Bloomfield Auctions rejects accusations it is acting immorally and insulting the memory of Nazis’ victims
A Northern Ireland auction house is going ahead with the sale of Adolf Hitler memorabilia despite an outcry from Jewish leaders.
The managing director of Bloomfield Auctions, Karl Bennett, rebuffed accusations on Wednesday that the sale was immoral and would insult the memory of those murdered by the Nazis.
Continue reading...Frank-Walter Steinmeier becomes his country’s first head of state to speak at Warsaw commemorations
Germany’s president has asked for forgiveness for the crimes his country committed in the second world war, on the anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.
Frank-Walter Steinmeier, the first German president to speak at the commemorations in Poland’s capital, joined his Polish and Israeli counterparts to mark 80 years since Jewish insurgents’ doomed uprising against Nazi occupiers.
Continue reading...Tweet, now deleted, was in response to Rachel Shabi’s comments on Holocaust education
The Board of Deputies of British Jews has apologised to the journalist Rachel Shabi after a message on its official Twitter account described her as an “asshole”.
The tweet from the organisation’s account on Saturday was in response to Shabi’s comments on Holocaust education.
Continue reading...Images found in attic taken by Polish firefighter who risked life to record how Jewish Poles fought the Nazis despite impossible odds
The photographs are blurry, composed hastily and taken surreptitiously, sometimes with heads or objects in the foreground obscuring part of the view.
But Holocaust historians say the imperfect pictures, discovered last month in a Polish attic decades after their creator died, are nonetheless priceless. They are the only known photographs from inside the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising not to be taken by Germans.
Continue reading...Liliana Segre, 92, has been subjected to racist attacks, and fears the Holocaust will become a footnote in the history books
An Italian senator who survived the Auschwitz concentration camp and this year found herself witnessing a far-right government take power again in Rome has said her “personal nightmare” is that the Holocaust will all but vanish from history books.
Liliana Segre, 92, was the only one of her relatives to survive the Holocaust, which killed six million Jews as part of Nazi Germany’s second world war campaign to obliterate the Jewish population in Europe.
Continue reading...Irmgard Furchner, 97, who worked at Stutthof concentration camp during the second world war, is given a two-year suspended sentence
A 97-year-old former secretary at a Nazi concentration camp has been found guilty of complicity in the murder of more than 10,500 people imprisoned there, and handed a two-year suspended sentence.
Irmgard Furchner, who has been on trial in the northern German town of Itzehoe for more than a year, spoke to the court on one occasion earlier this month to say she was sorry for what had happened, but stopped short of admitting her guilt.
Continue reading...Images released by Israeli Holocaust memorial show Hitler’s regime clearly orchestrating 1938 atrocity
Harrowing, previously unseen images from 1938’s Kristallnacht pogrom against German and Austrian Jews have surfaced in a photograph collection donated to Israel’s Yad Vashem memorial, the organisation said on Wednesday.
One shows a crowd of smiling, well-dressed middle-aged German men and women standing casually as a Nazi officer smashes a storefront window. In another, brownshirts carry heaps of Jewish books, presumably for burning. Another image shows a Nazi officer splashing petrol on the pews of a synagogue before it is set alight.
Continue reading...Josef Schütz given five-year jail sentence in Germany but is unlikely to be put behind bars
A German court has handed a five-year jail sentence to a 101-year-old former Nazi concentration camp guard, the oldest person so far to go on trial for complicity in war crimes during the Holocaust.
Josef Schütz was found guilty on Tuesday of being an accessory to murder while working as a prison guard at the Sachsenhausen camp in Oranienburg, north of Berlin, between 1942 and 1945.
Continue reading...Vatican archive of 2,700 cases of requests for help by Jewish people renews debate on Pope Pius XII legacy
Pope Francis has ordered the online publication of 170 volumes of files relating to Jewish people from the recently opened Pope Pius XII archives, amid renewed debate about the legacy of the second world war-era pope.
The archive of 2,700 cases “gathers the requests for help sent to Pope Pius XII by Jewish people … after the beginning of Nazi and fascist persecution”, said the Vatican’s secretary for relations with states, Paul Richard Gallagher, in a statement.
Continue reading...Mimi Reinhardt was in charge of compiling names of Jews to work in German industrialist’s factory
The woman who drew up lists of people for the German industrialist Oskar Schindler that helped save hundreds of Jews during the Holocaust has died aged 107.
Mimi Reinhardt, who was employed as Schindler’s secretary, was in charge of drawing up the lists of Jewish workers from the ghetto of the Polish city of Kraków who were recruited to work at his factory, saving them from deportation to Nazi death camps.
Continue reading...Boris Romanchenko died after rocket hit building where he lived in Ukrainian city
A 96-year-old man who survived a string of Nazi concentration camps including Buchenwald and Bergen-Belsen has been killed by an explosion during the Russian assault on the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv, a spokesperson for the Buchenwald concentration camp memorial foundation has confirmed.
“We are shocked to confirm the violent death of Boris Romanchenko, whose niece informed us on Monday morning that he died last Friday after a bomb or rocket hit the multistorey building where he lived in Kharkiv and his apartment was burned out,” a spokesperson told the Guardian.
Continue reading...Nazism is born in silence, says Volodymyr Zelenskiy, after missile struck close to Holocaust memorial site
Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, has appealed to Jewish people across the world to speak out against the Russian assault on his country, a day after a missile hit close to a Holocaust memorial site in the capital, Kyiv.
