust or at least not on the scale.

However, the hate for Jews is not solely a German thing, there were many violent against the Jewish population of Europe and beyond. These acts have been happening for centuries. Even in the 11th and 12th centuries, there were Pogroms.

Before I go into some of the more recent Pogroms, it is important to understand what a Pogrom is. There are several definitions, following are just a few of them:

• An organized massacre and looting of helpless people, usually with the connivance of officials, specifically, such a massacre of Jews.

• A pogrom is generally thought of as a cross between a popular riot and a military atrocity, where an unarmed civilian, often urban, population is attacked by either an army unit or peasants from surrounding villages, or a combination of the two… Jews have not been the only group to suffer under this phenomenon, but historically Jews have been frequent victims of such violence. In mainstream usage, the word has come to imply an act of antisemitism.

• Originally used to describe violent and often murderous anti-Jewish persecutions (the most important of which took place in Kishinev) in Russia following the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881, more recently the term ‘pogrom’, from the Russian pogrom (total destruction, devastation) has also been used to refer to attacks on other groups.

As I stated earlier this was not just a German phenomenon, the actual word comes from the Russian language. There were pogroms everywhere in Europe and other parts of the world. Even in a peaceful place like Limerick in Ireland, my hometown.

The Limerick Pogrom

On the evening of 11 January 1904, Fr John Creagh took the pulpit during mass at the Redemptorist church at Mount St Alphonsus in Limerick. His congregation comprised the weekly meeting of the ‘Monday Division’ of the Arch-Confraternity of the Holy Family, a 6,500-strong male sodality which, under his then spiritual direction, was a powerful force in the city’s Catholic life. John Creagh, a Redemptorist and Spiritual Director of the Arch Confraternity of the Sacred Heart, gave a sermon at their weekly meeting attacking Jews. He repeated many Anti-semitic conspiracy theories, including that of ritual murder, and said that the Jews had come to Limerick “to fasten themselves on us like leeches and to draw our blood”. Dermot Keogh describes what happened after Creagh delivered his lecture calling for a boycott on 11 January 1904.

In 1904 there were roughly 35 Jewish families, about 150 people, in the Limerick urban area. They lived in Collooney Street (now Wolfe Tone Street), not far from the present-day O’Connell monument, and had established a Jewish burial ground at Kilmurray, near Castleconnell. The first attack on them came in January, a few days prior to Fr Creagh’s sermon, when, following a colourful Jewish wedding, Judge Adams commented on their commercial success and vibrancy. This led to a sour report in the Limerick Leader, which compared their prosperity to the poverty of the native population.

A few days later the matter was taken up by Fr John Creagh CSSR, spiritual director of the Arch Confraternity of the Sacred Heart, which had a membership of around 6,000.
From the pulpit Fr Creagh stated:

‘The Jews were once chosen by God. But they rejected Christ, they crucified Him. They called down the curse of His precious blood on their heads. They were scattered over the earth after the Siege of Jerusalem in 70 AD, and they bore away with them an unquenchable hatred for the name of Jesus Christ and his followers. The Jews came to Limerick apparently the most miserable tribe imaginable, with want on their faces, and now they have enriched themselves and can boast a very considerable house property in the city. Their rags have been exchanged for silk. How do the Jews manage to make their money? Some of you may know their methods better than I do, but it is still my duty to expose these methods. They go about as peddlers from door to door, pretending to offer articles at very cheap prices, but in reality, charging several times more than in the shops…They forced themselves and their goods upon the people and the people are blind to their tricks.”

Collooney Street where most Limerick Jews lived, was only a few minutes’ walk from the Redemptorist church. The hundreds who left the church after the meeting had to pass the top of Collooney Street on their way home; many were fired up by Creagh’s incendiary sermon. The Jewish community immediately sensed the menacing mood of the crowd-turned-mob and remained locked in their homes as the church militants passed by. Jewish shops, however, remained open and their owners felt menaced. One old Fenian, a member of the confraternity, single-handedly defended a shop from attack until the police arrived to mount a guard.

John Raleigh, a teenager (15 years of age), was arrested and incarcerated in Mountjoy Prison for one month for throwing a stone at the rabbi (which struck him on the ankle). Once released he returned home to a welcoming throng who were protesting that the teenager was innocent and that the sentence imposed was too harsh. While in prison Raleigh was called a “Limerick Jew slayer” by a warder, but Raleigh, who claimed he was innocent, was insulted by this and reported the incident to the chief warder. Later, after 32 Jews had left Limerick due to the pogrom, Creagh was disowned by his superiors, who said that “religious persecution had no place in Ireland”

The Jedwabne Pogrom

Reinhard Heydrich, chief of the Reich Main Security Office, issued orders on 29 June and 2 July 1941, for German forces to support ‘self-cleansing actions’ by the local population to rid itself of people alleged to have collaborated with the Soviet occupation, communists and Jews.

