Gangs of thugs in brown shirts owned the streets. They drove around in trucks, flashing their guns and their swastika armbands, hooting at the pretty girls. If they wanted to pick you up or beat you up, they did so with impunity. Anybody who resisted was beaten or killed or taken away to Dachau or Buchenwald or some other concentration camp. (You must understand that at that time, the concentration camps were prisons where opponents of the Nazi regime were detained . . . The inmates were made to work at hard labor and lived in dreadful conditions, but the words 'concentration camp' came to stand for monstrous cruelty and almost certain death. Nobody even imagined there would one day be a death camp like Auschwitz.)

Cheering crowds greet Hitler as he enters Vienna. Austria, March 1938.

— Wide World Photo

How can I describe to you our confusion and terror when the Nazis took over? We had lived until yesterday in a rational world. Now everyone around us -- our schoolmates, neighbours, and teachers; our tradesmen, policemen, and bureaucrats -- had all gone mad. They had been harboring a hatred for us which we had grown accustomed to calling 'prejudice'. What a gentle word that was! What a euphemism! In fact they hated us with a hatred as old as their religion; they were born hating us, raised hating us; and now with the Anschluss, the veneer of civilization which had protected us from their hatred was stripped away.

Jews in Vienna forced to scrub Schuschnigg's slogans off the sidewalk --
www.HolocaustResearchProject.org

On the pavements, protesters had written anti-Nazi slogans. The SS grabbed Jews and forced them at gunpoint to scrub off the graffiti while crowds of Austrians stood around jeering and laughing.

The Nazi radio blamed us for every filthy evil thing in this world. The Nazis called us subhuman and, in the next breath, superhuman; accused us of plotting to murder them, to rob them blind; declared that they had to conquer the world to prevent us from conquering the world. The radio said that we must be dispossessed of all we owned; that my father, who had dropped dead while working, had not really worked for our pleasant flat -- the leather chairs in the dining room, the earrings in my mother's ears -- that he had somehow stolen them from Christian Austria, which now had every right to take them back.

Members of the League of German Girls wave Nazi flags in support of the German annexation of Austria. Vienna, Austria, March 1938.   — Dokumentationsarchiv des Oesterreichischen Widerstandes

Did our friends and our neighbors really believe this? Of course they didn't believe it. They were not stupid. But they had suffered depression, inflation, and joblessness. They wanted to be well-to-do again, and the fastest way to accomplish that was to steal. Cultivating a belief in the greed of the Jews gave them an excuse to steal everything the Jews possessed.

We sat in our flats, paralyzed with fear, waiting for the madness to end. Rational, charming, witty, dancing, generous Vienna must surely rebel against such insanity We waited and we waited and it didn't end and it didn't end and still we waited and we waited.

The restrictions against Jews spread into every corner of our lives. We couldn't go to movies or concerts. We couldn't walk on certain streets. The Nazis put up signs on Jewish shop windows warning the population not to buy there. Mimi was fired from her job at the dry cleaners because it had become illegal for Christians to employ Jews. Hansi was no longer allowed to go to school.

SS men supervise the confiscation of goods belonging to Jews deported from Vienna --
www.HolocaustResearchProject.org

Uncle Richard went to the cafe where he had been going for twenty years. It now had a Jewish side and an Aryan side, and he sat on the Jewish side. Because he had fair hair and didn't look Jewish, a waiter, who did not know him, said he had to move to the Aryan side. But on the Aryan side, a waiter who did know him said that he had to go back to the Jewish side. He finally gave up and went home.

Baron Louis de Rothschild, one of the wealthiest Jewish men in Vienna, tried to leave the city. The Nazis stopped him at the airport and put him in prison, and whatever they did to him there convinced him that he ought to sign over everything to the Nazi regime. Then they let him leave. The SS took over the Rothschild Palace on Prinz Eugenstrasse and renamed it the Center for Jewish Emigration.

