Hitler's European Holocaust Helpers

[IndianaGreen]

05/20/2009

THE DARK CONTINENT

Hitler's European Holocaust Helpers

By SPIEGEL Staff

The Germans are responsible for the industrial-scale mass murder of 6 million Jews. But the collusion of other European countries in the Holocaust has received surprisingly little attention until recently. The trial of John Demjanjuk is set to throw a spotlight on Hitler's foreign helpers.

He's been here before, in this country of perpetrators. He saw this country collapse. He was 25 at the time and his Christian name was Ivan, not John; not yet.

Ivan Demjanjuk served as a guard in Flossenbürg concentration camp until shortly before the end of World War II. He had been transferred there from the SS death camp in Sobibor in present-day Poland. He was Ukrainian, and he was a Travniki, one of the 5,000 men who helped Germany's Nazi regime commit the crime of the millennium -- the murder of all the Jews in Europe, the "Final Solution."

<snip>

It's completely undisputed that the Holocaust would never have happened without Hitler, SS Chief Heinrich Himmler and the many, many other Germans. But it's also certain "that the Germans on their own wouldn't have been able to carry out the murder of millions of European Jews," says Hamburg-based historian Michael Wild.

It's a perception that many survivors never doubted. When the Association of Surviving Lithuanian Jews convened in Munich in 1947, they passed a resolution that bore an unmistakable title: "On the guilt of a large part of the Lithuanian population for the murder of Lithuania's Jews."

In the Third Reich with its well-functioning bureaucracy, there were comprehensive registers of the Jewish population. But in the territories conquered by the German army, Hitler's henchmen needed information of the type supplied in the Netherlands by registry offices whose staff went to a lot of trouble to compile a precise "Register of Jews."

http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/0,1518,625824,00.html

[davepc]

1. I've heard that most of the concentration camp guards were Ukranian Nazis not Germans...

[RaleighNCDUer]

2. Yep. Just as most Danish Jews survived because the Danes

refused to cooperated in rounding them up - one of the great, unknown stories of WW2 was how a small nordic nation which bordered on Germany itself, most the population of which perfectly fit Hitler's ideal of the Aryan race, successfully defied the Nazis, despite being occupied by them.

And yet the Ukranians, the Bulgarians, Poles, even the French cooperated in rounding up their own citizens because of their ethnicity, making their murders inevitable.

[dflprincess]

3. I suppose the reason it remains unknown is that it shames so many other nations

and the fact Sweden willingly took the Danish Jews in shames the U.S. which would not raise immigration quotas for Jewish refugess.

http://www.auschwitz.dk/Denmark.htm
It's one of the great untold stories of World War II: In 1943, in German-occupied Denmark, the Danish people find out that all 7,500 Danish Jews are about to be rounded up and deported to German concentration camps. Danish citizens spontaneously make their own decision: it's not going to happen. And it didn't. Risking their own lives, the Danes quickly rallied round to save their fellow citizens, and almost all of the country's Jews were able to escape the clutches of the Nazis and find refuge in neutral Sweden.

more at the Wikiepdia link:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rescue_of_the_Danish_Jews

During the early years of the occupation, Danish officials repeatedly insisted to the German occupation authorities that there was no "Jewish problem" in Denmark....

Without the recalcitrant Danish government to impede them, Denmark's German occupiers began planning the deportation to Nazi concentration camps of the 8,000 or so Jews in Denmark. On September 28, 1943, Georg Ferdinand Duckwitz, a German diplomat, after secretly making sure Sweden would receive Jewish refugees, leaked word of the plans for the operation against Denmark's Jews to Hans Hedtoft, chairman of the Danish Social Democratic Party. Hedtoft contacted the Danish Resistance Movement and the head of the Jewish community, C.B. Henriques, who in turn alerted the acting chief rabbi, Dr. Marcus Melchior. (The official chief rabbi, Dr. Max Friediger had already been detained as a "hostage" on the night of August 29, 1943, along with some 100 prominent Danes, including a dozen Jews, in a camp near Copenhagen.) At the early morning services, on September 29, the day prior to the Rosh Hashanah services, Jews were promptly warned by Rabbi Melchior of the German action and urged to go into hiding immediately and to spread the word to all their Jewish friends and relatives.

The improvisational nature of the early phases of the rescue was particularly notable. When Danish civil servants at several levels in different ministries learnt of the German plan to round up all Danish Jews, they independently pursued various measures to find the Jews and hide them. Some simply phoned friends and asked them to go through telephone books and warn those with Jewish-sounding names to go into hiding. Most Jews hid for several days or weeks before being smuggled to Sweden, which offered asylum to all Danish Jews who reached its shores.

