Police launch investigation after memorial in Brittany to former minister daubed with swastikas
A stone memorial commemorating the life of the Holocaust survivor and former minister Simone Veil has been defaced with swastikas, police have said, sparking fresh concern over antisemitism in France.
The memorial to Veil, at Perros-Guirec in the western Brittany region, was found to have been daubed with the Nazi insignia on Wednesday morning. An investigation has been launched.
Continue reading...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.
Continue reading...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.
Continue reading...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.
Continue reading...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.
Continue reading...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.
Continue reading...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
Continue reading...Apology came after the extremist Republican congresswoman visited Washington’s US Holocaust Memorial Museum
Marjorie Taylor Greene, the extremist Republican congresswoman, has apologized for her comments comparing the required wearing of safety masks in the US House to the horrors of the Holocaust.
“I’m truly sorry for offending people with remarks about the Holocaust,” Taylor Greene told reporters outside the Capitol on Monday, saying she had visited Washington’s US Holocaust Memorial Museum earlier in the day. “There’s no comparison and there never ever will be.“
Continue reading...Republican congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene apologised for comparing Covid-19 mask requirements and vaccinations to the Nazi Holocaust that killed 6 million Jews. ‘I have made a mistake and it’s really bothered me for a couple of weeks now, and so I definitely want to own it,’ Taylor Greene said. Her apology on Monday came amid calls from some Democrats to censure her for the Holocaust remarks. Her comments had also been denounced by Republican congressional leaders
Wiener Holocaust Library in London has gathered testimonies and photographs of forced evacuations at end of second world war
First-hand accounts from survivors of Nazi death marches, which formed a last ruthless chapter of the genocide, are to go on display with testimonies translated into English for the first time.
During the death marches, tens of thousands of people died on roadsides of exhaustion, shot for failing to keep up, or murdered in seemingly random massacres as the Nazis moved people from concentration camps before liberation by the allies, leaving a trail of blood across Europe.
Continue reading...In 1938, there was a surge of classified ads in this newspaper as parents – including my grandparents – scrambled to get their children out of the Reich. What became of the families?
On Wednesday 3 August 1938, a short advertisement appeared on the second page of the Manchester Guardian, under the title “Tuition”.
“I seek a kind person who will educate my intelligent Boy, aged 11, Viennese of good family,” the advert said, under the name Borger, giving the address of an apartment on Hintzerstrasse, in Vienna’s third district.
Continue reading...After his death, I wanted to know more about his life, and the city that made him and very nearly killed him
Every Hanukkah through my childhood, if I was visiting my grandparents’ Liverpool home, my Grandpa Oskar told me the exact same story. With a pickle on his side plate – my grandma serving up his favourite dinner of latkes, vusht (smoked sausage) and eggs – he’d recount the night during this very Jewish festival in 1937 that his family – our family – fled for their lives from the Nazis.
The preparations for their escape might have been secretly in motion for weeks, but the first he knew of the plan was as it was happening: he arrived home from school to be told he and his brother were going on a trip that very December night. They’d be travelling with their mum; their father – my great-grandpa – would meet them on their journey. It was only later that he’d learn their destination was England, a new permanent home for our family, now refugees.
Continue reading...Measure helps close legal loopholes that led to many victims’ descendants having applications rejected
The German government has agreed a draft law to naturalise some descendants of Nazi victims who were previously denied citizenship.
Described by Berlin as a symbolic step, the measure helps close legal loopholes that had led to many victims’ descendants having their citizenship application rejected.
Continue reading...Germany’s greatest living painter donates 100 works, including his Birkenau series, to capital’s new museum
Fans of the German painter Gerhard Richter are expected to flock to Berlin to view 100 works that he has in effect donated in a long-term loan to a new museum of modern art. The works include a series of paintings addressing the Holocaust that he has vowed never to sell.
The donation by the 89-year-old, who is one of the world’s highest-priced living artists, is destined for the Museum der Moderne, which is under construction in the German capital.
Continue reading...The authors of a study on the fate of Polish Jews under Nazism have been told to apologise to a woman for defaming her uncle. The implications for future historical work are alarming
Poland’s nationalists have won their latest battle to defend the country’s wartime reputation. On Tuesday, the Warsaw district court ordered two leading historians to apologise to a woman for defaming a relative in their book about the Holocaust. The landmark ruling has serious implications for academic freedom and the future of Holocaust research, with historians around the world condemning the judgment.
“These are not matters to be adjudicated by courts, this is a point that can be discussed by scholars or interested readers in the exchange of opinions. In that sense, it’s really scandalous,” says Jan Tomasz Gross, whose seminal book Neighbours was a watershed in Poland’s public discussion of the Holocaust more than 20 years ago. “It’s part of a broad effort to stifle any inquiry and particularly the complicity of the local population in the persecution of Jews during that time.”
Continue reading...Man is alleged to have been Nazi SS guard at Sachsenhausen camp between 1942 and 1945
German prosecutors have charged a 100-year-old man with 3,518 counts of accessory to murder on allegations he served during the second world war as a Nazi SS guard at a concentration camp on the outskirts of Berlin.
The man is alleged to have worked at the Sachsenhausen camp between 1942 and 1945 as an enlisted member of the Nazi party’s paramilitary wing, said Cyrill Klement, who led the investigation of the centenarian for the Neuruppin prosecutors’ office.
Continue reading...Court tells professors to apologise to 81-year-old woman who claims they defamed her late uncle
A court has ordered two prominent historians to apologise to an elderly woman who claimed they had defamed her late uncle over his wartime actions, in a case seen as critical to independent Holocaust research in Poland.
Prof Jan Grabowski of the University of Ottawa and Prof Barbara Engelking of the Polish Center for Holocaust Research were accused of defaming Edward Malinowski by suggesting in a book that he gave up Jews to Nazi Germans.
Continue reading...Case brought in wake of rightwing government criminalising blame of Polish nation for Nazi crimes could have implications for further research
Two Polish historians are facing a libel trial over a book examining Poles’ behaviour during the second world war, a case whose outcome is expected to determine the future of independent Holocaust research under Poland’s nationalist government.
A verdict is expected in Warsaw’s district court on 9 February in the case against Barbara Engelking, a historian with the Polish Centre for Holocaust Research in Warsaw, and Jan Grabowski, a professor of history at the University of Ottawa. While the case is a libel trial, it comes in the wake of a 2018 law that makes it a crime to falsely accuse the Polish nation of crimes committed by Nazi Germany. The law caused a major diplomatic spat with Israel.
Continue reading...As the pandemic has forced the cancellation of most large gatherings, many institutions including the Auschwitz-Birkenau memorial museum in Poland, Yad Vashem museum in Israel and the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington DC are marking Holocaust Remembrance Day this year with online events
Continue reading... Red Cross returns nearly 160,000 records, many of which belonged to Dutch Jews sent to Nazi death camps
Nearly 160,000 registration cards belonging to Dutch Jews and people from other persecuted minorities, many of whom were destined for Nazi death camps, will be put on display for the first time in the National Holocaust Museum in Amsterdam after being handed over by the Red Cross.
The cards include name, address, date of birth, profession, marital status, family composition and, in three out of four cases, the date of their transport to a concentration camp written in red pencil. They ended up with the Red Cross after the war and were used to locate missing persons.
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