The 70th anniversary of Hitler meeting the Mufti (Elder of Ziyon)

"The Mufti isn't a Palestinian Arab hero despite his Jew-hatred.  He is a hero because of it."

"It seems that my meeting with Eichmann undermined efforts deployed at the time with the Führer to stop the genocide of the Jews." [1]

Today is the 70th anniversary of Hitler meeting the Mufti (Elder of Ziyon, 28/11/2011)

Germany stands for an uncompromising struggle against the Jews. It is self-evident that the struggle against the Jewish national homeland in Palestine forms part of this struggle, since such a national homeland would be nothing other than a political base for the destructive influence of Jewish interests. Germany also knows that the claim that Jewry plays the role of an economic pioneer in Palestine is a lie. Only the Arabs work there, not the Jews. Germany is determined to call on the European nations one by one to solve the Jewish problem and, at the proper moment, to address the same appeal to non-European peoples....At some not yet precisely known, but in any case not very distant point in time, the German armies will reach the southern edge of the Caucasus. As soon as this is the case, the Führer will himself give the Arab world his assurance that the hour of liberation has arrived. At this point, the sole German aim will be the destruction of the Jews living in the Arab space under the protection of British power. (Adolf Hitler to Haj Amin Al-Husseini, mufti of Jerusalem, November 28, 1941)

The Mufti of Jerusalem was the undisputed leader of Palestinian Arab nationalism from the 1920s through the 1940s, and his hatred of Jews pervaded all he did.

It will be recalled that the Mufti was given his position by the British because he was regarded as a "moderate." This is what gave him the platform to start his career of inciting against and murdering Jews in earnest.

He was responsible for the anti-Jewish pogroms in Palestine in 1920, 1921 and 1929; he initiated the deadly riots from 1936-1939, and he initiated contact with the Nazis as soon as they came to power in order to come up with ways to work together with them to get rid of the Jews.

Not only that, but towards the end of the war, he pulled out all the stops to murder Jewish children rather than have them rescued - even when the desperate Nazis were considering swapping them for money or for German prisoners. Meaning that his desire to murder Jews exceeded even that of Hitler himself.

The Mufti was an unrepentant anti-semite and desired nothing less than the complete genocide of the entire Jewish people, every man, woman and child.


Today, November 28th, is the anniversary of the Mufti's seminal meeting with Hitler where the Fuehrer explained his genocidal plans in detail to his kindred anti-semite.

Today, the Mufti of Jerusalem is considered a hero among Palestinian Arab leadership.

One year ago, Mahmoud Abbas said in a speech,

We must also recall the outstanding [early] leader of the Palestinian people, the Grand Mufti of Palestine -- Haj Mohammed Amin al-Husseini, who sponsored the struggle from the beginning, and sponsored the struggle and was displaced for the cause and died away from his home."

Berlin exhibition: Hiding the truth about Husseini

"The grand mufti delivered a talk to the imams of the Bosnian SS division in 1944, and was a key Islamic supporter of Nazi Germany's destruction of European Jewry."

Source: article by Benjamin Weinthal, JPost

The publicly funded Multicultural Center's (Werkstatt der Kulturen) decision to remove educational panels of the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Hajj Muhammad Amin al-Husseini, who was an ally of Adolf Hitler, from an exhibit, sparked outrage on Thursday among a district mayor, the curator of the exhibit, and the Berlin Jewish community.

The curator, Karl Rössler, told The Jerusalem Post that it is a "scandal" that the director of the Werkstatt, Philippa Ebéné, sought to censor the exhibit.

"One must, of course, name that al-Husseini, a SS functionary, participated in the Holocaust," said Rössler.

The exhibit covers the "The Third World during the Second World War" and three exhibit panels of 96 are devoted to the mufti's collaboration with the Nazis. The grand mufti delivered a talk to the imams of the Bosnian SS division in 1944, and was a key Islamic supporter of Nazi Germany's destruction of European Jewry.

Ebéné denied that there was an "agreement " reached with the local German-Muslim community to shut down the exhibit. She termed media queries regarding an agreement as "Eurocentric." She told the Post that the exhibit was intended as a "homage to soldiers from African" countries who fought against the Nazis.

When asked about her opposition to the inclusion of the mufti panels, she asked, "was there ever a commemoration event in Israel to honor the [African] soldiers?"

Rössler was notified last Friday that Ebéné wanted to take out the panels dealing with the grand mufti, but he rejected her demand to remove them. Meanwhile, the exhibit in its uncensored version has been relocated to the Ufer Hallen gallery.