“No obstacles should be made for the efforts aimed at self-cleaning among anti-communist and anti-Jewish circles in the newly occupied territories. To the contrary, they should be instigated without leaving a trace, and if need be – intensified and directed on the right track, but in such a manner so that the local ‘self-defence circles’ could not refer to the orders or political promises made to them.” —Reinhard Heydrich

On 10 July 1941, hundreds of Jewish men, women, and children were massacred by local Poles in the town of Jedwabne.

Prior to the Holocaust, Jews made up between 60 and 70 per cent of the overall population of some 2,000 in Jedwabne. The town was situated in an area that was a hotbed of the antisemitic National Democratic Party (Endecja). After the German-Soviet invasion of Poland, Jedwabne was taken by the Soviets.

Shortly after the Soviets retreated, Polish townspeople rounded up hundreds of their Jewish neighbours and forced them to dismantle a monument of Vladimir Lenin that the Soviets had installed. From there the Jews were forced into a barn, where they were burned to death.

There is general agreement that German secret police or intelligence officials were seen in Jedwabne on the morning of 10 July 1941, or the day before, and met with the town council. Szmuel Wasersztajn’s witness statement in 1945 said that eight Gestapo men arrived on 10 July and met with the town authorities. Another witness said four or five Gestapo men arrived and “they began to talk in the town hall”. “Gestapo man” was used to refer to any German in a black uniform, Persak writes. The witnesses said they believed the meeting had been held to discuss murdering the town’s Jews.

According to the IPN’s( Institute of National Remembrance) report, on 10 July 1941 Polish men from nearby villages began arriving in Jedwabne “with the intention of participating in the premeditated murder of the Jewish inhabitants of the town”. Gross writes that a leading role in the pogrom was carried out by four men, including Jerzy Laudański and Karol Bardoń, who had earlier collaborated with the Soviet NKVD and were now trying to recast themselves as zealous collaborators with the Germans. He also writes that no “sustained organized activity” could have taken place in the town without the Germans’ consent. The town’s Jews were forced out of their homes and taken to the market square, where they were ordered to weed the area by pulling up grass from between the cobblestones. While doing this, they were beaten and made to dance or perform exercises by residents from Jedwabne and nearby.

The massacre is a controversial topic in Poland; as the main perpetrators of the massacre were Poles, it goes against the commonly accepted Polish narrative of the Holocaust.

The Kielce pogrom

The Kielce pogrom was an outbreak of violence toward the Jewish community centre’s gathering of refugees in the city of Kielce, Poland on 4 July 1946 by Polish soldiers, police officers, and civilians during which 42 Jews were killed and more than 40 were wounded. Polish courts later sentenced nine of the attackers to death in connection with the crimes.

The Pogroms of 1189 and 1190

From 1189 to 1190, the anti-Jewish pogroms in London, York, and numerous other cities and towns displayed cruelty and barbarity never before seen by English Jews. Indeed, these acts of violence distinguished themselves as some of the worst atrocities committed against European Jews in the Middle Ages

The catalyst for the anti-Jewish violence in 1189 and 1190 was the coronation of King Richard I on September 3, 1189. In addition to Richard’s Christian subjects, many prominent English Jews arrived at Westminster Abbey to pay homage to their new king. However, many Christian Englishmen harboured superstitions against Jews being present at such a holy occasion, and the Jewish attendees were flogged and thrown out of the banquet following the coronation. After the incident at Westminster Abbey, a rumour spread that Richard had ordered the English to kill the Jews. Christians attacked the predominantly Jewish neighbourhood of Old Jewry, setting the Jews’ stone houses on fire at night and killing those who tried to escape. When news of the slaughter reached King Richard, he was outraged, but only managed to punish a few of the assailants because of their large numbers.

When Richard left on the Third Crusade, the Jews of the village of King’s Lynn attacked a Jew who converted to Christianity. A mob of seafarers rose up against Lynn’s Jews, burned down their houses, and killed many. Similar attacks occurred in the towns of Colchester, Thetford, Ospringe, and Lincoln. While their houses were ransacked, the Jews of Lincoln managed to save themselves by taking refuge in the city’s castle. On March 7, 1190, attacks in Stamford, Lincolnshire killed many Jews, and on March 18, 57 Jews were massacred in Bury St. Edmonds. However, the bloodiest of the pogroms took place from the 16th to the 17th of March in the city of York, staining its history forever.

sources

https://www.historic-uk.com/HistoryUK/HistoryofEngland/Pogroms-1189-1190/

https://www.worldjewishcongress.org/en/news/this-week-in-jewish-history–hundreds-of-jews-massacred-in-jedwabne-pogrom

https://www.jpost.com/diaspora/antisemitism/article-711642

Click to access jews%20of%20limerick%2050.pdf

98 years ago: The Limerick Pogrom

https://www.theirishstory.com/2020/07/05/revisiting-the-limerick-pogrom-of-1904/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kielce_pogrom

What Were Pogroms?

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The Rawagede Massacre

I love the Netherlands. I was born and raised there and proud to call myself a Dutchman. Like all other countries in this world, it has pages in history that are not so glorious.

