Remembering the lesbians, prostitutes, and resisters of Ravensbrück concentration camp.

Nestled alongside an idyllic lake, the Ravensbrück concentration camp, 50 miles north of Berlin, was constructed in 1939 specifically to house women. By the end of the war, 130,000 women from 20 European countries had been led through its entrance, often unaware of the danger inside.

Most of the camp’s inhabitants weren’t Jewish; rather, they were considered inferior because they were prostitutes, lesbians, political resisters, “work-shy,” or “asocial.” Roma (Gypsies) and Jehovah’s Witnesses—the latter had only to renounce their faith to be freed—were also imprisoned there. All were considered “useless mouths” by the Nazis, worthy of brutal treatment. More than 30,000—some estimate as many as 90,000—women perished there from starvation, disease, gassings, hanging, torture, or execution by shooting.

“They had what I would call dead eyes,” said Sylvia Salvesen, a Norwegian survivor of Ravensbrück, recalling her first impression of the bald, skeletal prisoners she saw when she arrived at the camp in 1943. Author Sarah Helm chronicles Salvesen’s story, and those of many others, in a new book, Ravensbrück: Life and Death in Hitler’s Concentration Camp for Women. Helm’s exhaustive research includes interviews with numerous survivors. The youngest were in their mid-80s; many have since passed away.


Remembering the lesbians, prostitutes, and resisters of Ravensbrück concentration camp.

Dream Deferred | The Holocaust’s forgotten black victims – the ‘Rhineland Bastards’

Most people know about the Nazi Holocaust, the murder of 6 million Jews and 6 million others: Russians, Gypsies, Slavs, socialists, disabled people and LGBT people.

Alongside the big narrative of the Holocaust there are a myriad of small, individual stories and testimonies that help illustrate and shed light on the cruelty and barbarity of the Nazi regime.

One such account is the story of what happened to Germany’s tiny black population.

Primo Levi once wrote, “this is a story interwoven with freezing dawns”. Some may know their story, I certainly didn’t.

Tucked away inside Hitler’s anti-Semitic diatribe, Mein Kampf, there is the following passage:

It was, and is, the Jew who brought negroes to the Rhine, brought them with the same aim and with deliberate intent to destroy the white race he hates by persistent bastardisation, to hurl it from the cultural and political heights it has attained, and to ascend them as its masters.

[,,,]
An organisation named “Commission Number 3″ was created by the Nazis to deal with the so-called problem of the “Rhineland Bastards”. This was organised under Dr Eugen Fischer of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology, Human Heredity and Eugenics. It was decided that the African-German children would be sterilised under the 1933 Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring.

The programme began in 1937, when local officials were asked to report on all “Rhineland Bastards” under their jurisdiction.

All together, some 400 children of mixed parentage were arrested and sterilised. The Nazis went to great lengths to conceal their sterilisation and abortion programme.

What happened to these Afro-Germans is very complex – their experiences were not uniform. Some of these children were subjected to medical experiments and others mysteriously “disappeared”.

Hans Hauck, a black Holocaust survivor and a victim of Hitler’s mandatory sterilisation programme, explained in the film Hitler’s Forgotten Victims that when he was forced to undergo sterilisation as a teenager, he was given no anaesthetic. Once he received his sterilisation certificate, he was “free to go”, so long as he agreed to have no sexual relations whatsoever with Germans.
_____
From the comments:

A picture may be worth a thousand words, but the photograph taken in 1933 of a brown-skinned boy wearing a swastika in a schoolyard in Hamburg, Germany, does not begin to tell the story of the remarkable life of Hans J. Massaquoi. Mr. Massaquoi, former managing editor of Ebony magazine, has now told the story himself in his new book, Destined to Witness: Growing Up Black in Nazi Germany. http://www.loc.gov/loc/lcib/0003/black_nazi.html



Dream Deferred | The Holocaust’s forgotten black victims – the ‘Rhineland Bastards’

Regina Jonas was Ordained in 1935 and Died at Auschwitz. Now, Her Memory is Finally Being Honored. – Tablet Magazine

