The History Book Club discussion

Chapter Five

Discussion Topic

The discussion topic is about a newsworthy item which is quite timely for our discussion:



Pope at Yad Vashem: Never again, Lord, never again!

Rather than mentioning Jews - or Nazis, Germans, concentration camps or World War II - Pope Francis takes more global and theological approach to the Holocaust.

By Ilene Prusher | May 26, 2014 | 5:00 PM | 18

Pope Francis gave a short speech Monday during his visit to Yad Vashem, Israel’s official memorial to the Holocaust, addressing humanity as “Adam” and blaming it for descending to the murderous behavior that lead to the deaths of six million Jews.

Rather than mentioning Jews – or Nazis, Germans, concentration camps or World War II – Francis took a more global and theological approach to the Holocaust. The speech began with the question “Adam, where are you?” a line from Genesis 3:9 in which God inquires into the first human beings’ whereabouts when it is clear that Adam and Eve have gone astray.

“Who convinced you that you were God? Not only did you torture and kill your brothers and sisters, but you sacrificed them to yourself, because you made yourself a god. Today, in this place, we hear once more the voice of God: Adam, where are you?” the pope posed in a speech he delivered in Italian.

“Here before the boundless tragedy of the Holocaust, That cry – 'Where are you?' – echoes like a faint voice in an unfathomable abyss,” he said. “A great evil has befallen us, such as never happened under the heavens. Now, Lord, hear our prayer, hear our plea, save us in your mercy. Save us from this horror.”

The pope continued: "Grant us the grace to be ashamed of what men have done, to be ashamed of this massive idolatry, of having despised and destroyed our own flesh which you formed from the earth, to which you gave life with your own breath of life. Never again, Lord, never again!"

Pope Francis, on his third and final day of his holy land tour, became the third pope to visit Yad Vashem, following the historic visits of Pope John Paul II in 2000 and Pope Benedict in 2009. Accompanied by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, President Shimon Peres, and Rabbi Israel Meir Lau, the former chief Ashkenazi rabbi and himself a Holocaust survivor, Pope Francis rekindled the eternal flame in the museum’s Hall of Remembrance and then laid a wreath with the help of two high school students, pausing reflectively for more than a minute. He bowed his head deeply, listening as a farewell letter was read aloud in Italian. The letter was from a young woman to her sister just days before her deportation from Romania. The woman, Ida Goldish, and her young son Vily died a few days later.

As part of the official ceremony, the pope greeted six Holocaust survivors, shaking their hands and listening to brief highlights of their stories. These included Moshe Ha-Elion, Avraham Harshalom, Chava Shik, Joseph Gottdenker, Eliezer Grynfeld and Sonia Tunik-Geron.

Afterwards, Ha-Elion, who spent 21 months in Auschwitz as well as having been in three other concentration camps, said the pope’s speech felt more like a prayer than an address.

“His focus was asking humanity, how did we deteriorate to such a situation? It was a general question for humanity, more than it focused only and specifically on the Holocaust. But I think his approach was appropriate,” said Ha-Elion, 89, who now lives in Bat Yam and is the president of Israel’s Greek Holocaust survivors organization. Ha-Elion, who came from Salonika, is the only one to survive from his entire family, and now has 10 grand and great-grandchildren.

Another survivor in the audience, Miriam Aviezer, said she wished the pope had seized the moment to say something about anti-Semitism, particularly given two developments in the last two days: a shooting at a Jewish museum in Brussels, in which four people died, an attack outside a Paris synagogue short aftewards and the startling success of the far-right National Front in European parliamentary elections.

“His words were emotional, but not very concrete,” said Aviezer, who came from Croatia and was hidden as a child during the Holocaust. “The pope has the power to influence Christians all over the world and he could have made a strong statement against anti-Semitism that would sway many people.”

Avner Shalev, the Chairman of the Yad Vashem directorate, said separately from the formal ceremony that he was very concerned about these developments. “Anti-Semitism is strengthening in Europe – there is no denying it,” he said. “Everything that we do here is focused of getting people to learn from what happened not long ago, so clearly we have to do more in terms of education.”

Shalev, who has overseen the visits of all three popes to Yad Vashem, said that

Pope Francis’ words were a testament not just to the Vatican’s recognition of the Holocaust, but this particular pope’s view of the Shoah as a break in humanity. He also noted that the pope had offered to open the Holy See’s archives from the period of World War II, which have thus far been closed, and said he believes the pope will stand by his word regardless of what might be found. Some critics say the Catholic Church did not do enough to oppose the Nazis’ plan, though there were many cases of individual churches, clergy members and average Christians who helped save Jews.

Shalev also said that pope’s invitation Sunday to President Shimon Peres and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas to come to the Vatican for a prayer meeting was a “bold statement.” Many analysts have noted that the invitation is unusual and suggests a different path for this pope, perhaps hearkening back to a time when the Holy See played a much more prominent role in politics.

“Everyone knows that the peace process needs to advance somehow,” said Shalev. “So he asked them and they immediately responded. I think that’s the most political that it can be, and coming from him, I think there is a power in that invitation.”

Rabbi Arthur Schneier, an American rabbi accompanying the pope on the visit, said it was a remarkable moment in the history of the Israel-Vatican relations – which after all were only made official in 1993. Schneier, an Austria-born Holocaust survivor and the rabbi of the Park East Synagogue in New York, has been involved in trying to forge better relations between Jews and the Vatican since 1965.

During the visit to the Western Wall in the morning, he gave the pope a copy of the Jewish “traveler’s prayer” [tefilat haderech.] “Christians believe that St. Christopher protects you in your journey, and I explained that although we don’t have a saint for that, we do have this important prayer, and that it’s not just for this trip, because life is a journey,” Schneier told Haaretz.

Schneier noted that during the visit to the president’s house shortly after the visit to Yad Vashem, the pope did specifically mention anti-Semitism and racism.

“I think this trip is a very positive and constructive step in the relationship between the Catholic church and the Jewish people and also the Vatican’s respect for the state of Israel. That is a very significant and clear reaffirmation of something that began with Vatican II,” he said, referring to a 1965 decision of the Catholic Church to state that it does not view Jews to be responsible for Jesus’ death.

“He is the one to take it even further than his predecessors. In the history of mankind, we can’t look at it measured in days or weeks,” Schneier said. “For Israel, it’s 20 years after diplomatic relations. I think it will give further encouragement to other religious leaders who are either silent or are afraid of interfaith relations.”
(Source: http://www.haaretz.com/travel-in-isra...)

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Violence cannot be defeated by violence ...Pope Francis
http://www.catholicherald.co.uk/news/...

Full text of Pope Francis’s speech at Yad Vashem

Read more: Full text of Pope Francis's speech at Yad Vashem | The Times of Israel http://www.timesofisrael.com/full-tex...
Follow us: @timesofisrael on Twitter | timesofisrael on Facebook

http://www.cbn.com/cbnnews/insideisra...

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/27/wor...

http://www.theyeshivaworld.com/news/h...

http://time.com/115750/pope-francis-i...

Video: (BBC)
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-...

Video: (Pope Francis at Yad Vashem, 26 May 2014)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3-SNb...
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Your thoughts on any of the above.

During his visit, the Pope signed the Yad Vashem Guest Book in Spanish.

English translation of his message:

With shame for what man, who was created in the image of God, was able to do; with shame for the fact that man made himself the owner of evil; with shame that man made himself into God and sacrificed his brothers.

Never again!! Never again!!

My take was that they were considered influential along with the other political prisoners and were presenting opposition to what the Nazis called their "ideals". The Catholic Church refused to print Nazi propaganda in their newspapers and many of the priests including the Jesuits were considered the intelligentsia

A quote from Martin Bormann:

As Martin Bormann put it: "All Polish intelligentsia must be exterminated . . . Polish priests will preach what we want them to preach. If any priest acts differently, we will make short work of him. The task of the priest is to keep the Poles quiet, stupid, and dull-witted."

http://www.scrapbookpages.com/DachauS...

http://www.catholictradition.org/Prie...

I think that one thing that has been forgotten - is that at Auschwitz - the focus seemed to be on the extermination of the Jewish people.

However, Dachau was focused on the extermination of the intelligentsia and the majority of prisoners at Dachau were Christians, including Protestant, Roman Catholic, and Orthodox clergy and lay people, German Communists, Social Democrats, and other political opponents of the Nazi regime.

Dachau also served as the central camp for Christian religious prisoners. According to records of the Roman Catholic Church, at least 3,000 religious, deacons, priests, and bishops were imprisoned there.

The number of Jewish prisoners at Dachau rose with the increased persecution of Jews and on November 10-11, 1938, in the aftermath of Kristallnacht, more than 10,000 Jewish men were interned there. (Most of men in this group were released after incarceration of a few weeks to a few months.)

http://www.antiochian.org/souls-aflame

(Sources for the above - The Jewish Virtual Library
http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/j... and Scrapbookpages.com and www.catholictradition.org/Priests/dac... and Antiochian Orthodox Christian Archdiocese of North America.)

Hermann Muller



Hermann Muller was a politician; led the Republic's long-lived Great Coalition. He was born in Mannheim to a middle-class home; his father was a factory director. He studied business and then clerked for com-mercial firms in Frankfurt and Breslau. In 1893 he joined the SPD; he became editor in 1899 of the Görlitzer Volkszeitung and served on the Görlitz city council in 1903-1906. He relocated to Berlin in 1906 to join the SPD's Par-teivorstand and served in the Party's Press and Foreign Relations offices. A Party moderate, he reported from Paris when war erupted the considerable sup-port among French workers in favor of war credits; thereafter he had no qualms over supporting SPD policy.

