The Wailing Wall, also referred to as the Kotel, the Western Wall, or Solomon’s Wall, and whose lower sections date to about the first century BCE, is located in the Old Quarter of East Jerusalem in Israel. Built of thick, corroded limestone, it is about 60 feet (20 meters) high and close to 160 feet (50 meters) long, though most of it is engulfed in other structures.
Further,
The wall is believed by devout Jews to be the Western Wall of the Second Temple of Jerusalem (destroyed by the Romans in 70 CE), the only surviving structure of the Herodian Temple built during the realm of Herod Agrippa (37 BCE–4 CE) in the first century BCE.
1914-1918, WORLD WAR I
1918, November 11, Armistice Day. The Germans finally surrendered on November 11, 1918.
1919, The Treaty of Versailles. The Germans finally surrendered on November 11, 1918.
One thing he held on to, the prize that was supposed to make up for all his deceptions of the American people and of himself — the League of Nations. The League Covenant was added to the Treaty of Versailles, which Wilson brought back to the United States for ratification by the Senate. In the end, the Senate rejected it.
1918-1933, WEIMAR REPUBLIC
This is a good place to start reading.
1922, Hyper-Inflation in the Weimar Republic. That is different from your run-of-the-mill inflation. German Deutschmarks were worthless, where German citizens used the money to play with or to cook with. Read on.
Read Breggin’s “Psychiatry’s Role in the Holocaust,” 1993 . . .
If you want to know how the guards and administration of the death camps became so inured with killing people, their own patriots, you’ll need to read this article that contains the 1993 article written by a psychologist, Dr. Peter Breggin.
1933 is a pivotal year because that’s when the National Socialists took power from the Germann constitution.
1933, January, The Enabling Act.
was a law that gave the German Cabinet—most importantly, the Chancellor—the powers to make and enforce laws without the involvement of the Reichstag or consult with Weimar President Paul von Hindenburg. Critically, the Enabling Act allowed the Chancellor to bypass the system of checks and balances in the government and these laws could ignore individual rights prescribed in the Weimar Constitution.[2]
This explains the effects of the results of the Enabling Act,
Hitler persuaded Paul Von Hindenburg to enact the Reichstag Fire Decree. The decree abolished most civil liberties including the right to speak, assemble, protest, and due process. Using the decree the Nazis declared a state of emergency and began to arrest, intimidate, and purge his political enemies. Communists and labor union leaders were the first to be arrested and interned in the first Nazi concentration camps.[5] By clearing the political arena of anyone willing to challenge him, Hitler submitted a proposal to the Reichstag that would immediately transfer all legislative powers to the chancellor. This would in effect allow Hitler’s government to act without concern to the constitution.
1933, February 27, The Reichstag Fire.
1933, July, German Sterilization Law. The Rockefeller Foundation made ongoing and large contributions to the eugenics movement and its sterilization programs in Germany before the war. Check this out:
The Rockefeller Foundation, in particular, provided funds to eugenicists outside the USA; in Germany Hermann Poll, himself a eugenicist and geneticist, coordinated its activities (Schneider 2002: Kay 1993). Already in the early 1920s the foundation had sponsored individual research of the geneticist Agnes Bluhm, the social hygienist Alfred Grotjahn, and the geneticist Hans Nachtsheim (Kühl 1994: 20; Weindling 1985: 309). The German Research Institute for Psychiatry in Munich owed its promotion to the status of a Kaiser-Wilhelm-Institute in 1924 to a grant from Rockefeller; under the directorship of Ernst Rüdin it became one of the centres of eugenic research in Germany. The Kaiser-Wilhelm-Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity and Eugenics, founded in Berlin in 1927, also profited significantly from the Rockefeller Foundation. In 1929 it won a grant for a large-scale research project on the “German Racial Structure” (Deutsche Rassenkunde); from 1930 to 1934 it received annual payments of $25.000, which helped to keep the institution afloat during the economic crisis and secured its survival. Othmar Freiherr von Verschuer’s studies on twins, which he conducted at the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Institute in Berlin, were co-sponsored by the Prussian ministry of public welfare and the Rockefeller Foundation (Schmuhl 2005: 118; Weindling 1985: 314).
1933-1945, THE THIRD REICH
The Third Reich became the official Nazi designation for the regime in Germany from January 1933 to May 1945, as the presumed successor of the medieval and early modern Holy Roman Empire of 800 to 1806 (the First Reich) and the German Empire of 1871 to 1918 (the Second Reich). Read on.