Born in Berlin in 1902 into a poor Orthodox Jewish family, Jonas was influenced by her rabbi, Dr. Max Weil, who, though Orthodox, allowed girls to become bat mitzvah. At his urging, Jonas continued her studies at the liberal Hochschule für die Wissenschaft des Judentums in Berlin from 1924 to 1930. All the other women in her classes were there to become teachers; Jonas, like the men she studied with, wanted to become a rabbi. Her primary supporter was Rabbi Eduard Baneth, who was determined to ordain her, but died just before she finished her training. Though her thesis—“Can a Woman Be a Rabbi According to Halachic Sources?”—received praise from her teachers, none of them agreed to ordain her, including Rabbi Leo Baeck, the leader of the Jews in Germany, who wasn’t willing to jeopardize the unity of the Jewish community as the Nazi threat was intensifying.

Jonas was ultimately ordained, in a private ceremony, by Rabbi Max Dienemann, the president of the General Association of Rabbis in Germany, on December 27, 1935. She struggled to be accepted. A 1936 article in Der Israelit cites a comment describing Jonas’ ordination as a form of “treason and a caricature of Judaism.”

At first, she worked in hospitals, homes for the elderly, and schools, but as more rabbis emigrated she began to preach in synagogues around Germany. In November 1942, she and her mother were deported to Terezin, where she worked with the famous psychiatrist Victor Frankl to care for new prisoners.

Though some survivors, including Baeck, who had also been imprisoned at Terezin, certainly knew Jonas, they didn’t refer to her by name in their writings. The reason in part may found in the forward to Frankl’s classic, Man’s Search for Meaning. He wrote that he erased from his memory everything that happened before he entered Auschwitz. Part of what he erased was the legacy of Regina Jonas.

Regina Jonas was Ordained in 1935 and Died at Auschwitz. Now, Her Memory is Finally Being Honored. – Tablet Magazine

A Weighty Inheritance: An Excerpt from 'God, Faith, and Identity From the Ashes' – Tablet Magazine

I grew up in a Jewish home in a predominately Jewish town in a predominately Jewish suburb. I spent two hours every Monday, Wednesday, and Sunday at Hebrew School, and attended High Holiday services with my family at our local Conservative synagogue. I was Jewish, of course, just as everyone around me seemed to be, but I could sense early on that the world of Judaism in which I existed was just a bit different from everyone else’s.

None of my friends, after all, had great aunts and uncles and grandparents with inky numbers scrawled on their forearms. I understood it from a young age as something that set my family apart—set me apart—and somehow marked us, too. We were a family of Holocaust survivors, and that was the lens through which, unbeknownst to me at first, every Biblical account I read and every prayer I learned was filtered. From a young age, my faith was bound to my family’s legacy; their stories my ritual text, their sorrows my liturgy.

[,,,]
I realized then that I had missed out on years of questions, stories, and, more acutely, years of a real relationship with my grandparents. All I had were my pieced-together memories, grainy home movie footage, and second-hand accounts of their experiences during the Holocaust. The lore I had been consumed by when I was younger had been largely cobbled together from what I knew about them at the time, snippets of stories of my grandmother surviving because of her skill as a seamstress, of cousins and uncles looking out for each other during the war and after. It wasn’t fair, my 17-year-old self angrily thought. There were so many more things I needed to know.

A Weighty Inheritance: An Excerpt from 'God, Faith, and Identity From the Ashes' – Tablet Magazine

Brian Brown Gets Defensive About His Russia Activism: 'Absolute Lies And Slurs' | Right Wing Watch

So earlier today I was involved in a two-pronged conversation concerning WW2 and the role and responsibilities of the railroads (and by proxy the workers) had in the Holocaust.  The question was asked were any of those "workers" ever held accountable?

Things were going along great till this, ",,,do you think that there will be a modern day holocaust with Christians being forced out of their homes and thrown in FEMA camps? That's what I'm concerned about these days."

Frustrated by this conversation stopper (faux Christian Persecution Complex), I posed the above to a group of like minded thinkers, we bandied about some of the myth-conceptions surrounding Hitler and the Third Reich. One comment touched on one of Hitler's alleged proclivities and the "most of the Nazis were homosexuals" canard that some like to pull out of a hat and teach.