The missile strike on Tuesday hit Kyiv’s television tower, reportedly killing at least five people. The tower is located close to the memorial site of Babyn Yar, the ravine where Nazi soldiers massacred up to 150,000 people during the second world war, including more than 30,000 Jews, who were shot there in the autumn of 1941 after the Nazi takeover of Kyiv.
Continue reading...The Russian leader’s pretext for invasion recasts Ukraine’s Jewish president as a Nazi and Russian Christians as true victims of the Holocaust
When Vladimir Putin announced Russia’s invasion of Ukraine at dawn on Thursday, he justified the “special military operation” as having the goal to “denazify” Ukraine. The justification is not tenable, but it would be a mistake simply to dismiss it.
Vladimir Putin is himself a fascist autocrat, one who imprisons democratic opposition leaders and critics. He is the acknowledged leader of the global far right, which looks increasingly like a global fascist movement.
Continue reading...‘Aunt Annie’ was killed in the Holocaust – but not before marrying her sweetheart in captivity. Now her great-niece has found 260 other couples who did the same
Saskia Aukema knew little about her great-aunt Annie, who was murdered during the Holocaust. All she knew was that Annie had declined to go into hiding like her siblings, and continued working as a hospital nurse, even after the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands began in May 1940.
“That was the family story: this was the woman who didn’t hide and chose to be with her patients. That was all I knew… this line, this one sentence,” she told the Observer.
Continue reading...That night was unquestionably the worst I’ve experienced during my 100 years on this earth
I was born in Budapest in 1921 and was living there when war broke out. I received my army call-up in May 1943; at the time, Hungary was one of the Axis powers and had been fighting the Soviet Union on the eastern front for the past two years. I received basic military training but, because I was Jewish, I wasn’t given a regular uniform. Instead, I was conscripted into a labour corps and sent with 3,600 others to the mines in Bor, Serbia, which provided copper for the German army.
The labour camps were harsh environments, but I spoke good German and was able to secure a job as a stoker on a train that carried rocks from the mine, which meant I managed to stay warm. In September 1944, the approach of the Russian army led to the hurried closure of the mine and, to our delight, we learned we were to head back to Hungary, accompanied by the Hungarian guards from the camp.
Continue reading...John Boyne’s story is used by more than a third of teachers in England in lessons on the Nazi genocide, a study found
The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas may “perpetuate a number of dangerous inaccuracies and fallacies” when used in teaching young people about the Holocaust, an academic report has said.
According to research by the Centre for Holocaust Education at University College London, more than a third of teachers in England use the bestselling book and film adaptation in lessons on the Nazi genocide.
Continue reading...A new collection of photographs reveals the lives survivors have built and the legacies they have passed down the generations
The film and photographic images that emerged from the Holocaust, often in a blurrily dark monochrome, instantly became the visual definition of evil in the 20th century. So to set this brutal iconography against the cheerily crisp colours of modern English suburban homes in springtime – complete with armchairs, French doors on to patios, bright tulips in pots – might risk accusations of superficiality, or worse.
But when the people in these apparently mundane locations are themselves survivors of the Holocaust, the sheer joyful fact of their existence becomes a triumphant rejoinder to the unimaginable cruelty and depravity of three-quarters of a century ago. The new images are collected together in Generations: Portraits of Holocaust Survivors, which opens later this week to coincide with world Holocaust day, at the Royal Photographic Society (RPS) gallery in Bristol after a showing at the Imperial War Museum in London.
Continue reading...I sent Ewald Althans a message suggesting we meet in a coffee shop, not far from my East Berlin hotel. I thought it might be a more relaxed place in which to talk. He declined. “I do not feel too comfy any more sitting in a cosy place having an intense talk about National Socialism, Hitler, Auschwitz, etc,” he texted back. “I suggest we have a nice long walk.” I felt terribly naïve. After all, he had a point. Sitting in a Berlin coffee shop, chatting openly about the Nazis, really might not be the best way to go. I agreed to wait for him at the hotel. It required patience; he sent me repeated messages apologising for being late. “No worries,” I replied. “It’s been 29 years since we last met. I can wait another hour.”
Despite both the three decades that had passed and the Covid mask, I recognised him immediately. He wore drainpipe jeans ripped at the knee instead of an expensive sculpted suit, and his once straw-blond hair was now grey. Nevertheless, it was still recognisably him: the man once tipped to lead Germany to a new fascist glory. We turned out of the hotel and began to stroll down one of Berlin’s sun-dappled, tree-lined avenues. “So,” I said, “You’re no longer a neo-Nazi then?” He laughed, but did not answer. Perhaps he didn’t consider it a question deserving of a response.
Continue reading...Artefacts from hideout of family sent to Auschwitz death camp with Anne Frank and her family are put on display in Netherlands
A clock that is the sole surviving object from a second world war Jewish hideout will go on display at Amsterdam’s Dutch Resistance Museum this year.
The round mantelpiece clock may have been one of the last things people saw as they were seized by the Nazis and sent to death camps.
Continue reading...A new translation of Felix Salten’s 1923 novel reasserts its original message that warns of Jewish persecution
It’s a saccharine sweet story about a young deer who finds love and friendship in a forest. But the original tale of Bambi, adapted by Disney in 1942, has much darker beginnings as an existential novel about persecution and antisemitism in 1920s Austria.
Now, a new translation seeks to reassert the rightful place of Felix Salten’s 1923 masterpiece in adult literature and shine a light on how Salten was trying to warn the world that Jews would be terrorised, dehumanised and murdered in the years to come. Far from being a children’s story, Bambi was actually a parable about the inhumane treatment and dangerous precariousness of Jews and other minorities in what was then an increasingly fascist world, the new translation will show.
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