Müller entered the Reichstag in 1916. During the revolution he represented the SPD on the Berlin executive of the Workers and Soldiers Councils.He was elected to the National Assembly* and remained in the Reichstag from June 1920 until his death, serving as faction leader during 1920-1928. Clever and influential, he became Foreign Minister in June 1919 and, with Transportation Minister Johannes Bell of the Center Party,* assumed the burden of signing the Versailles Treaty.* As Chancellor during March-June 1920, he led the last Wei-mar Coalition. A pragmatist, he believed that socialism was attainable only through compromise with the liberal, middle-class parties. But his reputation was damaged after the Kapp* Putsch when he was irresolute when faced with Communist insurrection in the Ruhr. Atypically, it was Müller who entered the motion of no confidence in November 1923 that toppled the cabinet of Gustav Stresemann.

Müller returned as Chancellor in the Great Coalition of June 1928 to March 1930. Buffeted by several frustrating episodes, his government was perpetually spurned by at least one member of his broad-based coalition, including the SPD (Otto Wels, cochairman of the faction, remarked in January 1930 that the Party and the government should not be confused with one another). The controversial issues that rocked his government included construction of a pocket battleship (permitted by Versailles), reform of reparations* via the Young Plan, and fund-ing of unemployment insurance in the wake of the depression. Ultimately, it was the inability of the SPD and the DVP to compromise on a means to finance unemployment insurance that ruined his coalition. Some time before he resigned, Müller (already quite ill) accurately predicted that his cabinet's collapse would end parliamentary democracy in Germany. Hindenburg, who otherwise loathed the SPD, later claimed that Müller was the best of his Chancellors.
(Source: http://weimar_republik.enacademic.com...)

More:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hermann_...
http://www.deutsche-biographie.de/sfz...
http://www.dhm.de/lemo/html/biografie...
http://www.answers.com/topic/hermann-...
http://www.fact-index.com/h/he/herman...
http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/t...
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php...
by Gabriel Kuhn (no photo)
by F.L. Carsten (no photo)
by Dietrich Orlow (no photo)
by Mary Fulbrook (no photo)
by Ruth Henig (no photo)

Heinrich Brüning



Heinrich Brüning, (born Nov. 26, 1885, Münster, Ger.—died March 30, 1970, Norwich, Vt., U.S.), conservative German statesman who was chancellor and foreign minister shortly before Adolf Hitler came to power (1930–32). Unable to solve his country’s economic problems, he hastened the drift toward rightist dictatorship by ignoring the Reichstag and governing by presidential decree.

The son of an industrialist, Brüning received his doctorate from the University of Bonn in 1915 and then rose to the command of a machine-gun company in World War I. After the war he served as business manager of the League of German Trade Unions from 1920 to 1930. A Roman Catholic, Brüning was a member of the Catholic Centre Party and from 1924 represented Breslau (now Wrocław, Pol.) in the Reichstag (lower house). In the Reichstag he came to be known as a financial and economic expert, and in 1929 he became the leader of his party in that legislative body.

Upon the fall of the coalition government of the Social Democrat Hermann Müller, Brüning was called on to form a new, more conservative ministry on March 28, 1930, without a Reichstag majority. His policies, formed in response to the onset of the Great Depression, involved increased taxation, reduced government expenditure, high tariffs on foreign agricultural products, cutbacks in salaries and unemployment insurance benefits, and continued payment of the reparations imposed on Germany by the Treaty of Versailles (1919). Brüning’s austerity measures prevented any renewal of inflation, but they also paralyzed the German economy and resulted in skyrocketing unemployment and a drastic fall in German workers’ standard of living.

On July 16, 1930, after the Reichstag rejected a major part of his plans, Brüning began governing by presidential emergency decree, using Article 48 of the Weimar Constitution as a basis for this step. On July 18 he dissolved the Reichstag, which returned after new elections in September 1930 with Communist and, more important, Nazi representation greatly increased. To accommodate this shift to the right, the Chancellor enacted a more nationalistic foreign policy.

In October 1931, Brüning took over the foreign ministry while retaining the chancellorship. He helped President Paul von Hindenburg win reelection in the spring of 1932, but on May 30 of that year Brüning resigned, a victim of intrigues by General Kurt von Schleicher and others around Hindenburg. The immediate cause of his dismissal was his project to partition several bankrupt East Elbian estates. Hindenburg, himself an eastern landowner, considered this plan Bolshevism, and his withdrawal of confidence left Brüning with no choice but to resign.
(Source: http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/t...)

More:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heinrich...
http://www.lwl.org/westfaelische-gesc...
http://www.calvin.edu/academic/cas/gp...
http://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/...
http://spartacus-educational.com/GERb...
http://www.historyplace.com/worldwar2...
http://www.fpp.co.uk/History/General/...
http://oldhickorysweblog.blogspot.com...
(no image) Heinrich Bruning: Leben, Wirken, Schicksal by Astrid Luise Mannes (no photo)
by William L. Patch, Jr. (no photo)
by William Smaldone (no photo)
by Dietrich Orlow (no photo)
by Richard J. Evans

President Hindenburg



Paul von Hindenburg was born in 1847 and died in 1934. He was Weimar Germany's second president, after Ebert, and he led the nation through the catastrophe of the Wall Street Crash. Hindenburg dismissed the last hope Weimar really had - Heinrich Brüning - and he appointed Hitler chancellor on January 30th 1933, as the constitution allowed him to do.

Hindenburg joined the Prussian Cadet Corps in 1858. In 1866 he was commissioned into a guards regiment and he fought in both the Seven Weeks War against Austria and the Franco-Prussian War. He was decorated for bravery. In January 1871, he represented his regiment at the declaration of the German Empire.

In 1911, he retired from active military service as head of the Fourth Army Corps. In August 1914, he was re-called to military service to lead the Eighth Army in Prussia. By mid-September 1914, he had achieved national fame by inflicting two severe defeats on the Russian Army at Tannenburg and the Masurian Lakes. Hindenburg became a national hero in Germany. He was promoted to Field Marshall and given the sole command of the Eastern Front in November 1914.

In August 1916, Hindenburg was appointed Chief of the Greater German General Staff. This position gave him vast power even in the civil sphere. Hindenburg had a major input into the harsh Treaty of Brest-Litovsk with Russia. It was Hindenburg who advised the government to seek an armistice as he knew that by the autumn of 1918, Germany could not successfully fight against the Allies – especially as they were now fighting the full might of the American army. The March 1918 German offensive on the Western Front had failed and Germany had to save what she could, especially the fact that Germany itself had not suffered the material damage that France and Belgium had suffered. This would not be true if the Allies actually got to Germany and the war was continuing.

Hindenburg also used his huge influence to persuade Kaiser Wilhelm to abdicate and to go to Holland. Hindenburg remained in control of the German army until July 1919 when he once again retired from the military.

In 1925, Hindenburg was persuaded to stand in the presidential elections – the result of Ebert’s death. With his background he was not an obvious choice as Hindenburg had no love of republics and was a monarchist at heart. However, he was persuaded that his country needed an authoritative person to build on the growth Weimar Germany experienced from 1924 on. There was still a belief amongst many people that the army had not lost the war but had been let down by back-stabbing politicians. Therefore, Hindenburg’s credentials were good. He won the 1925 presidential election (though not overwhelmingly) and was re-elected in 1931.

In 1932, Hindenburg dismissed as chancellor the one capable politician Weimar Germany had from 1930 to January 1933 – Heinrich Brüning. Such was Hindenburg’s fear of communism that the association of Brüning’s planned economic reforms with communism was enough to prevent their introduction. It also ensured the dismissal of Brüning.

In the later years of his presidency, Hindenburg was heavily influenced by those who surrounded him – especially his son. Hindenburg showed more and more signs of senility and was open to their suggestions. Though he disliked Hitler because he did not come from the right social class and had only been a corporal in the war, he was persuaded to appoint him chancellor in January 1933. The constitution gave him the power to do this. Hindenburg had been persuaded by his son and Franz von Papen, that Hitler could be controlled and that if anything went wrong, then Hitler and the Nazis would get the blame thus damaging their political standing in Germany. Von Papen hoped that he would set the political agenda and that Hitler would simply agree to this.

In February 1933, the Reichstag building was burned down. Hitler told the ageing president that it was the work of the communists in Germany and that he, as president, should introduce emergency powers which Hitler would loyally carry out. Hindenburg readily agreed. Hitler also knew how to play on the president’s fear of communism. The introduction of emergency powers – lawful under the constitution – was the start of Hitler’s move to a dictatorship.

Hindenburg died at his Prussian estate in August 1934. Hitler used the opportunity to give him a state funeral. He then dropped the title president and adopted the title most associated with him - Fuhrer. Hindenburg was buried at Tannenburg.

The Weimar Constitution was remarkably democratic and, on paper, offered Germany a great deal. However, it was open to misuse and with the amount of power it gave to a president, posed Weimar Germany many problems once that president in power was open to so much external influence.
(Source: http://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/...)