The ensuing discussion centered around where this thought may have originated and why, ",,, found myself reading The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich,,,At any rate in book one which was about Hitler's early life and his efforts to start the political party; this book says that he went anyplace he could to gain support and that some of his early supporters were thugs and homosexuals. This may have been the reference your teacher had,,,But this was before he had any power and it would be a stretch to make that idiotic statement." (Ed. for grammar, spelling and punctuation)

To which I responded (minus the citations),,,
The Right's misinformation concerning Hitler and gays could be coming from Scott Lively's book the Pink Swastika: Homosexuality in the Nazi Party, it is his favorite canard and he uses it very well.

Lively's ideas have proven too radical for the mainstream family values movement, but they've gotten some traction on the far right. Bryan Fischer, director of issues analysis for the influential American Family Association, regularly parrots his arguments linking gays to Nazis. ("Homosexuality gave us Adolph Hitler," he opined in a 2010 post on the organization's website, "and homosexuals in the military gave us the Brown Shirts, the Nazi war machine and six million dead Jews.") Lively's theories have also gained currency in foreign countries, including former Soviet republics, where he has helped advance anti-gay legislation. But nowhere has his influence been more keenly felt than in Uganda

Lively is one of many western evangelicals responsible for Uganda's kill the gays bill as well as the anti-gay sentiment in Russia.

What's less well known is that three American evangelical preachers, Scott Lively, Caleb Lee Brundidge and Don Schmierer, visited the country a month before the bill was introduced, giving talks about how "the gay movement is an evil institution" which seeks to prey on children, destroy "the moral fiber of the people," and abolish marriage and the family and replace it with "a culture of sexual promiscuity." Lively boasted that their campaign was "a nuclear bomb against the gay agenda in Uganda," and later admitted to meeting with Ugandan lawmakers to help draft the bill, although he professed ignorance of the death penalty provision. Other American evangelicals, including Kevin Swanson and Lou Engle, have also expressed their support for the so-called Kill the Gays bill.

It's not just LGBT people in Uganda who've been harmed by the spread of aggressive evangelicalism. American megachurch pastor Rick Warren has a Ugandan protege, a pastor named Martin Ssempa, who has preached aggressively against contraception (in one bizarre public stunt, he burned condoms in the name of Jesus). Ugandan president Yoweri Museveni had formerly been a staunch advocate of the so-called ABC program (consisting of abstinence, monogamy and condom use) which successfully reduced HIV infection rates in Uganda; but thanks in part to Ssempa's influence and access, the government was persuaded to stop free condom distribution, and as a result, new HIV infections spiked again. (Ssempa, too, has called for the imprisonment of gay people. President Museveni also has ties to the Washington, D.C.-based fundamentalist group "the Family," which has called him their " key man" in Africa.)

The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany by William L. Shirer though a landmark book has a few "problems" from a strict academic standpoint although one has to remember it was written in 1960s. So you could be correct as well (name removed) I do remember back in the mid 90s Shirer's attitude towards homosexuality (it being a perversion) was taken to task.

So the attached article, which mysteriously appeared on my news feed tonight, and the accusation comes as no big surprise, although I didn't realize that NOM's influence ranged beyond domestic interests. I should have known better.

Joe Jervis points us to a debate on C-SPAN this weekend between the National Organization for Marriage’s Brian Brown and Freedom to Marry’s Evan Wolfson, where things got a little contentious when Wolfson confronted Brown about his anti-gay activism in Russia.

Brown has never explicitly advocated for repressive Russian anti-gay policies, including the infamous “gay propaganda” ban, but he has acted as an outside validator for Russian politicians imposing the harsh new policies.

Last year, for instance, he spoke to a Russian parliament committee about the supposed dangers of gay adoption just a few days before the legislature voted to tighten its prohibition on the adoption of Russian orphans by same-sex couples or by couples in countries where same-sex marriage is legal.

And this year, Brown was a member of the planning committee for a World Congress of Families event in Moscow that was to take place at the Kremlin and was financed by members of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s inner circle. Although the World Congress of Families dropped its official sponsorship of the event under pressure from some of its member groups, the event went ahead as planned, with Brown as a featured speaker. That conference ended with delegates issuing a resolution calling for more countries around the world to pass “gay propaganda” bans like Russia’s.

Brian Brown Gets Defensive About His Russia Activism: 'Absolute Lies And Slurs' | Right Wing Watch

Walmart: ‘Work Makes You Free.’ It’s Prettier In The Original German.