Before the beginning of WW I in 1939, the German government had run a several-years’ campaign stripping Jews of their rights. Remember, this was a government program. Remember that. The Nazi revolution in Germany lasted from 1933 to 1939. It seems like some have a difficult time pinpointing the beginning of the holocaust. It’s important to remember that the Nazis were the government soldiers who were committing all the murders and implementing laws that degraded Jews. Some Germans citizens may have agreed or gone along in silence or were even vocal and active supporters of the regime, but it should be remembered that it was a government movement. This should help to put a limit on that kind of madness. It’s confined to the government.
TERMS
For this, Wikipedia is not a bad place to start:
The term holocaust, previously used in 1895 to describe the massacre of Armenian Christians by Ottoman Muslims,[9] comes from the Greek: ὁλόκαυστος, romanized: holókaustos; ὅλος hólos, “whole” + καυστός kaustós, “burnt offering”.[e] The biblical term shoah (Hebrew: שׁוֹאָה), meaning “destruction”, became the standard Hebrew term for the murder of the European Jews; Yom HaShoah is Israel’s Holocaust Remembrance Day. According to Haaretz, the writer Yehuda Erez may have been the first to describe events in Germany as the shoah. Davar and then Haaretz both used the term in September 1939.
Generally, the first time that anyone learns of the holocaust is in connection with Adolf Hitler. The second reference would probably be the autobiography, Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl, published in 1947. Born in 1929 and dying in 1945, Anne Frank‘s book did not inspire any aesthetic or courage in me in the least. I thought it was kind of beneath people to not fight. Or maybe absconding one’s family into hiding from a fascist empire was exactly what was called for.
The third phase of diving into the Holocaust might come through Elie Wiesel’s memoir, Night.
I don’t mean to start this page with a documentary interview, but I didn’t want to forget it, its relevance, and its importance.
High-school teachers tend to teach Elie Wiesel’s Night as a primer to events of the Holocaust. I taught it several times. But I also included primary source documents from other survivors, like Tovi Blatt, who survived Sobibor. Elie Wiesel, however, became to be known as the representative broker on holocaust studies in educational circles.
Elie Weisel has been designated as the Jewish writer and spokesman for the Jewish Holocaust of WWII. His “Night” is quite good, I enjoyed it, but questions have been raised recently as to the authenticity of that memoir. See here, titled “Truth and Fiction in Night.” So the accuracy of the historical record is what’s important.
WHAT HAPPENED?
WHAT LED UP TO WHAT HAPPENED?
Was the Holocaust Inevitable? Patrick Buchanan.
WAS THERE A PRECEDENT?
AMERICAN COMPANIES COLLABORATED WITH THE GERMAN NAZIS
IBM, a vaunted American corporation, worked with the Nazis to collect Jews into death camps.
This has little relevance to the Jewish holocaust in Germany, but I wanted to post it here to show what was happening to Americans who opposed WWII at home.
DOCUMENTARIES
No Guns for Jews. Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership,
One of the most compelling interviews I’d ever listened to and watched was the one given by Gerda Weissman Klein in the One Survivor Remembers. You can watch the full interview at this site but you have to sign up for an account. I think the video is worth the time to see. Here is a trailer if you’d like to preview it.
GUN CONTROL in GERMANY
It started in 1919 with the Treaty of Versailles. Now, I am not certain who penned or informed the Treaty of Versailles but the main folks who shaped it were probably the British and or Americans. Both hated the German nation.
1928, The Law on Firearms and Ammunition was enacted, compelling citizens to license and registers their guns.
BOOKS
JEWS
1. The High Walls of Jerusalem: A History of the Balfour Declaration and the Birth of the British Mandate for Palestine, Ronald Sanders, 1984.
2. Israel and the New Covenant, Roderick Campbell, 2010.
3. The Pity of it All: A History of Jews in Germany, 1743-1933, Amos Elon, 2003. From “A Book You Need to Read,” Lew Rockwell, October 23, 2023.
4.
5.
1938, German Weapons Act.
THE CAMPS
Memory of the Camps, 1945.
Charles Burris explains the history of the film.
This is the most important film you will ever see. Filmed by British, American, and Soviet forces in 1945 as the Nazi concentration and death camps were liberated. The searing graphic images are horrific. The wry ironic narration by the late Trevor Howard perfectly magnifies this horror.