More:
http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/t...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_von...
http://www.firstworldwar.com/bio/hind...
http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/historic...
http://www.biography.com/people/paul-...
http://www.history.com/topics/world-w...
http://www.historyinanhour.com/2012/1...
http://histclo.com/essay/war/ww1/bio/...
by William J. Astore (no photo)
by Anna von der Goltz (no photo)
by Christopher Munro Clark (no photo)
by Anna von der Goltz (no photo)
by Richard J. Evans

Dachau



On March 22, 1933, a few weeks after Adolf Hitler had been appointed Reich Chancellor, a concentration camp for political prisoners was set up in Dachau. This camp served as a model for all later concentration camps and as a "school of violence" for the SS men under whose command it stood. In the twelve years of its existence over 200.000 persons from all over Europe were imprisoned here and in the numerous subsidary camps. 41.500 were murdered. On April 29 1945, American troops liberated the survivors.

The Memorial Site on the grounds of the former concentration camp was established in 1965 on the initiative of and in accordance with the plans of the surviving prisoners who had joined together to form the Comité International de Dachau. The Bavarian state government provided financial support. Between 1996 and 2003 a new exhibition on the history of the Dachau concentration camp was created, following the leitmotif of the "Path of the Prisoners".
(Source: http://www.kz-gedenkstaette-dachau.de...)

More:
http://www.thirdreichruins.com/dachau...
http://www.kz-gedenkstaette-dachau.de...
http://www.orthodoxytoday.org/article...
http://www.history.ucsb.edu/faculty/m...
http://holokauston.wordpress.com/2009...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dachau
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dachau_c...
http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.p...
http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/j...
http://www.historyplace.com/worldwar2...
http://history1900s.about.com/od/1930...
by Sam Dann (no photo)
by Harold Marcus (no photo)
by Fern Overbey Hilton (no photo)
by Joshua M. Greene (no photo)
by Pierre Moulin (no photo)
by Flint Whitlock

Theodor Eicke



Theodor Eicke was born in Hudingen Alsace- Lorraine on 17 October 1892, the son of a station-master. He was discharged from the Imperial army after reaching the rank of sub-paymaster and being decorated with the Iron Cross (Second Class).

Eicke joined the police administration in Thuringia after qualifying as an inspector in 1920, he was briefly employed by the security police and the criminal police and by the police administration in Ludwigshafen on the Rhine.

He lost various jobs because of his anti-republican political activities, but in 1923 he was hired as a commercial executive by I.G. Farben (Ludwigshafen), also looking after their anti-espionage service.

Eicke joined the Nazi Party and the SA on 1 December 1928 and was transferred to the SS on 20 August 1930 where he was quickly promoted. Appointed SS-Standartenfuhrer on 15 November 1931, he was put in charge of the SS regiment in the Rhine-Palatinate.

Sentenced to two years’ penal servitude in March 1932 for political bomb attacks, he fled to Italy on Himmler’s instructions, returning to Germany in mid-February 1933.

The aggressive, restless Eicke soon clashed, however, with the Gauleiter of the Rhine- Palatinate, Josef Burckel, who declared him a “dangerous lunatic,” ordering his detention at the Psychiatric Clinic in Wurzburg on 21 March 1933.

Eicke was struck off the SS rolls, but reconfirmed in his old rank on 26 June 1933 and promptly appointed by Himmler as the new commandant of the Dachau concentration camp.

In May 1934 he was entrusted by the SS leader with the take-over of the concentration camps by the SS and with their re-organisation. On 4 July 1934 Eicke was appointed as Inspekteur der Konzentrationslager und SS- Wachverbande and a week later he was promoted to SS-Gruppenfuhrer.

The brutal, energetic Eicke had earned his promotion by his important role in suppressing the so-called Rohm putsch; it was Eicke who personally executed the SA chief in his cell at Stadelheim prison, in Munich on 1 July 1934.

In his new role Eicke proved to be a dedicated servant of Himmler and Heydrich, replacing the policemen who acted as guards at Dachau, by SS Death’s Head formations, the toughest and most ruthless troops that the Nazis possessed.

Under Eicke’s regime no pity was to be shown for “enemies of the state” and prisoners were treated with maximum severity. Eicke laid down exact instructions on corporal punishment, beatings, solitary confinement and shooting of offenders who were considered as “agitators,” mutineers or refractory elements who refused to obey instructions regarding working details.

Dachau was with its SS motto that “tolerance is a sign of weakness,” became a model for the German concentration camp system as a whole.

Rudolf Hoess who served at Dachau, and was later the Commandant at Auschwitz recalled his training at Dachau given by Eicke:

“The purpose of Eicke’s everlasting lectures and orders to the same effect was to turn his SS men completely against the prisoners, to stir up their feelings against the prisoners.”

Eicke’s writing paper bore the maxim “Only one thing matters – the command given,” and he warned his SS guard of severe penalties for any trace of softness. Eicke saw his task in terms of establishing a military discipline in accordance with SS ideals of “loyalty, bravery and devotion to duty,” telling his concentration camp commanders in 1939 “that they must be ready to carry out even the hardest and most difficult of orders without hesitation.”

On 14 November 1939 he was appointed Commander of the first SS-Totenkopf Division which he constituted in Dachau and took over the organisation and employment of the SS Death’s Head Formation which saw active service in Poland.

The Totenkopf division took part in the French campaign, first in northern France, at Arras, La Bassee –channel, Bethune, Bailleul, Loire, Lyon and Charente. Subsequent to the Armistice, it served as part of the occupation forces in France until April/ May 1941.

In the war against the Soviet Union, the Totenkopf Division advanced through the Baltic States, liberating them from Russian occupation and proceeding to Lake Ilmen.

On 26 February 1943, Eicke was on an inspection flight in a Fiesler Storch when his plane was shot down by the Soviets near Orelka, Russia, and the plane crashed behind Soviet lines.

Several attempts were made by reinforced assault squads to recover the remains of their commander, they finally succeeded. after losing several men. Eicke was given an elaborate funeral at one of the cemeteries of the Division near Orelka.

In a manner reminiscent of the funeral rites performed by the ancient Germans upon the death of their tribesmen or kings, Theodor Eicke, or “Papa Eicke” as his troops called him, was laid to rest.

Later, when the Germans were forced to withdraw, officers from the divisional staff together, with a few selected men, exhumed Eicke’s corpse and brought it by truck to Kiev.
(Source: http://www.holocaustresearchproject.o...)

More:
http://spartacus-educational.com/GERe...
http://www.answers.com/topic/theodor-...
http://en.metapedia.org/wiki/Theodor_...
https://johnib.wordpress.com/tag/ss-l...
http://www.massviolence.org/Eicke-189...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodor_...
http://www.historyplace.com/worldwar2...
https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/...
http://www.germandaggers.info/Eicke.htm
http://www.scrapbookpages.com/DachauS...
by Charles W. Sydnor Jr. (no photo)
by Michael Thad Allen (no photo)
by Harold Marcus (no photo)
by Samuel W. Mitcham Jr. (no photo)
by Rupert Butler (no photo)
by Dr. Chris Mann (no photo)
by Arthur Donaldson (no photo)

Last night I watched a Netflix movie/documentary - Hitler's Children - descendants of some of the Nazi leaders have had difficulty coming to terms with their ancestors. But there was a striking segment about Ranier Hoess (he spells his name than way versus Hess) - and I believe that this might have been the way his grandfather spelled his name.

The point of this post is that he was given a tour of his grandfather's villa at Auschwitz that the family and even his father had grown up in and it was quite spacious by standards of that day and even now in disarray you can tell that the garden and land around the villa must have been beautifully maintained (most likely by the prisoners). Ranier has some of the family photos with him and he tries to match them up with the background of the villa - it is a very interesting segment and you can see how very close they actually were to the camp itself. There was frosted opaque glass on some of the windows facing the camp - I imagine so that the children or others would not be able to view inside. That of course is just an hypothesis.

"Hitler’s Children”
is a unique documentary film that reveals, for the first time, the ways in which family members of high rank senior Nazi officers from Hitler’s inner circle struggle with the burden of carrying a terror-inducing surname.

During detailed interviews, families such as Goering, Himmler, Hoess amongst others, share the feelings of guilt and responsibility that accompany them in their daily lives.

During his detailed and intensive research, director and producer, Chanoch Ze’evi, third generation of Holocaust survivors, was able to convince direct descendants’ of members of the Nazi regime to speak with him, thereby creating a in-depth and mesmerizing dialogue that tells the story of the Holocaust from a new and original vantage point.

http://www.hitlerschildren.com



Note: Ranier Hoess (Hess) holding a photo of his grandfather and father.

More:
http://www.haaretz.com/jewish-world/j...
http://www.thetelegraph.com/area/mili...
http://www.daserbedeskommandanten.com
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/artic...

The following is a story written by Eldad Beck - in fact he was the one who accompanies Ranier to Auschwitz in the film. I thought the last scene of the film showed a still angry Beck which was different from the Beck that we saw in other parts of the film - maybe there was a falling out between Eldad and Ranier and maybe he is painting Ranier in an unfavorable light because of perceived or actual slights. I cannot be sure but I did verify that this article was written by the same person in the film.
http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,73...

Additional:
http://www.hdke.hu/files/csatolmanyok...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KicA_0...

Ranier Hoess (Hess) visits Auschwitz where his father lived - grandson on Rudolf Hoess (Hess):
http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-1812...

http://www.clevelandjewishnews.com/fe...

The Times of Israel - about Ranier's trip to that country:
http://www.timesofisrael.com/auschwit...

http://www.timesofisrael.com/auschwit...

This is from the BBC and I was not mistaken that the BBC and the documentary Hitlers Children stated that he Ranier was seeing the villa for the first time - the author has indicated that this was not the first time that Ranier visited Auschwitz and that he had gone the first time with his mother and the author.

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-...

