Category Archives: Second world war

‘It’s absolutely insane’: the US-based camp where Jews guarded Nazis

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Semi-animated Netflix documentary short reveals the secret story of the Jewish soldiers who watched over prisoners of war on US soil

Too vast in scope to be contained within war drama, the Holocaust movie constitutes an entire genre unto itself, collecting a potentially infinite number of tragedies great and small. The history of the 20th century’s most massive atrocity comes with thousands of footnotes now gradually expanded upon by media depicting the unsung courage and untold evil. Israeli documentary film-makers Daniel Sivan and Mor Loushy singled out one such extraordinary tale for their latest joint project, Netflix’s short film Camp Confidential, drawing attention to a highly covert military operation only recently released from behind redaction-marker bars. “The first thing is, when producers Benji and Jono Bergmann approached us with this and told us of the story, we didn’t believe it,” Sivan tells the Guardian. “It was just so out-there.”

The black-op facility tucked away in northern Virginia’s Fairfax county sounds like something out of a pulp paperback: Jewish soldiers, many of them refugees from the devastation in Europe, watched over Nazi prisoners of war in a surreally domestic setting. Known as PO Box 1142, it housed such notables as spymaster Reinhard Gehlen and rocket scientist Wernher von Braun. But those in charge of the base were also tasked with maintaining a baseline quality of life for the inmates, leading to bizarre scenes such as a department store outing with former members of the Third Reich to purchase unmentionables for their wives. Bulldozed after the war and buried in secrecy until the National Parks Service unearthed some remnants in the early 2000s, the clandestine camp now doubles as a cautionary tale for modern Jews and a memorial for those who came before them.

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Former Nazi camp secretary goes on trial over murders of 11,000 people

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Irmgard Furchner, who tried to flee last month, is accused of complicity in killings at Stutthof death camp

A 96-year-old former secretary at a Nazi concentration camp has gone on trial in Germany for alleged complicity in the murder of more than 11,000 people imprisoned there, three weeks after she attempted to flee the proceedings.

Irmgard Furchner was pushed into the court in Itzehoe, northern Germany, strapped into a blue ambulance wheelchair and clutching a brown cloth bag. A silk patterned scarf, sunglasses and a medical mask covered her face.

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El Alamein, Dresden and a cold war spy: the incredible life of Victor Gregg

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A celebration of the achievements of the Britain’s oldest para veteran, who died last week aged 101

I first met Victor Gregg on a freezing afternoon in 2009 when we were to talk about his experiences in the second world war.

He was 90 and had sent me an email saying he would pick me up at Winchester station. When I arrived there was no sign of him. After 10 minutes a car parked up the road flashed its lights. It was Vic practising a routine he had learned more than 50 years earlier in the Western Desert, when Rifleman Gregg was assigned to Vladimir Peniakoff, the founder of “Popski’s Private Army”, a unit of British special forces. Vic’s job was to drive thousands of miles, alone, through the dunes, carrying stores and intelligence to Popski’s contacts. Vic said Popski had told him: “Before you go in, suss out how you are going to get out.” This was a life lesson for Vic, I had just been “sussed out” by him before going further.

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Secretary of Nazi concentration camp told judge she wouldn’t attend trial

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Irmgard Furchner, 96, was arrested after failing to turn up at court and absconding from retirement home

A 96-year-old woman who was arrested on Thursday after failing to turn up for the start of her trial in Germany on charges of aiding and abetting the murder of thousands of concentration camp prisoners had warned the judge in advance that she would not show up.

Irmgard Furchner was discovered about 38 miles from the courtroom after escaping her retirement home in a taxi, which dropped her off at an underground station in the early hours of the morning. She had written to the judge that to “avoid embarrassment” and due to her “advanced age and physical impediments” she would not be attending the trial.

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‘Another miracle’: boy’s escape from Auschwitz train is made into opera

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Push will be performed in Boortmeerbeek, where Simon Gronowski fled to safety, nine days before his 90th birthday

The 90th birthday of Simon Gronowski, who at the age of 11 escaped a train destined for Auschwitz thanks to three Belgian resistance fighters, is being honoured with the staging of an opera inspired by his story near the rail tracks where he fled the Nazis eight decades ago.

Sitting alongside Gronowski during Sunday’s performance in Boortmeerbeek, a village north-east of Brussels, will be the sculptor Koenraad Tinel, whose elder brother was the Flemish SS guard who ordered him and his mother, Chana, on to the train on 19 April 1943. Chana did not escape from the transport and was killed in the gas chambers on arrival at the death camp.

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We’re told not to bottle up bad experiences – but a stiff upper lip can be for the best | Adrian Chiles

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As an inveterate over-sharer, I learned a lesson this week from a former army nurse. Perhaps airing our worst moments gives them too much space to grow

Sometimes people I speak to on my radio programme say something that will stay with me for a long time. Marguerite Turner, 98, said two such things to me last week. She was talking about her work in the second world war. Her most vivid memory is of a single night in May 1942. As a nurse in the Voluntary Aid Detachment, she was stationed in the south of England at a large private house being used as a medical facility. Around midnight, she stepped outside to take a break in the blissful scented silence of the garden. Then: “I heard a sort of engine noise from somewhere. There was no light. The noise grew louder and louder, then a whole lot of planes flew over. You couldn’t see them; they were so high up. They went on and on. I knew they must be ours because there was no one shooting at them. I stood listening in that garden. Then they grew fainter and fainter, obviously going somewhere.”

