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Tag: Holocaust

  • Shirley MacLaine Criticized After Suggesting the Holocaust Victims’ Fate Was a Result of Karma

    Shirley MacLaine is finding herself in hot water with anti-Semitic groups for comments she made about the Holocaust in her book, What If….

    In her book, Shirley MacLaine questions whether the victims of the Holocaust might be responsible for their own fate because of Karma.

    “What if most Holocaust victims were balancing their karma from ages before, when they were Roman soldiers putting Christians to death, the Crusaders who murdered millions in the name of Christianity, soldiers with Hannibal, or those who stormed across the Near East with Alexander?” she asks in the book. “The energy of killing is endless and will be experienced by the killer and the killee.”

    A spokesman for the Community Security Trust, a group that campaigns against anti-Semitism, said her suggestions are highly offensive.

    “The first impressions are that these comments will offend and bemuse many Jews – and many others,” the spokesperson said in a statement to The Hollywood Reporter.

    Shirley MacLaine has a long history of espousing New Age beliefs, including her beliefs in UFOs, reincarnation and out-of-body experiences.

    As the title suggests, MacLaine’s book, which was published in November 2013, covers a wide-range of topics beginning with the phrase, “what if”… and ending with her theory of what might have occurred and usually has something to do with her belief in reincarnation.

    For example, she suggests Stephen Hawking‘s long battle with ALS is a result of something he may have done in a past life.

  • Nazi War Criminal Alois Brunner Declared Dead

    Nazi war criminal Alois Brunner has been officially declared dead, though he is thought to have passed some time in 2010.

    Brunner, an Austrian Schutzstaffel (SS) officer, and the “best man” to Nazi SS-Obersturmbannführer (lieutenant colonel) Adolf Eichmann, is responsible for the execution of roughly 128,500 European Jews during the Holocaust. He was convicted of crimes against humanity, and was sentenced to death in absentia in France in 1954.

    Brunner then spent decades eluding capture, though the Israeli Mossad sent him letter bombs in 1961 and 1980, causing him to lose and eye and all of the fingers on his left hand.

    It was believed by German intelligence that Brunner lived in Damascus, Syria, under the alias “Georg Fisher.” Efraim Zuroff, director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Israel office, told the New York Times that Brunner took a position as an adviser to Syrian president Hafez Assad, thus influencing “the mistreatment of the Syrian Jewish community.”

    Though German intelligence first thought Brunner to be dead in 2010, this year would have marked his 102nd birthday, so it as been deemed the war criminal died of natural causes.

    In a 1985 interview with the German magazine Bunte, Brunner explained that another SS officer was mistaken for him and was executed in his place, which allowed him to evade capture. He likewise did not have an SS blood type tattoo, so he wasn’t detected in an Allied prison camp.

    Brunner fled Germany in 1954 with a forged Red Cross passport, and made his way to Syria, where he took a government job. Details of his position remain vague, but it is thought he was an adviser on torture and repression techniques, a skill-set he learned during his time as an SS torturer.

    In the Bunte interview, Brunner said his only regret was that he was unable to murder more Jews. In a 1987 phone interview with the Chicago Sun Times, Brunner remarked, “All of the Jews deserved to die because they were the Devil’s agents and human garbage. I have no regrets and would do it again.”

    Zuroff commented, “The significance is only that one very prime target can no longer be brought to justice, and that’s very sad, because it just underlines the failure of the world community to see to it that the primary movers and shakers of the Final Solution were forced to pay for their crimes.”

  • Adolf Hitler’s Personal Copy Of Mein Kampf Auctioned

    Adolf Hitler’s personal copy of Mein Kampf has been auctioned online.

    Mein Kampf, which translates to “My Struggle,” was written by Hitler while he spent time in prison in 1923 and was later published in 1925.

    The book, written eight years before Hitler took power of Germany, was basically a blueprint for his plans for Germany and exterminating the Jews and others that didn’t measure up to his ideal German. This particular copy was taken from Hitler’s Munich apartment by US Army 1st LT Joseph Ben Lieber in 1945.

    The auction was held by recurring Pawn Stars expert Craig Gottlieb and took place on Historyhunter.com. The auction ran from October 18 until November 1. “Mein Kampf is one of the most printed titles in the world,” Gottlieb explained in a news release. “There was a joke that everyone in Germany had a copy, but nobody read it because it was so badly written.”

    “This is not your run-of-the-mill copy of Mein Kampf,” he continued. “Obviously Hitler must have had multiple editions of his own book, but this one was in his Munich apartment and Hitler’s eyes almost certainly scanned its pages at some point.”

