Category Archives: Holocaust

Show shines light on overlooked artist who made UK’s first Holocaust memorial

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Work of German-Jewish sculptor Fred Kormis, who fled Nazis in 1930s, is subject of exhibition in London

The work of an overlooked German-Jewish artist who created the UK’s first memorial to victims of Nazi persecution is to be the focus of an exhibition that shines light on the unreported aspects of his life.

Fred Kormis, who fled Germany in the 1930s and later became a British citizen, was described by the Wiener Holocaust Library in London as a forgotten émigré artist who played a unique role in Weimar culture and 20th-century British art.

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Dutch row over which victims of Nazis get ‘stumbling stone’ plaques

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Commemorations of 45 people ‘experimentally’ gassed reveal dark moments in the Netherlands’ history

They call them stumbling stones – little brass plaques in the pavement marking addresses where Holocaust victims once lived.

As the Netherlands marks 80 years of liberation, a row has sprung up about placing Stolpersteine for 45 Dutch political prisoners – Jewish activists, communists, critical Christians – who were “experimentally” gassed by the Nazis at the Bernburg psychiatric clinic in Germany in 1942.

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German court rejects appeal by ex-Nazi secretary over role in 10,500 murders

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Irmgard Furchner, 99, was found guilty in 2022 of being an accessory to killings at Stutthof concentration camp

A German court has rejected an appeal by a 99-year-old woman who was convicted of being an accessory to more than 10,500 murders during her role as a secretary to the SS commander of the Nazis’ Stutthof concentration camp during the second world war.

The federal court of justice upheld the conviction of Irmgard Furchner, who was given a two-year suspended sentence in December 2022 by a state court in Itzehoe, northern Germany.

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‘Every piece of evidence is vital’: Holocaust survivor calls for victims’ shoes to be salvaged

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Manfred Goldberg, 94, urges authorities to preserve fragments of thousands of shoes left to rot at Stutthof concentration camp site

One of the last remaining survivors of the Stutthof Nazi concentration camp has appealed to authorities to salvage fragments of tens of thousands of shoes belonging to murdered Holocaust victims that were recently discovered in a forest at the site.

Manfred Goldberg, who was imprisoned as a teenager at Stutthof, 24 miles (38km) east of Gdańsk, said he was “shocked and dismayed” to hear of the existence of the remnants, eight decades after the shoes’ owners were forced to remove them before being gassed and cremated.

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France ‘investigating whether Russia behind’ graffiti on Holocaust memorial

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Reports say investigators looking into possibility that Russian security services ordered vandalism in Paris

France is investigating whether graffiti painted on the wall of Paris’s Holocaust memorial last week was a destabilisation operation coordinated from Russia, French media have reported.

On the morning of 14 May, about 20 spray-painted red hand symbols were discovered on one of the memorial’s exterior walls, which is dedicated to honouring individuals who saved Jews from persecution during the Nazi occupation of France.

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Kate Osamor has Labour whip restored after investigation into Gaza genocide comments

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Exclusive: MP apologised for saying on eve of Holocaust Memorial Day that Gaza should be remembered as a genocide

Kate Osamor has had the Labour whip restored after an internal investigation was conducted into her comments on Holocaust Memorial Day.

The MP for Edmonton apologised for sending her local party members a message saying Gaza should be remembered as a genocide on the eve of the memorial day.

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Macron to say France and allies could have stopped Rwanda genocide in 1994

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French president marks 30th anniversary with video, airing Sunday, saying international community lacked will to stop the slaughter

The French president, Emmanuel Macron, has said France and its western and African allies “could have stopped” Rwanda’s 1994 genocide but did not have the will to halt the slaughter of an estimated 800,000 people, mostly ethnic Tutsis.

In a video message to be published on Sunday to mark the 30th anniversary of the genocide, Macron will emphasise that “when the phase of total extermination against the Tutsis began, the international community had the means to know and act”, the presidency said on Thursday.