Although this story has been "resolved," I find it ironic that the "queen of corporate welfare" would offer this example of cultural anthropology. Bare in mind that the entrance of Dachau is one of the most photographed historical markers in the world. The motto associated - Arbeit Macht Frei or Work Makes You Free - to call it "inspirational" in the general sense of the word, not so much.

Walmart: ‘Work Makes You Free.’ It’s Prettier In The Original German.

Ashes Of Holocaust Victims Killed In Dachau Find Final Resting Place In Durham Hebrew Cemetery

Jewish cemeteries are not typically places where ashes are interred, but in a rare ceremony on Sunday (May 25), a small rock consisting of pressed human ashes was placed in a wooden box and lowered into a deep grave as some 200 mourners looked on.

The ashes were handed to a North Carolina soldier who toured the crematorium at the Dachau concentration camp in Germany shortly after it was liberated by American troops in 1945.

Their journey from Dachau to Dobson (a small town north of Winston-Salem) to Durham is a remarkable story of a soldier’s witness to the atrocities of the Holocaust and his son’s commitment to finding them an honorable resting place.

Under sunny skies and in the presence of the mayor and representatives of the Veterans of Foreign Wars, two rabbis sang Psalm 23 in Hebrew and delivered a short eulogy for the unknown person or people whose ashes were buried.

“We do not know if they are the ashes of a scholar or a silversmith, a homemaker or a physician,” said Rabbi Jen Feldman of the Kehillah Synagogue in nearby Chapel Hill. “Their identity or identities, the stories of their life or their lives, are silent to us.”

Nevertheless, the ashes are reminders “of the infinite value of each human life,” added Rabbi Daniel Greyber of Beth El Synagogue in Durham.

Ashes Of Holocaust Victims Killed In Dachau Find Final Resting Place In Durham Hebrew Cemetery

ADDENDUM::Escaping Hitler | Web Exclusives | Daily Writings From Our Top Writers | First Things

Another view of the Kindertransport that Sir Nicholas was instrumental in creating,,,

Every spring, on Holocaust Remembrance Day, those who died under Nazi persecution are honored in ceremonies throughout the world; and those who survived it recall what they experienced. Anita Weisbord is among them.

When Hitler’s army forcefully annexed Austria to the German Reich in March of 1938, Weisbord’s homeland suddenly became unrecognizable. Born in Vienna in 1923 as the youngest of three in a loving, Jewish-Austrian household, she was shocked to see the fanaticism and bigotry of Austrians wearing swastika armbands and chanting of “Hitler awake, Jews perish!”

“That was the end of my childhood as I knew it,” recalls Weisbord today, “Overnight, Jews became non-persons. We lost all our rights.”

Escaping Hitler | Web Exclusives | Daily Writings From Our Top Writers | First Things

Man Behind Massive Nazi-Looted Art Trove Strikes Deal With German Authorities

A reclusive collector who hoarded hundreds of valuable artworks at his Munich home has agreed to cooperate with German authorities' efforts to determine which pieces were seized by the Nazis.

As part of the deal announced Monday, Cornelius Gurlitt will get back those works that are indisputably his.

Authorities found some 1,400 items at Gurlitt's home while investigating a tax case in 2012, though it only became public last November. Officials say at least 458 works may have been seized from their owners by the Nazis, and Gurlitt's representatives are in talks with several claimants seeking restitution. The works include Henri Matisse's "Femme assise," for which two claims have been made.

Officials have said for months they would like to reach an agreement with Gurlitt, who in February filed an appeal against the artworks' seizure.

Man Behind Massive Nazi-Looted Art Trove Strikes Deal With German Authorities

Former Auschwitz medic arrested in Germany | World news | theguardian.com

Growing up I remember many news stories about the "capture" and trials. I remember the numbers on my "aunt's" wrist. As a senior in college, John Demjanjuk's prosecution was just beginning, a case I had followed up until his death in 2012. I remember the numbers stamped on the wrist of a waitress at one of my favorite eating haunts. Slowly the trials began to fade. We all got older victims, perpetrators, witnesses and those with an interest in seeing justice done. So many have gotten away, but yet,,,

German police have arrested a former Nazi medic who served at the Auschwitz death camp on multiple charges of aiding and abetting murder.

