Author: Webb

Nazi euthanasia to create a master race

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Jewish Holocaust: A Forgettable, Unforgettable Era

According to historians, at least 6 million Jews were systemically annihilated by the Nazi regime during the Holocaust. A total of 5 million people of other ethnic groups, such as Gypsies, Slavs and Poles, also perished in the Holocaust. By Nazi standards, these groups were considered to be undesirable and “inferior.”

Euthanasia was the Nazis’ vision of a biologically “pure” population to create an “Aryan master race”. Besides the annihilation of the above ethnic races, this vision also forced the sterilization of all persons who suffered from so-called hereditary diseases, including mental illness, learning disabilities, blindness and deafness, according to Dr. Patricia Heberer, a historian at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Of the 11 million people who died in World War II, statistics show that about 275,000 Germans — children and adults — were murdered because of their disabilities, either by lethal injection, starvation, or in gassing installations designed to look like shower stalls.

Books written by and about Holocaust survivors and sociological studies about the Holocaust continue to educate the public about the atrocities committed, why they happened, and why this massive genocide should never happen again.

by OS2 Wendy Kahn

Journal Staff Writer

Found at: http://www.dcmilitary.com/navy/journal/9_13/features/28266-1.html

Gassings at Dachau

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Chilling Accounts from Holocaust Survivor

For students at Frenship learning about the Holocaust has been a life changing experience. On Friday they got a rare chance to hear from the heart of Holocaust survivor, Eva Hance.

[…]

She says she will never forget the day she and her Jewish family were taken from Hungary to a concentration camp in Germany. “The life was miserable.” The camp located in Dachau held thousands of Jewish prisoners, many of them young children like Eva.

Even decades later, the torment she experienced there is unforgettable. “You know what the Germans did when they had a baby? They would throw it up for a target shoot,” Eva says.

More than 50,000 men, women and children were tortured, gased, shot and starved of food and water for days at a time. Eva spent every moment living in fear. “I was shot on my left leg because I wanted to have some water,” Eva says.

[…]

KCBD — NewsChannel 11 / Lubbock, TX

www.kcbd.com/Global/story.asp?S=1741325

First prisoner at Auschwitz

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Stanislaw Ryniak, Auschwitz Inmate, Dies at 88

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

February 28, 2004

www.nytimes.com/2004/02/28/international/europe/28RYNI.html?
ex=1098763200&en=65cf6fa18167905f&ei=5070

WARSAW, Feb. 25 — Stanislaw Ryniak, the first person imprisoned at Auschwitz, the World War II Nazi concentration camp, has died. He was 88.

[…]

Mr. Ryniak was arrested by the Nazis in his hometown, Sanok, in southern Poland, in May 1940 and was accused of being a member of the Polish resistance. He was 24.

He arrived at Auschwitz on June 14, 1940, together with hundreds of other Polish political prisoners on that first train load of inmates.

Numbers were tattooed on prisoners’ arms in the order of their arrival. The first 30 numbers were given to German criminal prisoners who would serve as camp guards. Mr. Ryniak’s number was 31.

In 1944 he was sent to the Leitmeritz work camp, in what is now the Czech Republic, where he was subjected to hard labor until the end of the war. On his release, he weighed 88 pounds.

[…]

The Nazis, who started World War II by invading Poland on Sept. 1, 1939, built the Auschwitz camp in the southern city of Oswiecim in 1940 for Polish prisoners. (Auschwitz is the German rendering of Oswiecim.) They soon expanded it to include the Birkenau complex and began confining hundreds of thousands of European Jews. […]

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

Another survivor and her family

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Holocaust survivor speaks of suffering

By GAYDA HOLLNAGEL of the La Crosse Tribune

Published — Thursday, February 12, 2004

www.lacrossetribune.com/articles/2004/02/12/news/z02newsholocaust.txt

Holocaust survivor Nesse Godin travels thousands of miles each year to keep the promise she made to women who helped her survive persecution in Nazi concentration camps.

[…]

Telling the story of the Holocaust has been her life’s work, said Godin, who came to the United States in 1950 with her husband, two children and her mother. Godin said her husband also is a survivor. The couple’s third child was born in the United States. She also has seven grandchildren.

[…]

Her story begins with her pre-war life in Siauliai, Lithuania, where her parents owned a small store that sold dairy products. The city came under Soviet rule in 1940 and was occupied by the German army June 26, 1941, four days after the invasion of the USSR.

… By August, the Jews that remained were forced to move into a ghetto, and it was from there that her father was selected for deportation to the Auschwitz concentration camp, where he was killed.