More:

http://www.thejewishweek.com/arts/fil...

Major Dick Williams

Major Dick Williams, who has died aged 91, was one of the first British soldiers into Belsen, the German concentration camp in Lower Saxony.



http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obitu...

(Source: The Telegraph)

Another documentary that I watched tonight on Netflix is Auschwitz: The Nazis and the 'Final Solution.

However, It was noted that Auschwitz was first not designed to be for Jewish prisoners - but for all of Poland's political prisoners. Auschwitz itself and the area around the camps were of great interest to the Germans because of the supply of natural resources - water, coal and lime. Within 20 miles of Auschwitz lay a network of mines with access to some of the richest coal seams in Europe. These resources were of great interest to IG Farben - the giant German industrial conglomerate, They'd been experimenting for years in how to make synthetic rubber and fuel, essential raw materials for the German war effort. Water, lime and coal were the most important ingredients they needed. Now they found that Auschwitz was just the right place to site their new factory in the East. The Nazis envisioned a new city with only ethnic Germans - with all other property owners deported.

Höss (Hoess/Hess) who had worked in concentration camps since 1934 knew that his task was to create a place that would strike terror into the Poles. But the gas chambers for which Auschwitz was to become infamous were not yet conceived.

Höss (Hoess/Hess) even adopted the cynical motto of Dachau concentration camp in Germany—Arbeit Macht Frei—"Work makes you free"—and emblazoned it on the new gates of Auschwitz. The Polish prisoners now arriving at the new camp were subject to appalling treatment from the SS. Over half the 23,000 Poles first sent to Auschwitz were dead within twenty months.

But this documentary presents the beginnings of Hess's world.

Link to the documentary site: (This is an excellent resource)

http://www.pbs.org/auschwitz/learning...

by Laurence Rees

More:
This is what Laurence Rees would like people to come away with after viewing this.

What would you like people to come away with after viewing this?

I've been making programs around this subject for twelve to fourteen years. Something I've asked myself a lot is, why? Insofar as I can answer the question, I think it's because this is a crime that's committed by people who live in a cultured country at the heart of Europe. The people who did this were often extremely intelligent. A large number of people sitting around the table at the Wannsee Conference (held January 20, 1942, outside of Berlin to plan details of the "final solution to the Jewish question") held academic doctorates, many of them doctorates in law, interestingly enough.

Many of the people in charge of the killing squads were not mindless thugs. One of them held two Ph.D.s and he insisted his staff call him "Doctor-Doctor." (Reinhard) Heydrich (head of the German Security Service), who helped mastermind this, was an accomplished musician. You're dealing with people who are extremely cultured. They made these decisions extremely calmly, extremely coldly, extremely-as they thought-rationally.

So how on earth is it possible? It's fantastically easy to dismiss this kind of event as the work of insane people, of madmen. The disturbing thing is they're not mad. They're doing what they think is the right thing to do at the time. Unless we understand why people like this think it's the right thing to do at the time, we're helpless in the face of it happening again.
===================

My comment to the above - chilling.

The documentary is well done.

The series uses four principal elements: rarely seen contemporary color and monochrome film from archives, interviews with survivors such as Dario Gabbai and former Nazis such as Oskar Gröning, computer-generated reconstructions of long-demolished buildings as well as meticulously detailed and historically accurate re-enactments of meetings and other events. These are linked by modern footage of locations in and around the site of the Auschwitz camp.

Laurence Rees stressed that the re-enactments were not dramatisations, but exclusively based on documented sources:

There is no screenwriter… Every single word that is spoken is double — and in some cases triple — sourced from historical records

There are actual interviews with former inmates and guards to include authentic re-enactments of relevant events - and none of them hold back.

Worthwhile to watch.

(Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auschwit...')

I watched it on Netflix - here is another link which claims to be valid - http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/auschw... and I believe it is on Amazon Prime.

Sachsenhausen



The SS established the Sachsenhausen concentration camp as the principal concentration camp for the Berlin area. Located near Oranienburg, north of Berlin, the Sachsenhausen camp opened on July 12, 1936, when the SS transferred 50 prisoners from the Esterwegen concentration camp to begin construction of the camp.

In the early stage of the camp's existence the SS and police incarcerated mainly political opponents and real or perceived criminal offenders in Sachsenhausen. By the end of 1936, the camp held 1,600 prisoners. Between 1936 and 1945, however, Sachsenhausen also held Jews, homosexuals, Jehovah's Witnesses, "asocials" (among these prisoners were Roma and Sinti), and, later, Soviet civilians. Prominent figures interned in Sachsenhausen included Pastor Martin Niemöller, former Austrian chancellor Kurt von Schuschnigg, Georg Elser, Herschel Grynszpan, and Joseph Stalin's son, Iakov Dzhugashvili.

The number of Jewish prisoners in Sachsenhausen varied over the course of the camp's existence, but ranged from 21 at the beginning of 1937 to 11,100 at the beginning of 1945. During the nationwide Kristallnacht ("Night of Broken Glass") pogrom of November 1938, Reichsführer SS (SS chief) and Chief of German Police Heinrich Himmler ordered the arrest of up to 30,000 Jews. The SS transported those arrested to Sachsenhausen, Dachau, and Buchenwald concentration camps. Almost 6,000 Jews arrived in Sachsenhausen in the days following the Kristallnacht riots.

In the following months, the number of Jews at Sachsenhausen steadily decreased, as SS authorities released Jewish prisoners, often in exchange for a stated intent to emigrate. By the end of 1938, Sachsenhausen held 1,345 Jews.

There was another marked increase in the number of Jewish prisoners when, in mid-September 1939, shortly after World War II began, German authorities arrested Jews holding Polish citizenship and stateless Jews, most of whom were living in the greater Berlin area, and incarcerated them in Sachsenhausen. Thereafter, the number of Jewish prisoners decreased again, as SS authorities deported them from Sachsenhausen to other concentration camps in occupied Poland, most often Auschwitz, in an effort to make the so-called German Reich "free of Jews" (judenfrei).

By autumn of 1942 there were few Jewish prisoners still in Sachsenhausen, and their numbers remained low until 1944. In the spring of 1944, SS authorities began to bring thousands of Hungarian and Polish Jews from ghettos and other concentration camps to Sachsenhausen as the need for forced laborers in Sachsenhausen and its subcamps increased. Many of these new Jewish prisoners were women. By the beginning of 1945 the number of Jewish prisoners had risen to 11,100.

Following anti-German demonstrations in Prague in November 1939, German authorities incarcerated some 1,200 Czech university students in Sachsenhausen. In total, German authorities deported over 6,000 people from the annexed Czech provinces to Sachsenhausen.

German forces in Poland shot or deported to concentration camps thousands of Poles, especially teachers, priests, government officials, and other national and community leaders, in an attempt to eliminate the Polish educated elite and thereby prevent organized resistance to German rule in Poland. The German authorities sent some of these Poles to Sachsenhausen. On May 3, 1940, for example, 1,200 Polish prisoners arrived in Sachsenhausen from the Pawiak prison in Warsaw. The prisoners included many juveniles, Catholic priests, army officers, professors, teachers, doctors, and minor government officials.

The first group of Soviet prisoners of war arrived in Sachsenhausen at the end of August 1941. By the end of October 1941, the SS had deported about 12,000 Soviet prisoners of war to Sachsenhausen. Camp authorities shot thousands of the Soviet POWs shortly after they arrived in the camp. Estimates of Soviet POWs killed at Sachsenhausen range from 11,000-18,000.

In retaliation for the August 1944 Polish Home Army uprising in Warsaw, the German authorities expelled most of the Polish population from the city. The Germans deported 60,000-80,000 Polish civilians to concentration camps. By early October 1944, the Germans had deported about 6,000 Poles to Sachsenhausen.

In November 1936, the camp headquarter's staff of the Sachsenhausen concentration camp consisted of 70 SS personnel; by 1944 this number had reached 277. SS guard personnel at Sachsenhausen numbered around 1,400 in 1941, and by January 1945, this number had risen to 3,356. In mid-1936, SS Lieutenant Colonel Michael Johann Lippert oversaw the construction of the camp. SS Major Karl Otto Koch replaced Lippert as camp commandant in October, and held the post until the summer of 1937.

During the years 1938-1939 Sachsenhausen experienced frequent changes in camp leadership. At the beginning of 1940, SS-Oberführer [an SS rank between colonel and brigadier general, for which there is no English equivalent] Hans Loritz took over as camp commandant. SS Lieutenant Colonel Anton Kaindl replaced Loritz in 1942 and held the position of camp commandant until 1945. The guards of Sachsenhausen in the early years of the camp were men from the SS Death's Head units (SS-Totenkopfverbände); later, members of the Waffen-SS were transferred to the SS Death's Head Battalion and deployed as guards.
(Source: http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.p...)

More:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sachsenh...
http://www.stiftung-bg.de/gums/en/ind...
http://www.jewishgen.org/forgottencam...
http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/j...
http://www.visitberlin.de/en/spot/ged...
http://www.newberlintours.com/daily-t...
http://www.scrapbookpages.com/Sachsen...
http://www.holocaustresearchproject.o...
by Jerzy Pindera (no photo)
by Patricia Heberer (no photo)
by Andre Sellier (no photo)
by Daniel Blatman (no photo)
by Eugen Kogon (no photo)

Chapters Five - Thirteen

Hermann Baranowski



Hermann Baranowski (11 June 1884 in Schwerin – 5 February 1940 in Aue) was a German politician and military figure. A member of the Nazi Party, he is best known as the commandant of two German concentration camps of the SS Death's Head unit. He was the Schutzhaftlagerführer of Dachau concentration camp in 1938. He served as the SS-Oberführer of Sachsenhausen concentration camp from February 1938 - September 1939.