Right after Grandmother died, the world held a conference at Evian-les-Bains, a luxurious spa in the French Alps near Lake Geneva, at which the fate of the Austrian Jews was up for discussion. Eichmann sent representatives of our community to plead with other countries to pay the Nazi ransom and take us in. "Don't you want to save the urbane, well-educated, fun-loving, cultured Jews of Austria?" they asked. "How about paying $400 a head to the Nazi regime? Too much? How about $200?"

They couldn't get a cent.

No country wanted to pay for our rescue, including the United States. The dictator of the Dominican Republic, Trujillo, took a few Jews, thinking they might help bring some prosperity to the tiny, impoverished country. I have heard that they did.

Transport list of Viennese Jews -- www.HolocaustResearchProject.org

From the NAZI Officer's WIFE -- Edith Hahn Beer, c.1999

Never Forgotten

"...So the end of the ghetto fight against Germany was also inevitable. Disease, starvation, and mounting casualty figures from the murderous artillery fire took their toll. There was no one left to fight, and the defence collapsed. It is estimated that the Germans expended more artillery shells in subduing the Warsaw ghetto, defended by a handful of bedraggled Jewish partisans, than they did in the initial capture of Warsaw in 1939, when it was defended by the Polish Army. General Jurgen Stroop wrote a seventy-five-page battle report to the Fuhrer in Berlin, and a proud Hitler awarded the general an Iron Cross to ease his Halsschmerzen. When General Alfred Jodl, Chief of Operations of the German Armed Forces High Command heard this report read at the Nuremberg Trials, he could not contain himself: 'That dirty, arrogant S.S. swine', he shouted. 'Imagine writing a seventy-five-page boastful report on a little murder expedition, when a major campaign fought by soldiers against a well-armed enemy takes only a few pages.
"The world, however, took little note of the Warsaw uprising. It was too busy following the daily communiques of the two-front World War. But Adolf Eichmann noted it, and in his diary set down that a chill of fear swept through Germany upon the news. Even Goebbels was apprehensive. 'It shows what is to be expected of the Jews when they are in possession of arms', he jotted in his diary. And Jews too noted it, Jews in concentration camps, Jews in America, Jews in Russia, Jews in Palestine.
"In Germany orders were issued that henceforth there were to be no large concentrations of Jews anywhere. The extermination was to continue to the bitter end, at an accelerated pace. Even as German armies retreated in Russia and France, the death trains with their human cargoes kept rolling to Germany's gas chambers, and the chimneys continued to belch fine layers of warm, human ashes over the countryside and to fill the air with the sickening-sweet odour of the 'bakeries', as the Germans jestingly called the crematoriums. Only when Allied soldiers crossed Germany's borders did a frantic scramble begin to eradicate all traces of concentration camp activities. But the Allied advance was too swift, and what the world had refused to believe remained intact for all the world to see."
Max I. Dimont, Jews, God and History

Nazi Germany embarked on its Thousand Year Reich under a persuasively charismatic chancellor who promised Germans their rightful place in the world order as Aryan specimens of humanity perfected. All other nations of the world would be in thrall to Germany as befits a master race. Nothing would deter Adolf Hitler and his minions, but to subjugate the world to the command and control of German hegemonic power through which Germany would become a light unto the world.

Illuminating totalitarian fascism at its height of entitlement, advancing into the future to destroy an entire people through the creation of a twofold campaign of epic proportions; the Axis powers controlled by Nazi Germany determined to conquer the responding Allied powers themselves determined to combat fascism and rescue the world from the domination of a creed whose purpose was to create a vast pool of victims comprised of the people of all the conquered countries.

A second stream of purposeful action demanded resources to be taken from combat zones; finances, manpower, transport by truck and by rail, administration, planning and execution; the gathering up of Europe's Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, political dissenters for confinement and execution. That venture sufficiently successful that by war's end in 1945 six million Jews were annihilated. Seventy years later, the persecutor-slaughterers and the remnants and successors of the persecuted have a common cause.