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Amsterdam to mark role of tram system in transportation of Jews to death camps

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Documentary on deportation of 48,000 Jewish Amsterdammers during Holocaust prompts city to act

On 8 August 1944, an Amsterdam tram took Anne Frank from Weteringschans prison, past the “secret annexe” where she had hidden from the Nazis, on the start of a journey to her death.

It was one of a series of Dutch night trams that deported 48,000 Jewish Amsterdammers during the Holocaust, trams commissioned by the Nazis and paid for with the Jewish wealth they stole.

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Breslau 1941: clandestine photos tell of the Holocaust’s upheaval and terror

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Images taken secretly some 80 years ago are being published for the first time to mark International Holocaust Remembrance Day

A remarkable series of photographs of Jewish families being forced to leave their homes in Germany in the middle of the second world war has been published for the first time, following a chance discovery.

The images are a striking new testament to the sudden upheaval and terror of the Holocaust and were taken secretly by an amateur photographer. He is believed to have wanted to pass down the scenes he was witnessing, despite the risk to himself. They show groups of people gathering outside a restaurant near the railway station in the Silesian city of Breslau, now Wrocław in Poland. Jewish men, women and children of all ages were held here for a few days before deportation by train. Almost all are certain to have been killed just a few days later in a documented shooting in Lithuania. Others were killed at a later date in Poland.

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‘I knew nothing’: the Warsaw ghetto boy who found his family at 83

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A DNA test has helped Shalom Koray find relatives in the US after escaping the Holocaust in a rucksack at the age of two

In 1943, a two-year-old boy found wandering the streets of the Warsaw ghetto at the height of the Jewish uprising was smuggled out in a rucksack, probably by a police officer.

The identity of the child could not be known. There was no one to attest even to a first name. His early life would be spent hidden away in orphanages, still not safe from antisemitic persecution, and without any real understanding of what it was to have a parent.

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French Holocaust denier found in Fife loses extradition fight

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Vincent Reynouard discovered living double life in Scottish village where he worked as a tutor, reports say

A Holocaust denier who was arrested in a Scottish fishing village will be extradited back to France after spending two years on the run from the authorities.

Vincent Reynouard lost his extradition battle after his arrest in November 2022. He had been discovered living a double life in Anstruther, Fife, where he worked as a private tutor, according to reports.

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Antisemitism is deeply ingrained in European society, says EU official

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Remarks by rights chief come as civil society groups warn of a rise in antisemitism amid Israel-Hamas war

Antisemitism is a “deeply ingrained racism in European society” that poses an existential threat to the continent’s Jewish community and the fundamental aims of the European Union, an EU official has warned.

Michael O’Flaherty, the director of the bloc’s agency for fundamental rights, said it was worrying that only a third of the general population considered antisemitism a big problem, when there was no doubt “dramatic moments in our societies trigger antisemitic responses”.

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Prospective AfD mayor ‘will be barred from Holocaust events’

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Jörg Prophet, who wants Germany to abandon its ‘guilt cult’, could become party’s first city mayor

Directors of a memorial at a former Nazi concentration camp have raised alarm about the revisionist views of a far-right politician expected to become its local mayor, saying he will be barred from attending events to commemorate the Holocaust if he is elected.

The Alternative für Deutschland politician Jörg Prophet last Sunday finished almost 20 points clear of the runner-up in municipal elections in Nordhausen, a city of about 42,000 in the eastern state of Thuringia.

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Palestinian intellectuals condemn Mahmoud Abbas’s antisemitic comments

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Palestinian Authority leader caused outrage after talking about Hitler and European Jews in a speech to his Fatah party

Dozens of leading Palestinian intellectuals, artists and other public figures have published an open letter condemning antisemitic comments made by the Palestinian Authority president, Mahmoud Abbas.