Due to his husky build, prisoners nicknamed him “Foursquare.” He is known by Jehovah's Witnesses as one who tried to get Jehovah's Witnesses, who were in the camps for their Christian neutrality, to sign statements rejecting their faith, terrorizing them and having them executed in front of their fellow believers. He never missed an opportunity to poke fun at their God. “I have taken up a fight with Jehovah. We will see who is the stronger, I or Jehovah,” Foursquare had said on 20 March 1938. He died of a terrible illness but his daughter would always answer, when asked what her father died of, that the Bible Students (Jehovah's Witnesses) prayed her father to death.
(Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hermann_...)

More:
http://www.jta.org/1940/02/28/archive...
http://www2.holocaust.cz/en/history/c...
http://www.redcap70.net/A%20History%2...
http://www.fold3.com/page/286060870_s...
http://nuremberg.law.harvard.edu/php/...
http://www.scrapbookpages.com/DachauS...
http://www.camps.bbk.ac.uk/resources/...
http://www.desertwar.net/rudolf-hoss....
http://alexhpoole.files.wordpress.com...
by Detlef Garbe (no photo)
by Benjamin Carter Hett (no photo)
by Jan Prybyla (no photo)
by Geoffrey P. Megargee (no photo)
by Hans Hesse (no photo)
by Robert M. Spector (no photo)
by Martin Goldsmith (no photo)

Yes it must have been terrible for him and a travesty for all of the victims. I am not familiar with that documentary.

Update: Just checked it out - it was televised by PBS - on the show called Frontline.

Here is the link on amazon (not in goodreads)

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000...

It appears to be available on Netflix but only on DVD not streaming. Not available on Amazon Prime.

Found it on PBS - you can watch it online but be forewarned - there are warnings about the graphic details - so if you get upset easily or you are underage - you should not watch or get permission from a parent or legal guardian.

Here is the link:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontli...

As the film's history shows, it was a project that was supervised by the British Ministry of Information and the American Office of War Information. And during that summer of 1945 some of the documentary editing was done under the direction of Alfred Hitchcock.

"At the time we found the film, it was not entirely clear what role Hitchcock played in its development," says David Fanning, executive producer of FRONTLINE. "Moreover, one reel of the original six, shot by the Russians, was missing. There was a typed script intact -- undated and unsigned -- but it had never been recorded."

FRONTLINE took the film, added the script and asked the late British actor, Trevor Howard, to record it. The aim was to present the film unedited, as close as possible to what the producers intended in 1945.

"Memory of the Camps" includes scenes from Dachau, Buchenwald, Belsen and other Nazi concentration camps whose names are not as well known. Some of the horrors documented took place literally moments before the Allied troops arrived, as the Germans hurried to cover the evidence of what they had done.

Twenty years after its first broadcast on FRONTLINE, "Memory of the Camps" remains one of the most definitive and unforgettable records of the 20th century's darkest hour.

================
Eleven million people died in these death camps and 6 million of them were Jewish people.

Will add the above to the glossary - which is where this should be placed.

@Teri - it appears to be - I am watching it now. Not sure if this is the full documentary. I am fairly certain that this is not the full film - this appears to be only 13 minutes long - I believe that PBS wants you to buy the DVD. I will look for the full DVD and post it on the glossary if available.

Teri has come back with additional info:

Teri has indicated where the other segments are which with my sad eyes - I did not see:
Here is what she stated. And thank you for both - the info and getting back to the book. (smile)

Above and to the left of the video clip are 4 links for the four parts of the film in it's entirety. :-) Back to the book...

At the very beginning of the Memories of the Camp documentary - it states the following - spoken and written on the screen:

In March 1933, 17,264,296 Germans voted for the National Socialist Party. 20,680,000 others cast their vote for Democrats, Communist Christian Socialists, People's Party, etc.

Lack of unity among those opposing the Nazis proved fatal. The National Socialist Party won in favor.

The German people had embarked on that long incredible journey that led seemingly out of chaos to unprecedented triumph.

Promise after promise had been fulfilled.

Austria 1938
Czechoslovakia 1938
Poland 1939
Norway, Denmark and France - in quick succession

A place in the sun at last.

True, they had lost their trade unions and a lot of books had been burned, but it seemed a good sort of bargain.

And one got to like being told what to do - having one's views prescribed, especially if it meant a vista bright with the promise of grandeur and conquest.

In the spring of 1945, the Allies advanced into the heart of Germany, and came to Bergen-Belsen.

Right outside of the camp were picket fences, beautifully maintained, flowers, fully stocked farms and well fed cattle and then everything changed.

There was a smell - a smell coming from the concentration camp.

The commentator did say later on - there were three hundred such camps in Germany just like Belsen - nobody could say that they did not know what was going on!

There were some happy endings to all of the horrors that were shown - some survived and saw themselves in the footage:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontli...

Rudolf's last name for our purposes in this discussion should be spelled Hoess. We were spelling it a variety of ways. But Hoess it is.

True Kathy - it is the "what" that seems to trouble folks to this day. Along with how could decent folks allow these things to occur?

And remember there were over 17 Million votes who voted legitimately for the Nationalist Socialist Party - although let us say that these votes did not necessarily mean that they knew what the Nazis had planned for their future.

But having said that - the recent elections have to give one a chill.

Here is a news account:

A German political party that has been compared to the Nazis will enter the European Parliament for the first time, in an election marked by a surge in right-wing parties that are either skeptical or hostile to the EU.

The NPD has been campaigning on a platform of stopping immigration and been called racist and anti-semitic.

They have fought under the banner of slogans like "Money for granny instead of Sinti and Roma" and "the boat is full", given interviews insisting Europe is "a continent of white people" and, as pictured below, have marched with banners proclaiming the Nazi ideology of "National Socialism".

The victory for the NPD has been put down to a recent reform to German electoral law - ending a ban on parties that fail to get 3% of the popular vote taking seats in the European Parliament. The party won around 1% of the vote.

"We say Europe is the continent of white people and it should remain that way," Udo Voigt, the party's lead candidate, told Reuters.

"We want to make sure that even in 50 years' time an Italian, a Frenchman, an Englishman, an Irishman and a German are still recognizable as European and cannot be mistaken for Ghanaians or Chinese."

In France, Marine Le Pen's anti-immigration Front National defeated the Socialist Party with an extraordinary quarter of the vote.

Outgoing Tory MEP Martin Callanan described the party as "openly racist" and described the result as "black day for Europe".

(Source: http://www.searchlightmagazine.com/ne...)

More:
France - http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/05...
http://blogs.reuters.com/john-lloyd/2...
http://www.jta.org/2014/05/26/news-op...
UK - http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/04/wor...

==================

And we ask how this occurs and hope that these kinds of things will never happen again.

Note: Also placed in glossary

I guess she finally gets her man after a lot of badgering:



Alexander Family Archive
On Sunday 19 May 1946, Hanns and Ann were married at the New Liberal Jewish Synagogue in north-west London. Alfred Alexander and Paul Graetz stand behind them.

Colonel Otto Meyer



Otto Meyer (1912–1944) was an Obersturmbannführer (Lieutenant Colonel) in the Waffen SS during World War II who was awarded the Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross with Oak Leaves. He was also a recipient of the Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross with Oak Leaves (German: Ritterkreuz des Eisernen Kreuzes mit Eichenlaub). The Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross and its higher grade Oak Leaves was awarded to recognise extreme battlefield bravery or successful military leadership.

Meyer volunteered for service in the SS in 1934 and was selected to become an officer in 1936 and posted to the SS-Junkerschule Bad Tölz, upon graduation he was promoted to Untersturmführer (First Lieutenant) and posted to the SS Deutschland Regiment. As a company commander he served in the Polish Campaign, the Battle of France, Operation Marita in the Balkans and the invasion of Russia Operation Barbarossa. On 9 November 1941 he was promoted to Sturmbannführer (Major) and in January 1942 awarded the German Cross in Gold for personal bravery. At the beginning of 1943 he was transferred to the 9th SS Panzer Grenadier Division in France and promoted to Obersturmbannführer (Lieutenant Colonel).[1] In January 1944 he was given command of the 9th SS Panzer Regiment and for his leadership during the battle for Tarnopol awarded the Knight's Cross. In June 1944 the division served in Normandy where he distinguished both himself and his regiment by destroying over 300 allied tanks. After escaping from the cauldron of Falaise (Falaise Pocket), he was killed crossing the River Seine on 28 August 1944. In September 1944 he was awarded a Posthumous award of the Oakleaves to the Knight's Cross.
(Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otto_Mey...)

More:
http://en.metapedia.org/wiki/Otto_Mey...
http://en.ww2awards.com/person/13693
http://www.lexikon-der-wehrmacht.de/P...
http://www.thewarehouse.co.nz/red/cat...
http://www.thegermanwarmachine.com/wa...
http://www.eestileegion.com/?home/waf...
http://www.wehrmacht-awards.com/forum...
http://www.thefullwiki.org/List_of_Kn...
by Kurt Meyer (no photo)
by Samuel W. Mitcham Jr. (no photo)
by Samuel W. Mitcham Jr. (no photo)
by Walther Fellgiebel (no photo)
by Heinz Linge (no photo)

Found this on Thomas Harding's site:



She still had her man (smile) - she still has her arm in his. I am glad to see that their marriage endured.