Maya Zehden, a spokeswoman for the 12,000-strong Berlin Jewish community, told the Post that Ebéné's rejection of the exhibit showed "intolerance," and a director who is "incapable of acting in a democratic" manner. Zehden urged that the Berlin government consider replacing Ebéné as director. Zehden also sharply criticized Günter Piening, Berlin's commissioner for integration and migration, for defending Ebéné's decision to censor the exhibit.

Piening told the large daily Tagesspiegel that, "We need, in a community like Neukölln, a differentiated presentation of the involvement of the Arabic world in the Second World War." Zehden termed his statement "an appeasement attempt" to ignore the fact that "there was no official resistance from the Arabic world against the persecution of Jews" during the Shoah.

She accused Piening of showing a false tolerance to German-Arabs in the neighborhood by not wanting to deal with disturbances from the local community. Piening issued conflicting statements to the Post. While denying his statement to the Tagesspiegel, he said, however, that his comment was stripped out of a context of quotes. He said the "reason" for the removal of the grand mufti panels dealt with a "misunderstanding of the background of the exhibit."

In an e-mail to the Post, Heinz Buschkowsky, the district mayor in Neukölln, where the exhibit was originally planned, wrote, it is a sign of "anticipatory obedience to avoid probable protests. I do not consider this position to be good."

He added that Piening's statement is a "repression of the facts dealing with anti-Semitism." The district mayor wrote that the center by its own "claim to stand for freedom, tolerance, and culture should be careful not to set off suspicion that it is imposing censorship."

National Socialism and Anti-Semitism in the Arab World, Matthias Küntzel, JCPA

Maryland historian links roots of radical Islam with Nazi propaganda

Elimination of the Jewish National Home in Palestine: The Einsatzkommando of the Panzer Army Africa, 1942, Klaus-Michael Mallmann and Martin Cüppers, Yad Vashem

Jeffrey Herf: The Jewish Enemy: Nazi Propaganda during World War II and the Holocaust, review by Karl Pfeifer, Engage

The Mufti and the Holocaust, John Rosenthal on Der Mufti von Jerusalem und die Nationalsozialisten by Klaus Gensicke, Policy Review (The Hoover Institution)

Middle East Anti-Semitism, by Dr Denis MacEoin, A Liberal Defence of Israel blog

Abdel Aziz Rantisi: "the question is not what the Germans did to the Jews, but what the Jews did to the Germans"

Book: Hitler's Jihadis : Muslim Volunteers of the SS, by Jonathan Trigg

Crystal Night: when good men did nothing

They saw, they knew and they did nothing.

Source: article by Mitchell Bard , TJP

"On November 9-10, 1938, Nazi storm troopers throughout Germany and Austria ransacked Jewish homes, marauded through the streets, broke windows of Jewish-owned stores and looted merchandise, set fire to synagogues, randomly attacked Jewish men, women and children and arrested thousands of men. When the violence ended, at least 96 Jews were dead, 1,300 synagogues and 7,500 businesses destroyed and countless Jewish cemeteries and schools vandalized. A total of 30,000 Jews were rounded up and sent to concentration camps. The broken glass strewn through the streets from the mayhem caused the pogrom to be called "Crystal Night" or Kristallnacht.

Some Germans claimed after the war that they did not know what the Nazis were doing to the Jews. On Kristallnacht, for the first and only time during the Third Reich, historian Ian Kershaw observed, "the German public was confronted directly on a nationwide scale with the full savagery of the attack on the Jews."

After Kristallnacht, a member of the Hitler Youth admitted, "no German old enough to walk could ever plead ignorance of the persecution of the Jews, and no Jews could harbor any delusion that Hitler wanted Germany anything but judenrein, clean of Jews."

While many Americans would also claim they were unaware of the atrocities committed by the Nazis during the Holocaust, the events of November 9-10 were well documented. The New York Times ran a front-page story on November 11: "A wave of destruction, looting and incendiarism unparalleled in Germany since the Thirty Years War and in Europe generally since the Bolshevist Revolution swept over Great Germany today as National Socialist cohorts took vengeance on Jewish shops, offices and synagogues for the murder by a young Polish Jew of Ernst vom Rath, third secretary of the German Embassy in Paris." Another Times story was headlined, "All Vienna's synagogues attacked."

Franklin Roosevelt made no immediate comment after Kristallnacht, referring questions about it to the State Department. Only after five days of widespread public outrage did he take any action: recalling the US ambassador from Germany and stating in a press conference, "The news of the past few days from Germany has deeply shocked public opinion in the US. Such news from any part of the world would inevitably produce a similar profound reaction among American people in every part of the nation. I myself could scarcely believe that such things could happen in a 20th century civilization..."