Photographs (from the LIFE archives) by Hugo Jaeger
(Adolf Hitler’s personal photographer)

German reparations paved the way for Germany to pledge that all successive generations would be exposed to the shameful history of the dread barbarism of a German government that acted on behalf of the German people. And an eventual pact between the State of Israel -- which had been brought into existence as an antidote to the potential of any future state seeking a replay of Nazi Germany's Final Solution -- and the country that had given birth to the Holocaust.

A network encompassing all sectors of business, production, research, trade, government, military, society, art, exists between Israel and Germany. The economies of the two countries are intertwined; Germany presents as Israel's principal trading partner in the European Union, and is the third-largest trade partnership in the world with Israel after China and the United States. The bizarre bestiality of Nazi Germany has morphed into present-day Germany as a human-rights leader in Europe.

A number of exchanges and foundations in the sciences link joint cooperation elevating ing both countries' international reputations as captains of innovation. Cultural and educational exchanges represent further connections. One in two young Israelis has visited Germany, with tens of thousands of Israelis coming to Berlin annually, many taking up residence. German visitors are attracted to Tel Aviv and other Israeli cities.

Sister-city relationships number close to a hundred; business collaborations and cultural exchanges have seen Jewish life and culture flourishing once again in Berlin and other German cities. The first rabbinical seminary since the end of the war was inaugurated in 2009 in Berlin. "Never again" has ensured that each new generation is exposed to the horrors of the Holocaust.

Is it even remotely possible for a country to make amends for an unspeakable mass extermination on such an unimaginable scale, that such trust and forgiveness is extended?

Of course there are complications. Israel, established in the geography from which Jews emanated historically in Judea in the ancient past is also home to other tribal peoples who are enraged at the re- creation of a Jewish state in the midst of Islamic countries and the threat from that source is never-ending. And just as Jews have returned to Germany where they lived before WWII for a thousand years, Muslims too have migrated to Germany, their presence now threatening Jews once again in Germany.

From Holocaust Survival to Happiness

"There was no water system, electricity, nothing. I was always barefoot [in 1940s Konus, Hungary]. If a car came into town, that was like a national holiday. We used to run out of school."
"People used to see bundles of bodies tied together with wires, floating in the rivers."
"My dad and I and my brother went to one side. And my mom and my three young sisters went straight to the gas chambers."
"I remember one day they called everyone to the middle of camp [Auschwitz/Buna work camp] and brought in three people, and hung them that night. One guy stole a piece of bread, another stole an apple. To survive, you had to. We called it organizing, not stealing."
"You didn't care [about death]. You're so desperate, so hungry, you don't focus on human beings. You're an animal."
"I had my number, 6024, and that's all I knew. You could have called my name, I wouldn't have answered you."
"When you were marching on the death march, you could hear shooting continuously. People who couldn't walk anymore, they shot them. Bang, bang, bang, bang -- continuously, you see?"
"I was sitting on top of someone's head [packed open freight cars]. People were starving, freezing -- it was January. They'd stop the train every so often and pull all the dead bodies out."
"[Buchenwald] was worse than Auschwitz. In Auschwitz, at least I went to work. In Buchenwald, you went there to die."
"[On April 22, 1945 came the Americans] All the guards were gone. You always thought that the Germans were coming back. You were so scared of everything."
David Moskovic, Holocaust survivor, Ottawa, Canada

David Moskovic is seen with his only surviving sibling, his sister Edith, who now lives in Florida.     Courtesy Joy Moskovic

David Moskovic's memory reaches back to the early summer of 1944 when, transported with his family to the Auschwitz death camp he recalls a smokestack and foul-smelling smoke blackening the sky; nearby a mountain of clothing and shoes. "But nobody knew what it was." Now, 85, he was fourteen when he was introduced to the world outside of his rural village, a farming community, now located in Slovakia. Even there his family heard of dreadful misfortunes of European Jews, and then his family was swept toward that wholesale misfortune.

