Remarkable nonsense about ‘the Holocaust’
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(3) “Whoever publicly or in a meeting approves of, denies or renders harmless an act committed under the rule of National Socialism … in a manner capable of disturbing the public piece shall be punished with imprisonment for not more than five years or a fine.”
Source: Strafgesetzbuch, StGB, November 13, 1998
Federal Law Gazette I, p. 945, p. 3322, Section 130 “Agitation of the People.”
Ohio mission faces sobering issues on trip through Israel
Saturday, November 07, 1998
By VINDU P. GOEL
PLAIN DEALER REPORTER
JERUSALEM — From the Holocaust to the crucifixion of Jesus Christ, death has played a critical role in the identity and history of Israel.
Traveling in Israel on a weeklong study trip, a group of 40 Northeast Ohio business, civic and religious leaders spent yesterday seeing firsthand some of the ways that death has shaped this land, which is holy to Jews, Christians and Muslims.
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As a perpetual flame sent smoke through a hole in the ceiling, William B. Summers and his daughter Kelly laid a wreath of sunflowers on a grave containing the ashes of Jews from every Nazi death camp.
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Cleveland Live News
1998 THE PLAIN DEALER.
Used with permission.
1998 Cleveland Live. All rights reserved.
Webmaster note: The miracle about this story is that we have been told for years that some of the so-called death camps were so well obliterated by the Nazis before the end of the war that there is virtually no trace of them. Here, however, not only have they located each and every “death camp,” they have retrieved ashes that for years have been said not to exist. It’s a miracle!
Playing for your life in Auschwitz
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“We got to know them by communicating through a hole in the lavatory wall,” she says. “I could write in Gothic script, which the Germans use on official documents, so I started to forge papers for escapees. If the Nazis were going to kill me, I wanted to die for what I had done, not for what I was.”
Anita and her sister tried to escape too but were arrested at Breslau station, imprisoned as trouble-makers and deported to Auschwitz.
“The camp had a cello but no one to play it, so I was lucky. I played every day in the women’s orchestra, sitting at the gate, accompanying other prisoners in and out of the camp to Strauss’s Radetzky March. We were only a jumble of instruments so we couldn’t play anything too elaborate.
“Dr Mengele was there. I had to play Schumann’s Trumerei for him. But playing in the orchestra saved my life. And my sister’s, too, as I was able to get her a job as a gofer, running messages and errands.
“We were in Auschwitz for a year, living in a hut opposite the gas chamber. When the Russians came in 1944 we were moved to Belsen, where prisoners died so often that they didn’t need a gas chamber. But we knew by then that the war was already going badly for the Germans and in six months we were liberated by the British.” Anita Lasker-Wallfisch lit a fourth cigarette in half an hour and sighed. “It is important that the world knows about this.”
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© Associated Newspapers Ltd., 06 November 1998
Webmaster note: In the late 1930s, Hitler forbade the use of the old German script, changing Germany over to the more modern letterforms. It would appear that Ms. Lasker-Wallfisch was at the very least an inept forger.
Learning to Not Repeat a History of Hate
A Holocaust Memoir in Doubt
By Doreen Carvajal
Until Binjamin Wilkomirski’s truth came into conflict with his own legal identity, the slim memoir of his Jewish childhood in the concentration camps of Poland was hailed as a “small masterpiece,” a searing sketch of death and horror — rats rummaging among corpses, starving babies sucking fingers to the bone, a dying mother’s last glimpse of her son.
Hans Vischjager (below), says Anne Frank‘s message has lessons for us today. Shown with his mother and baby brother Harvie in about 1951 (right), he says his mother Hilda survived the gas chamber by thinking of him.
Hans Vischjager and Anne Frank are linked together by the same city, the same religion and above all by a shared suffering writes Phil Cohen.
So it is natural that Hans, who now lives in Winchmore Hill and is a psychotherapist, should warmly welcome the Anne Frank Exhibition to Enfield.
He was born in Amsterdam a few streets away from where the Frank family lived, his parents — like hers — were Jewish and he lost virtually his entire extended family in the Nazi concentration camps.
Hans’s father, grand-parents, uncles, aunts, cousins, nephews and nieces all died in Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen and Buchenwald camps — only his mother and an uncle survived, and they later married.
Anne Frank, her sister Margot and their mother also perished after being discovered hiding out in a secret annexe above their father Otto’s business premises.
There Anne had written her diary that has sold millions of copies and made her a symbol of hope against all forms of discrimination, racism and oppression.
An exhibition, Anne Frank — A History For Today, at Southgate College from 1 to 21 December tells the moving story of Anne’s life and times — an ordinary schoolgirl caught up in horrific historical events.
The council’s education department took the initiative to bring the event to Enfield.
Whenever Hans returns to Amsterdam and hears the chimes of the famous Western Tower clock, that Anne refers to in her diary, he thinks of her living just a few streets away.
He believes the Holocaust has a lesson for modern events whether in Bosnia or Africa.
Like Anne Frank he was a hidden child, in his case being given away by his parents at the age of 11 months to be brought up by the Dutch Resistance because his parents feared capture by the Nazis. He thought his foster mother was his real mother. After the war he was taken to see his real mother in hospital and she did not know him. “Later I found out that when she came hack from Auschwitz she was 25 years old, she weighed 38 pounds, she had no hair because they shaved her head and she suffered TB, typhoid and pleurisy.