Roosevelt agreed to allow 15,000 German Jews already in the United States to remain, but resisted all calls to increase the overall quota of immigrants from Nazi-occupied countries. Equally significant, his failure to take any action against Germany, or to mobilize an international coalition to challenge Hitler, sent the message that the world would not intervene to save the Jews. How much he could have done given the isolationist and xenophobic mood of the American public at that time is debatable, but the consequences of his inaction were catastrophic.

On January 21, 1939, Hitler told the Czech foreign minister, "We are going to destroy the Jews." Nine days later he spoke of "the destruction of the Jewish race in Europe." By the time the war started in September 1939, most Jews, about 370,000, had escaped Germany and Austria. The 175,000 who remained were viewed by the Nazis as hostages in case the Jews outside Germany were considering any vengeful acts.

The deportation of German Jews to their deaths began in October 1941. At the end of April 1943, 150 Jewish children who had been living on a farm training to be Zionist pioneers were deported in one of the final transports of German Jews. Most died in concentration camps. Fewer than 10,000 of the 131,800 German Jews targeted for extermination by the Nazis survived.

Of the 43,700 Austrian Jews who had failed to escape the Nazis, fewer than 2,000 returned to their homes after the war. These were just a fraction of the six million Jews murdered in the Holocaust.

On this 70th anniversary of Kristallnacht we should be reminded of Edmund Burke's warning: "All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.""

The writer is author of the newly-released 48 Hours of Kristallnacht: Night of Destruction/Dawn of the Holocaust - An Oral History and director of the Jewish Virtual Library.

Beatification of Pius XII could be an impediment to Catholic-Jewish relations

Pope Benedict XVI has announced that he supports the beatification of Pope Pius XII, who died 50 years ago. This is a contentious issue. Pius XII remained silent while millions of Jews (including 1.5 million children) were being exterminated by the Nazis during WWII. The Church claims that he was being "prudent". After the war, when there was no need to be "prudent", he neither condemned antisemitism nor sanctioned members of the clergy (like Bishop Hudal), who played a major role in helping former Nazis to escape trial and find a safe haven overseas, mostly in Latin America. Faced with moral dilemmas, Pius XII sadly chose to remain silent.

Source: TJP

"(...) Pius XII was also credited with having tried to stop the October 16, 1943, deportation of more than 1,090 Roman Jews, negotiating a halt to further round-ups and opening Rome's churches, convents, monasteries and the Vatican itself to Jewish refugees.

"No doubt after October 16, generous, organized efforts to save Jews and others were made by all Catholic institutions in Rome," Italian Jewish historian Anna Foa said. "This could not have been done without specific orders by Pacelli."

A DPA German news agency report recently estimated that more than 7,000 Roman Jews owed their lives to this activity.

Rome Chief Rabbi Dr. Riccardo Di Segni disagreed, telling the Post that Pacelli failed to prevent the October 16 deportations from happening.

"The train to Auschwitz was not stopped," he said. "Seven hundred and fifty Roman Jews were gassed immediately on arrival. Another thousand were deported during the following nine months. In Bulgaria, where the Bulgarian government intervened forcefully, a similar train never left the station," therefore saving his own grandfather, he said.

Regarding Pius XII's possible beatification, Di Segni said, "On a human level, I can accept Pacelli's weaknesses, but beatification would make him an ideal for future generations. That, for me, would become an impediment to dialogue."

Rosen * said, "If the Catholic Church wishes a respectful relationship with the Jewish people, sensitivity toward Jewish sensibilities is appropriate," meaning "suspension of any action [toward sainthood for Pius] as long as survivors of the Shoah are still with us."

The International Jewish Committee for Inter-religious Consultations, said Rosen, "has requested full access for independent scholars to the Vatican's archives as soon as possible, thus ensuring maximal credibility."

Eugene Fischer, former head of Catholic-Jewish relations at the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, speaking at Gary Krupp's Rome conference, said he agreed with Rosen.

The prefect of the Vatican Secret Archives, Bishop Sergio Pagano, told the Post that five or six more years of work were need by the five archivists cataloguing, stamping and numbering documents from the 1939-58 Pius XII's papacy. (...)

"Regarding Pius XII's beatification, as a historian, I would think it prudent to wait a few years after the opening of the archives" Pagano said. "Allowing further research and waiting can only strengthen his case. Certainly nothing negative will be found. Probably scholars will be disappointed, because there will be nothing dramatically new - although perhaps some papers indicating Pius XII's 'wishes' - rather than direct orders - might emerge."