[,,,]
The arrest followed a recommendation from the German office investigating Nazi war crimes to bring charges. It was the latest in a series of arrests since Germany launched a renewed drive to bring to justice the last surviving perpetrators of the Holocaust.

For more than 60 years German courts prosecuted Nazi war criminals only if evidence showed they had personally committed atrocities. But in 2011 a Munich court sentenced John Demjanjuk to five years in prison for complicity in the extermination of Jews at the Sobibor camp, establishing that all former camp guards could be tried.

"There cannot be a statute of limitation for crimes against humanity, and mass murderers must continue to live in fear of the long arm of the law," Lauder said.

Former Auschwitz medic arrested in Germany | World news | theguardian.com

See also: 
Nearly 70 Years Later, a New Round of Auschwitz Prosecutions

A different angle on the story from above. The Guardian article focused on one arrest, this piece talks of a list of 50 former guards who worked at the Auschwitz.

They worked as guards at the Holocaust’s most notorious death camp, and nearly seven decades later they may finally be brought to account before a court of law.

Germany’s Central Office for the Investigation of Nazi Crimes has prepared a list of 50 former guards who worked at the Auschwitz concentration camp in Nazi-occupied Poland and are still alive, said Kurt Schrimm, the head of the office.

Staff members searched old court records and Holocaust-related documents looking for names, and even traveled to Poland last year to try to augment their lists. One checked the names of the Auschwitz guards against databases to determine which were still alive.

The next step is ruling out those who were already tried, either by the occupation authorities or the German legal system. “We have to determine now whether or not these 50 people that we found on this list can be legally prosecuted,” Mr. Schrimm said Wednesday in a telephone interview.

The list includes names that have been known to his office since the Auschwitz trials in the ’60s as well as recent additions made last year, Mr. Schrimm said.

“The Last of the Unjust”: A new look at Eichmann, more evil than banal - Salon.com

Lanzmann found Murmelstein living in Rome in 1975, where he cuts the figure of a sprightly, dapper continental gentleman with an impeccable Italian wardrobe, a bountiful intellect and a sardonic wit. (Although this footage was shot nearly 40 years ago, he seems a strikingly contemporary figure.) He had stayed away from America and Israel, the focal points of postwar Jewish emigration, and for good reason. To many people in the Jewish world, his name became identified with the way some leaders of Europe’s Jewish community had capitulated to Nazi domination and collaborated with a campaign of mass extermination. Gershom Scholem, the German-born Jewish philosopher and historian, suggested at one point that Murmelstein should be hanged as a traitor.

[,,,]
Murmelstein was a powerful and well-connected figure in the Jewish world; he could easily have emigrated to England as late as 1939. Indeed, he almost did: He accompanied a fellow rabbi to London shortly before the war started, and then returned to Vienna on a nearly empty commercial flight. He could have refused to work with Eichmann and other Nazi commanders, and accepted the alternative: a bullet in the back of the head, or a one-way rail journey to “the East.” (Murmelstein says, by the way, that he didn’t learn the precise nature of what happened to deported Jews in Eastern Europe until 1945, although he knew that none of them ever came back.) Instead, he stayed behind, risking his own life every day in tense diplomatic encounters with murderers and psychopaths. He admits that he relished power and followed a strong drive for self-preservation — largely so that someone would be alive to tell the story. Many people died in Theresienstadt, but nowhere near as many as did in Lodz or Warsaw or Vilnius or the other Jewish ghettoes wiped out by the Germans before the war’s end. They dithered over the place and then they left, and when the Red Army finally arrived in the spring of 1945, Murmelstein and most of the town’s Jewish residents were still there.

“The Last of the Unjust”: A new look at Eichmann, more evil than banal - Salon.com

Jim Bob Duggar Compares US To Nazi Germany During The Holocaust | Right Wing Watch

Duggar ended the address by retelling a story about a time when Mike Huckabee and his daughter visited a concentration camp, which he used to compare the current state of the US to Nazi Germany.

“As they were walking out of that concentration camp, he said little Sarah looked up at him and she said, ‘Daddy why didn’t somebody do something?’ You know what, that’s where we are at in our nation,” Duggar said. “Do we want our children, when we’re going to tell them about how great America was, they’re going to look at you and say, ‘Why didn’t somebody do something?’”