“In my eyes she must have looked horrific,” he said. Eventually he was returned to her although he rejected her and later became a rebellious child, When he was about 30 his mother told him the truth about his past. “She said that when I was born I was the eldest and her pride and joy.
“Mother suffered in various concentration camps and escaped the gas chambers on three occasions because she and a girlfriend crawled underneath the gas ovens and stayed there until everyone had gone.
“She said the only reason she survived was knowing I was alive and safe somewhere,” he said.
Hans’s mother is now 78 years old and lives in Los Angeles. His family moved to the USA where he joined the army and trained as a nurse.
He was then called up to fight in Vietnam, refused to go, moved to Holland where he married an English woman and then eventually to the UK.
Reading Anne Frank’s diary, he says, you realise that even though cooped up in that attic she was alive, she saw the birds and trees, she was ‘a picture of the universe’ and that captured the imagination.
“I don’t need sympathy, neither do the Jewish people. People need to be acutely aware of what it could possibly mean to live under a dictatorship.
“In remembering what happened to me 50 years ago, hopefully people will see things in a different light.
“The story of Anne Frank is a constant reminder that we must be united in being vigilant against any form of genocide or atrocities whether on grounds of colour, creed or religion.
“We can make sure it never happens again. People might say there is nothing we can do, others may say we can learn to live in harmony.
“When people visit the exhibition, all they need to do is walk away, not with an answer, because there are no answers, but with a thought, that is the moat important thing.”
Enfield News, November 1998
‘Pre-empting the Holocaust’
by Lawrence L. Lange
[page107]
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Recently I watched the testimony of a survior of the Kovno ghetto, in Lithuania. He spoke of the so-called Kinderaktion, in which the Germans rounded up all the children (and many of the elderly) and took them to the nearby Ninth Fort — a killing site outside Kovno — for execution. The witness was present in the room when an SS man entered and demanded from a mother the one-year-old infant she was holding in her arms. She refused to surrender it, so he seized the baby by its ankles and tore the body in two before the mother’s eyes.
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A doctor at Mauthausen, in training to serve at the front as a physician with an SS unit, liked to amputate the arms or legs of Jews to see how long it would take them to bleed to death. After all, this would be useful medical information for his subsequent military career. Once, when he was not thus professionally engaged, showing admirable initiative because he clearly was not ordered to do this, he took two young Jews from an arriving transport, killed them, cut off their heads, and boiled the flesh off the skulls, which he used as desk trophies for himself and a colleague. After the war he married another doctor and together they set up a gynecological practice in Germany.
The Atlantic Monthly
“Pre-empting the Holocaust”
November 1998
page 105
E-mail: [email protected]
Opinion: The Holocaust Meets Popular Culture
by Abraham H. Foxman
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They [young people] are bombarded by as much disinformation as information. Holocaust deniers would have them believe that there were no concentration camps, no death camps; that Hitler’s Nazis didn’t have a Final Solution; that it is all just a Jewish conspiracy.
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Superman, in three recent issues of the comic book, was sent back in time to fight Nazi evil, but he never names the victims. The intent was to send a universal message. The result proved offensive to Holocaust victims. Didn’t the writers know that every Jew was a victim?
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Abraham H. Foxman is national director of the Anti-Defamation League and a Holocaust survivor.
Saturday, October 31, 1998
Copyright 1998 The New York Times
An imposing presence: the deniers have three times more sites than their detractors in the world
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Today [Tue, 18 Aug 1998] my wife and I went to the Ohlsdorfer Friedhof (Cemetary) here in Hamburg, for a walk in the nice green parks (Spaziergang) and also to visit and pay our deepest respect to the thousands of German soldiers buried there (the youngest soldiers we saw buried there were 16 and 17 years young ). We sat for awhile with the 36,000 citizens of Hamburg who were killed in the fire bombing in 1943. People have planted small crosses and plaques along the sides of the mass graves — some listing the names of whole families, from Grandpop (Oma and Opa) through to the little blonde kids.
We also walked through the very old Jewish part of the cemetary, and my wife said, “I notice this place (which has literally hundreds and hundreds, if not thousands, of very old gravestones) was not bulldozed or destroyed by the Nazis.” As a matter of fact, it wasn’t even touched. Many, many grave stones are over 100 years old — not destroyed, not broken, not damaged by anything except a bit of neglect. And I noticed that many many (actually most) gravestones bore the names of Jews who were born in Hamburg well BEFORE the war and who died in Hamburg well into the 1950s-1970s.
Out in the entrance to the Jewish graveyard (where all male visitors are asked to cover their heads) is a large memorial to the “Members of our race who died between 1933-1945.” There is no indication of what race they are talking about: it is a Jewish cemetary in a German city, but, silly me, I thought Judaism was a religion. Out in front of this large memorial mounted on a pedestal is a large urn which contains “Ashes from Auschwitz.”
On the way home we saw, situated right in one of Hamburgs best suburban addresses a large Synagogue — built in 1933 and according to the sign outside was used right up until the start of WW2 — not destroyed, not blown up by the Nazis, and across the front entrance it carries a Hebrew Proverb in large letters. It now houses an exhibition hall for Semitic culture, and a State Radio station.
[from an e-mail correspondent]