The pre-war, pre-Vatican II context of Pius's papacy may also influence evaluation of Vatican wartime actions.

Catholic historians such as Alberto Melloni and Jesuit scholar Giovanni Sale admit that before Vatican II (1962-1965), anti-Semitism was very common in Catholic circles. "It was part of the environment, and people were not conscious of doing evil," Pagano said.

Sale recently wrote that "the dominate mentality at that moment and in that part of the Italian Catholic world... was marked by a certain anti-Judaism... For many it was not easy to remove that mental habit and... see in the Jew an 'older brother' to love and above all, in that delicate moment, to help."

"Yet very often individual priests and nuns acted courageously, exposing themselves to risks beyond the general orders received," Pagano said. "Anti-Semitism was more prominent in higher echelons, not on the people level."

* Rabbi David Rosen, the American Jewish Committee's chairman of the International Jewish Committee for Inter-religious Consultations

- Pius XII (Yad Vashem)
- Rabbi Shear-Yashuv Cohen: Pope Pius XII did not do enough to save Jews during WWII

Hitler becomes Chancellor of Germany

Seventy-five years ago, on January 30, 1933, Hitler was offered the post of Chancellor of Germany:

"The Nazi Party, while not holding an absolute majority in the Reichstag, became overnight the power in the land. Throughout Germany, as the news of Hitler’s Chancellorship spread, the Brownshirts, who for so many months had been the terror of the streets, marched in triumph. They knew that their triumph was complete, and that no arrangement of Cabinet offices could reduce or restrain it. That night the watchers from the British Embassy witnessed the Nazi triumph: "From 8 p.m. till past midnight", the ambassador’s wife, Lady Rumbold, wrote to her mother two days later, "a continuous procession went past the Embassy, of Nazis in uniform and their admirers, bands, flags, torches, over four hours of it! The old President watched from his window, and a little further down the street the new Chancellor, Hitler, and his supporters stood on a balcony, and had a stupendous ovation. On our steps, and perched up on the ledge with the columns, stood wild enthusiasts, singing all the old German hymns! Every now and then there were shouts of "Germany awake", "Down with the Jews", "Heil Hitler"! It seemed as tho’ the whole of Berlin was processing along the Wilhelmstrasse.""

A History of the Twentieth Century, Vol. One: 1900-1933, Martin Gilbert, HarperCollins, 1997

Nazism: Saul Friedländer describes the ostracisation of Max Liebermann

“Max Liebermann, at eighty-six possibly the best-known German painter of the time, was too old to emigrate when Hitler came to power. Formerly president of the Prussian Academy of Arts, and in 1933 its honorary president, he held the highest German decoration, the Pour le Mérite. On May 7 Liebermann resigned from the academy. As the painter Oskar Kokoschka wrote from Paris in a published letter to the editor of the Frankfurter Zeitung, none of Liebermann’s colleagues deemed it necessary to express a word of recognition or sympathy. Isolated and ostracised, Liebermann died in 1935; only three “Aryan” artits attended his funeral. His widow survived him. When, in March 1943, the police arrived, with a stretcher, for the bedridden eighty-five-year-old woman to begin her depotation to the East, she committed suicide by swallowing an overdose of the barbiturate Veronal.”

In Nazi Germany & the Jews, the Years of Persecution 1933-39, by Saul Friedländer, Weidenfeld & Nicolson (1997)

Self-portrait and portrait of his wife Martha Liebermann

Saul Friedländer, professor of history at the University of California, was awarded the Peace Prize at the annual Frankfurt Book Fair. The German Book Trade association said:
"Saul Friedländer gave a voice to the grievances and cries of those human beings who were turned to dust. He gave them memory and a name. The acknowledgment of human dignity forms the basis for peace among mankind, and Saul Friedlander returned to the murdered millions the dignity of which they had been robbed."
"Friedländer is one of the last historiographers to have witnessed and experienced the Holocaust — a genocide that was announced early on, planned openly and carried out with machinelike precision. Friedlander rejects the distanced approach often associated with the writing of history: He creates a space for incomprehensibility — the only possible reaction to such an unfathomable crime."

Papageienallee (1902)

Otto Weidt, Righteous Among the Nations

Otto Weidt was born in 1882 in northern Germany. He learnt the job of wallpapering and upholstery following his father career. At the beginning of the First World War he was a convinced pacifist. Due to a sight illness he was not recruited until the end of the war, when he was required to the sanitary service. Because his sight problem was getting worse he had to quit his job as upholsterer. Since the beginning of the forties, he was the owner of a brush factory in one of Berlin poor towns. The factory was considered "important for the war", because part of its production was destined to the German Army. In his factory, Otto Weidt employed between 1941 and 1943 approximately 30 blind and deaf Jews and other 8 illegal Jews. During a long time he could protect his workers against deportation by bribing the officials of the unemployment office and the Gestapo. With the help of other collaborators, he got false documents and work permits for some refugees. To be able to buy more food he sold many of his brushes in the black market.