Those planes, it turned out, were among the first of Bomber Harris’s so-called “thousand bomber raids” on German cities. That night the target was Cologne. Nearly 500 Germans were killed outright and 45,000 were made homeless. Forty-three of the aircraft she had heard didn’t return. And there, deep in the darkness a long way down, stood this young nurse, her tranquillity overwhelmed by the deafening din of violence. Seventy-nine years on, the viciously juxtaposed smell and sound are with her as if it was yesterday. As she puts it: “The scent of lilac and a curtain of engines.”

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Former Nazi concentration camp secretary, 96, faces trial

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Irmgard Furchner faces charges of aiding and abetting the murder of thousands of prisoners at Stutthof

A 96-year-old woman who worked as a secretary for a Nazi concentration camp commandant is to face trial in northern Germany on Thursday on charges of aiding and abetting the murder of thousands of prisoners.

Irmgard Furchner, who was just 18 when she started work at Stutthof camp on the Baltic coast in Nazi-occupied Poland, is the first woman to stand trial in decades over crimes connected to the Third Reich.

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Unsung hero: how ‘Mr Radio Philips’ helped thousands flee the Nazis

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In June 1940, a Dutch salesman, acting as a consul in Lithuania, issued Jewish refugees with pseudo visas to escape Europe. His remarkable story is only now being told

He helped save more Jewish lives than Oskar Schindler, but while the brave deeds of the German industrialist were known around the world because of an Oscar-winning film, few know the name Jan Zwartendijk, a Dutch radio salesman who helped thousands of Jews flee Nazi-occupied Europe.

Now a book by the celebrated Dutch writer Jan Brokken seeks to rescue Zwartendijk from obscurity, as well as other courageous officials who bent the rules to help several thousand Jews trapped between Nazi Europe and the Soviet Union.

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Wife of a Spy review – wartime mystery thriller of double and triple dealing

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Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s old-fashioned drama delivers big performances and intriguing plot twists

Kiyoshi Kurosawa has probably long since got used to seeing the words “no relation” after his name; and this Japanese film-maker has in any case established his own distinctive, valuable presence in Asian cinema. Just two years ago, he released his complex drama To the Ends of the Earth, and now, working with Ryû Hamaguchi as co-writer, he has created this excellent wartime mystery thriller, which won the Silver Lion at last year’s Venice film festival: an old-fashioned drama replete with big performances and plot twists, double-cross and triple-cross. It’s like a three-quarter scale version of a Lean epic, a mid-level Zhivago or English Patient, but all the more intriguing for being relatively modest in scope.

Yû Aoi is outstanding as Satoko, a movie actor in 1940 Kobe in Japan, married to Yûsaku (Issey Takahashi), a prosperous international trader whose liberal politics and contact with foreigners makes him frowned upon in increasingly nationalist Japan. Yûsaku is visited by his old schoolfriend Taiji (Masahiro Higashide), who is now in police uniform, and caught up in the new fascist enthusiasm. A gulf between the two is opening up, despite Taiji having not got over his erstwhile crush on Satoko. Something sinister is in the air, and when Yûsaku comes back from a business trip to Japanese-controlled Manchuria, he is stunned by evidence of war crimes carried out there by Japan’s Kwantung army. Disgusted by his country, he plans to pass on details to the international community and chiefly the Americans: Satoko realises that this makes her the wife of a spy and the question of her own personal and political loyalties, and her husband’s, are a tense enigma to the very end.

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Porcelain seized by Nazis goes up for auction in New York

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Prized collection smuggled across Europe by Jewish owners in 1930s expected to fetch more than $2m

A collection of prized Meissen porcelain smuggled across Europe after its Jewish owners were forced to flee the Nazis and later procured for Hitler before being uncovered in a salt mine by the “Monuments Men”, is to be auctioned in New York next month.

The extraordinary journey that the 18th-century artworks have undergone, reflecting the turmoil of the second world war years, has been reconstructed by art historians and restitution lawyers before their sale by Sotheby’s, the international auction house.

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Josephine Baker to become first Black woman to enter France’s Pantheon

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Performer who became part of the French resistance will be moved to the mausoleum in November

The remains of Josephine Baker, a famed French-American dancer, singer and actor who also worked with the French resistance during the second world war, will be moved to the Panthéon mausoleum in November, according to an aide to President Emmanuel Macron.

It will make Baker, who was born in Missouri in 1906 and buried in Monaco in 1975, the first Black woman to be laid to rest in the hallowed Parisian monument.

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Polish appeals court overturns ruling against Holocaust historians

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Case has raised questions about freedom to research Poland’s wartime past

A Polish appeals court has overturned a ruling against two leading Holocaust historians accused of defamation, in a closely watched case that raised questions about the freedom to research Poland’s second world war past.