Alexander Family Archive
A photograph of Hanns and Ann Alexander taken when the couple were in their eighties.

(Source: http://www.hannsandrudolf.com/mobile/...)

I believe this is Hanns and Ann - I wonder who the little boy is? (It is Michael Harding)

This one is great - our author - Thomas Harding with his uncle Michael Harding (the page boy grown up) and his great uncle Hanns Alexander in 1987:

Source for all of the above photos - our author Thomas Harding's site:

http://www.hannsandrudolf.com/mobile/...

Joseph Goebbels



Born on October 29, 1897, in Rheydt, Germany, Joseph Goebbels served as minister of propaganda for the Nazi German government of the Third Reich, and is generally held responsible for presenting a favorable image of the Nazi regime to the Germans. Following Adolf Hitler's suicide, Goebbels served as chancellor of Germany for a single day before he and his wife, Magda Goebbels, poisoned their six children and took their own lives.

Infamous Nazi Paul Joseph Goebbels was born on October 29, 1897, in Rheydt, Germany, the third of five children. Goebbels graduated from a Roman Catholic high school and spent five years in undergraduate study at the University of Heidelberg, where he focused on history (he had a clubfoot, and the defect kept him out of the military during World War I).

Goebbels graduated from Heidelberg in 1922 with a doctorate in German philosophy, after which he pursued a career in writing, even having written an expressionist novel called Michael: ein Deutsches Schicksal in Tagebuchblattern. He was also getting caught up in the nationalistic tide sweeping through the country on the heels of the war.

In the fall of 1924, Goebbels became district administrator of the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (NSDAP; National Socialist German Workers' Party, or the Nazi Party), and two years later, Adolf Hitler made him district leader in Berlin. In 1927, Goebbels founded Der Angriff ("The Attack"), a weekly national Socialist newspaper, and the following year, Hitler appointed him to the post of national director of propaganda for the Nazis.

Once installed, Goebbels began creating the Führer myth around Hitler, punctuating it with huge rallies geared toward converting the German people to Nazism. His day-to-day activities also included designing posters, publishing propaganda pieces, using his bodyguards to incite street battles and generally increasing political agitation.

His control of the propaganda machine stretched over all media of the time—newspapers, radio, films, films, theater, literature, music and the arts—and he became a figure to be feared, especially by Jews, who were now in the crosshairs of the Nazi Party.

In 1932, at Hitler's command, Goebbels organized a boycott of Jewish businesses. The following year, he led the burning of books deemed "not German enough," which chiefly targeted Jews once again. "The era of extreme Jewish intellectualism is at an end," Goebbels declared. During World War II, Goebbels's skill with propaganda was on full display: He turned battlefield losses into victories and raised morale with each speaking engagement.

With Germany's back to the wall in 1943, and the Allies demanding complete surrender, Goebbels began espousing theories of "total war," which would have immobilized the military, national resources and the general population to their fullest extent in the war effort—in essence, initiating a stance of accepting only victory or total destruction.

By 1944, Germany had adopted Goebbels's war plan, and in July of that year, Goebbels was appointed general plenipotentiary for total war. However, by late April 1945, Germany had lost the war and Hitler was dictating his last will and testament to Goebbels, which appointed Goebbels chancellor of the Reich. The following day—May 1, 1945—instead of taking command, Goebbels had his six children poisoned, and he and his wife, Magda, committed suicide in Hitler's "bunker" in Berlin. (Source: http://www.biography.com/people/josep...)

More:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_G...
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/goebbels...
https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/...
http://www.psywarrior.com/Goebbels.html
http://www.calvin.edu/academic/cas/gp...
http://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/...
http://www.history.com/topics/world-w...
http://www.holocaustresearchproject.o...
http://www.nizkor.org/hweb/people/g/g...
http://www.ihr.org/jhr/v15/v15n1p18_W...
by Ralf Georg Reuth (no photo)
by Viktor Reimann (no photo)
by Helmut Heiber (no photo)
by Alan Wykes (no photo)
by Toby Thacker (no photo)
by Peter Longerich (no photo)
by Heinrich Fraenkel (no photo)
by Curt Riess (no photo)
by David Irving

Cross of Honor



The German Cross of Honour ('Ehrenkreuz 1914-18' in German) was belatedly instituted on 13 July 1934 by the then-German President Paul von Hindenburg - German Army Chief of Staff from 1916 until the close of the war - as a means of recognising the sacrifices made by German servicemen from 1914-18.

The medal, designed by Eugene Godet, comprised a bronze cross made of iron and featured a pair of crossed swords together with the legend '1914-18'.

Three classes of the medal were issued: to combatants, non-combatants and next-of-kin (i.e. widows or parents).

Although available to all servicemen and their widows the Cross of Honour was not automatically issued: it was instead awarded upon application by individuals concerned. In the event it took a lengthy period before the millions of applicants - some eight million in all - all received their medals given that each application had to be individually investigated.

The Cross of Honour was also variously known as the Hindenburg Cross and the Honour Cross of the World War 1914-1918 (in German 'Ehrenkreuz des Weltkrieges 1914-1918').
(Source: http://www.firstworldwar.com/atoz/cro...)

More:
http://collections.ushmm.org/search/c...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hono...
http://1914-1918.invisionzone.com/for...
http://www.awm.gov.au/collection/REL%...
http://antique-photos.com/en/awardsda...
http://www.thirdreichmedals.com/germa...
http://www.spiegel.de/international/g...

No books readily available for listing.

Rabbi Prinz



Joachim Prinz was 24 years old in 1926 when he became a rabbi in Berlin. He was a passionate speaker with a radical approach to the pulpit that contrasted sharply with the staid, conventional style of his colleagues. His, often controversial, sermons attracted standing room only audiences to some of the largest synagogues in the city. Young people were eager to belong to his study groups.

Having buried the first victims of Hitler’s brutality in 1934 he understood early on that there was no future for the Jews of Hitler’s Germany and, in a best selling book, “We Jews”, he urged them to leave the country where many had lived for generations. He was himself expelled in 1937 and came to the United States with his family.

For the next forty years he brought the same kind of independent thinking and energy to Temple B’nai Abraham in Newark, N.J. and to his leadership of Jewish organizations like The American Jewish Congress where he served as President.

His life-long commitment to the cause of justice and civil liberty that was honed under the Nazis culminated in his 1963 speech at the March on Washington. He died in 1988 after a long life dedicated to progressive Judaism, The State of Israel, and an end to bigotry of all kinds.
(Source: http://www.joachimprinz.com/Joachim_P...)

More:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joachim_...
http://www.nytimes.com/1988/10/01/obi...
http://www.joachimprinz.com/biography...
http://www.joachimprinz.com/Joachim_P...
http://www.joachimprinz.com/civilrigh...
http://www.jta.org/2013/08/28/news-op...
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rabbi-e...
http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-...
http://www.thekingcenter.org/archive/...
http://njjewishnews.com/article/4265/...
by Michael A. Meyer (no photo)
by Guy Miron (no photo)
by Stuart Svonkin (no photo)
by Ezra Mendelsohn (no photo)
by Stephen Fried

Reich Citizenship Law



The Reichstag passed the so-called Nuremberg Laws (or “Nuremberg Racial Laws”) on September 15, 1935, during the Seventh Reich Party Rally of the NSDAP in Nuremberg. Henceforth, these laws formed the basis of the Nazi persecution of the Jews. The “Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor” (“Blood Protection Law”) aimed to isolate the Jews racially and socially by prohibiting them, under pain of severe punishment, from marrying or having sexual relations with non-Jews. In addition, Jews were prohibited from employing Aryan housemaids younger than 45. They were also barred from flying the new, official swastika flag. The following Reich Citizenship Law stripped all Jews of the political rights deriving from German Reich citizenship and relegated them to the status of second-class citizens. In the following months, the regime used this legal demotion to push the Jews out of a number of professions, occupations, and programs of study for which Reich citizenship was required. In order to effectively enforce these laws, however, the question of who exactly was a Jew needed to be clarified with precision. An official definition was provided by the First Regulation to the Reich Citizenship Law of November 14, 1935 (or the Implementing Decree of November 14, 1935). It defined who was a “full Jew” or a "mixed-breed" [Mischling] in the National Socialist sense.
(Source: http://ghdi.ghi-dc.org/sub_document.c...)

More:
http://alphahistory.com/nazigermany/r...
http://www.holocaust-history.org/shor...
http://archive.adl.org/children_holoc...
http://staff.bcc.edu/faculty_websites...
https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/...
https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nurember...
http://www.holocaustresearchproject.o...
http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.p...
http://www.owlnet.rice.edu/~rar4619/r...
http://history1900s.about.com/od/1930...
http://avalon.law.yale.edu/imt/1416-p...
http://der-stuermer.org/nurenberglaws...
by Diemut Majer (no photo)
by Henry Friedlander (no photo)
by George L. Mosse (no photo)
by Marion A. Kaplan (no photo)
by Richard Bessel

This is an interesting article which plays into our conversation which I will place here and in the glossary:

Ebay blocked this but the owners hope to get 5 to 7 million dollars and a previous car that was once Goering's went for $2M - you have to ask yourself who would pay this kind of money and why would they want to? You would think and hope that this kind of sale would tank and the item would be worthless because of the kind of suffering that this man caused. But regretfully obviously not.

http://www.stuff.co.nz/world/10206947...

Discussion Topic: - what are your thoughts about this situation in light of what we learned about this man and his compatriots in the book and why does something owned by a man who was absolutely detestable have any value at all?