By bribing the Gestapo, in 1942 Weidt managed to free his workers, who had been taken to a camp for their deportation. He brought them back and he achieved to keep them living underground. For Alice Licht, who lived illegally and with whom he kept a tight relationship, he rented an atrium to live with her parents. He housed the four people of the Horn family in his factory behind a camouflaged wall. When a confident reported the family hideout, the four of them were deported to Auschwitz on October 14th, 1943: the blind man Chaim Horn, his wife Machla and their two sons. Probably at the same time Licht's hideout was discovered and they were deported to Theresienstadt and from there to Auschwitz. To save Alice Licht, Otto Weidt went to Auschwitz, to Christianstadt to be precise, a secondary camp of the Groß-Rosen concentration camp. Through one of the civilian workers he contacted her and made her runaway and return to Berlin possible.

Otto Weidt died in 1947 in Berlin.

A survivor thanks to Otto Weidt's help is the author Inge Deutschkron. With her book They remained in the shadows she made a literary monument to Otto Weidt and others who supported Jewish refugees. With her help the museum Blindes Vertrauen (blind trust) was installed at the old brush factory.

Sources:

The International Raoul Wallenberg Foundation (text)
Museum Otto Weidt’s Workshop for the Blind (photos)

The Koffán Károly Group - Hungarian Righteous Gentiles

An amazing story by Anshel Pfeffer from the Haaretz:

Budapest, 1944. Precise information from an informer led an officer of the Arrow Cross militia to search for a Jewish man who had slipped away from the ghetto at the studio of painter Lajos Szentivanyi. There was no time to arrange a proper hiding place, and the Jew simply concealed himself behind a screen in a room that was bad for hiding in, his yellow shoes peeking out beneath it. Fortunately, in the room was a spectacular nude painting that Szentivanyi was working on and from which the officer could not look away. Whether or not he saw the shoes, he stopped searching, spoke a few words to Szentivanyi and left.

The incident is one of the war stories of a small group of teachers and students from the Open School of Art in Hungary, founded by Karoly Koffan, which saved hundreds of Jews and other victims of the Nazis. There is something naive, almost comical, in their stories about forging documents and impersonating soldiers in order to enter the ghetto and take out Jews who pretended to be art students. They did not belong to any organized underground and had neither diplomatic immunity nor access to the resources available to a large organization. They did not have a plan to follow and did not keep orderly records of their activities. They helped people on the basis of personal acquaintanceship, motivated by humanitarian feelings and a sense of adventure. And just as their work had begun in an unstructured manner, after liberation and the end of the war they went on with their lives, without memorializing their deeds or asking for credit.

The story of the bohemian underground that was active during the year of the German occupation of Hungary's capital, from March 1944 to February 1945, is coming to light now, over 60 years later, thanks to a young German, Lauren Krupa, who had heard about it in his childhood. Now, together with some friends, he is trying to make a documentary about the Koffan group and to have its members recognized as Righteous Gentiles by Yad Vashem Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Authority.

It is difficult to imagine anyone less suited than Karoly Koffan to be cast as the leader of a clandestine rescue group. On the eve of the war Koffan was a 30-year-old painter living in Paris. In addition to painting, he also worked in sculpture and graphics, built a puppet theater and made furniture. He was not a political person but like many people in his milieu, he was a member of the Communist Party, and when the Germans occupied Paris in 1940 he fled back to his homeland, Hungary. In Budapest Koffan established the Open School of Art, where he tried to reproduce the cosmopolitan atmosphere he had known during his five years in Paris.

The school, many of whose students were Jewish, had no regular course of study. Students could go into any class, move from one teacher to another and even pay for a single class. Tuition fees were often waived for promising but poor students, who were like family at the school at Erzsebet Square, the top floor of which was the home of Koffan, his wife Keska and their two young children.

Hungary was a German ally. Although tens of thousands of immigrant Jews were deported from the country and murdered, Jewish citizens of Hungary were not touched. Koffan's school enjoyed relative freedom for three years, until 1944, when Germany decided to take over the country. One of the Germans' first actions after entering Budapest on March 19, 1944, was to arrest opponents of the Fascist regime. Among those who were arrested was Lajos Szentivanyi's father, who was sent to the Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria.