    “The chain of custody of the book is unbroken since 1945,” Gottlieb added. “This particular artifact is one of the most profound in the group, which makes the provenance that supports the artifact so crucial to its value.”

    In March, a signed copy of the book sold for $65,000, and a copy sold in England last year for $70,000. While Gottlieb had hoped that the book would bring in over $100,000, unfortunately it only sold for $28,400.

  • Pope Francis Stresses Peace During Holy Land Visit

    Monday wrapped up the end of an arduous, three day trip to the Holy Land for Pope Francis, only the fourth such trip by a pope since the inception of the Catholic church some 2,000 years ago.

    Before embarking on his historic journey, Pope Francis and the Vatican insisted that the purpose of the journey was strictly religious, with the main goal being the meeting between Pope Francis and Patriarch Bartholomew of the Orthodox Church, a meeting marking the 50th anniversary of the first meeting between a Catholic pope and Orthodox patriarch since the Great Schism in 1054 CE. Pope Francis even hearkened back to the 1964 meeting and Pope Paul VI’s reputation as the “pilgrim Pope” in his latest tweet:

    While creating better ties between the Catholic and Orthodox churches was perhaps the stated purpose of the Pope’s visit to the Holy Land, the Argentinian-born leader of the Catholic Church was able to accomplish much more.

    The Pope’s visit could have started on rocky ground as he decided to fly directly into Bethlehem, a Palestinian city, instead of heading to Israel first. Pope Francis only complicated matters further by referring to the “state of Palestine”, giving credence to the UN upgrade of Palestine to non-member observer state status in 2012, and by also making an impromptu stop at the separation wall constructed by Israel along the West Bank, taking a moment to pray for an end to the violence which has surrounded the Holy Land for the past two centuries.

    While the first half of the Pope’s ventures were concentrated on paying homage to the plight of the Palestinian state, Francis spent the second half of his visit attending to the Israeli aspect of the equation.

    The day started with Pope Francis visiting the third holiest place in the Islamic world, the Dome of the Rock. From there, the Pope continued his visit of religious intersectionality by praying at the Western Wall, the holiest place for Jews to gather and pray. Holding to Jewish tradition of placing a note in the crack of the wall, Pope Francis left behind a Spanish version of the “Our Father” prayer.

    Francis’s next stop, while not the most religiously significant, was perhaps the most politically important gesture of his three-day trip. When Theodor Herzl went to Pope Pius X in 1904 to ask for assistance in the creation of the Israeli state, he was adamantly denied, with Pius even insisting that the remaining Jews convert to Christianity.

    To atone for such a political insult with long-lasting implications, Pope Francis spent much time at the Mount Herzl cemetery, becoming the first Pope to lay a wreath on Theodor Herzl’s grave. Pope Francis would also lay a wreath, composed of yellow and white flowers, in the Hall of Remembrance at the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial. While at the memorial, Pope Francis had a message for the world concerning the events of the Holocaust: “Never again, Lord, never again! Here we are, Lord, shamed by what man — created in your own image and likeness — was capable of doing.”

    And if the political implications of Pope Francis’s trip were not evident enough, he also invited both the President of Israel, Shimon Peres, and the Palestinian President, Mahmoud Abbas, to the Vatican for all three gentlemen to pray for peace. Both presidents eagerly accepted the invitation.

    In a time with ever-rising tensions and declining Christian and Catholic populations, the Pope’s visit could not have been more important. Perhaps Pope Francis’s calming nature and egalitarian principles will be the first to appeal to an area which has been plagued by power grabs for centuries.

    Image via YouTube

  • Majdanek Death Camp: 20 Former Guards Probed By Nazi Investigators

    German Nazi investigators have identified 20 guards that served at the Majdanek death camp. They could face charges in Germany for being accessories to murder at the death camp.

    Thomas Will, who is the lead investigator, said that 30 suspects were identified, but out of those 30, 10 had already died. The remaining 20 men and women all reside in Germany. More than 200 others are still under investigation, but their whereabouts have not yet been located.

    Kurt Schrimm, the federal prosecutor, said that he will be turning the case over to state investigators in the coming weeks, so that they can pursue charges.

    In 2011, John Demjanjuk became the first person to be convicted in Germany for being a death camp guard. There was no evidence that showed he was involved in the killing of people at the death camp. His case sparked the Majdanek investigation.

    Demjanjuk died before his appeal, but his case caused the prosecutors to pursue charges against 30 other guards who served in Auschwitz.