Jim Bob Duggar Compares US To Nazi Germany During The Holocaust | Right Wing Watch

Jennifer Teege: Black woman is granddaughter of notorious Schindler's List Nazi butcher Amon Goeth | Mail Online

Another book to add to my continuously growing list,,,

It is one of the most harrowing scenes in Schindler’s List.

Nazi commandant Amon Goeth, played by Ralph Fiennes, shoots Jewish camp inmates from his balcony, then calmly sips wine as his dogs tear them limb from limb.

Jennifer Teege was among the millions to see the epic Holocaust film – but in her case without realising Goeth was her maternal grandfather.

She discovered the horrifying truth only by chance when, years later, she picked up a book about the SS captain in her local library.

It was written by Goeth’s illegitimate daughter, whose picture looked like Mrs Teege’s own mother, who had given her up for adoption.

‘It was like the carpet was ripped out beneath my feet,’ said the 43-year-old, who is a mother of two living in Hamburg. ‘I had to go and lie down on a bench.'

Jennifer Teege: Black woman is granddaughter of notorious Schindler's List Nazi butcher Amon Goeth | Mail Online


See also:




Documentary trailer concerning her mother Monika





If you have Netflix, the documentary.

Daughter of notorious Nazi Rudolf Höss claims number of Holocaust victims is exaggerated, says father 'was the nicest man in the world' - NY Daily News

I have always been fascinated with Nazi Germany and the atrocities they committed against man. Not in a sick or perverted way but as a student of psychology. I didn't know any relatives of the main characters were still alive, much less in the US,,,

A Nazi monster who admitted killing one million Jews "was the nicest man in the world," his daughter said in a revealing interview published this weekend.

Brigitte Höss, who lived in comfort at three different concentration camps while innocents were getting slaughtered just yards away, still hides her real identity from the public while living in northern Virginia with her son.

“If somebody asks about my dad,” the 80-year-old Hoss told the Washington Post magazine, “I tell them that he died in the war.”

Her father was actually the notorious Rudolf Höss, the commandant of Auschwitz where more than one million Jews were exterminated.

Brigitte Höss expresses remorse for those who died, but questions the recorded number of Jews killed.

“How can there be so many survivors if so many had been killed?” she said in the interview.

Daughter of notorious Nazi Rudolf Höss claims number of Holocaust victims is exaggerated, says father 'was the nicest man in the world' - NY Daily News

Archaeological dig at Concentration Camp reveals what the Nazis tried to hide

There is a bit of synchronicity in finding and posting this story as the holocaust and some of the sites came up in a recent conversation concerning paranormal investigating,,,the topic was extreme paranormal and what locations are considered to be examples of such,,,for me 1 place has held a life long fascination from a historical perspective but with my interest in the paranormal there is now an added facet,,,Corrie ten Boom's home from the movie The Hiding Place,,,

Others mentioned Anne Frank,,,and some specifically mentioned the camps,,,I was taken aback to learn that a friend had lost many family members to the atrocity of the holocaust,,,puts a different perspective on things,,,


As reported in Haaretz, Haimi — who lost family members in the camp — is using standard archaeological techniques to piece together the layout of the camp, while looking for artifacts and other clues that could help historians chronicle the events that transpired there. Haimi is sifting the earth for anything left behind, while also relying on more non-invasive, high-tech aids such as ground-penetrating radar and global positioning satellite imaging.

[,,,]
"Because of the lack of information about Sobibor, every little piece of information is significant," said Haimi. "No one knew where the gas chambers were. The Germans didn't want anyone to find out what was there. But thanks to what we have done, they didn't succeed."

[,,,]
He also uncovered a unique version of the yellow star Jews were forced to wear by the Nazis, made out of metal instead of cloth, which researchers determined to have originated in Slovakia.

[,,,]
In addition, the archaeological site could be used an important tool against Holocaust denial. Haimi believes that, with survivors rapidly dying, it could soon become a key tool for understanding the Holocaust, calling it "the future research tool of the Holocaust."


There is a link to a longer article that is worth reading as well,,,

Archaeological dig at Concentration Camp reveals what the Nazis tried to hide