Perhaps that is why the people at the school, in contrast to a large part of the population, including the many Jews who had flocked to Budapest, understood immediately what was about to happen. The Nazi takeover of Budapest, the arrest of the Jews and their deportation to Auschwitz were swift and not as orderly as in other countries in the Third Reich. Thus, hundreds of thousands of Jews were sent to their deaths, but there were also many opportunities for rescue. Koffan and Szentivanyi ran the group's rescue activities, while three students, carried out the missions. The students - Andre Meszaros, Laszlo Ridovics and Sandor Kovacs - were dispatched to bring Jews forged documents as well as to rescue people from the ghetto and the death marches and bring them to a hiding place.

"Suddenly, many people I knew had to wear a yellow patch and this bothered me very much," Ridovics says in the film Krupa is making about the group. "We were ashamed." At first the group helped anyone who was in danger from the Nazis and their Fascist partners. "It made no difference whether someone was a political refugee, a Jew or a leftist," Ridovics said. Eventually, however, the Jews became the main target for their assistance. "We were a group of people who were determined to stop this slaughter," Meszaros explains simply in the film.
...
In October 1944, the Germans gained full control over Hungary and appointed Ferenc Zalasi, the head of the Fascist Arrow Cross party, head of state. Mandatory military conscription was imposed, but Koffan's students quickly defected and returned to their rescue activity. Their army coats helped them to go into the ghetto, the walls of which were incomplete.

"We didn't know names but there were people who said, 'Hide us,'" Meszaros related. "In a situation like that you don't say, 'Go away, I don't know you.' You have to hide him. I would simply leave the ghetto with someone. If you walked down the street with a Jew, people knew. I wouldn't say anything, I'd wear an army coat and lead a young man out. I'd speak to him as if he were a slave, ordering him: 'Move. Walk in front of me.'" Sometimes they even used the army uniforms in order to hitch a ride back in a German truck.

Danger was a constant companion, as Ridovics related. "I was in the ghetto and a soldier came up to me: 'What are you doing here? You aren't a Jew.' He searched my pockets and there was a Schutzpass in one of them. He stood me up against a wall and he had a pistol and then he said: 'Run over there and I'll fire in the other direction, but if you don't run fast, I'll shoot you in the ass.'"

Later on, the students even began going into the transit camps where Jews were sent before being transported to Auschwitz. They tried to rescue them physically as well as by using documents. Edith Weinberger, a Jewish student at the Open School, who was rescued, along with her brother, with the help of the group, relates in the film how Ridovics carried on his back a Jewish man who collapsed during a deportation march. At the time, the school served as a temporary hiding place for Jews and others who were trying to flee to safety. Early in the morning, before classes, students would bring the people to other, nearby hiding places. Sometimes as many as 20 people stayed at the school overnight.

Koffan and Szentivanyi continued with their art even during the war. That is how the unfinished nude came to save the Jewish man hiding behind the screen in Szentivanyi's studio. "So many Jews and Communists hid at Szentivanyi's place that you could hardly open the door," Meszaros related. "Jews escaped from the marches and ran to Koffan's home and cried out to be hidden. At first they would hide behind the curtains but Mrs. Koffan said to take them out and took them into the living room. She said that either we would be saved together or we would die together. When the soldiers came in, she gave each one an art book." Amazingly, the ruse worked; the soldiers thought they were students in a class.

Third Reich: "a religiosity exclusively oriented to the Germanic community, its mystic roots, its traditions, its future power"

Alberto da Veiga Simões (1888 – 1954), Portuguese ambassador to Germany (1933-1940), understood as early as 1937 the nature of Nazi ideology.

“In August 1933, after long years of service, Veiga Simões was appointed ambassador to Germany. His antagonism to Hitler’s policy and ideology and to the mystic zeal of the Nazi pseudo-religion increased with time, and this emerges in the long and frequent reports he sent to Salazar. For Veiga Simões, the German imperialistic rhetoric breached the limits of the norms ruling relationships between nations in the modern state. He witnessed the way in which the German Reich introduced new and threatening elements into the state, especially the concept of “Volk [which is a] dynamic assimilator of all the analogous elements that fall within the range of its functioning, and [are] in constant movement.” He understood clearly that the cult of the state, the subordination of the family unit to totalitarian guidelines, the disintegration of religious orders, and the gradual destruction of minorities would all produce a dangerous amorphous mass.

“In fact, the Third Reich’s eliminatory zeal regarding all the religious denominations ― Jews, Catholics, Lutherans of all kinds ― has one source and one end: to substitute all the religious truths of human and universal order that share a faith that joins them to all of mankind, with a religiosity exclusively oriented to the Germanic community, its mystic roots, its traditions, its future power.”

