York1These photos he kept in a trunk in our basement, and as far as I know, he never looked at them.
Reminds me of a police officer friend I had years ago.
He'd inherited his uncles photo album from WW2. There were plenty of shots of friends and places, ships and equipment. All the photos had captions to them as to who, what, when, where, and why.
Until the section where his uncle was part of an infantry unit that liberated a concentration camp, Dachau I believe it was. Photos, photos, more photos, each more horrific than the next. No captions, except one, just one, at the end of the section. It said:
"After this we didn't take no more prisoners."
Backshop daveklepper From what I read, this was an afterthought, and not the agenda of the formal conference. I did not read of any Romanie going to gas chambers or using the same special trains as Jews, but I'll be glad to learn from any information you supply. Dead is dead. Whether in a gas chamber or starved or worked to death. The Romani, Slavs, mentally handicapped, etc, were all going to end up dead. It was just the order in importance that the Germans decided who went first.
daveklepper From what I read, this was an afterthought, and not the agenda of the formal conference. I did not read of any Romanie going to gas chambers or using the same special trains as Jews, but I'll be glad to learn from any information you supply.
From what I read, this was an afterthought, and not the agenda of the formal conference. I did not read of any Romanie going to gas chambers or using the same special trains as Jews, but I'll be glad to learn from any information you supply.
Dead is dead. Whether in a gas chamber or starved or worked to death. The Romani, Slavs, mentally handicapped, etc, were all going to end up dead. It was just the order in importance that the Germans decided who went first.
Exactly Backstop. The lack of empathy by the author for other ethnic groups that suffered like atrocities is disturbing. Until confronted none of these other ethnic groups were mentioned.
daveklepperFrom what I read, this was an afterthought, and not the agenda of the formal conference.
i suspect there are reasons the number of Romany was less, including a lack of historian interest in them and a general lifestyle favoring 'resistance to capture'; I also have not studied any kind of objective estimate of the actual population or demographics of true Romany peoples.
It has always been interesting to note how much of the NS party rhetoric concerned not 'racial Jews' but the so-called 'international Jewish finance-capital conspiracy' as used in,say, the Feder plan. Meanwhile the blackshirt and goon elements successfully and progressively demonized Jewishness to the point wiping out whole nations of 'little people' was thinkable, while leaving the "finance" untouched. In that alone is enough creeping horror for one century.
This is a topic that affected me in a roundabout way.
My father was in the 3rd Army artillery, basically a second line behind the infantry, during WWII.
As they moved from France, the first line liberated a camp, and then they moved on.
My father's group was left to do some of the work. Even though my father's group was forbidden to take pictures, he had a very small camera with which he snapped photos as they entered the camp.
These photos he kept in a trunk in our basement, and as far as I know, he never looked at them.
When I was a boy, my mother would tell me every-so-often that dad had gone outside in the middle of the night and walked -- he had had a nightmare and needed to get out in the air outside. She merely said it was a nightmare about the war, but she didn't elaborate.
By the time I was in high school, she told me about the photos, and without my father ever seeing them, she showed them to me.
It was just what you would expect -- piles of naked bodies, some stacked six or eight feet high. Hundreds of them.
It so affected my father that even fifty years later, he would still have nightmares every once in while. He never talked about it.
York1 John
You know what the greatest horror was? When the Israelis captured Adolf Eichmann. People seemed to expect a monster but what they got was a beaureaucrat. It's what Hannah Arendt meant when she said, "The banality of evil."
daveklepperGypsies were to be exterminated, but we do not have the records for special trains that we have for Jews, and they did not have a "Wannsee Conference" (sp. emended) that planned the "Final Solution."
It is in fact precisely at the Wannsee conference that Romany became included, in the same footnote that condemned the Jews. This concerned the 'Kommissarbefehl' (for expedient Sonderkommando interdiction of Soviet administration through 'elimination' of the political administrators -- some bright bureaucrat noting that as long as they had the special machinery set up, why not extend it to Gypsies and Jews.
To me this makes the horror greater, not less.
Non-Jewish Russians and Poles were not to be exterminated, but more than six million of each lost their lives in WWII.
Also Chinese.
Good question. Not in as mass movements. Gypsies were to be exterminated, but we do not have the records for special trains that we have for Jews, and they did not have a "Wannsee Conference" that planned the "Final Solution." Communists were to be exterminated, but they were mostly just arrested and shot.
In general, non-Jewish, non-German Europeans were to be slaves to Germans but not erased completely. But Wansea planned for all Jews to be either killed outright or worked-to-death in slave-labor camps.
In some slave labor camps Jews were joined by others who were slaves but not earmarked for death unless they had shown opposition to Nazi rule before being put in the camps.
Gypsies = Romanie
I do not know of any other group than Jews who had both special trains to the camps and also were forced to enter the gas chambers.
243129 Mr. Klepper, let me clarify my original question. Were there other ethnic groups Involved in the deportation of which you speak?
Mr. Klepper, let me clarify my original question. Were there other ethnic groups Involved in the deportation of which you speak?
