Tag Archive for: Nazi

Watch “Night Will Fall” about Nazi Atrocities During the Holocaust

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Children who Survived Auschwitz Source AP

Jewish Children liberated at Auschwitz, February 1945. Source : Archives of the US National Holocaust Memorial.

On January 27, 1945 forward units of the 100th Rifle Division of the 1st Ukrainian Front entered the Auschwitz Birkenau death camp precinct liberating several thousand remaining survivors. More than 1.1 million were murdered there by the Nazi SS, 1 million of them Jews. Among the first groups they encountered in the remaining barracks were children, twins, victims of the ‘angel of death, Dr. Josef Mengele’s sadistic medical experiments. The Russian troopers in their white camouflage coats hugged and gave them chocolate. These Jewish children hadn’t felt any humane treatment during their enforced incarceration in Auschwitz.

Earlier in January 1945 the SS blew up the remaining crematoria. An earlier one was destroyed in the lone heroic resistance effort by Jews inside the camp in October 1944 with dynamite secured by Jewish women inmates.  The SS guards assembled more than 60,000 camp inmates  in January 1945 who  sent on a forced death march from which only 12,000 survived.  One of the survivors of that death march was the Nobel Laureate Eli Wiesel who as a youth of 16 was eventually liberated by the US Army at Buchenwald in April 1945. Another Nobel Prize winner and Holocaust survivor was Italian Jewish resistance fighter, chemist and author Primo Levi who received his Nobel award for Literature, posthumously in 2002. Levi fell to his death in his family home in Turin in 1987, some say depressed by the atrocities  he had witnessed. Wiesel’s biographic works about his experience at Auschwitz the forced march and liberation were memorialized in his trilogy Night, Dawn and Day. Levi’s Survival in Auschwitz: if this is a Man was testimony to the Nazi dehumanization and perseverance to survive and return home.

Israelis at Auschwitz-Birkenau Source AP

Israelis at Auschwitz-Birkenau. Source:  AP.

Another 5 million Jews didn’t survive.  They were murdered in unspeakable ways in the einstazgruppen slaughter in Russia, death camps in Germany and occupied Europe.  Their fate in the Final Solution was ratified by the SS at the Wansee Conference in Berlin on January 20, 1942. The objective of the SS Conference was to make Europe judenrein. Among the Six Million European Jews murdered were 1.5 million children. The Jewish children those Russian troops encountered at Auschwitz on January 27, 1945 were among the lucky survivors.

Palestinian leads 2015 UN International Holocaust Memorial at Auschwitz Birkenau

Tuesday, January 27, 2015 is the 10th annual UN International Holocaust Memorial Day. Ynet.com  drew attention that this year’s  annual commemoration with be headed by a Palestinian UN official.  Maher Nasser will host the event,  Palestinian to host UN International Holocaust Remembrance Day to be held at the site of the death camps at Auschwitz- Birkenau in Poland.  Nasser was  born in Albrieh, a village near Ramallah. The 25 year UN bureaucrat   held posts in Gaza and  Jerusalem. eHeh HH He  now holds a management position in the UN Department of Public Information.  Ironic  in that the Haj Amin al Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, fled to Berlin from Baghdad  following the Farhud, the Nazi-Arab massacre of Jews  in 1941.  The  was welcomed as  Hitler’s house guest during WWII. He  promoted  the genocide of Six Million European Jewish men, women and Children and sponsoring the recruitment of Muslim Waffen SS units in the Balkans.

UN Secretary General Ban-ki Moon will attend.   Israel’s President Reuven Rivlin will lead an Israeli delegation.  Rivlin will speak about the rise of Global Anti-Semitism and the threat of Islamic Jihadism. More than 100 Holocaust and Russian veterans will also attend the ceremonies at Auschwitz. In the Israeli delegation will be former Israeli Foreign Minister Sylvan Shalom  in 2005 proposed the UN commemoration of the Holocaust  to “honor of the six million Jews, 1 million Gypsies, 250,000 disabled people, and 9,000 homosexual men murdered by the Nazis and their collaborators.”

The Auschwitz-Birkenau UN commemoration of the Holocaust may not be televised. However, on the eve of International Holocaust Memorial Day, January 26th,  at 9:00 PM EST, HBO  will show a documentary on  Nazi atrocities, Night Will Fall.   It is based  on archival footage taken by British military photographers and cinematographers following the liberation of Nazi concentration camp, Bergen –Belsen in April 1945.  Famed Hollywood film director Alfred Hitchcock was briefly involved with the original British documentary in 1945.

Marlow Stern in his Daily Beast review of Night Will Fall, “Inside Alfred Hitchcock’s Lost Holocaust Documentary,” noted how the original project and Hitchock’s involvement came about:

Back in 1945, Sidney Bernstein, the chief of the Psychological Warfare Film Section of the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force, was commissioned to create the definitive documentary chronicling the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps. Bernstein’s aim was, in his words, to “prove one day that this had actually happened” and have it serve as “a lesson to all mankind as well as to the Germans.”