The civil case was brought against Prof Barbara Engelking and Prof Jan Grabowski for a book they co-edited about the complicity of Catholic Poles in the genocide of Jews during Nazi Germany’s occupation of Poland.

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Poland’s president signs bill to curb claims on property seized by Nazis

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Move to limit Jewish people’s opportunity to seek restitution sparks furious response from Israel

Poland’s president has decided to sign a bill that would set limits on the ability of Jews to recover property seized by Nazi German occupiers and retained by postwar communist rulers, drawing fury from Israel, which said the law was antisemitic.

“I made a decision today on the act, which in recent months was the subject of a lively and loud debate at home and abroad,” Andrzej Duda said in a statement published on Saturday. “After an in-depth analysis, I have decided to sign the amendment.”

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How the ‘art of the insane’ inspired the surrealists – and was twisted by the Nazis

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The author of an acclaimed new book tells how Hitler used works by psychiatric patients in his culture war

On a winter’s day in 1898, a stocky young man with a handlebar moustache was hurrying along the banks of a canal in Hamburg, north Germany. Franz Karl Bühler was in a panic, fleeing a gang of mysterious agents who had been tormenting him for months. There was only one way to escape, he thought. He must swim for it. So he plunged into the dark water, close to freezing at this time of year, and struck out for the far side. When he was hauled on to the bank, soaked and shivering, it became clear to passersby that there was something odd about the man. There was no sign of his pursuers. He was confused, perhaps insane. So he was taken to the nearby Friedrichsberg “madhouse”, as it was known then, and taken inside. He would remain in the dubious care of the German psychiatric system for the next 42 years, one of hundreds of thousands of patients who lived near-invisible lives behind the asylum walls.

Bühler’s incarceration disturbed him, but it also marked the beginning of a remarkable story, one in which he played a leading role. It reveals the debt art owes to mental illness, and the way that connection was used to wage history’s most destructive culture war.

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Amsterdam ‘stumbling stones’ commemorate gay victims of Nazis

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Four brass memorial plaques embedded in street remember Jews and resistance fighters

More than 75 years after they were murdered in the gas chambers or shot, gay victims of Nazi persecution were remembered with “stumbling stones” laid in Amsterdam this week.

The Netherlands has about 8,500 Stolpersteine, (stumbling stones), the brass memorial plaques embedded in the street that call on passers-by to remember individual victims of the Nazi genocide and oppression, a mental “stumbling” that forces pedestrians to reckon with the past.

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Exhibition to show 50 contemporary portraits of Holocaust survivors

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Imperial War Museum display shows survivors alongside younger generations of their families

When Kitty Hart-Moxon, 97, was recently asked to choose one object that symbolised the horrors she survived at the hands of the Nazis in Auschwitz, Belsen, and on death marches, she had no doubts.

A glass container encasing the preserved tattooed numbers she had cut out of her own arm and also that of her mother, Rosa Lola, which she keeps in a cupboard at her home in Harpenden, Hertfordshire, is a shocking, tangible reminder.

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Anger as Poland plans law that will stop Jews reclaiming wartime homes

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Daughter of Holocaust survivor pledges to continue her fight for family property seized by Nazi occupiers

A few years ago, Shoshana Greenberg stood outside a building in Lodz, Poland, once owned by her family, with an old photograph in her hands and tears running down her face.

Greenberg, now 74 and living in Tel Aviv, was on a quest to reclaim property lost during the Holocaust. Her father was head of a prominent, wealthy Jewish family in Lodz that owned industrial buildings, residential homes and holiday properties.

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Revealed: the secret trauma that inspired German literary giant

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WG Sebald’s writing on the Holocaust was driven by the anger and distress he felt over his father’s service in Hitler’s army

His books are saturated with despair. Over and over again, his emotionally traumatised characters are caught – inescapably – in plots that doom them to a life of anguish. Often, they kill themselves.

Now, the psychological wounds and suicidal thoughts that blighted WG Sebald’s own life and secretly inspired him to begin writing fiction are to be laid bare for the first time in a forthcoming biography.

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Trump told chief of staff Hitler ‘did a lot of good things’, book says

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  • Remark shocked John Kelly, author Michael Bender reports
  • Book details former president’s ‘stunning disregard for history’

On a visit to Europe to mark the 100th anniversary of the end of the first world war, Donald Trump insisted to his then chief of staff, John Kelly: “Well, Hitler did a lot of good things.”

Related: Nightmare Scenario review: Trump, Covid and a lasting national trauma

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EU founding father Robert Schuman moves a step closer to sainthood

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Pope Francis gives ‘venerable’ status to post-war French statesman and supporter of European unity

Robert Schuman, a French statesman who was an early advocate for the bloc that evolved into the European Union, has moved ahead on the Catholic church’s path toward possible sainthood.

The Vatican said Pope Francis on Saturday approved a decree declaring the “heroic virtues″ of Schuman, a former prime minister and finance minister after the second world war. In 1950, as foreign minister, he developed a plan to promote European economic unity in hopes of furthering peace.

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