In a letter published on Sunday, 96 people, including Rashid Khalidi, the historian, Dana el-Kurd, the political scientist, and Sam Bahour, the prominent businessman, said they “unequivocally condemn the morally and politically reprehensible comments” made by Abbas, which were publicly circulated last week.

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Vatican beatifies Polish family executed by Nazis for sheltering Jews

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Ulma family including unborn child all beatified for their actions to help Jews during second world war

The Vatican has beatified a Polish family of nine – a married couple and their small children – who were executed by the Nazis during the second world war for sheltering Jews.

During a ceremonious mass in the village of Markowa, in south-east Poland, the papal envoy Cardinal Marcello Semeraro read out the Latin formula of the beatification of the Ulma family signed last month by Pope Francis.

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Former guard at Nazi death camp charged with being accessory to murder

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Gregor F, 98, who worked as guard at Sachsenhausen between 1943 and 1945, to be tried in juvenile court due to age at time

A former Nazi concentration camp guard has been indicted on charges of acting as an accessory to murder in the latest of a string of eleventh-hour attempts to gain justice for Holocaust victims and survivors.

The 98-year-old, identified as Gregor F, worked as a guard at the Sachsenhausen camp north of Berlin between 1943 and 1945.

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‘The Holocaust happened on British soil’: Inquiry into​ Nazi camps creates bitter divide on Alderney

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An official investigation of claims that many more people than previously thought died during Nazi control of the Channel Island has pleased some, but dismayed others

Their foreboding entrance smothered in ivy, the tunnels gouged out of sheer rock beside Water Lane on the island of Alderney have long terrified generations of the island’s children.

For decades, though, it seemed that was as far as the notoriety of the dank tunnels on the outskirts of St Anne, the capital of the tiny Channel Island, would extend.

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Channel Island Nazis inquiry under pressure to find out why perpetrators never faced justice

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Thousands of people may have perished on Alderney during the second world war but their murderers never stood trial

The official inquiry into Nazi atrocities committed on Alderney in the Channel Islands is under pressure to investigate why those responsible for committing war crimes on British soil were never brought to trial in the UK.

Prof Anthony Glees, the security and intelligence expert who advised Margaret Thatcher’s war crimes inquiry, told the Observer: “This is a vital opportunity to establish all the facts, and it must examine why those who perpetrated such heinous war crimes were never brought to trial in this country. The review into the atrocities on Alderney is to be warmly welcomed, but I believe it should not just focus on the numbers killed, as important as that is.”

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The RSF are out to finish the genocide in Darfur they began as the Janjaweed. We cannot stand by | Kate Ferguson

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Peace between Hemedti’s RSF and Sudan’s army will not end war crimes. As UN security council president, Britain must act

As conflict in Sudan escalates, it is becoming clear that the Rapid Support Forces has returned to Darfur to complete the genocide it began 20 years ago. The RSF is the Janjaweed rebranded, the “devils on horseback” used by the Sudanese government from 2003 to implement widespread and systematic crimes against non-Arab communities across Darfur. The RSF was, and still is, commanded by Gen Mohamed Hamdan “Hemedti” Dagalo.

In recent weeks, what we knew was coming has been confirmed. Yale University’s Conflict Observatory, which uses a combination of satellite imagery, Nasa thermal-detection data and open-source analysis, found evidence of the “targeted destruction of at least 26 communities” by the RSF between 15 April and 10 July. Mass graves have been discovered, and satellite imagery shows entire urban neighbourhoods and villages have been burned down.

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‘No more cover-up’: Nazi concentration camps on Channel Island finally to be officially investigated

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Review could show that thousands more Jews and prisoners of war died on Alderney than previously thought

The full horrors of the only Nazi concentration camps to exist on British soil will finally be investigated in an official government inquiry, the Observer can reveal.

Eighty years on from one of the darkest episodes in British history, the government is to carry out a review into the numbers of prisoners murdered by the Nazis on Alderney, the tiny Channel Island and British crown dependency.

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