He eventually roped in his good pal, Alfred Hitchcock, to serve as the film’s supervising director. But the horrifying and heartbreaking footage of numerous concentration camps, shot by British, American, and Russian World War II soldiers as they were being liberated, became tangled up in a complicated web of politics and artistic rows. A magnificent new HBO documentary pulls back the veil on the making of German Concentration Camps: Factual Survey.

The eye-opening film-on-a-film, Night Will Fall, will premiere January 26 on HBO. It is narrated by Helena Bonham Carter, produced by Stephen Frears and Brett Ratner, and directed by Andre Singer, who serves as president of The Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain.  Singer executive producer  of  the documentaries The Act of Killing and Werner Herzog’s Into the Abyss. It was done in concert with London’s Imperial War Museum, and took 18 months of poring over thousands of feet of film to trace the making of the unmade epic.

[…]

The British soldiers found tens of thousands of emaciated prisoners inside the camp, many of whom were on the brink of death by starvation. The camera lingers on piles of naked, skeletal corpses stacked several bodies high, as well as line after line of dead children. A total of 30,000 corpses were witnessed by Allied troops, according to the film. Singer managed to track down several British soldiers who were there, and some break down in tears recalling the horrors.

“It’s very difficult to describe,” recalls survivor Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, who was 19 when Bergen-Belsen was liberated. “You’ve spent years preparing yourself to die, and you’re still here. Every British soldier looked like a God to us.”

night will fall poster 2Alissa Simon in her August 2014 Variety  review of Night Will fall, reported that,  “rather than wait, the impatient American government commissioned [Hollywood director]  Billy Wilder to use their footage [from German Concentration Camps Factual Survey] . Singer includes an excerpt of Wilder’s short film, Death Mills, intended for German and Austrian audiences, and clips from an interview with Wilder.”

Dorothy Rabinowitz in her Wall Street Journal review of Night Will Fall: Nazi Crimes on Film  explains why the original footage of the British film languished in the vaults of the Imperial War Museum (IWM) after excerpts were shown in the Nuremberg Trial of Nazi leaders:

Still, despite the stellar talents and authority of its creators, the film would be stored, rather than seen. Though its footage would provide some of the most damning testimony presented at the Nuremberg war crimes [trials].  It would be housed, from 1952 on, in the archives of the Imperial War Museum. Then four years ago the IWM undertook the enormous task of restoring and digitizing the documentary, along with the long-missing sixth reel. “Night Will Fall,” a new documentary about the historic film, leaves no question as to the reason it was withheld. Its commentators note that the British government then, whose policy was to bar any flow of European Jews to Palestine, was not eager to present a film that would create a great deal of sympathy for these survivors, as such a film surely would.

These graphic revelations of the Nazi final solution atrocities against millions of Jews and others should be a warning of the primary objective of the Global Jihad movement:  the annihilation of Jews, Christians and minority religions sought by Muslim extremists, following the way of Allah.

EDITORS NOTE: This column originally appeared in the New English Review.

ISIS is beheading children, and Obama drops two bombs

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During my morning run, I pondered last night’s address by President Obama regarding the current situation in Iraq. What immediately struck me was that Obama spent more time talking about what he did not want to do than really defining what needed to be done.

Everyone is talking about an F/A-18 aircraft striking an ISIS artillery piece — hardly a strategic objective. This does back up what Obama so narrowly defined last night as his intent – address the threat to Americans in Irbil and Baghdad. I am pleased that we took the action to provide humanitarian relief.

The president was very careful in his words, and they were mostly political – not practical. But Obama was more adamant in declaring what he is not going to do — meaning the enemy has been provided a gap to exploit.

However, why was Barack Hussein Obama in such a rush to provide U.S. military resources in Libya supporting Islamist forces? We were told it was a humanitarian crisis, but it seems now hardly so. And please, don’t tell me it was just NATO — America is NATO. And now Americans know Libya as the place where an ambassador and three other Americans were killed in a terrorist attack, our embassy has been evacuated, and as we reported here, the same Islamists we supported have established a caliphate in eastern Libya.

Last night, President Obama had the chance to define a clear and present evil in our time. ISIS represents the Nazis of this century. There is no clearer portrayal of 7th century barbarism than this movement which we have allowed to gain strength, momentum and victory. Its blitz across Syria and Iraq can easily be compared to that of the 20th century blitzkrieg of Hitler. And the savagery being inflicted is beyond belief — consider the marking of Christian homes — history does repeat itself.

President Obama hid behind the excuse of Iraqi government reconciliation — destroying ISIS is not linked to the success or failure of Iraq’s governance. The destruction of ISIS is a global imperative — and someone has to lead. President Obama referred last night to opening discussions with other partners, the UN (who backs Hamas), and I suppose he will chat with a local Kiwanis Club and the Boy Scouts. Last night was a moment where Barack Hussein Obama could have shown Churchill-like leadership — instead he took the cautious path of Neville Chamberlain. And again, why was he so anxious in Libya and not now?

There is a quote, sometimes attributed to Sir Edmund Burke: “all that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.” In the grander scheme, bombing some artillery pieces is doing nothing. If I were Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi listening to Obama last night — and trust me he was – he isn’t threatened. Evil has knocked on Barack Obama’s door on his watch. You can’t just turn up the volume on the TV inside and attempt to ignore it. Frankly, it’s like Obama turned on the sprinkler system to try and scare it away.