This was when the infamous Adolph Eichmann, tasked as a major Nazi Final Solution organizer, began rounding Jews up in the provinces of Hungary. Rattling trains of cattle cars duly delivered 12,000 Jews on a daily basis to Auschwitz. Germany and its Axis supporters might have been fighting a war on the world stage against the Allied forces, but it viewed Hitler's dream of exterminating the world's Jews as too important to be neglected, so energy was not spared to fulfill that obligation, diverting troops and transport to the vital task.

On the day the town crier in Mr. Moskovic's sleepy little town ordered that all Jewish residents must assemble the following morning, he, his parents, his brother and sisters were placed in a cattle car with standing room only for the two-day trip to the death camp; no toilet facilities, but then no food or water either. On entering the camp gates SS guards separated the arrivals; women with children, the elderly and most girls to the left, men and youth to the right.

Moskovic, like others detailed to work as slave labourers to IG Farben -- still a German chemical colossus in Germany -- were taught various labour skills. He was taught how to lay bricks and was expected to work toward building a factory -- which American or Russian bombers would regularly bomb to rubble. "The whole world was shaking. When it stopped, it was back to work."  Those were twelve-hour workdays where the workers were fed a typical Auschwitz diet of 700 calories daily mostly comprised of stale bread heels and watery 'soup' absent nutrients.

The Buna camp inmate life expectancy was about three months on average. Workers considered too ill or too weak to work were liberated from their tasks, sent to the Birkenau gas chambers. Finally, in January of 1945 as the Soviet army began to close in, the Nazi command ordered 58,000 prisoners to be evacuated from Auschwitz on a forced march, one of which Mr. Moskovic and his father survived. They weren't called "death marches" for no reason; any who fell or became ill on the move were summarily executed.

After several days of marching they were once again on a train, this time to be taken to a concentration camp close by Weimar in Germany. Eventually American troops drew near to Buchenwald and the SS began killing prisoners; 500 or a thousand prisoners taken outside the fence by guards, forced to dig their own graves, then shot to death, to fall into the ready graves. David Moskovic survived this ordeal as well, managing to evade being called into a death group, by subterfuge.

When the Americans did arrive, he and the several thousand left in the camp were liberated, and he returned to his home village, hoping to find family members there. One day one of his sisters arrived. Before reaching the gas chamber his sister Edith had spontaneously been helped by several Slovak women who took her from the line to hide her under the linen they were handing out. They had been tasked to hand towels to victims informed they were headed to showers, to wash, not to be gassed by the deadly Zyklone B.

In 1950, David Moskovic applied to emigrate to Canada. There he found work as a plumber's apprentice. Preparing, among other apprentices to write a test to attain their master plumber's licences, a friend informed him that the city of Ottawa's then chief inspector had said: "There's a Jew coming through ... let's skin him alive." "A free country, with all the freedom in the world, and that's what happens to you in Ottawa!", he said wonderingly. "Would you ever believe it?"

Eventually he married, after starting his own company, General Plumbing and Heating. He and his wife had three children. "I used to drive down the Queensway and I didn't feel the tires touching the road. Life was terrific." He had moved beyond his soul-scathing experience in Europe. "Many people live that camp life till they die. I'm not one of them. I never fell into that horrible stuff. I became a Canadian boy, a good citizen, and I never looked back. I've had a good life and I never think about the camp."

"My life is so good that every day I get up and say thank God of another beautiful day. Every day's a gift. I'm a happy person." This speaks to the resilience of the individual, that hope was never lost despite horrendously brutal and tragic conditions imposed on men and women and children by the atrocious genocidal ideology of a vicious totalitarian government. It speaks also of the sad universality of anti-Semitism. But above all it speaks of human condition and the will to survive.