The Jews were smuggled out of Denmark by transporting them by sea over the Øresund from Zealand to Sweden — a passage of varying time depending on the specific route and the weather, but averaging under an hour on the choppy winter sea, as noted by Preben Munch-Nielsen in an interview with the USHMM.<4> Some were transported in large fishing boats of up to 20 tons, but others were carried to freedom in rowboats or kayaks. The ketch Albatros was one of the ships used to smuggle Jews to Sweden. Some refugees were smuggled inside freight cars on the regular ferries between Denmark and Sweden, this route being suited for the very young or old who were too weak to endure a rough sea passage. The underground had broken into empty freight cars sealed by the Germans after inspection, helped refugees onto the cars, and then resealed the cars with forged or stolen German seals to forestall further inspection.

[rockymountaindem]

5. To defend our own record, the US did admit 30k German Jews prior to the war n/t

[dflprincess]

7. We don't have much of a record to defend

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20090117162626AAMqIvN

THE POLICIES:
Prior to and during WWII, the policies of the U.S. regarding Jewish refugees who were fleeing Nazi persecution and genocide were restrictive. Indeed, these restrictions are often referred to as the "Jewish Refugee Crisis." The Crisis that was at its worst from 1938 to 1944.

Through the quota system, immigration regulations, visa requirements, and the time required to process visa applications, the number of Jewish refugees, particularly those from Germany and Austria, was limited and then reduced. The U.S. failed to provide adequate safe harbor to Jewish refugees fleeing the persecution of Nazi Germany. The U.S. is a good and compassionate country; but it is a terrible truth that the U.S. turned away thousands of refugees, delivering many to their deaths at the hands of the Nazi regime.

American politicians and bureaucrats, while maintaining an appearance of great humanitarianism, used immigration policies to prevent Europe's Jews from escaping to the United States. For example, the policy of the U.S. State Department was, at best, wrongheaded. Many Americans expressed concern that Germans posing as Jewish refugees were trying to establish themselves in the U.S. for a takeover. The State Department, particularly Breckinridge Long, Assistant Secretary, took these exaggerated thoughts and used them to cut their quotas in half again. He did keep the President informed of his policies, but he always stressed it was for the betterment of America. At one point he instructed the immigration consuls to place "obstacles" in the way in order to make it very difficult to gain a visa.

A.D. Morse writes: "In 1938 the Nazis burned every synagogue in the nation, shattered the windows of every Jewish establishment, hauled twenty-five thousand innocent people to concentration camps, and forced the Jews to pay 1,000,000,000 marks for the damage."... "Five days later, at a White House press conference, a reporter asked the President 'Would you recommend a relaxation of our immigration restrictions so that the Jewish refugees could be received in this country?' 'This is not in contemplation,' replied the President. 'We have the quota system'." ...

It was not until 1944 that the U.S. began to take steps toward easing resrtrictions.

Source(s):
http://feingold.senate.gov/statements/07...
http://www.fff.org/freedom/0691a.asp
http://history.sandiego.edu/gen/st/~imlo...
A.D. Morse, "While Six Million Died: A Chronicle of American Apathy." Random House: New York 1967.
W.R. Perl. "The Holocaust Conspiracy: An International Policy of Genocide." Shapolsky Publishers, Inc. 1989.

Though a recent book claims that FDR did try and get the restrictions loosened. It has long been known that Eleanor Roosevelt tried desperatly to get the quotas lifted - at least for children.

[rockymountaindem]

8. A lot of that can be laid at the feet of Sen. Nye and Breckenridge Long

[struggle4progress]

4. The Kielce Pogrom (1946)

http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Holocaust/Kielce.html

[struggle4progress]

6. Zolynia Memorial

... A Jewish survivor from Lezajsk returned just after the liberation. She had survived the war by posing as a non-Jew. Stopping for tea in a cafe, she overheard the conversation between a group of local residents at the next table, which she described years later:

Apparently, nine Jews returned to Lizhensk and lived together in one house. Some people came at night and threw a bomb into the house. All of them were killed. There was a debate among them. Some said that this was good, for what more do Jews want to find here? Who needs them here? On the other hand, others said that, even though there is no need for them, it was possible to have warned them to leave, and if they would not have left we could have been able to take appropriate measures. Both sides agreed that no crime or travesty was committed here, for if there were still Jews alive, they would now know not to come here again, for we will kill them like mice.

Visiting a former school teacher in Grodzisko, she was warmly greeted by the teacher, his wife and their children. However, she noted, "I was forced to present myself as a non-Jew to his older children, as a distant relative whom they did not know." She soon left and did not return to her home town ... http://www.zolynia.org/displaced.html

[LostinVA]

9. The Baltic states and Ukraine were probably the worst -- they relished it.

Compare them to the courage and humanity of the Danes.