by Lawrence Bush on May 10, 2012
Four Israeli Mossad agents captured Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann in Buenos Aires, Argentina on this date in 1960. Eichmann had been living with his family for more than a decade, under the name Ricardo Klement. Israel’s intelligence network had been alerted by a Dachau concentration camp survivor, Lothar Hermann, whose daughter Sylvia had begun to date Eichmann’s son. The son had bragged of his father’s Nazi exploits, and Sylvia ultimately investigated on behalf of the Mossad and met Eichmann in his house. The agents kidnapped him near the house, kept him in a safe house for more than a week to confirm his identity, then drugged him and smuggled him out of Argentina on an El Al plane. He was placed on trial for crimes against humanity in Israel and was the only convicted prisoner to receive capital punishment in the country’s history.
“Eichmann’s astounding willingness, in Argentina as well as in, Jerusalem, to admit his crimes was due less to his own criminal capacity for self-deception than to the aura of systematic mendacity that had constituted the general, and generally accepted, atmosphere of the Third Reich.” —Hannah Arendt
by Lawrence Bush on April 3, 2012
The first Nazi concentration camp liberated by the U.S. military, Ohrdruf, was entered by the 4th Armored Division of the Army on this date in 1945. Ohrdruf had been established as a slave labor camp near Gotha, Germany only six months earlier, and days before its liberation the SS had evacuated most of its 11,000 prisoners on death marches to Buchenwald. General Dwight D. Eisenhower visited the abandoned camp on April 12th and cabled the following to General George C. Marshall of the Joint Chiefs of Staff: “The visual evidence and the verbal testimony of starvation, cruelty and bestiality were so overpowering as to leave me a bit sick. . . . I made the visit deliberately, in order to be in a position to give first-hand evidence of these things if ever, in the future, there develops a tendency to charge these allegations merely to ‘propaganda.’” Eisenhower also visited the nearby Kaiseroda salt mine, where the Nazis had hidden valuable paintings and $250 million in gold bars.
“My body was decimated, starved and thrashed to the point of no return in Ohrdruf for stealing a piece of a potato, and my flickering life was daily, and hourly, on the brink of being snuffed out from starvation or being clubbed for no reason. . . ” — Rabbi Murray Kohn
by Lawrence Bush on March 24, 2012
More than 6,200 Dutch physicians, 97 percent of the country’s doctors, went on strike against the Nazi-created Chamber of Physicians on this date in 1943. Mandatory registration with this newly formed guild would have forced the physicians to follow Nazi guidelines for racial screening and “euthenasia” for the handicapped and mentally challenged. Hundreds of the protesters were arrested, and for weeks there was almost no medical service in The Netherlands, but the threat of epidemic disease eventually convinced the Nazis to relent and rescind their registration order. The doctors’ strike was just one example of widespread Dutch resistance to Nazism, including a Communist-led general strike in February, 1941 to protest the first round-up of Jews in Amsterdam. There were numerous acts of sabotage, and some 60,000 Dutch citizens hid of up to 300,000 of their Jewish compatriots during the Nazi occupation. The Dutch village of Nieuwlande resolved that every household would hide one Jewish family or at least one Jew, and all 117 inhabitants are now recognized as “Righteous Among the Nations” by Israel’s Yad Vashem. Despite this mass resistance, however, the Nazis deported and killed more than 75 percent of the country’s’ 140,000 Jews.
“I don’t think of all the misery but of the beauty that still remains.” —Anne Frank
by Lawrence Bush on January 19, 2012
Nazi Germany committed itself to “the Final Solution of the Jewish Question” — mass murder — on this date in 1942 at the Wannsee conference, a meeting of some fifteen Nazi bureaucrats convened and chaired by Reinhard Heydrich, Heinrich Himmler’s second-in-command. The meeting, held in a Berlin suburban villa, determined that deportation and slave labor in the East would be the fate of Jews in German-occupied lands. “Able-bodied Jews, separated according to sex,” said Heydrich, “will be taken in large work columns to these areas for work on roads, in the course of which action doubtless a large portion will be eliminated by natural causes. The possible final remnant will, since it will undoubtedly consist of the most resistant portion, have to be treated accordingly, because it is the product of natural selection and would, if released, act as the seed of a new Jewish revival.” The Nazis already had in place the Nuremberg racial laws, a “euthanasia” program for the “genetically unfit,” the killing squads of the Einsatzgruppen, and a concentration camp system; at Wannsee, all of the logistics for the mass extermination of Jews were mobilized into a single design during a one-hour presentation by Heydrich and half an hour of questions-and-answers.
“It is good when terror precedes us that we are exterminating the Jews. We are writing history anew, from the racial standpoint.” —Adolf Hitler
Four Israeli Mossad agents captured Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann in Buenos Aires, Argentina on this date in 1960. Eichmann had been living with his family for more than a decade, under the name Ricardo Klement. Israel’s intelligence network had been alerted by a Dachau concentration camp survivor, Lothar Hermann, whose daughter Sylvia had begun to date Eichmann’s son. The son had bragged of his father’s Nazi exploits, and Sylvia ultimately investigated on behalf of the Mossad and met Eichmann in his house. The agents kidnapped him near the house, kept him in a safe house for more than a week to confirm his identity, then drugged him and smuggled him out of Argentina on an El Al plane. He was placed on trial for crimes against humanity in Israel and was the only convicted prisoner to receive capital punishment in the country’s history.