Holocaust Archaeology: Yahad-In Unum

"The purpose of my organization Yahad-In Unum (Hebrew "together"; Latin "One") is to look for the victims. We are not looking for the killers; we are looking for the victims."
"In many genocides, we only remember the names of the killers. The Jews have given sanctity to the names of the victims so that we remember them."
"We are now 23 full-time in my organization. I'm not alone now. All are younger than me."
"My goal is to give back to the families so they can pray and say Kaddish on the mass graves. The second goal is to give back the Jewish victims to the Jewish people. The third one is to fight the Holocaust deniers."
"We are investigating the crimes of Hitler against the Jews ... [and] we have interviewed 3,800 neighbours who were present at the killings. They could look through the window. They were not collaborators. They were teenagers who ... saw everything."
"They are now old and they want to speak before they die. For the majority of them, it is the first time they speak. We have recorded all of them and it is accessible through our website."
"I want to say to the young people, perhaps one day you will be a doctor, perhaps you will be a soldier or a journalist, and you will be in a country of genocide. You must take a photo and send it to CNN or somewhere, and that's the way you will protect humanity ... There is a Russian proverb in all these countries that says the work is over when the last victim is buried. If we don't do this, in future we will have no evidence of this crime."

 Father Patrick Desbois, head of Yahad-in Unum   http://www.yahadinunum.org

Father Patrick Desbois is a French Catholic priest. He has elected himself to bear witness to a mass atrocity, to remember and to find evidence, and to record and to memorialize. It is beyond human capacity to really understand what happened, why it happened, how it happened, that during World War II Nazi Germany strayed from the focus of world domination for the Third Reich, to perfect the world they envisioned by removing from it all traces of the presence of European Jewry as a start to eliminating Jews world-wide.

What is beyond human understanding is the capacity for some humans to demonstrate their capacity for mass slaughter, and to consider it a benefit to the world. To select an ancient people that persevered through countless millennia, to retain its faith and its cohesion as an ethnic group, with its distinct culture, heritage and religion, against all adversities. And adversity was never in short supply throughout the history of the Jewish people. And nor, since the advent of the Holocaust and beyond is it now in short supply. Father Desbois has dedicated his efforts to the memory of those who perished.

The founding of Yahad-In Unum took place in 2004, a joint project between leaders of France's Catholic and Jewish communities as a measure to bring Jews and Catholics together for a common purpose in shared humanity. The major initiative of the organization is meant to investigate and identify sites of mass graves of Jews murdered by German Fascist mobile killing units, called the Einsatzgruppen. And to look for their remains in Ukraine, Russia, Belarus, Poland, Moldova and Romania.

The pathological viral mental derangement more commonly spoken of as anti-Semitism had long found fertile ground and a comfortable home in Europe. Hitler and his minions felt that Germans were too civilized, would be too squeamish about having death camps positioned on German soil, so most of those concentration, labour and death camps were located elsewhere throughout Europe, where pogroms were not uncommon, and where it was less likely that any protests would arise, should anyone find the institutionalized obliteration of a people morally offensive.

Through dedicated on-the-ground research, Yahad-In-Unum has discovered evidence of mass graves in "village after village", representing the work of the Einsatzgruppen, separating the local Jewish population from their non-Jewish counterparts and eliminating them, men, women and children, in well organized operations, and in calculated cold blood. Yahad-In-Unum has signed a contract with the American Jewish Committee to ensure that revealed sites would be respected, "the graves will be protected forever and not be desecrated".

Father Desbois wears many hats, besides his anti-racist historical-humanitarian one; he is director of the Episcopal Committee for Relations with Judaism, itself connected with the French Conference of Bishops. His grandfather was a French soldier, deported to the Nazi prison camp Rawa-Ruska during the Second World War. Father Desbois himself studied anti-Semitism at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, as well as undertaking the study of Jewish religion and culture with a leader of the Jewish community in France.

Father Desbois embarked on a trip to Ukraine in 2002 to see for himself where his grandfather had been imprisoned, and while there he planned to pay his respects at a memorial he was certain he would find there. When he arrived he discovered to his amazement that there was no evidence, no kind of commemoration to the one-and-a-quarter-million Jews whose lives had been destroyed in Ukraine and Belarus. And he resolved to rectify that blatant oversight in respect and honour for the victims of morbidly destructive racism.