I believe that the best way for any country to deal with the darker days of its history is not to deny or run away from it. But rather confront it and deal with it.

The Rawagede massacre is one of those darker days in Dutch history.

On December 9, 1947, Dutch soldiers raided the West Javanese kampong Rawagede, now Balongsari. A large part of the male population of Rawagede, were killed without trial. Until the 1990s, there was hardly any attention to mass murder in the Netherlands. While such acts of violence were for decades, dismissed by the Dutch government as ‘excesses’, we now know that they fit into a pattern of frequent and structural extreme violence by the Dutch armed forces during the war of independence.

In the early morning of December 9, 1947, Dutch soldiers led by former resistance fighter Major Fons Wijnen attacked the West Javanese kampong Rawagede, now Balongsari, in the Krawang region. Until then, the Dutch armed forces had difficulty getting a grip on Krawang. Rawagede was seen as a centre of Indonesian resistance, and the Dutch military was looking for a local rebel leader, Lukas Kustario. He was not found. Yet, during a “cleansing operation,” almost the entire male population of the kampong was summarily executed without trial. According to Dutch military reports, 150 men were killed. However, various Indonesian sources speak of a death toll of 312 to 433 men.

Below are just some witness accounts:

“We had to make two rows, each row with seven men. Then we were shot from behind, from a distance of about two meters. My father, Bapak Locan, stood in line with me. When the soldiers fired, the man behind me was a shield. The bullet went right through him and only grazed my back. The poor man died instantly and fell on top of me. I felt his warm blood run down my face. Before the soldiers left, they shot each of them again to be certain we were dead. They shot me in the hand. I was the only one of the fourteen men who survived. My father was also dead.”
—Survivor Bapak Saih

“He was shot from behind. Together, with four girlfriends, I carried his body home on a bamboo bench that served as a stretcher. I washed him, wrapped him in cloths and buried him myself.”
—Ibu Wanti Binti Taswi, Eyewitness and she was widowed by the Rawagede massacre

“Yes, that’s how it was,” I think at that moment. “That was us, and those were the victims of our violence. Ordinary, sweet village people.”
—Veteran Jan Glissenaar

“We got prisoners of war, and those prisoners of war were shot several times when the cry was: go take a piss, which people then turned around and were shot in the back. […] Those were not incidental cases, that was the normal course of business.”
—Joop Hueting, Dutch East Indies (Indonesia) veteran

source

A cry to heaven-By Grant Gochin

Jewish nursery school in Lithuania. Almost no Jewish children survived in Lithuania.

Renowned cantors unite to give their voices to Baltic Truth premiere

This is a blog by my friend Grant Gochin who has been working tirelessly to expose the lies of the Lithuanian government about Lithuania’s part in the Holocaust.

There were very few survivors from Lithuania. In the villages, there were almost none. We know what happened in some locations because we have testimonies from some survivors.

Yakov Zak testified about the Lithuanian Holocaust: “The rabbi of Kelmė, Kalmen Benushevits, who had escaped to Vaiguva at the outbreak of the war, had been brought together with the Jews from Vaiguva. He had been forced to kneel next to the pit the entire day. He had quietly whispered a prayer, watching while the Jews were shot. After all the Jews were shot, he was shot as well.”

And

“The mystic religious melodies of the yeshiva students, their rabbis and leaders were eternally silenced. The town was ruined down to the foundations; the Jewish community of Kelmė was ruined forever. Peasants also related that while the yeshiva students were being taken to be shot, they did not weep. Like stone statues, they moved slowly, with their eyes raised to the sky, murmuring prayers.”

What is little known and seldom discussed is the particular cruelty and contempt that Lithuanians displayed towards observant Jews during the Holocaust. Frequently, Jews were tied by their beards to horses and dragged to their deaths as a form of public entertainment. They were beheaded, and publicly tortured. Everywhere, Torah scrolls and religious books and objects were destroyed and burnt.

My own cousin, Sheyne Beder of Birzai Lithuania, testified: One day, shortly after Dr. Levin was shot the Lithuanian murderers carried out the popular rabbi of Birzai, Rabbi Bernshteyn. He was taken to the Shirvenas Lake. There the rabbi was forced to duck underwater several times. Then the murders explained to the rabbi that he, Bernshteyn, was guilty of all the sins that Jews had committed against the world, and that he was responsible for the sins of all the Jews of Birzai. They set his beard on fire, burned his body with irons and finally shot him”.

For Lithuanians, the blood sport of torturing Jewish clergy was particularly entertaining. After starving and torturing the Jews, Lithuanians would take pleasure in murdering children in front of their parents and raping daughters in front of their fathers. By humiliating and destroying clergy in front of their congregations, spirituality and entire belief systems were upended, leaving only the human shell of the Jews left to murder.