    Majdanek concentration camp was located near Lublin, and was established during the German occupation in Poland. Reports say that around 360,000 Jews were killed in the camp. Not all the guards who served at the camp are being investigated, since Majdanek was also a labor camp and some of the guards were not involved in genocide.

    Prosecutors are now concentrating on the investigation of guards who were present at the time of the killings.

    Schrimm stated that they will be announcing more suspects within the coming months. Head Nazi-hunter Efraim Zuroff is urging state prosecutors to give importance to new cases, since the suspects are old, and they want to move on with the case before they pass away. “We are very hopeful that the work will be expedited so as many people as possible can be brought to justice,” said Zuroff.

    Image via YouTube

  • Treblinka Camp Secrets: More Proof That The Nazis Were Monsters

    Forensic archeologist Caroline Sturdy Colls has been granted unprecedented access to excavate one of history’s greatest crime scenes: Hitler’s secret extermination camp in the Polish village of Treblinka.

    It was in this camp during the years of 1942 and 1943, almost one-million Jews were killed. But strangely, for the past 70-years all evidence of this camp and its victims vanished. Ms. Sturdy Colis plans to reveal what Hitler and his henchmen were so desperate to hide.

    The grisly results of this dig are revealed in “Treblinka: Hitler’s Killing Machine,” which is an hour-long show premiering Saturday on the Smithsonian Channel. But they’re revealed in a way that pays respect to the estimated 900,000 Jewish victims of that killing machine.

    “The ethical dimension of the work that I do is really important to me,” Caroline Sturdy Colls told NBC News.

    The difference at Treblinka, which is as infamous as Auschwitz and Dachau in the hell that was the Holocaust, is that there were no inmates liberated by allied troops, and no photos showing unused gas chambers. The Germans finished their work at Treblinka in 1943 and bulldozed the camp in an effort to cover their tracks. They went so far as to plant crops and build a farmhouse on the leveled ground.

    The story detailing the horrors of Treblinka were brought to light by several eyewitnesses accounts and by captured guards. They revealed that one camp at Treblinka was primarily a forced-labor facility. Another camp was designed specifically for herding thousands of victims at a time into one side of a “bathhouse,” where they were gassed to death with carbon monoxide exhaust from tank engines. The bodies were taken out the other side for mass burial, and later cremation.

    When the reign of terror ended, Treblinka became a memorial out of respect for the victims, therefore no excavation was allowed, even if it entailed an effort to get to the truth about these camps. That is until Sturdy Colls and her colleagues won approval from Polish authorities as well as Jewish religious leaders to conduct a limited dig.

    “There are some questions that can only be answered by archaeology,” Sturdy Colls explained. “As we enter, unfortunately, an age without survivors, archaeology can provide much more new evidence.”

    Using GPS and computerized maps, aerial photography and ground penetrating radar and laser-scanning technology, the archaeologists were able to narrow down their search areas.

    “Without that technology, I never would have been able to do this work at Treblinka, because no one wanted excavations there,” Sturdy Colls said. “Nobody wanted the ground to be disturbed unnecessarily.”

    During the digs, investigators found bones from previously unknown mass graves. Some of the bones showed evidence of cut marks, which Sturdy Colls said would be consistent with tales of victims being chopped up before burial.

    This discovery was an emotional moment for the investigators and excavators, even though Sturdy Colls is accustomed to crime scene investigations and has seen so much in her career.

    “What we were doing there was closing the lid again on that grave site. … It didn’t cross my mind that it would be me reinterring the remains,” she said.

    Sturdy Colis expects the study to counter the lingering claims of Holocaust-deniers — and show that, despite its best efforts, Nazi Germany couldn’t erase the evidence of a monstrous human tragedy.

    “They did a very good job of hiding it, but in actual fact, they didn’t ‘sterilize’ this landscape,” Sturdy Colls said. “They weren’t that efficient.”

    Image via Wikimedia Commons

  • Treblinka Camp Secrets: More Proof Holocaust Existed

    NBC News tells us of the grim secrets recently found by archaeologists at a Nazi death camp. The findings were also documented by filmmakers and shown Saturday on the Smithsonian television channel.

    Treblinka is an Eastern Poland Nazi camp that claimed thousands of Jewish citizens in the early 1940s. The camp was destroyed by the Germans in 1943. After the war, Treblinka served as a memorial; the three sites of the death camp were not excavated in earlier years out of respect to the victims.

