1934: A 13-year-old Jewish boy escapes Nazi Germany to become the highest decorated WWII Palestinian (future Israeli) soldier in the British Army.
2010: A top Israeli computer scientist searches for her favorite artist of her youth.
From the rise of the Nazi Party through the formation of the State of Israel, across a sea of time, their worlds collide…
via The Lost Artist: Love Passion War – A Search for a Famed Illustrator Uncovers a WW II Hero
Today is the 108th birthday of a rebel, a saint and a Righteous Gentile: Oskar Schindler. How do you calculate the number of lives that exist today because he was brave enough to save the lives…
How do you punish the perpetrators of the biggest genocide in human history? Do they deserve a fair trial, which their millions of victims never got? These are some of the questions the Allies debated during and after WWII. They were eventually resolved by the Nuremberg Trial, which Ann and John Tusa describe in vivid detail in their book by the same name (The Nuremberg Trial, New York: Atheneum, 1986). Several options were suggested, even before the war was over and the Ally victory secured.
Documents released in 2006 from the British War Cabinet indicate that in December 1944 the Cabinet considered a swift and severe punishment of the Nazi leaders involved in crimes against humanity. Winston Churchill suggested summary execution of the top Nazi leaders. A year earlier, at the Tehran Conference, Joseph Stalin proposed executing 50,000-100,000 Nazi officers. Roosevelt appeared prepared to go on board with this idea, but at the time Churchill vehemently objected, stating that most of them were…
View of the Reichstag assembly after Hitlers speech in Berlin on Jan. 30, 1937. Left first row, right: Adolf Hitler. Standing on the steps: the Prussian Premier Hermann Goering. (AP Photo)
IG Farben didn’t start out as a Nazi death factory, which is what it’s known for to this day. In fact, up to the mid 1930s its chief executives were not particularly anti-Semitic. Formed in 1925, IG Farben started out as a chemical company that manufactured dye. It was so successful, that by the 1930s it became the largest chemical company in the world and the fourth largest company in general. One of its leaders, Carl Bosch, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1931 for the development of chemical high-pressure methods. In Hell’s Cartel: IG Farben and the Making of Hitler’s War Machine (New York, Henry Holt and Company, 2008), Diarmuid Jeffreys describes the progression—or, more fittingly, regression–of IG Farben from Germany’s leading chemical company to a death factory during the Holocaust.
Jeffreys records of the most telling moments of this transition: the episode when the company’s leader, Carl Bosch, who valued the scientific work of many of his Jewish colleagues and employees, paid a visit to Hitler himself in the attempt to…
Source: IG Farben: Manufacturing Death | Literaturesalon’s Blog
Hannah Arendt referred to Adolf Eichmann as the paradigm of the banality of evil: an ordinary man led by extraordinary circumstances to exceptional evil. However, given that Eichmann spearheaded some of the key initiatives of the murder of 6 million Jews during the Holocaust, I have argued that he was quite extraordinary: extraordinarily sociopathic and evil. The circumstances of Fascist Germany allowed his true nature to be revealed and his thirst for power through murder to be played out.
In Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (New York: Harper Perennial, 1993) historian Christopher R. Browning reveals the true nature of the banality of evil by recounting the…
Source: The true banality of evil: Ordinary Men by Christopher R. Browning | Literaturesalon’s Blog
The Holocaust refers to the genocide of nearly 6 million Jews by the Nazis and Nazi collaborators. There is no doubt that the Jews were singled out for systematic extermination. However, it is also important to keep in mind that the Nazis murdered or sent to slave labor camps millions of non-Jews as well. Over 3 million Russians died as prisoners of war and in concentration or labor camps established by the Nazis.
Max Hastings documents that by February 1942, “almost 60 percent of the 3.35 million Soviet prisoners in German hands had perished; by 1945, 3.3 million were dead out of 5.7 million taken captive. (Inferno, 488). A large percentage of Russian civilians sent to Nazi forced labor camps—170,000 out of 2.77 million workers—perished there, along with large numbers of Polish and Italian prisoners of war. (Inferno, 489).
The Nazi policy of deliberately starving the…
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Nazi Germany, photo from the Wikipedia Commons
Hannah Arendt on the Role of the Masses in mass horrors
by Claudia Moscovici
Totalitarianism isn’t an easy phenomenon to grasp. One of the most difficult things to understand is how could hundreds of millions of people all over Europe and the Soviet Union have allowed the horrors of the Holocaust and the mass purges to take place. In The Origins of Totalitarianism Hannah Arendt offers one of the best explanations for these mass horrors. “Mass” is the key word here. Arendt’s explanation consists of describing this modern social entity called “the masses,” which she distinguishes from the mob (itself capable of spurts of violence, such as during pogroms) as well as from classes (based on economic self-interest). The masses are a quintessentially totalitarian phenomenon. Arendt posits that one of the key features of the totalitarian state is its system of indoctrination…
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