Dvoyre Lazarsky of Ariogala Lithuania and Frida Praz of Vaiguva Lithuania, testified: “The rabbi of Raseiniai, Rabbi Katz, was not in the camp. He sat in his home and studied day and night. With a broken heart, he observed the annihilation of his congregation. But he could not help them. The heavens, to which he shouted and pleaded for mercy from the depths of his heart, remained mute. Lithuanian partisans once came to the old man’s house. They found him sitting and studying. They ordered him to get dressed and go along with them. He categorically refused to go along and announced that he knew where they were taking him, and that he was ready to be shot in his home. The murderers spared him two times, and went away. The third time, two partisans came and forced the rabbi to leave his house. Dvoyre personally saw the rabbi being taken away in the direction of Jurbarkas, to Zhuvelishkiai. The rabbi went slowly, marking his steps, his head bowed down low to the ground. The murderers took the rabbi to Zhuvelishkiai, and there they shot him”.

The government of Lithuania states “No partisan ever murdered a Jew”. The Lithuanian government has an entire government agency dedicated to Holocaust fraud. They constantly report how many Lithuanians were benevolent to Jews. A testimony from Elke Flaks, born in the town of Krazhiai is an example of Lithuanian benevolence: “When they arrived at the pit, Rabbi Kremerman held his youngest child in his arm. In his other hand he held a book, and he recited something for the children. The murderer permitted the rabbi and the children to say their confession before death, and ordered them to undress”.ADVERTISEMENT
Lithuania had the highest murder rate of Jews in all of Europe. It was safer to be a Jew in Nazi Germany, than it was to be a Jew in Lithuania. The participation of local Lithuanians in the Holocaust was massive, in some places, estimates indicate that 50% of the population participated. Not a single Holocaust perpetrator has ever been punished by the Government of Lithuania. Deliberately.

Khonon Reif, born in the town of Tirkshliai testified: “The last Jew brought to the marketplace was the town rabbi, Kalmen Magid. The bandits made the men line up in rows. The director of the Lithuanian gymnasium, Miltsius, placed the rabbi in front of all the Jews, cut off his beard with a pair of scissors and cut a crucifix into the hair on his head. Rabbi Kalmen Magid stood with his head bowed, weeping. All the Jews wept with him. The Lithuanian population of the town and from the surrounding countryside had assembled to watch this show, and they enjoyed it thoroughly. When they were finished with the rabbi, the murderers pulled out the town doctor, Khayim Lipman. He was from Kaunas. His parents and brother were sent to Russia as bourgeois in the spring of 1941. The Lithuanian murderer ordered the doctor to point out the Communists among the Jews. Dr. Lipman responded that there were no Communists among the Jews of Vekshniai. The Lithuanian murderers began to entertain the Lithuanian public. They forced the Jews to dance around the rabbi and clap their hands, and to fall down and get back up. If any Jew collapsed, the Lithuanians doused him with cold water and forced him to get back up and dance again.

Reif also testified: “Finally the Lithuanian murderers forced the rabbi to get onto a horse, and then they forced the assistant rabbi, Rabbi Bloch, to pour a bucket of water on Rabbi Magid’s head. On a nearby hill next to the study house stood the entire Lithuanian 11 intelligentsia” of the town, dressed in their holiday clothes, along with simple peasants. All of them watched as their Jewish neighbors were tormented, and they enthusiastically clapped as if they were watching a circus.

The German ordered all the Jews to line up, and each one had to pass by him. The German asked the happy Lithuanian “intellectuals” as each Jew passed him by: “Communist?”ADVERTISEMENT
The Lithuanians answered each time, “Yes, Communist!” At this, the German would strike the Jew with his whip. The Lithuanians would begin to applaud. The show at the marketplace and then at the synagogue yard lasted for more than three hours.

Khane Pelts testified: “In one group were the town rabbi, Rabbi Yitshok Bloch, his brother Reb Zalmen Bloch, Rabbi Azriel Rabinovitz, Rabbi Pinchas Elfand and several other pious Jews with long beards. Together with them were many students of the yeshiva. It was told that at the grave Rabbi Zalmen Bloch gave a speech to the Jews, telling them that they should die proudly for the glory of God’s name, repenting for the sins which the Jewish people had committed over the course of many years. Yitshok (Iske) Bloch (not a relative) also made a final speech. He was a Revisionist. He said to the murderers: “You are sprinkling the trees with our blood, and the floors will be washed with your blood in revenge.” Iske Bloch was sliced into pieces with knives. The rabbis’ beards were torn out along with pieces of flesh, and then they were shot”.

Malke Gilis testified about the daughter of a Rabbi: “Mrs. Elfant, born in Yelok, daughter of the rabbi in Yelok. As Mery Shlomovitz relates, Mrs. Heni Bloch (nee Blekhman) had begun to give birth at the pit. The Lithuanian murderers threw the unfortunate mother into the pit while she was still alive. The little, half-born child was dragged along after its mother as she was thrown into the pit. The Lithuanian murderers were doubled over with laughter at this tragic scene. Mery saw this incident with her own eyes, while she was standing not far from the pit”.