    The archaeologists now cover the site with as much respect as possible; they wish to cause as little disturbance to the long-resting bones as possible. One of the first discoveries were quite unsettling– Stars of David tiles in the bathhouse where hundreds of thousands of Jews were killed were found– a part of the Nazi’s sadistic plan to lull the Jews into a false sense of security before their mass murder.

    The Treblinka camp discovery is also important because it sheds more light on why some may deny the existence of the Holocaust.

    The Treblinka camp was thoroughly dismantled and covered by Germany in what seems like a deliberate effort to cover their tracks, and the farmhouse and crops planted over the three-sectioned Treblinka sites give further evidence towards that sentiment. Become more enlightened on the subject by watching Treblinka: Hitler’s Killing Machine on the Smithsonian channel. The premiere was Saturday at 8 p.m., but check your local listings for the repeat showings.

    Image via Wikimedia Commons

  • Heinrich Himmler, Nazi: Private Letters Published

    Heinrich Himmler was a Nazi – and his first order of duty – the extermination of the Jews as ordered by the Führer, Adolf Hitler.

    His letters will be published in sections in Germany’s Die Welt newspaper under the heading, “Insight into the orderly world of a mass murderer.”

    (image)

    The newspaper will feature parts of Himmler’s personal letters and personal family photos, published for the first time.

    The excerpts, which begin publication this weekend, come from roughly 700 letters that Himmler wrote to his wife, Margarete a nurse he called his “dear, precious woman.” In later letters, while Himmler was having an affair with his secretary who eventually bore him two daughters, he addressed as simply, “Dear Mommy.”

    Although the letters do not describe details of his role in the Holocaust, and other atrocities that occurred during WW II, they do reveal the thoughts and words of a “clearly cold, feeling-less, self-righteous bureaucrat” who orchestrated the mass murders of millions of Jewish men, women and children.

    For example: In a letter sent to his then-fiancée in June 1928, Himmler wrote to Margarete: “You have to fight with these wretched Jews because of the money…Don’t get frustrated over the Jews, good lady — If only I could help you.”

    Die Welt says he was referring to Margarete selling her share of a private clinic in Berlin to a fellow occupant of the building, who was Jewish.

    An Israeli film director, Vanessa Lapa, owned the letters and approached the newspaper three years ago with them. After historians verified authenticity, they were able to be published.

    Lapa is expected to debut a documentary on Himmler next month at the Berlin International Film Festival.

    The letters were found inside a safe in Himmler’s home in Bavaria.

    He committed suicide toward the end of World War II.

    Image via YouTube, # 2

  • Nazi Diary Of Alfred Rosenberg Finally Found

    A long lost diary that once belonged to one of Hitler’s aides, has finally found its way home. The diary was written by Alfred Rosenberg, who played an important role in the Holocaust. It is made up of 425 pages and is dated from 1936 through 1944.

    Rosenberg was head of the Nazi party’s foreign affairs department and was known for looting priceless artifacts and mass murdering many Jews. His diary entries quote Hitler and express the Nazis’ hate for Jews.

    Rosenberg was hanged after the Nuremberg trials and his diary was sold to the chief prosecutor of the trials, Robert Kempner. When Kempner died in 1993, the diary was lost for a brief period of time. Kempner’s heirs had agreed to give the diary to the the Holocaust Memorial Museum, but it was not able to be recovered.

    It was eventually found in the home of Herbert Richardson, an academic publisher and former professor who had worked for Kempner. The diary was seized by federal agents with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and turned over to the Holocaust Museum.

    “The Rosenberg diary will add to our understanding of the ideas that animated the extremist ideology of Nazism,” the museum’s director, Sara Bloomfield said in a statement. “We are grateful to our partners at ICE who helped us secure this important piece of history, a significant addition in our urgent efforts to rescue the evidence of the Holocaust.”

    Image via Wikimedia Commons.

  • Schindler’s List (the Actual Thing) Is Now for Sale on eBay

    Schindler’s List (the Actual Thing) Is Now for Sale on eBay

    If you’re a history buff with a few million dollars sitting around, you can buy one of the most famous lists in history – on eBay.

    Schindler’s List, or the List of Schindlerjuden, is now up for auction on the site. No, not the Academy Award-winning film, but the actual list – one of only 4 remaining copies. The bidding starts at $3 million.

    Its sellers, Gary Zimet and Eric Gazin, hope that the final price could hit as high as $5 million.

    “We decided to sell the list on eBay because it has over 100 million worldwide members, and this is a global story,” said Gazin. “There are billionaires using the site, wealthy celebrities. We like the platform.”