This hour-long documentary on the liberation of the German concentration camps was assembled in London in 1945, but it was never completed. It was constructed from footage shot by the service and newsreel cameramen accompanying the British, American, and Russian armies, but it wasn’t shown until May 7, 1985, when PBS FRONTLINE first presented it to mark the 40th anniversary of the liberation. PBS FRONTLINE broadcast the film just as it was found in the archives of London’s Imperial War Museum, unedited, with the missing soundtracks, and with the title given to it by the Museum — “Memory of the Camps.” The project originated in February 1945 in the Psychological Warfare Division of SHAEF (Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force). “Memory of the Camps” was intended to document unflinchingly the conditions of the camps in order to shake and humiliate the Germans and prove to them beyond any possible challenge that crimes against humanity were committed and that the German people — and not just the Nazis and SS — bore responsibility.
A variety of bureaucratic and technical glitches delayed the completion of the film. In the end, it was unfinished, and the British military command felt the need for a more congenial approach to improving Anglo-German relations. They worried that the film might increase the chaos and demoralization. Despite being shelved for decades, five of the film’s six reels had survived in a 55-minute fine-cut print without titles or credits. (The quality of the print reflects the fact that the negative was lost and it was made from a nitrate positive cutting copy, the equivalent of a work-print today.) Missing was a sixth reel comprised of Russian footage of the liberation of Auschwitz and Maidanek, presumed to have been taken to Moscow.
The editing of the footage was done by a team of accomplished filmmakers, including Alfred Hitchcock. One of Hitchcock’s important contributions was the inclusion of wide establishing shots which support the documentary feel of the film and showed that the events in the film could not have been staged. According to Peter Tanner, one of the film’s editors, Hitchcock’s concern was that “we should try to prevent people thinking that any of this was faked…so Hitch was very careful to try to get material which could not possibly be seen to be faked in any way.”
Escape from Sobibor, 1987, starring Alan Arkin and Rutger Hauer. The film is based on Richard Rashke’s book, Escape from Sobibor, 1982. From the Amazon summary,
On October 14, 1943, six hundred Jews imprisoned in Sobibor, a secret Nazi death camp in eastern Poland, revolted. They killed a dozen SS officers and guards, trampled the barbed wire fences, and raced across an open field filled with anti-tank mines. Against all odds, more than three hundred made it safely into the woods. Fifty of those men and women managed to survive the rest of the war.
Another book I liked, principally for the details and an interview captured between its pages, was the book, From the Ashes of Sobibor: A Story of Survival, by Thomas Toivi Blatt, 1997, a survivor of the camp who moved to Santa Barbara after the war. There are other books on the Sobibor camp in eastern Poland.
Then there was Schindler’s List, release date, 1994, starring Liam Niesem as Oskar Schindler. Charles Burris makes these points,
Oskar Schindler is a vainglorious and greedy German businessman who becomes unlikely humanitarian amid the barbaric Nazi reign when he feels compelled to turn his factory into a refuge for Jews. Based on the true story of Oskar Schindler who managed to save about 1100 Jews from being gassed at the Auschwitz concentration camp. A testament for the good in all of us. Schindler’s List is my favorite movie.
1944, Giorgio Perlasca, 1910-1992, was an Italian who helped save thousands of Hungarian Jews from the Holocaust by issuing them fake passports to travel to neutral countries. Despite fighting alongside Franco in the Spanish Civil War, Perlasca became disillusioned with Fascism and escaped from Italy to the Spanish embassy in Budapest in 1944, where he became a Spanish citizen on account of his war experience. While there he worked with Spanish diplomat Angel Sanz Briz in creating fake passports to smuggle Jews out of the country. When Sanz Briz was removed from his post, Perlasca pretended to be his substitute so that he could continue printing false passports. He also personally sheltered thousands of Hungarian Jews while they were waiting for their passports. It is estimated he saved over 5,000 Jews from the Holocaust. After the war, he returned to Italy where he lived in obscurity until he was contacted in 1987 by a group of Hungarian Jews he had rescued, and his remarkable story became public. He died in 1992. A movie was produced about his efforts, called Perlasca: The Courage of a Just Man, 2002. The starring actor does an excellent job. The drama is taut, and the dialogue is sharp and building. You will like this movie.
THE HOLOCAUST IN FICTION & NON-FICTION FOR YOUNG ADULTS
Start here. Most students’ introduction to the Holocaust begins with Anne Frank, and for that, we should be grateful. Here is a timeline of Anne Frank. It’s just that her narrative seems to concentrate the horrors of war, authoritarianism, and fascism on the persecution of one particular group, the Jews. But the broader effect of anti-semitism is that it reduces everybody’s quality of life.
Here is a timeline of the Holocaust. Another. Another.
CONSCIENTIOUS OBJECTORS TO HITLER
Franz Jaggerstatter. Sophie Scholl.
NAZI MONSTERS
Roland Freisler.
San Gabriel Tutor 