Yente Alter (nee Gershovitz) testified: “All day long on Thursday, June 26, 1941 the men continued to be tormented in various murderous ways. The town rabbi Shmuel Fundler and Shmuel Gershovitz had half their beards shaved off by the Germans, who chased them around the yard together with the rest of the men. The torture of the men became a daily program for the German murderers and their loyal assistants, the Lithuanian partisans.

She also testified: “There were lootings virtually every day. Any Lithuanian who wanted to, looted openly and freely. During the work the partisans tormented, bullied and mocked the Jews and their religion. They had a weakness for teasing, mocking and tormenting religious Jews. Once at work in the courtyard and park of the Polish Count Oginsky, Rabbi Shmuel Fundler was forced to get into harness instead of a horse. The rabbi could not withstand this, and suffered a heart attack. He lay dead on the spot. This was July 2 or 3 1941”.

No government has ever created and implemented such a sophisticated Holocaust revision program, as Lithuania. They are the only government in the world ever to go to court in order to defend the good reputation of someone who was a mass murderer of Jews.

Lithuania had a miniscule Jewish survival rate of 3.6%, the lowest in the world. Only 0.04% of Lithuanians have been proven to rescue Jews. Due to the intense pleasure Lithuanians derived from murdering Jewish clergy, almost none survived.

Every aspect of Jewish life became a target for dehumanization by creative Lithuanian perpetrators, and their Nazi enablers. Mass rape of young Jewish virgins was common. Rape is an act of violence and humiliation. In one well known case, it was combined with the destruction of personal identity and religion. Every component of their victims identity was stripped from them prior to their murder. JewishGen describes the events as follows:

People still talk about one particular grave in which 74 high school girls were shot. This is what happened: The Nazis and their local collaborators selected these girls from the school, used them for their own pleasure and than brought them to the mass grave sites to be killed. But then for a brief moment a miracle happened. A priest arrived and told the girls that he would convert them to Christianity, and thereby save them from being shot. Was this a sincere gesture on the part of the priest to save the girls? Or was it merely the commander’s cruel deception of the priest and the girls? These are still unanswered questions. It soon became clear to the girls that no such miracle had occurred when they saw the murderers making the preparations to execute them. And when the girls began to resist, they began shooting. One of the girls was able to grab hold of a half drunken murderer and began choking him. She was immediately fended off by another one of them who split her head open with his rifle. In this way everyone was killed on the spot and tossed into a mass grave. They say that this particular girl who put up a fight was tall and strong. Her name was Rochale Tsin. This is how all the girls were killed. Today they lie in the first grave by the entrance at the Koshan Memorial.

Jews were also incarcerated in their beautiful shuls, starved there for weeks, then often set on fire. Lithuanians did this to dehumanize us and to inspire doubt in our God, and destroy our souls, before murdering our bodies. It was a Chilllul Hashem of the worst kind, a desecration of God’s name and presence that ended 600 years of flourishing Jewish life.

Continuing Lithuanian Holocaust revisionism and their heroization of the murderers, is dehumanization of Jews. It is Holocaust triumphalism. Does this not compel us to demand justice?

On September 14, 2022, Cantor Dudu Fisher (of Lithuanian descent) will join with Cantor Daniel Singer (also of Lithuanian descent) to present the documentary, Baltic Truth. The documentary will address the massive fraudulent cover up of Lithuanian Holocaust crimes by the current government of Lithuania. Fisher and Singer are among two of the greatest Litvak Cantors in history. They will implore the heavens, as did Rabbi Katz, for mercy, from the depths of their souls. They will commemorate and memorialize our Jewish brothers and sisters, who were murdered with such delight and enthusiasm by their Lithuanian neighbors.

Reif also testified: “Rabbi Kalmen Magid ordered everyone to recite the Jewish confessional prayer, and did the same himself. Everyone sat hopelessly, recited Psalms and wept. In the second barn the women tore the hair out of their heads, kissed their small children, wept bitterly and wildly, and took leave of one another.

Cantors Fisher and Singer will recite the Confessional Prayer ordered by Rabbi Magid, since we are all that remain to give voice to our brethren.

Please note that should you be in New York on 9/14/22, and wish to participate, tickets are available at: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/baltic-truth-narrated-by-broadway-star-dudu-fisher-ft-live-concert-tickets-407980730347

Register on Eventbrite

We want you to know that Lithuanian Diplomats have been invited to attend.

We respectfully ask you to consider signing this petition presented by one of the documentary sponsors, The Israeli American Civic Action Network:

Israeli-American Civic Action Network

Please support this well worth and in my opinion noble cause.

source

https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/a-cry-to-heaven/

Renowned cantors unite to give their voices to Baltic Truth premiere

You Don’t Have to be a Rocket Scientist—A Monkey Can Do It!

The first animals to reach space were fruit flies that the United States launched aboard captured German rockets in 1947. However the first mammal in space was Albert II, a rhesus monkey launched by NASA who reached an altitude of 83 miles (134 km) on 14 June 1949. Albert was anesthetized during flight and implanted with sensors to measure his vital signs but died upon impact at re-entry.