Veiga Simões frequently used irony and cynicism to express his contempt for German anti-humanism, which, within Portuguese governmental circles, greatly contributed to his image as an enemy of the Reich.”
Portugal, the Consuls, and the Jewish Refugees, 1938-1941, by Avraham Milgram, Shoah Resource Center, Yad Vashem
http://www1.yadvashem.org/odot_pdf/Microsoft%20Word%20-%203230.pdf

Alberto da Veiga Simões in Berlin

Apology of evil, by Pilar Rahola

“I want to shatter the core of the lie”, stated the elated Robert Faurisson, cheered loudly with passionate applause. The well-known French negationist Faurisson had just been sentenced in his country for having denied the Nazi extermination against Jews. Yet, this did not prevent him from enjoying a pleasant holiday in the Iranian paradise, and from participating as a speaker in the congress on the Holocaust organised by Iranian fascists. In the corridors of the congress, David Duke, ex leader of the Ku Klux Klan, expressed his satisfaction to the few European journalists that covered the event, and took advantage to talk about the western “shame”, that represses freedom of speech… Of course, Iran was, for the well-known American racist, a model of freedom.

... It means that the Iranian Congress on the Holocaust was a great show of hate and disdain for the Jewish victims of the Shoah, funded by a member state of the UN, whose influence in Islam, in the Middle East and the world, is more than notorious. Obviously, once again President Ahmadinejad threatened Israel, called for its disappearance and encouraged all Muslims to take part in its demise. In conclusion: an apology for hate, a war threat on another country, a public show of Anti-Semitism, without complexes an Anti-Semite orgy, and lastly, the notorious inaction and indifference of the world, perfectly demonstrated in the perverse silence of the Organization of the United Nations. If the Iranian Congress served any purpose, unfortunately it was to confirm what we already knew. It proved that the apology for Nazi negationism can be made without suffering any consequences.

I have dozens of friends who have been victims of the terrible disaster of the Holocaust; I remember my Colombian friend, whose grand-mother had completely lost her mother tongue, Polish, when she, at 13, was rescued from Auschwitz, having lost her whole family. I remember the trembling look of a Chilean survivor telling me, in tears, that a European had never apologized. I remember a sad man that I met in Santiago whose father, working as a musician, was forced to play the violin as his family was executed. There were more than 1 million children, two thirds of the European Jewish population disappeared; dozens of villages with their centuries of Jewish life, poets, school teachers, peasants, traders, doctors, children and grand-parents, men and women, all were wiped off the map. Smoke, only smoke, and some do not even want them to be remembered. Smoke and oblivion.

For such pain, for such evil, for such a tragedy that is such burden to carry, with centuries of guilt in Europe, I feel a profound sadness, I feel profoundly lost and profoundly defeated.

It is true. Duke the racist has reasons to feel exultant, feeding the hate for Jews and laughing at the extermination of six million people, it does not cost anything. Who cares? Which country has expelled the Iranian ambassador from its territory? Who has demanded an explanation at the United Nations General Assembly? Who is going to send to prison those who participated in this apology for evil? Who is moved by this horror?

Having written a number of times that Jews stand alone in their misfortune and that Israel faces survival alone, this occasion gives me the most evidence to be sure of the fact. I wonder whether the world would have allowed an official congress, public and legal, in favour of racism. Would there not have been all kinds of protest and acts of solidarity? Wouldn’t they have envisaged an economic boycott, military intervention? Wouldn’t the route of diplomacy have been exhausted first? Wouldn’t left-wing organisations have taken to the streets, indignant about the apology of evil that racism represents? Wouldn’t SOS Racism have been outraged? Wouldn’t those like the writer Saramago have expressed their profound rage? Yet, when racism is perpetrated against Jews, the victims of the greatest extermination of all times, the world considers that this is not its problem, as it has never been.

Impunity gives rise to hate, raging and reinforced, and, with hate reinforced, all the doors of evil are opened.

As an old saying puts it: “When your enemy assures that he wants to kill you, believe him”. What should the Israelis think confronted with the reiterated threats of destruction by Iran, a country that will have nuclear weapons without being punished? What can the Jews think around the world? They think that they stand alone. That they always stood alone in the face of the anti-Semitic hate.
December 14, 2006
Translated by Margarita Estapé.
Pilar Rahola comes from a republican and anti-fascist family. She is a Catalan writer, journalist and former parliamentarian of the republican left.
http://www.pilarrahola.com/

Baruch Lopes Leão de Laguna, the “Portuguese” painter who died at Auschwitz

Baruch Lopes Leão de Laguna was a notable representative of late 19th, early 20th century Dutch portrait painting. He was born in Amsterdam on 16 February 1864, to a Portuguese sephardic family. His early life was marred by tragedy, as would his later life be. His parents, Salomão Lopes de Leão Laguna and Sara Kroese, died when he was 11, and he was raised in the orphanage of the Portuguese Jewish community in Amsterdam. Teachers in the community were supportive and he trained at the Quellinus Art School and then at the National Academy of Fine Arts. To earn a living, Leão Laguna worked in the studio of painter Jacob Meijer de Haan.