Kristallnacht



Kristallnacht, literally, "Night of Crystal," is often referred to as the "Night of Broken Glass." The name refers to the wave of violent anti-Jewish pogroms which took place on November 9 and 10, 1938, throughout Germany, annexed Austria, and in areas of the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia recently occupied by German troops.

Instigated primarily by Nazi Party officials and members of the SA (Sturmabteilungen: literally Assault Detachments, but commonly known as Storm Troopers) and Hitler Youth, Kristallnacht owes its name to the shards of shattered glass that lined German streets in the wake of the pogrom—broken glass from the windows of synagogues, homes, and Jewish-owned businesses plundered and destroyed during the violence.

In its aftermath, German officials announced that Kristallnacht had erupted as a spontaneous outburst of public sentiment in response to the assassination of Ernst vom Rath, a German embassy official stationed in Paris. Herschel Grynszpan, a 17-year-old Polish Jew, had shot the diplomat on November 7, 1938. A few days earlier, German authorities had expelled thousands of Jews of Polish citizenship living in Germany from the Reich; Grynszpan had received news that his parents, residents in Germany since 1911, were among them.

Initially denied entry into their native Poland, Grynszpan's parents and the other expelled Polish Jews found themselves stranded in a refugee camp near the town of Zbaszyn in the border region between Poland and Germany. Already living illegally in Paris himself, a desperate Grynszpan apparently sought revenge for his family's precarious circumstances by appearing at the German embassy and shooting the diplomatic official assigned to assist him.

Vom Rath died on November 9, 1938, two days after the shooting. The day happened to coincide with the anniversary of the 1923 Beer Hall Putsch, an important date in the National Socialist calendar. The Nazi Party leadership, assembled in Munich for the commemoration, chose to use the occasion as a pretext to launch a night of antisemitic excesses. Propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, a chief instigator of the pogrom, intimated to the convened Nazi 'Old Guard' that 'World Jewry' had conspired to commit the assassination and announced that, "the Führer has decided that … demonstrations should not be prepared or organized by the Party, but insofar as they erupt spontaneously, they are not to be hampered."

Goebbels' words appear to have been taken as a command for unleashing the pogrom. After his speech, the assembled regional Party leaders issued instructions to their local offices. Violence began to erupt in various parts of the Reich throughout the late evening and early morning hours of November 9–10. At 1:20 a.m. on November 10, Reinhard Heydrich, in his capacity as head of the Security Police (Sicherheitspolizei) sent an urgent telegram to headquarters and stations of the State Police and to SA leaders in their various districts, which contained directives regarding the riots. SA and Hitler Youth units throughout Germany and its annexed territories engaged in the destruction of Jewish-owned homes and businesses; members of many units wore civilian clothes to support the fiction that the disturbances were expressions of 'outraged public reaction.'

Despite the outward appearance of spontaneous violence, and the local cast which the pogrom took on in various regions throughout the Reich, the central orders Heydrich relayed gave specific instructions: the "spontaneous" rioters were to take no measures endangering non-Jewish German life or property; they were not to subject foreigners (even Jewish foreigners) to violence; and they were to remove all synagogue archives prior to vandalizing synagogues and other properties of the Jewish communities, and to transfer that archival material to the Security Service (Sicherheitsdienst, or SD). The orders also indicated that police officials should arrest as many Jews as local jails could hold, preferably young, healthy men.

The rioters destroyed 267 synagogues throughout Germany, Austria, and the Sudetenland. Many synagogues burned throughout the night, in full view of the public and of local firefighters, who had received orders to intervene only to prevent flames from spreading to nearby buildings. SA and Hitler Youth members across the country shattered the shop windows of an estimated 7,500 Jewish-owned commercial establishments, and looted their wares. Jewish cemeteries became a particular object of desecration in many regions.

The pogrom proved especially destructive in Berlin and Vienna, home to the two largest Jewish communities in the German Reich. Mobs of SA men roamed the streets, attacking Jews in their houses and forcing Jews they encountered to perform acts of public humiliation. Although murder did not figure in the central directives, Kristallnacht claimed the lives of at least 91 Jews between 9 and 10 November. Police records of the period document a high number of rapes and of suicides in the aftermath of the violence.

As the pogrom spread, units of the SS and Gestapo (Secret State Police), following Heydrich's instructions, arrested up to 30,000 Jewish males, and transferred most of them from local prisons to Dachau, Buchenwald, Sachsenhausen, and other concentration camps. Significantly, Kristallnacht marks the first instance in which the Nazi regime incarcerated Jews on a massive scale simply on the basis of their ethnicity. Hundreds died in the camps as a result of the brutal treatment they endured; most obtained release over the next three months on the condition that they begin the process of emigration from Germany. Indeed, the effects of Kristallnacht would serve as a spur to the emigration of Jews from Germany in the months to come.

In the immediate aftermath of the pogrom, many German leaders, like Hermann Göring, criticized the extensive material losses produced by the antisemitic riots, pointing out that if nothing were done to intervene, German insurance companies—not Jewish-owned businesses—would have to carry the costs of the damages. Nevertheless, Göring and other top Party leaders decided to use the opportunity to introduce measures to eliminate Jews and perceived Jewish influence from the German economic sphere. The German government made an immediate pronouncement that “the Jews” themselves were to blame for the pogrom and imposed a punitive fine of one billion Reichsmark (some 400 million US dollars at 1938 rates) on the German Jewish community. The Reich government confiscated all insurance payouts to Jews whose businesses and homes were looted or destroyed, leaving the Jewish owners personally responsible for the cost of all repairs.

In the weeks that followed, the German government promulgated dozens of laws and decrees designed to deprive Jews of their property and of their means of livelihood. Many of these laws enforced “Aryanization” policy—the transfer of Jewish-owned enterprises and property to “Aryan” ownership, usually for a fraction of their true value. Ensuing legislation barred Jews, already ineligible for employment in the public sector, from practicing most professions in the private sector, and made further strides in removing Jews from public life. German education officials expelled Jewish children still attending German schools. German Jews lost their right to hold a driver's license or own an automobile; legislation fixed restrictions on access to public transport. Jews could no longer gain admittance to “German” theaters, movie cinemas, or concert halls.

The events of Kristallnacht represented one of the most important turning points in National Socialist antisemitic policy. Historians have noted that after the pogrom, anti-Jewish policy was concentrated more and more concretely into the hands of the SS. Moreover, the passivity with which most German civilians responded to the violence signaled to the Nazi regime that the German public was prepared for more radical measures. The Nazi regime expanded and radicalized measures aimed at removing Jews entirely from German economic and social life in the forthcoming years, moving eventually towards policies of forced emigration, and finally towards the realization of a Germany “free of Jews” (judenrein) by deportation of the Jewish population “to the East.”

Thus, Kristallnacht figures as an essential turning point in Nazi Germany's persecution of Jews, which culminated in the attempt to annihilate the European Jews.
(Source: http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.p...)

More:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kristall...
http://www.holocaustandhumanity.org/k...
http://www.ushmm.org/information/exhi...
http://www.history.com/topics/kristal...
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/holocaus...
https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/...
http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/t...
http://www.historyplace.com/worldwar2...
http://www.aish.com/ho/o/48956531.html
http://www.holocaustresearchproject.o...
http://history1900s.about.com/od/holo...
http://www.holocaust-history.org/shor...
http://www.myjewishlearning.com/histo...
http://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/...
http://www.spiegel.de/international/g...
http://holocaustcenterpgh.org/Kristal...
by Jonathan Kirsch (no photo)
by Gerald Schwab (no photo)
by Alan E. Steinweis (no photo)
by Martin Gilbert (no photo)
by James M. Deem

Neville Chamberlain



Neville Chamberlain was born on March 18, 1869, in Birmingham, England. He served as British prime minister from 1937 to 1940, and is best known for his policy of "appeasement" toward Adolf Hitler's Germany. He signed the Munich Agreement in 1938, relinquishing a region of Czechoslovakia to the Nazis. In 1939, Britain declared war on Germany. Chamberlain, who had lost political support, resigned in 1940 and died a few weeks later.

Born in Birmingham, England, on March 18, 1869, Arthur Neville Chamberlain served as his country's leader in the years leading up to World War II and the early days of the war itself, and is best remembered for his policy of appeasement with Nazi Germany. His father, Joseph Chamberlain, was a successful businessman who held several government posts, including as mayor of Birmingham for a time.

Neville Chamberlain had three sisters, Ethel, Ida and Hilda, as well as two older half-siblings, Beatrice and Austen, from his father's first marriage. He attended the Rugby School and then Mason College (now University of Birmingham). At the age of 21, Chamberlain went to the Bahamas to manage an estate there for several years. That business venture ultimately failed, but he had proven himself as a talented manager and businessman. Chamberlain found success in business after returning to England.

In 1911, Neville Chamberlain won election to the Birmingham City Council—his first political post. He married Anne Vere Cole that same year, and the couple eventually had two children together, X and Y. Chamberlain became Birmingham's lord mayor in 1915. Before long, he became a figure on the national political scene.

Chamberlain won election to the House of Commons in 1918 as a member of the Conservative Party. He went on to serve as postmaster general and minister of health. In the mid-1920s, Chamberlain and his half-brother, Austen, both served on Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin's cabinet.

In 1930, Chamberlain became chairman of the Conservative Party. He then used his talents for economics and business matters as chancellor of the exchequer. For six years, Chamberlain oversaw the country's financial policies.