Albert II was carried aboard a V2 rocket as well, though his fate was not as lucky as that of the fruit flies: a problem with the parachute on the recovery capsule sadly led Albert II to his death from the force of the impact upon landing.

Everything was proceeding smoothly until the parachutes were released, and failed to billow out to slow Albert II’s descent. About six minutes after he had been blasted from Earth, the six-pound monkey was killed upon his return, leaving a 10-foot-wide crater to mark the impact.

His distress throughout this tumultuous ordeal is preserved in electrocardiographic data captured by sensors attached to his furry body. David Simons, the Air Force project officer for V-2 animal studies, reported that Albert II’s heart rate was “clearly disturbed” by disorienting g-force shifts.

sources

https://www.spacelaunchschedule.com/space-news/first-monkey-in-space/

Who was the First Monkey to go into Space?

https://www.vice.com/en/article/vbgpdd/albert-first-primate-in-space-nasa-anniversary

A.B.C- The Boys from Argentina

ABC

“Mengele and Eichman tour
I was here last year due to my father’s Nazi hunt in the 50s, lovely small Restaurant, even met a man in his 90s who knew many Nazis. Even had dinner in the corner with him where Mengele and Eichman once sat. You wont find anything from the past inside like old tables or chairs,but the idea what folks were talking about back then was intriguing”

The above text is from a restaurant review posted on Tripadvisor in September 2018. The restaurant is the A.B.C restaurant in Lavalle 545, Buenos Aires, Argentina.

abc rest

I was always surprised where there were never any sanctions against Argentina, and other South American countries, but Argentina appears to have harboured and still does provide a safe haven for escaped Nazi war criminals.

The A.B.C restaurant is a prime example where Nazis dined and wined in plain sight. In 1950 Adolf Eichmann escaped with help from the Red Cross to Argentina m in 1952 his family followed him. Eichmann changed his name to Ricardo Klement.

ricardo

Joseph Mengele also moved to Argentina after he had been hiding ,more or less in plain sight, in Germany, In 1949 he fled to Argentina via Genoa in Italy, using the alias Helmut Gregor, also assisted by the Red Cross via a passport and Visa he obtained from them. Now I don’t want to be too critical of the Red Cross because the whole civil administration was a chaos in the ;ate 40s in Germany.

Mengele though soon started using his own name again, be it a with a slight Spanish angle to it as Jose Mengele.

Somewhere in 1953 both men met in the German style A.B.C restaurant where they held a party for another Nazi, the propagandist Johann von Leers, who worked for Goebbels and also wrote propaganda for Juan Perón. von Leers was moving to Egypt , so Mengele and Eichmann threw him some sort of goodbye party.

There were so many Nazis who received refuge in Argentina, there is a small town called Bariloche, which made international headlines in 1995  when it became known as a haven for Nazi war criminals, such as the former SS Hauptsturmführer Erich Priebke and SS officer Reinhard Kopps, known in Argentina as Juan Maler. Priebke had been the director of the German School of Bariloche for many years.

Donation

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Sources

BBC

https://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/the-long-road-to-eichmann-s-arrest-a-nazi-war-criminal-s-life-in-argentina-a-754486.html

 

 

 

 

The farce that was the Nuremberg Trials

Nuremberg

Today marks the 74th anniversary of the sentencing at the main Nuremberg trials.The sentencing took  two days, with the individual sentences read out on the afternoon of 1 October.

The Nuremberg trials were never really meant to serve justice. In one way I can understand it but on the other hand looking at the sentences handed out ,one can not escape the fact that it was really a window dressing exercise.

Of the 24 defendants the international tribunal found all but three of the defendants guilty. Twelve were sentenced to death, one in absentia,Martin Borman, and the rest were given prison sentences ranging from 10 years to life behind bars.

The fact that 3 of them got acquitted speaks volumes, Each one of those 24 men were involved in horrendous war crimes and genocide in one way or another, be it in actively participating or by facilitating No one should have walked out of that court a free man.

Those who did not get the death sentence were given very lenient sentences.

Albert Speer was pivotal in the Nazi crimes but he was very manipulative. His lies were believed and he was sentenced to 20 years. After his release he lived a wealthy life mainly from proceeds of stolen art.

Because the accused men and judges spoke four different languages, the trial saw the introduction of a technological innovation taken for granted today: instantaneous translation. IBM provided the technology and recruited men and women from international telephone exchanges to provide on-the-spot translations through headphones in English, French, German and Russian.

Strangely enough not one staff member of IBM were in the docks with the defendants. IBM played a crucial  role in the Holocaust  at all six phases: identification, expulsion from society, confiscation, ghettoization, deportation, and even extermination. Moreover, recently discovered  documents portray with crystal clarity the personal involvement and micro-management of IBM president Thomas J. Watson in the company’s co-planning and co-organizing of Hitler’s campaign to destroy the Jews.