Gradually, he became successful and was able to devote himself entirely to his own painting. His first exhibition was held in 1885 at Arti et Amicitiae, a cultural association. His work was well received by both critics and fellow artists. He married Rose Asscher, the daughter of a diamond cutter.

Baruch Lopes de Leão Laguna spent the first years of the Nazi occupation in hiding in a remote farm in Laren, and it is believed that painted the above self-portrait then. As a sign of gratitude, he offered it and several other paintings to the family that was, at great risk, helping him.

Eventually, Baruch Lopes de Leão Laguna was caught and taken to the Auschwitz extermination camp, where he was murdered on 19 November 1943. He was 79.

Posted at Rua da Judiaria, Nuno Guerreiro Josué's blog
http://ruadajudiaria.com/?p=566
Translated and adapted by Philosemite
http://www.jhm.nl/nieuws.aspx?ID=64

The smell of humans, by Ernö Szép

The Smell of Humans relates the three-week ordeal of a sixty-year-old Hungarian writer during the final phase of the Second World War, when organized deportations of Jews from Hungary more or less ceased, but a reign of terror was unleashed by Hungarian Fascists who seized power in mid-October of 1944. Along with hundreds of other elderly Jews, the writer was picked up by Arrow Cross thugs and led on a forced march to a village near the capital, where the captives were made to dig trenches—completely senselessly, since everyone knew the war was just about over. Or did they? Ernö Szép's book is at its perceptive best when describing the uncertain state of mind of both victims and aggressors—their despair, their terror, their cruelty, and above all, their delusions. (Ivan Sanders, Hungarian Quarterly, 1995)
“Past Fót, around seven-thirty, we reached a place where the highway split into three branches. Here we were allowed a rest. There was a tavern by the roadside, with some soldiers standing in front. A big, husky, sun-browned lieutenant, about forty-five years old, came out to look at us, and after eyeing us for half a minute, spoke up:
“Is there anything you gentlemen need?”
Hundreds of parched throats answered in unison:
“Water! Water!”
In a minute or two a hefty serving girl came out with two large pitchers of water, followed by the lieutenant carrying eight or ten beer mugs for those who had no cup of their own. That girl had to go back about twenty times to fill those pitchers. Almost everyone gave her a pengö; the poorer ones gave 40 or 60 fillérs.
After glancing around, the lieutenant came up close where the guard could not see him.
“Gentlemen, I feel sorry for you. It is a dirty rotten shame that old men are taken for labor. Believe me, every decent Hungarian is shamefaced at what is being done to the Jews here. It is because of this that Hungary will be wiped off the face of the earth. I am in uniform today because I have a family and I cannot run away from these swine. I happen to know the military commander at Veresegyház, and he is a decent man; I hope he will be able to help you gentlemen. Don’t worry this farce will be over in a few weeks.”
He looked around, and added with a little laugh: “I don’t dare to hang around any longer. Rest up, God bless.” He saluted us. “May the future be better!”
Suddenly he screamed fiercely:
“I want quiet and orderly behaviour here!” (This was for the benefit of an approaching Arrow Cross guard.)”
-------------
“We were proceeding in good marching order, at least we were trying to, but our slave-drivers soon began to scream out from either side:
“Stay in step, excellencies!”
“Step lively back there, your mother’s …” (This voice belonged to the youngest guard.)
“Chin up, old Moses!”
“Keep in step, you’re lagging behind!”
…
“What’s going on, straggling back there!”
“What a herd of pigs!”
“Straighten that line!”
“Let’s go, Abe, stop dragging your feet!”
“Close your ranks, you goddam dirty Jew, or I’ll show you!”
…
The policeman stepped up to one of the soldiers escorting us.
“Look, this man over here is surely over sixty years old. I saw the orders this morning, it said you are supposed to take men under sixty. There are several here older than that, how come you are taking them too?”
The Smell of Humans : A Memoir of the Holocaust in Hungary (1945)
by Ernö Szép (1884—1953)
Publisher: Corvina in association with A Central European University Press Book