After founding Yaham-In Unum, he set about collecting information revolving around the mass killings of Jews and Roma in east Europe between 1941 and 1944. With the help of translators, Father Desbois along with others conducts interviews with witnesses. And with the use of metal detectors, he and his team have succeeded in unearthing German cartridges and bullets from pits where the bodies of the slaughtered were discarded, along with jewellery belonging to the victims, and other artifacts.

He has written a book outlining the immensity of the project: The Holocaust by Bullets: A Priest's Journey to Uncover the Truth Behind the Murder of 1.5 Million Jews.

Tuesday March the 4th, Father Desbois has been awarded the Crif award "in recognition of his commitment to the truth"

The Choices of Free Will

During the Nazi regime in fascist Germany during the Second World War, millions of human beings experienced the premature culmination of their lives. Those millions were processed through a hugely successful enterprise envisioned by Adolf Hitler's Germany to make the world a better place. Largely by removing from it those elements of any society whose presence they deemed did not enhance the world community.

Those who suffered mental or physical disability or impairment, those whose gender orientation was suspect, those whose political views sought to undermine Fascist authority, and those whose ethnic and cultural origins bespoke an assault on the purity of the Nazi vision.

The enablers and the perpetrators who so willingly joined their fortunes with that of fascist Germany and Italy and other Axis countries, dedicated to the furtherance of their vision of a more ideal world set about their business with determination and dedication to the pursuit of that ideal world coming to fruition. They would undertake by any and all means possible and necessary to rid the world community of those incapable of investing it with value in their presence.

Gypsies and Jews were in particular favour of annihilation.

The movement to achieve a far better world through the elimination of sub-human hangers-on whose presence was regarded as an affront to the perfection of humankind was hugely successful. Not only were millions slaughtered in a concerted, well developed plan to muster technology and science to the necessity of obliterating their presence from the world, but those who fought the Axis Fascist alliance for the purpose of protecting civilization from barbarity posing as deliverance to the next order of civilization on the Allied side died in their millions as well.

With the passage of time since the advent and the end of World War II all too many of those known as Fascist criminal murderers lived lengthy lives denied their victims. There are those in current society, however, still demanding justice for those whose voice crying piteously for help was never heard before they perished. In their memory there are those who refuse to believe that it represents justice for the elderly murderers to breathe their last in the comfort of denial.

With enraged shouts of "murderer" and "executioner", relatively small groups of people dedicated to the memory of those whose lives were prematurely taken, committed to denying peace to their executioners, emerged in the public sphere to deny the rites of a funeral respecting the life and activities of Nazi war criminal Erich Priebke.

He lived to age 100. Year after year since the end of World War II this man was able to celebrate another year of living well in the embrace of his family. A family that would have liked to honour him as their head whose passing they would mourn.

Pope Francis' Rome vicar refused to enable a funeral for this man in a Catholic Church. Rome's chief of police concurred; his concern was for public order, knowing full well the huge contempt in which this war criminal was held by those whom his depraved killing spree on behalf of the Third Reich deprived of their lives.

One among many, Erich Priebke presided over one of the worst massacres to take place in German-occupied Italy. At the Ardeatine Caves outside Rome 335 civilians were slaughtered. No Jews, he asserted in an interview, were ever gassed en masse. The Holocaust was a feverish token of a collectively hysterical imagination.

 Into the breach stepped the schismatic Society of St. Pius X in the city of Albano Laziale south of Rome. They would celebrate the funeral Mass for Erich Priebke, since his values are theirs as well. They too have no use for Jews in civil society. As the hearse with Erich Priebke's coffin approached outside the walled compound of the Society of St.Pius X, the crowd responded shouting "We are all anti-fascist!".

And then, to ensure that no further critical chaos might ensue, the coffin with the body of the war criminal was taken into custody. By Italian authorities. The lawyer for the family of Erich Priebke spoke of an abduction of a corpse. The Italian police spoke of civil society, recriminations, violence, and the public peace.

There is no reason whatever that the family of Erich Priebke should enjoy the comfort of knowing a funeral Mass would give balm to the soul of a departed war criminal.

There is no forgiveness for the massively unforgivable.