There were subsequent trials but if you look at the amount of sentences it is absolutely shocking how so many got away with murder. Many of them got high positions in government bodies in Germany and the USSR,USA and the UK.

color

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Sources

https://www.history.com/topics/world-war-ii/nuremberg-trials

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/ibm-holocaust_b_1301691

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/ibm-holocaust_b_1301691

WikiPedia

 

 

The 1943 German law that denies justice to be done.

Justice

In 1943 a law was passed in Germany which gave all foreign Waffen SS members the German nationality by default.

This law still prevents extradition of WWII War criminals to be extradited to their native countries, because these men have the German nationality , and Germany does not extradite it’s own citizens.

These are just 2 examples of Dutch war criminals who received no or very little punishment for the crimes they committed during WWII.

Herbertus Bikker AKA The Butcher of Ommen

bIKKER

Herbertus Bikker was a Dutch war criminal. He was a member of the Waffen-SS. He served as a guard at the concentration  Erika near Ommen, in the Netherlands. His brutal treatment of the prisoners earned him his nickname ‘the Butcher of Ommen’

Bikker is the alleged murderer of Dutch resistance fighter Jan Houtman [nl] who was killed, twenty-seven years old, on 17 November 1944.

Following the end of World War II, he was sentenced to death by a Dutch court.  he managed to escape from prison in Breda on 26 December 1952 and fled to Germany, crossing the border at Ubbergen near Cleves. He settledd down in the city of Hagen, where he livedundetected until 1995. Following the law from 1943, foreign members of the Waffen-SS automatically received German nationality. Germany does not extradite its own nationals.

Although he was not extradited he was taken to court in Germany, . Bikker’s managed  to evade any jail time  to claim diminished responsibility due to illness.Following a breakdown and fainting in court,  neurologists advised against Bikker standing trial tHE Court was adjourned on 2 February 2004.

Bikker lived in Hagen as a pensioner until his death on 1 November 2008  which was only announced in 2009.

Siert Bruns AKA the Beast of Appingedam.

Siert

Siert Bruins was a a member of the Dutch Nazi party NSB. During the war he and his brother both joined the Waffen SS and fought at the eastern front.

Siert got wounded  at the front and  returned to the Netherlands where he  became a member of the SD. He was active around Delfzijl hunting members of the resistance.

He was sentenced to death in absentia by a Dutch court in 1949 for the murder of Dutch farmer and resistance member Aldert Klaas Dijkema. The German government refused to extradite him to the Netherlands. The death sentence was later revised to a life sentence.

In 1978, Bruins was tracked  down by Simon Wiesenthal in the German town Altenbreckerfeld. He was arrested and put on trial in Germany, in 1980, where he was found guilty for the murder of two Jewish brothers, Meijer en Lazarus Sleutelberg.He spent 5 years in jail for those murders.

In 2003, the Dutch minister Donner tried to convince the German authorities to send Bruins to the Netherlands, but without success

He went on trial again, in the western city of Hagen in September 2013 for the murder of Aldert Klaas Dijkema, in September 1944 in Appingedam near the German-Dutch border.However, the case was dropped when judges said there was insufficient evidence to proceed, partly because there were no witnesses left alive.

Bruins died on September 28,2015 aged 94.

 

These were only 2 examples but there are still dozens of so called German citizens who are walking around as free men.

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Sources

BBC

Dutch News.nl

Dutch Wikipedia

Trial International

 

 

 

Hitler’s Irish sister in law.

brdie

Bridget Dowling born on July 3, 1891 in Dublin. She grew up at Flemings Place, near Mespil Road.  She was still in her teens when she met Adolf Hitler’s half brother Alois Hitler, Jr. at the Dublin Horse Show in the RDS in 1909.

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Alois had pretended to be a wealthy hotelier who was touring Europe, but in fact he was a kitchen porter working in the Shelbourne Hotel in Dublin, which he later admitted to. He had left Austria  for, Dublin, Ireland, in 1896, aged 14, because of the  increasingly violent arguments with his father and the strained relationship with his stepmother Klara.Adolf’s mother.

Bridget fell for Alois’s charms and after a number of months courting in Dublin,the couple eloped to London in 1910 . mainly due to her family’s disapproval of her relationship with Alois, ,  They married on 3 June 1910 and later settled in Toxteth, Liverpool. On the 12th of March 1911, the couple had a baby boy called William Patrick,or Paddy.

The Census of England and Wales from 1911 shows that all three were  residing in Liverpool at 102 Upper Stanhope Street. Alois is listed as “Anton,” and wrote down the German word “sohn” (son) in reference to Patrick William.Bridget’s name is crossed out on the form as Cissy Fowling, instead, she appears as “Cissie Hitler”

cissy

In 1914 Alois left his wife and son and went to Germany. After WWI he pretended he had died. He had remarried although he was still married to Bridget, thus committing bigamy and he was charged with bigamy by the German authorities in 1924, but escaped conviction because Bridget intervened and divorced him even though she was a devout Roman Catholic.