Would you like more detail on the evil we face? How about the fact that ISIS is actually beheading children.

In the interview with CNN’s Jonathan Mann, Chaldean-American businessman Mark Arabo said that the “world hasn’t seen an evil like this for generations.” “There is a park in Mosul, where [ISIS] they actually beheaded children and put their heads on a stick and have them in the park,” he explained. “More children are getting beheaded, mothers are getting raped and killed, and fathers are being hung.”

Last night Obama could have made the case for that evil – but he did not. We hear that compassion means allowing illegals to invade America. We condemn Israel for defending itself against a declared Islamic terrorist organization that exists to destroy it — and will dig tunnels under Israeli kindergartens to do it. In ISIS we have the embodiment of evil and we have a tongued-tied President Obama who just will not say it is so.

ISIS is not something that just appeared over night. This monstrosity has festered over almost a year — and the Obama administration has watched. I’ve been on the battlefields of the 21st Century. The enemy only understands one language: the language of strength. Unfortunately that was not spoken last night by President Barack Hussein Obama.

All you needed to say last night, Mr. President, was this:

“I must apologize for allowing this evil to be born and grow. I ran as a president who wanted to end wars. I now realize my campaign promises and personal desires are not of any consideration, because the enemy also has a vote.

The Islamic State represents the most reprehensible evil the world has seen since that of Nazi Germany — and the world did nothing then. I shall not allow this on my watch. America will lead and we shall destroy this 7th century barbarism. Tonight, I am committing American military power to kill ISIS, wherever it is. If America sees the black flag we shall kill those who raise it.

First however, we will rescue the Yazidi and Christians trapped in the Sinjar mountains — and we shall kill any ISIS forces impeding that objective. Then in concert with our Kurdish allies, we will begin a committed offensive operation to ensure that Islamic totalitarianism and jihadism is defeated. God bless liberty and freedom. God bless America….and God curse ISIS.”

Sadly, that was not said, and the situation is even more confused than ever.

RELATED ARTICLE: Horror – Anglican Vicar of Baghdad: “Child I Baptized Cut in Half by ISIS”

EDITORS NOTE: This column originally appeared on AllenBWest.com.

Common Core Assignment: Think Like a Nazi and Explain Why Jews Are Evil

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[youtube]http://youtu.be/xD-Fm8P8Ig8[/youtube]

An essay assigned to 10th graders, at Albany High School, is at the center of controversy after students were asked to ‘think like a Nazi’. Students were assigned a persuasive writing essay where the teacher asked them to “pretend I’m a member of the government in Nazi Germany”, the handout obtained by CBS Channel 6 said.

The assignment went on to say “convince me you are loyal to the Nazis by writing an essay to convince me Jews are evil and the source of our problems.” Albany’ Superintendent, Dr. Marguerite Vanden Wyngaard, called the assignment “ill-conceived and inappropriate.” “How could you ask a student to justify prejudice leading to genocide,” said Dr. Vanden Wyngaard. “It is an illogical thing for a student to have to do. It doesn’t make any sense.” The teacher, whose name is not being released by the district, will not be teaching while a decision is being made on what consequences there will be, said Dr. Vanden Wyngaard. “It can go anywhere from a letter of council, a letter reprimand, all the way through to termination there is a broad spectrum,” said Dr. Vanden Wyngaard on the possible sanctions against the teacher. “I will not make that decision within the 24 hours because the spectrum is too big.”

The assignment didn’t make sense to the head of the Holocaust Survivors and Friends Education Center, in Albany, officials said Friday. They were disappointed but looked at the incident as an opportunity to educate both students and teachers going forward. “I was totally shocked when I learned this morning that anyone would have such an unbalanced lesson and grade students teaching racist anti semitic views,” said Shelly Shapiro, Director, Holocaust Survivors and Friends Education Center.

This story first broke back in April when The Times Union reported, via Poor Richard’s News:

Think like a Nazi, the assignment required students. Argue why Jews are evil.

Students in some Albany High School English classes were asked this week as part of a persuasive writing assignment to make an abhorrent argument: “You must argue that Jews are evil, and use solid rationale from government propaganda to convince me of your loyalty to the Third Reich!”

Students were asked to watch and read Nazi propaganda, then pretend their teacher was a Nazi government official who needed to be convinced of their loyalty. In five paragraphs, they were required to prove that Jews were the source of Germany’s problems.

The exercise was intended to challenge students to formulate a persuasive argument and was given to three classes, Albany Superintendent Marguerite Vanden Wyngaard said. She said the assignment should have been worded differently.

“I would apologize to our families,” she said. “I don’t believe there was malice or intent to cause any insensitivities to our families of Jewish faith.”

One-third of the students refused to complete the assignment, she said.

Vanden Wyngaard said the exercise reflects the type of writing expected of students under the new Common Core curriculum, the tough new academic standards that require more sophisticated writing. Such assignments attempt to connect English with history and social studies.