SS uniforms, firearms, parachutes among Nazi memorabilia targeted in apparent thefts to order
War museums across the Netherlands are scrambling to tighten their security after raids by highly organised thieves targeting memorabilia linked to Adolf Hitler’s Waffen-SS and other parts of the Nazi regime.
Amid huge global demand for second world war memorabilia, museums in Ossendrecht, in north Brabant, and in Beek, Limburg, have been ransacked in recent days and months.
Continue reading...Justice minister vows to ‘find and judge’ vandals who defaced Oradour-sur-Glane
Vandals have scrawled graffiti denying the Holocaust on a wall in the village that was the site of the Nazis’ biggest massacre of civilians in France during the second world war.
The justice minister vowed on Saturday to bring those responsible to justice.
Continue reading...Sign hangs next to Nicolas Rousseau artwork in Verdun asking public for information
A 19th-century oil painting stolen from Nazi-occupied France during the second world war has gone on display in an attempt to trace its rightful owners, after being returned by the son of the German soldier who was ordered to take it.
After 76 years in Germany, the small untitled artwork by the French painter Nicolas Rousseau is back in France and being exhibited at the World Centre for Peace, Liberty and Human Rights in the north-eastern town of Verdun.
Continue reading...Salo Muller secured €50m from Dutch railway for transporting people to Nazi camps
A Holocaust survivor who successfully campaigned for the Dutch railway to pay compensation for transporting people to the Nazi concentration camps has tabled a legal claim against the German state over the wartime role of the Deutsche Reichsbahn.
Salo Muller, 84, whose parents were taken by rail from Amsterdam to the Dutch transit camp Westerbork, and on to their deaths at Auschwitz, is demanding an apology and financial recompense for about 500 Dutch survivors and about 5,500 next of kin.
Continue reading...Pleased at the verdict, insulted by the penalty: Manfred Goldberg tells of his reaction to last week’s conviction of Bruno Dey for his role in 5,000 deaths at Stutthof
They were both German teenagers when they arrived at Stutthof concentration camp within a few weeks of each other in 1944. One was a 17-year-old recruit to the SS, the other a 14-year-old Jewish boy who had already spent three years incarcerated by the Nazis.
Manfred Goldberg, now 90, doesn’t know if Bruno Dey, now 93, was one of the guards that watched his every move from a tower, ready to shoot at any sign of transgression. But he is convinced of Dey’s part in the deaths of thousands of inmates. The SS guards committed “crimes beyond description”, he told the Observer. “Atrocities of that magnitude cannot be forgotten.”
Continue reading...Graffiti spray-painted on a monument to Nazi soldiers in a small Canadian city is being investigated by police as a hate crime – a move that has prompted disbelief among human rights advocates.
Around 21 June, the words “Nazi war monument” were spray-painted on to a cenotaph commemorating soldiers in the 14th SS Division in an Ontario cemetery, the Ottawa Citizen reported.
Continue reading...Britain should acknowledge that millions were complicit in the crimes of empire, just as Germans like my grandfather enabled nazism
Before the second world war, remembering history served only to glorify nations, to stir up revanchism or to sanctify heroes. Then Germany invented Vergangenheitsbewältigung, the attempt to deal with its Nazi shame by collectively confronting the unspeakable crimes of the Third Reich rather than evading them. This process, which started at the end of the 60s after two decades of collective amnesia, allowed something positive to grow from a negative legacy: Germany’s rehabilitation and reconstruction into one of the strongest democracies in the world.
Germany’s culture of remembrance could inspire countries such as Britain which have trouble understanding that in order to transform the weight of the past into wealth, it must confront history’s shadows – not ignore them.
Continue reading...East West Street author Philippe Sands uncovers secrets and lies on the trail of Otto Wächter, his devoted wife – and the son brought up to believe his father was a decent man
In the 1960s, my brother and I often visited our grandparents in Paris, near the Gare du Nord. As children, we understood that the past was painful, that we should not ask questions. Their apartment was a place of silences, one haunted by secrets. They only really began to be addressed when I was in my 50s, the consequence of an invitation to deliver a lecture in Lviv, in Ukraine. Come talk about your work on crimes against humanity and genocide, it said.
Continue reading...Mass internment camps did not begin or end with the Nazis – today they are everywhere from China to Europe to the US. How can we stop their spread? By Daniel Trilling
At the start of the 21st century, the following things did not exist. In the US, a large network of purpose-built immigration prisons, some of which are run for profit. In western China, “political education” camps designed to hold hundreds of thousands of people, supported by a high-tech surveillance system. In Syria, a prison complex dedicated to the torture and mass execution of civilians. In north-east India, a detention centre capable of holding 3,000 people who may have lived in the country for decades but are unable to prove they are citizens. In Myanmar, rural encampments where thousands of people are being forced to live on the basis of their ethnicity. On small islands and in deserts at the edges of wealthy regions – Greece’s Aegean islands, the Negev Desert in Israel, the Pacific Ocean near Australia, the southern Mediterranean coastline – various types of large holding centres for would-be migrants.
The scale and purpose of these places vary considerably, as do the political regimes that have created them, but they share certain things in common. Most were established as temporary or “emergency” measures, but have outgrown their original stated purpose and become seemingly permanent. Most exist thanks to a mix of legal ambiguity – detention centres operating outside the regular prison system, for instance – and physical isolation. And most, if not all, have at times been described by their critics as concentration camps.
