Holocaust

Almost one in four Dutch people born after 1980 think the Holocaust is “a myth” or that the number of Jewish people killed by the Nazis is “greatly exaggerated”.

Research by the US-based Claims Conference, an organisation representing Jews in negotiations with Germany for compensation and restitution, has found “shocking and disturbing” ignorance among millennials and Generation Z in the Netherlands, which ranked the worst for Holocaust denial from a selection of Western countries surveyed.

Here’s the studies homepage – New Study Reveals Nearly One Quarter of Dutch Millennials and GenZ Believe the Holocaust Was a Myth or Exaggerated

They also conducted a Canadian study.

They give a good look at the methodology.

The Austrian city of Linz has announced plans to rename a street honouring the founder of the luxury carmaker Porsche after a commission investigating controversial names found his Nazi past “problematic”.

The renaming of streets and other public places is still a hotly debated issue in Austria – Adolf Hitler’s birthplace – which Nazi Germany annexed in 1938 and which long cast itself as a victim.

Only in the past three decades has the country begun to seriously examine its role in the Holocaust, in which about a third of Austria’s Jewish population of 200,000 were murdered.

One example: A dark blot on the non-Orthodox American Jewish leadership is its absence from the March on Washington. Burns omits it.

In “The U.S. and the Holocaust,” a new PBS Ken Burn’s documentary, he attempts to place America’s response in perspective.

There are many issues is this very flawed film that he fails to explain and clarify. One of them is the response of the American Orthodox community. One example was The Rabbis March on Washington D.C. on October 6, 1943, which was the only public demonstration by American Jews to highlight the issue of rescue of the Jews of Europe.

I will not work on a more important film,” says Ken Burns about The U.S. and the Holocaust, a three-part, six-hour documentary (Sept. 18, PBS) about America’s response to the Nazis’ genocide. A comprehensive examination of both President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s actions and the anti-Semitic and anti-immigration climate in which he operated, Burns’ latest—co-directed by long-time collaborators Lynn Novick and Sarah Botstein—seeks to grasp why we chose to admit so few Jewish refugees in the 1930s and 1940s, and whether we could have done more to stop, or at least slow down, Hitler’s “Final Solution.” The answers it comes up with are not always flattering, complicating our understanding of the country’s WWII legacy. Yet per Burns tradition, they’re handled with enlightening and affecting nuance and empathy.

I liked his Civil War doc but can never forgive the disaster of his WW II effort. All I remember of the little I was able to stomach is the horrible sound track. 

A new book based on an investigation by a team led by a former FBI agent has concluded that Holocaust diarist Anne Frank’s family may have been betrayed to the Nazis by a Jewish notary who collaborated with the German occupiers.

Anne and her family hid from the Nazis during most of the war, but were captured in August 1944 after being betrayed by a still-unknown informant. They were sent to several concentration camps, and Anne died in Bergen-Belsen shortly before it was liberated by the Allies. Her diary, published after the war, became a classic of Holocaust literature.

It is hard to watch, but justice is being pursued 76 years later

A former SS guard who worked at Sachsenhausen concentration camp near Berlin from 1942-1945 must now stand trial in Germany under tight security measures. It has taken 76 years for this case to be brought in front of a court.

When the accused appeared there last week, he cut a sorry figure as he laboriously pushed himself forward on his rollator with oner liver-spotted hand, while shielding his face from the cameras with the other. It is hard to believe that the frail, 100-year-old in the home-knitted jumper was once in the SS.

Ninety-five-year-old Friedrich Karl B. has escaped trial in Germany. On February 20, the former concentration camp guard was extradited from Tennessee to Frankfurt after a US court found him to be a Holocaust perpetrator.

B. had admitted to having served as a camp guard, but he told a US immigration court in 2020 that he hadn’t seen any prisoners abused, hadn’t known of any deaths among the inmates and had not been posted to guard the evacuation marches of the camp.

Since there are no surviving witnesses to give testimony, when B. announced that he was unwilling to be questioned again, on March 31, prosecutors in Celle, central Germany, declared that their investigation was over: There was no new evidence, and that was that.