Holocaust

One man kneels at the edge of a pit filled with bodies. He knows that, within moments, he will be dead. His drawn face burns with defiance. Behind him stands a uniformed, bespectacled Nazi soldier. In his extended right arm, the soldier holds a pistol, just inches from his victim’s skull. A crowd of other Germans stands watching, curious but undisturbed.

This harrowing scene, captured in a 1941 photograph known as “The Last Jew in Vinnitsa,” became an iconic image of the Holocaust for the way it captured the banal savagery of mass slaughter. But for decades, nobody could answer the most basic question the photograph posed: Who were these two men?

German authorities are pressing for a 100-year-old former Nazi concentration camp guard to face trial almost 80 years after the end of the second world war.

The higher regional court in Frankfurt said on Tuesday it had overturned a decision by a lower court under which the suspect had been deemed unfit to stand trial.

The suspect, named as Gregor Formanek by German media, was charged last year with aiding and abetting murder in 3,322 cases while working at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp near Berlin between July 1943 and February 1945.

The youngest Canadians are the most likely to believe Jews exaggerate the devastation of the Holocaust, according to a new national poll.

I suspect these “young Canadians” have little connection to Canada let alone Western culture and values.

What Eisenhower as supreme allied commander did to ensure that the Holocaust would never happen again has relevance in our own day.

At the dawn of 2024, the United States is embroiled in a heated discussion over what constitutes antisemitism. In the wake of the October 7 terrorist attacks launched by Hamas against targets in Israel and the subsequent retaliatory military actions Israel has undertaken, protests in cities, on college campuses, and in the halls of Congress have ranged from peaceful to blatantly antisemitic, with chants, vandalism, and threats of violence.

This outstanding, long lost account reveals the fate of Hungary’s Jews in vivid, stomach-turning detail. By Adam LeBor

Old Mr Mandel, the carpenter, was one of the first to die on the train from Backa Topola, northern Serbia, to Auschwitz. For 60 years he had smoked 50 cigarettes a day. At first, crammed into the cattle truck, Mandel had “stared, blankly, deliriously at the surging mass of people all around”, Jozsef Debreczeni writes in his outstanding, vividly observed Holocaust memoir. Mandel’s cigarettes, like his money and jewellery, had been confiscated. But the decades-long habit somehow continued. Debreczeni watched as Mandel’s hand moved back and forth, as though still holding a cigarette. He raised his fingers and pursed his lips to puff the imaginary smoke. Then, after a while, Mandel’s head tilted to the side. His hands lay still.

A letter found among the private papers of Pope Pius XII suggests that the Holy See was told in 1942 that up to 6,000 people, “above all Poles and Jews,” were being killed in furnaces every day at Belzec, a Nazi death camp in Poland.

Though news of the atrocities being perpetrated by Hitler was already reaching Pope Pius XII’s ears, this information was especially important because it came from a trusted church source based in Germany, said Giovanni Coco, a Vatican archivist who discovered the letter. The source was “in the heart of the enemy territory,” Mr. Coco said on Saturday.

The Vatican on Sunday beatified an entire family for the first time to honor it for giving shelter to Jews during World War II while Poland was under German occupation.

Jozef Ulma, 44, his pregnant wife Wiktoria, 31, and their children, all under 8 years of age, were killed by German police on March 24, 1944, after being betrayed to Nazi authorities for sheltering eight Jewish people in their attic. The eight Jews were also killed.

After the massacre at the Ulmas’ farmhouse, 24 Jews in the family’s hometown of Markowa in southeast Poland were murdered by their Polish neighbors.

New documentation shows that Catholic institutions in Rome gave shelter to thousands of Jews fleeing the Nazis, a Thursday statement said.

The statement was issued jointly by the Pontifical Biblica Institute in Rome, Rome’s Jewish Community and Israel’s official Holocaust memorial, Yad Vashem.

Researchers from the three institutions presented the findings at a conference held at the Museum of the Shoah, which is near the Great Synagogue of Rome.