Godin, a teenager at the time, said she survived the ghetto, the Stuffhof Concentration Camp, four labor camps and the death march.

Her mother and two brothers also managed to survive, and the family eventually was reunited, except for her mother and one brother who wasn’t able to leave the Soviet Union until after their mother died.

[…]

Leuchter worse than McNamara

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The Fog of War

PG cert, 107 min

February 4, 2004

www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2004/04/02/bfalso02.xml
&sSheet=/arts/2004/04/02/ixartleft.html

Errol Morris’s The Fog of War, an artfully assembled interview with former US Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, won Best Documentary at this year’s Oscars. It’s high time Morris won, since he’s America’s pre-eminent documentarian and wasn’t recognised for his 1988 masterpiece The Thin Blue Line. But, fascinating though it is, The Fog of War didn’t deserve the award. It should really have won Best Actor.

Straight to camera, McNamara discusses his involvement in several of the most costly military engagements of the 20th century. Under Gen Curtis LeMay, he helped orchestrate the campaign of firebombings that killed nearly a million Japanese civilians in 1945. Under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, he was instrumental in the escalation of the Vietnam war. Yet Morris never pierces his guard for a second.

Garrulous, engaging and still intellectually razor-sharp at 87, McNamara confesses up front that he’s made errors of judgment in his lifetime. You won’t catch him admitting what they were, though. Typically, he meets Morris half-way by decrying the needless loss of life in Japan and stating that he and LeMay (a conveniently bloody-minded foil here) would have been prosecuted as war criminals if they’d lost.

“What makes it immoral if you lose and not immoral if you win?” he goes on to ask. It’s an excellent question that illustrates Morris’s wider concerns perfectly, but its unanswerability is McNamara’s escape clause.

Morris usually knows exactly how much rope his interviewees need to hang themselves — see Mr Death, his chilling 1999 study of execution expert and Holocaust denier Fred Leuchter. McNamara is no such monster, but only with unusually tricksy editing can Morris contrive to get him on the back foot at all. And far from providing an ironic underscore, the sinister throb of Philip Glass’s music is so familiar by now as to be oddly soothing.

[…]

© Copyright of Telegraph Group Limited 2004.

Survival of the Fittest?

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Benny Morris says he was always a Zionist. People were mistaken when they labeled him a post-Zionist, when they thought that his historical study on the birth of the Palestinian refugee problem was intended to undercut the Zionist enterprise. Nonsense, Morris says, that’s completely unfounded. Some readers simply misread the book. They didn’t read it with the same detachment, the same moral neutrality, with which it was written. So they came to the mistaken conclusion that when Morris describes the cruelest deeds that the Zionist movement perpetrated in 1948 he is actually being condemnatory, that when he describes the large-scale expulsion operations he is being denunciatory. They did not conceive that the great documenter of the sins of Zionism in fact identifies with those sins. That he thinks some of them, at least, were unavoidable. Continue reading →

Lessons of the Holocaust

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Chinese workers in Israel sign no-sex contract

Conal Urquhart in Tel Aviv

Wednesday December 24, 2003

Guardian

www.guardian.co.uk/israel/Story/0,2763,1112442,00.html

Chinese workers at a company in Israel have been forced to agree not to have sex with or marry Israelis as a condition of getting a job.

According to a contact they are required to sign, male workers may not have any contact with Israeli women — including prostitutes, a police spokesman, Rafi Yaffe, said.

He said there was nothing illegal about the requirement and that no investigation had been opened.

[…]

The labourers are also forbidden from engaging in any religious or political activity. The contract states that offenders will be sent back to China at their own expense.

About 260,000 foreigners work in Israel, having replaced Palestinian labourers during three years of fighting. When the government first allowed the entrance of the foreign workers in the late 1990s, ministers warned of a “social timebomb” caused by their assimilation with Israelis.

[…]

Analysts say there is much division within Israeli society over immigration and status, although the conflict with the Palestinians has given it an appearance of unity. Recent immigrants such as Russians and Ethiopians are disliked by older immigrants, and there is much resentment among secular Israelis at the privileges given to ultra-orthodox Jews. The foreign workers are at the bottom of the pile.

Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2005

Jews superior to gentiles

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Charedi Rabbis Rush To Disavow Anti-Gentile Book

Leaders of the country’s most prominent ultra-Orthodox yeshiva are scrambling to distance themselves from a book by one of their disciples, which argues that gentiles are “completely evil” and Jews constitute a separate, genetically superior species.

Continue reading →