Bridget raised her son as a lone parent  She moved to Highgate, North London, and took in lodgers to pay the bills.

Her son had moved to Germany in the 1930s and tried to capitalize on the Hitler name, he even got help from his uncle Adolf who got him a job in a bank. But William “Paddy” Hitler soon became an embarrassment for Adolf Hitler, especially after William threatened to tell the press that Hitler’s alleged paternal grandfather was actually a Jewish merchant. William moved back to the UK and immigrated to the US in 1939, where he eventually joined the US Navy in 1944.

us navy

In 1939, Bridget joined her son on a tour of the United States where he was invited to lecture on his infamous uncle. She decided to stay with her son in the USA Bridget settled in Long Island, New York, changing her name to Stuart-Houston, as did her son.

in 1947 William married  the German born Phyllis Jean-Jacques,The couple had four sons: Alexander Adolf (born. 1949), Louis (born. 1951), Howard Ronald (born died 1957–1989), and Brian William (born. 1965).

Howard Ronald Stuart-Houston, was a Special Agent with the Criminal Investigation Division of the Internal Revenue Service. He died in an a car crash on 14 September 1989,leaving behind no children.

Allegedly the other 3 sons of William made a  pact not to have children in order to end the Hitler bloodline, but Alexander denied there was an intentional pact to do so.

It is amazing to think that the Hitler bloodline is still continuing because of an Irish woman.

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Sources

Mail Online

Irish Central

Journal.ie

Independent.ie

 

 

 

 

The after war treatment of Dutch Jews.

jewish children

First of all let me tell you I am Dutch and I am proud to be Dutch. I love the country where I was born and where I grew up.

But I am not proud of some of its black pages in history.

I can understand why some Dutch bureaucrats and civil servants colluded with the German occupiers, most of them did this for self preservation. I understand it but I will never condone it.

This may sound like a contradiction but what happened after the war I can’t comprehend but yet I can understand. I can’t comprehend it because of the sheer ignorance and stupidity , but I can understand because of my personal dealings I had in the past with the Dutch civil service.

After the war some local authorities, and especially the authorities of the bigger cities like Amsterdam and the Hague, imposed fines on on hundreds of Jewish Holocaust survivors.

The City of Amsterdam collected several Million guilders(an equivalent of about $10 million)  from Holocaust survivors who were charged ground lease fees for periods they spent in hiding or in concentration camps. Many of the houses in question were used by Nazi occupation officers and local collaborates,  The Amsterdam authorities pursued Holocaust survivors for missed payments as late as 1947 and imposed fines on them for missing payments.

This is typically something some  Dutch civil servants.or rather ignorant pencil pushers, would do. Not looking outside the box, just at the books or the accounts and vigorously pursuing payments regardless of what the history was behind it.

amsterdam

In 2014 the Mayor of Amsterdam,van der Laan, a son of resistance fighters asked NIOD (the Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies) to research the cases.

Some of the money has since been reimbursed.

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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. To donate click on the credit/debit card icon of the card you will use. If you want to donate more then $2 just add a higher number in the box left from the PayPal link. Many thanks.

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Sources

NIOD

The Times of Israel

 

The effects of Operation Market Garden are still being felt today.

Garden

Operation Market Garden started on September 17 1944. It was supposed to end the war in the Netherlands.But the operation failed, as a result the war was prolonged for several months,compounded with one of the severest winters on record it resulted in a famine for the northern provinces.

POW

But there was more,as a form of reprisal the Germans started stealing everything valuable they could find. although Market Garden failed the Germans knew the war was coming to an end and they would be on the losing side.

Dr J.H. Smidt van Gelder, the director of the children’s hospital in Arnhem, stored 6 works of art in a bank vault for safekeeping during the Second World War.

Dr

One of the pieces was a painting called The Oyster Meal by Jacob Ochtervelt The paintings were looted in January 1945, when the Nazis plundered the town.Although the instructions were given not to loot the banks a German officer called Temmler paid no attention to those instructions.

Even Himmler had warned about Temmler, he said he would bring disrespect to the Nazi party, killing millions was okay, but stealing art was disrespectful.

The painting then made a bit of a mysterious journey. In 1971 was acquired by the property  Harold Samuel,  it had  painting reappeared on the Swiss art market ,a few decades after the war, where Harold Samuel bought it

Harold Samuel  bequeathed the painting to the City of London Corporation in 1987, on condition that they be shown permanently in Mansion House.

The Commission for Looted Art in Europe uncovered the history of the painting and discovered the rightful owners. Samuel’s daughters agreed to waive the condition so that The Oyster Meal could be returned to Charlotte Bischoff van Heemskerck, the daughter of Dr van Gelder,she is now aged 97.

It was returned to her in November 2017.

The painting went  on auction at Sotheby’s in July 2018, and was sold for estimated value 1.6 Million Pounds Sterling.

oyster meal

 

 

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Sources

BBC

Sotheby’s