    This copy of the list, which is responsible for saving over a thousand Jews during the Holocaust, comes from the family of Itzhak Stern – Oskar Schindler’s accountant and friend.

    “This exceedingly rare original Schindler’s List is the only one ever on the market. It emanates from the family of Itzhak Stern, Schindler’s accountant and right hand man (played by Ben Kingsley in the Academy Award-winning film). There are 3 others known which are in institutional hands. It is 14 pages in length and lists 801 male names, dated April 18, 1945. It is guaranteed authentic,” says the listing.

    Oskar Schindler is credited with saving the lives of at least 1,200 Jews during the Holocaust by employing them at his factories, which made enamelware and ammunitions. At first, his connections helped him protect his workers from internment in Nazi concentration camps. But after a while, he could only maintain their safety through bribes. By the end of the war, Schindler had spent most of his money on bribes to protect the Schindlerjuden.

    In 1944, with the help of a Jewish ghetto police officer, his secretary Mietek Pemper, and Stern, Schindler compiled the famous list, which contained 1,200 names of workers he would transport with him to a new factory. The list would ultimately save them from near-certain death.

  • Holocaust Victims: $1B To Be Spent On Survivors

    Holocaust victims around the globe will be receiving funds from Germany after an agreement was reached between Germany’s Ministry of Finance and the Conference on Jewish Material Claims.

    While the money won’t erase the horror of what was done to the Jewish people during the Holocaust, it will certainly help those who survived usher in their later years a little more comfortably. Over the next four years, an estimated $1 billion will be spent giving the victims home nursing and social services, medication, clothing, and food.

    “We are seeing Germany’s continued commitment to fulfill its historic obligation to Nazi victims,” Stuart Eizenstat, a former United States ambassador and Claims Conference negotiator said. “This ensures that Holocaust survivors, now in their final years, can be confident that we are endeavoring to help them live in dignity, after their early life was filled with indescribable tragedy and trauma. This is all the more impressive since it comes at a time of budget austerity in Germany.”

    The ministry said it would also pay a monthly stipend to Jews who survived concentration camps or who lived in hiding under the Nazi regime. As of now, over one third of those receiving restitution are living in Israel.

    Over 6 million Jews were murdered under Hitler’s orders.

    Image: Wikipedia

  • Donald Duck Holocaust: Printing Snafu Causes Outrage

    Donald Duck Holocaust: Printing Snafu Causes Outrage

    Donald Duck Holocaust: Those of you who were hoping for an Internet-born mash-up of Disney’s “Ducktales” and director Ruggero Deodato infamous horror outing “Cannibal Holocaust” are going to walk away from this article experiencing some extreme disappointment. I apologize in advance for ruining your entire week.

    In a recent German translation of the 1972 Disney comic book “Junior Woodchucks”, the word “holocaust” was accidentally used as a congratulatory term directed towards the firefighters who helped contain a blaze within the cozy little town of Duckburg. The word — which was used to describe an “inferno” or “blaze” — was not a translation error, according to publisher Egmont Ehapa. Apparently the English words were not entirely removed from the bubble over the offending character’s head, which resulted in the insensitive debacle.

    Although Ehapa claims the company has been very careful about using “sensitive” terms and imagery — the publisher recently removed a few images of Adolph Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” in the Duckburg city dump from one issue — the distributor came under fire seven years ago for attempting to make the Holocaust less horrific and more appealing to children.

    Donald Duck, as well as his pals Mickey Mouse and Bambi, were used by Walt Disney to spread anti-Nazi messages during World War II. A few examples of such animated propaganda can be found embedded below. Naturally, if the idea of Donald Duck locking horns with Adolph Hitler offends you, perhaps skipping the video is in your best interest.

  • A Flock, A Fade & A Fork

    One of the memes moving through Google+ today is #MonochromeMonday (curated by +Siddharth Pandit), from which I’ve collected today’s photos. Move your mouse cursor over each image to read the caption (if the photographer gave one). If you like what you see here be sure to visit the Google+ accounts of the sharers. It’ll be like a spa for your eyes.

    Also: Support the artists.

    Buon appetito.

    Shared by +Photogenix.


    Shared by +Grant Murray.


    Shared by +Andreas Eberhard.


    Shared by +Kimberly Pemberton.


    Shared by +Mikko Lagerstedt.


    Shared by +Thomas Russ Arnestad.


    Shared by +Roman Pastierik.


    Shared by +Monika Drgáčová.


    Shared by +Francisco Herrera.


    Shared by +Paul Simon Wheeler.