Chamberlain became Britain's prime minister in 1937. Some of his early efforts focused on improving the lives of workers. The Factories Act of 1937 restricted the number of hours that children and women worked. The following year, Chamberlain supported the Holiday with Pay Act, which gave workers a week off with pay. However, his work on the domestic front was quickly overshadowed by growing foreign relations issues.

Rather than challenge acts of aggression by Nazi Germany, Chamberlain sought ways to pacify Adolf Hitler. Chamberlain signed the Munich Pact in 1938, which gave parts of Czechoslovakia to Germany. Some have speculated that his desire to keep the peace was somewhat driven by Britain being outmatched by Germany's military at the time.

Chamberlain seemed to have underestimated Hitler's ambitions. In March 1939, Hitler violated the Munich Pact by invading Czechoslovakia. Britain and France agreed to protect Poland later that month. After Hitler's forces entered Poland that September, Chamberlain officially declared war on Germany; this declaration came shortly after the invasion, but his slight delay in making this announcement negatively impacted Chamberlain's popularity.

While he saw Britain through the early days of the war, Chamberlain found himself on the political decline. He resigned on May 10, 1940, and was succeeded by Winston Churchill as prime minister. Still Chamberlain remained a member of Churchill's cabinet. By that October, however, he was too ill with cancer to continue his work. Chamberlain died on November 9, 1940, in Heckfield (near Reading), Hampshire, England.
(Source: http://www.biography.com/people/nevil...)

More:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/historic...
http://www.historyguide.org/europe/mu...
http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/t...
http://www.britannia.com/gov/primes/p...
http://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/...
http://spartacus-educational.com/PRch...
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/...
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/dav...
http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-2430...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neville_...
http://apps.nationalarchives.gov.uk/n...
https://www.gov.uk/government/history...
https://www.princeton.edu/~achaney/tm...
by David Dutton (no photo)
by Robert J. Caputi (no photo)
by Robert C. Self (no photo)
by Frank McDonough (no photo)
by John Ruggiero (no photo)
by David Faber (no photo)
by Frank McDonough (no photo)
by R.A.C. Parker (no photo)
by Erik Goldstein (no photo)
by Giles MacDonogh (no photo)

Jill I hope not - because revenge looks as evil as the original perpetrator. The Holocaust was evil and horrible as anything that man has done. However, revenge does not do much for the perpetrator either and it never brings back the dead.

I was watching this newscast and it struck me that this is what revenge looks like - Israeli police this time taking things in their own hands and thinking that it is OK to beat up a kid because three other innocent Israeli Jewish boys (one who was also American) were killed by Hamas. Now that act was more horrible than anybody could have imagined - why kill three innocents. Why would Hamas or any splinter group think that this is OK?

But then you see it becomes a revenge situation where the community becomes incited and angry and then anything is possible - even more inhumane and evil acts like this one. Revenge is not the answer.

In case you missed this newscast - here you will see police officers who feel that many in the community will say - good - those people should get what they deserved and in fact other innocents are being killed and beat up as retribution. This is not right either. A vicious circle which only escalates. Revenge is very tempting - it leads folks to think they also now have a right to strike back.

American Teen Brutally Beaten by Israeli Police, Family Says

http://abcnews.go.com/International/a...

Note: Copy in glossary.

Interview that was done for the Jewish Channel:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4GZgkD...

Richard Glücks



Richard Glücks (help·info) (April 22, 1889, Odenkirchen, Rhine Province – May 10, 1945) was a high-ranking Nazi official. He attained the rank of a SS-Gruppenführer and a Generalleutnant of the Waffen-SS and from 1939 until the end of World War II was the head of Amt D: Konzentrationslagerwesen of the WVHA; the highest-ranking Concentration Camps Inspector in Nazi Germany. Close to Reichsführer-SS Himmler, he was directly responsible for the forced labour of the camp inmates, and was also the supervisor for the medical practices in the camps, ranging from human experimentation to the implementation of the "Final Solution", in particular the mass murder of inmates with Zyklon-B gas. When the Nazi regime fell and Germany capitulated, Glücks committed suicide by swallowing a potassium cyanide capsule.

Glücks was born 1889 in Odenkirchen (now part of Mönchengladbach) in the Rhineland. Having completed gymnasium in Düsseldorf, he worked in his father's business, a fire insurance agency. In 1909, Glücks joined the army for one year as a volunteer, serving in the artillery. In 1913, he was in England, and later moved to Argentina as a trader. When World War I broke out, Glücks returned to Germany under a false identity as a sailor on a Norwegian ship in January 1915 and promptly joined the army again. During the war, he eventually became the commander of a motorized artillery squad and was awarded the Iron Cross I and II. After the war, he became a liaison officer between the German forces and the Military Inter-Allied Commission of Control, the allied body for controlling the restrictions placed upon Germany in the Treaty of Versailles regarding re-armament and strength of their armed forces. Until 1924, he stayed in that position, before joining the staff of the 6th Prussian Division. He also served in the Freikorps.

Glücks joined the NSDAP in 1930 and two years later, the SS. From September 6, 1933 to June 20, 1935, he was a member of the staff of the SS-Group "West" and rose to the rank of an SS-Sturmbannführer.

Subsequently, he became the commander of the 77th SS-Standarte of the Allgemeine SS with the rank of an SS-Obersturmbannführer. On April 1, 1936, he became the head of staff of Theodor Eicke, then Concentration Camps Inspector and head of the SS-Wachverbände, first with the rank of a Standartenführer and later rising to Oberführer. When Eicke became field commander of the SS Division Totenkopf, which had been created following his instigation, Glücks was promoted to Concentration Camps Inspector and named by Himmler as Eicke's successor on November 18, 1939. On April 20, 1941, Glücks was promoted to the rank of an SS-Brigadeführer, and on March 29, 1942, he became the head of Amt D: Konzentrationslagerwesen of the newly formed SS-Wirtschafts-Verwaltungshauptamt (WVHA), the Economics and Administrative Department of the SS. On July 23, 1943, Glücks was made SS-Gruppenführer and a Generalleutnant of the Waffen-SS.

Glücks was described by Rudolf Höss as a static administrator and bureaucrat, afraid of Himmler and mostly occupied with maintaining the concentration camps as Eicke had set them up. At the same time, Höss described Glücks as a man unable to grasp the consequences of his directives, and claimed Glücks had risen to his high position (and stayed there) only as a protégé of Eicke and Oswald Pohl, the head of the WVHA.

Glücks's responsibilities at first mainly covered the use of concentration camp inmates for forced labour. In this phase, he urged camp commandants to lower the death rate in the camps, as it went counter to the economic objectives his department was to fulfill. Other orders of his were to ask for the inmates to be made to work continuously. At the same time, it was Glücks who recommended on February 21, 1940, Auschwitz, a former Austrian cavalry barracks, as a suitable site for a new concentration camp to Himmler, Pohl, and Heydrich. The camp opened on June 14, 1940, and Glücks was quick to provide slave labour from the camp to the new coal-oil and rubber plant erected nearby by I.G. Farben.

From 1942 on, Glücks was increasingly involved in the implementation of the "Final Solution", along with Oswald Pohl. In July 1942, he participated in a planning meeting with Himmler on the topic of medical experiments on camp inmates. From several visits to the Auschwitz concentration camps, Glücks must have been well aware of the dire conditions, and he certainly was aware of the mass murders and other atrocities committed there. Orders for the extermination went through Glücks' office and hands; and he specifically authorized the purchase of Zyklon B for gassing in Auschwitz.

When the WVHA offices in Berlin were destroyed by Allied bombing on April 16, 1945, the WVHA was moved to Born on Darß in Pomerania on the Baltic sea. Owing to the advances of the Russian forces, Glücks and his wife fled to Flensburg at the end of April. It is known that Glücks met Himmler for the last time there. After the capitulation of Germany, he is believed to have committed suicide on May 10, 1945 by swallowing a capsule of potassium cyanide at the Mürwik naval base in Flensburg, although the lack of official records or photos gave ground to speculations about his ultimate fate.
(Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_...)

More:
http://www.zoominfo.com/p/Richard-Glu...
http://www.dieterwunderlich.de/Richar...
http://www.holocaustresearchproject.o...
http://www.go2war2.nl/artikel/1299/Gl...
http://www.tagesspiegel.de/politik/ge...
http://www.hannsandrudolf.com/mobile/...
http://www.redcap70.net/A%20History%2...
http://www.deathcamps.org/occupation/...
by Michael Thad Allen (no photo)
by Reinhard R. Doerries (no photo)
by Alan Levy (no photo)
by Daniel Blatman (no photo)
by Diarmuid Jeffreys (no photo)
by Robert Lewis Koehl (no photo)

Does anyone know where Robert C. Self, the editor of the letters and diaries of Neville Chamberlain, UK former Prime Minister, teaches...I'me looking for vol. 4 of Chamberlain's papers and letters.

There may be a younger relation at Brown University - a Robert O. Self - he can be readily accessed though google. It appears that the younger Self uses O. as his middle initial. Not sure if they are related but you could query.

However, you may want to ask on this thread:

https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...

Also on the UK Amazon site I found this: - this Robert Self has a C. initial for his middle name and he states that he is an editor on many of his works.

ROBERT SELF was formerly Professor of British Politics and Contemporary History at London Metropolitan University, UK. He has authored or edited ten books including the first major biography of Neville Chamberlin to be based principally on an extensive range of archival sources.

You may want to contact the London Metropolitan University in the UK and ask them. Hopefully the Robert Self you are looking for is still alive.