Continue reading...Ban, which also includes other Nazi propaganda books, follows decades of campaigning by Holocaust charities
Amazon has banned the sale of most editions of Hitler’s Mein Kampf and other Nazi propaganda books from its store following decades of campaigning by Holocaust charities.
Booksellers were informed in recent days that they would no longer be allowed to sell a number of Nazi-authored books on the website including Hitler’s autobiographical screed and children’s books designed to spread antisemitic ideas among children.
Continue reading...For more than three-quarters of a century, the story of Lidice has stood as haunting testimony of Czech suffering and victimhood at the hands of cruel Nazi occupiers.
The village, 16 miles from Prague, was razed to the ground, its adult male population murdered and its women and children transported to concentration camps – where the majority died – after Adolf Hitler singled it out in retribution for the assassination in 1942 of Reinhard Heydrich, deputy leader of the SS, by British-trained Czech and Slovak resistance fighters.
Continue reading...Historians can now pore over secret files from the papacy of Pius XII, who has long faced accusations of being a Nazi sympathiser
New light will be shed on one of the most controversial periods of Vatican history on Monday when the archives on Pope Pius XII – accused by critics of being a Nazi sympathiser – are unsealed.
A year after Pope Francis announced the move, saying “the church isn’t afraid of history”, the documents from Pius XII’s papacy, which began in 1939 on the brink of the second world war and ended in 1958, will be opened, initially to a small number of scholars.
Continue reading...World leaders have gathered to hear the stories of Holocaust survivors 75 years after the liberation of the death camp. Batsheva Dagan, Stanisław Zalewski and Marian Turski shared their experiences of life inside Auschwitz and warned that it could happen again if minority rights are not protected
Continue reading...Those making trip to former Nazi death camp fear lessons of Holocaust are being forgotten
More than 200 survivors are to gather at the former Nazi extermination camp of Auschwitz, many probably for the final time, to commemorate the 75th anniversary of its liberation.
As rows over the make-up of the international guest list at the memorial ceremony threatened to overshadow Monday’s event, survivors who drew on harrowing memories of their incarceration warned the lessons from the atrocities sanctioned by Adolf Hitler’s administration and carried out often by ordinary Germans were in danger of being forgotten.
Continue reading...Roberto Alvim set off a storm of outrage with comments about culture that were eerily reminiscent of Hitler’s propaganda chief
Brazil’s culture secretary, Roberto Alvim has been fired after he appeared to paraphrase the Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels in an online video to promote a national arts prize.
“Brazilian art in the next decade will be heroic and national,” said Alvim, to the music from Wagner’s Lohengrin, said to be Hitler’s favourite opera, with a portrait of the far-right president, Jair Bolsonaro, and a Brazilian flag in the background.
Continue reading...All cemeteries have stories to tell, and the one on Mucurapo Road in Port of Spain, Trinidad, is no exception. Among the names carved on headstones are Irene and Oscar Huth, Erna Marx, Karl Falkenstein, Willi Schwarz and Otto Gumprich. Hebrew inscriptions are adorned with a Star of David.
Five years ago, Hans Stecher joined his mother, father and aunt in the Jewish section of Mucurapo cemetery. Aged 90 when he died, he was the last of about 600 Jewish refugees from Nazi Europe who ended up in Trinidad as they sought sanctuary from persecution and violence.
Continue reading...Polish resistance fighter who escaped Stutthof will face Bruno Dey, accused of being accessory to murder of 5,230 people
It was when the guards began burning piles of bodies in the open because the crematorium could not keep up with the task that Marek Dunin-Wąsowicz realised he was being held in a camp whose purpose was not just to “concentrate”, but systematically to murder thousands of people.
In the autumn of 1944, the 17-year-old Pole saw trainloads of Jews, most of them from Hungary, being taken straight to the gas chambers at Stutthof. Others were gassed inside an adapted railway carriage, set on tracks to trick prisoners into believing that they were being transported to another destination.
Continue reading...Bruno Dey, 93, tells trial he heard screaming but did not know killings were taking place
A 93-year-old former guard at the Nazi Stutthof concentration camp has testified at his trial that he once saw people being led into the gas chamber, followed by screaming and banging sounds behind the locked door.
Bruno Dey, a former SS private, went on trial on 17 October at the Hamburg state court where he stands accused of having been an accessory to the murder of 5,230 people while he was deployed at Stutthof from 1944 to 1945.
Continue reading...Roland Berger held up his father, Georg, as a role model – but the real story is darker
It was an inspirational tale: after watching the horror of the Kristallnacht pogrom in 1938, a German man tore up his Nazi party membership card in protest and turned against the regime.
His Christian-based principles led to him being hounded by the Gestapo, sent off briefly to Dachau concentration camp and eventually dispatched to the eastern front.
Continue reading...Man, 93, accused as accessory to murder of 5,230 people in what could be one of last such cases
A former guard at Stutthof concentration camp will go on trial in the northern German city of Hamburg on Thursday, in what could be one of the last criminal cases of an individual charged over the Holocaust.
The 93-year-old man, named in the German media as Bruno D, in keeping with the country’s press code, was 17 when he joined the SS-Totenkopfsturmbann (Death’s Head Battalion), which manned the watchtowers at the concentration camp east of what is now the city of Gdańsk, in Poland.
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