I should also point out that Germany does now have a number of Jewish communities and synagogues.
And it is also true that not all German Jews had their lives ended in the Holocaust. In addition to those that obtained "Aryan" forged documents that could not be identified as forged, and those that joined anti-Nazi Partisons and survived underground, there was the interesting case of most Berlin Jewish men married to Christian women. The night before the roundup, thousands of these women converged on the street in front of Gestapo Headquarters and prevented any traffic, foot or vehicle, and refused to leave unless they were promised that their husbands would not be taken from them. And it actually worked! This was only in Berlin, and those men survived.
Please cool it, both of you. It is obvious that he was referring only to German Jews, not all Jews under Nazi occupation, and that he wondered if Jews were settled in all German towns or just the 69 plus Berlin. That is a perfectly legitimate question. And it is true that there were Jews in most German towns and cities, but not in all. In this case ir is a memorial specifically for the Jews from somewhere between 69 and 109 towns, those that are in the final count of suitcases sent. Berlin has Grunwald Station, track 11, as a memorial for Berlin Jews and local street memorials to specific families. If I remember correctly, Frankfort on Maen (Sp) has a memorial adjacent to its West End Synagogue, which was Reform before WWII but now has an Orthodox congregation, an Orthodox congregation with a well-cared-for pipe organ! (Used in concerts)
Don't attack people on this thread. Period. Don't call names and use degrading adjectives or imply someone is stupid. Most of the time when you do that you simply don't understand what is behind the question or misstatement.
"Prissy"? Your comment to go "read some history books" is prissy. The question is not dumb it is being asked of the original poster for a reason.
Try some shredded wheat perhaps that will improve your attitude.
I have removed my comments in order to keep the discussion centered on Dave's information.
Thanks to Chris / CopCarSS for my avatar.
Murphy Siding 243129 daveklepper In a Wurzcburg station, with suitcases from 69 towns that had large Jeiwsh populations, plus one open suitcase with a poem by an Israeli poet that moved with his family from Germany dedicated to his childhood girlfriend who perished in the Holocaust. The attached is a picture furnished by the Yad v'Shem Jerusalem (Hand and Name, the Jerusalem Holocaust Memlorial) via the Jerusalem Post Only Jews from the 69 towns were shipped to concentration camps? The answer to your question is no. Read some history books.
243129 daveklepper In a Wurzcburg station, with suitcases from 69 towns that had large Jeiwsh populations, plus one open suitcase with a poem by an Israeli poet that moved with his family from Germany dedicated to his childhood girlfriend who perished in the Holocaust. The attached is a picture furnished by the Yad v'Shem Jerusalem (Hand and Name, the Jerusalem Holocaust Memlorial) via the Jerusalem Post Only Jews from the 69 towns were shipped to concentration camps?
daveklepper In a Wurzcburg station, with suitcases from 69 towns that had large Jeiwsh populations, plus one open suitcase with a poem by an Israeli poet that moved with his family from Germany dedicated to his childhood girlfriend who perished in the Holocaust. The attached is a picture furnished by the Yad v'Shem Jerusalem (Hand and Name, the Jerusalem Holocaust Memlorial) via the Jerusalem Post
In a Wurzcburg station, with suitcases from 69 towns that had large Jeiwsh populations, plus one open suitcase with a poem by an Israeli poet that moved with his family from Germany dedicated to his childhood girlfriend who perished in the Holocaust.
The attached is a picture furnished by the Yad v'Shem Jerusalem (Hand and Name, the Jerusalem Holocaust Memlorial) via the Jerusalem Post
Only Jews from the 69 towns were shipped to concentration camps?
The answer to your question is no. Read some history books.
I have read many history books. That is why I asked the question to the OP.
Are you getting enough fiber in your diet murph? You seem a bit testy.
54light15 243129- Obviously they were from towns around Wurzburg and were brought there as a central gathering point, probably by truck. This sort of thing happened all over Europe, such as Parisian Jews being gathered at the Velodrome de Hiver and the Drancy horse racetrack and then taken from these locations for "settlement in the East and given special treatment" as the nazis told them.
243129- Obviously they were from towns around Wurzburg and were brought there as a central gathering point, probably by truck. This sort of thing happened all over Europe, such as Parisian Jews being gathered at the Velodrome de Hiver and the Drancy horse racetrack and then taken from these locations for "settlement in the East and given special treatment" as the nazis told them.
That does not answer my question.
109 towns were invited to participate in the memoroial, and 69 participated up to the time of the news item, but more are expected. Only the specific "state."
As Charlie noted, Berlin haa had its own memorial station, platform 11 at Grunewald, for many years.
Thank you, Overmod, for finding the beautiful poem. Thanks to you also, Charlie.
Thanks for the clarification and backstory.
daveklepperI hope to add "Little Ruth" when posted on the poet's website.
https://www.poetryinternational.org/pi/poem/24211/auto/0/0/Yehuda-Amichai/Little-Ruth/en/tile
In case you wondered why the empty suitcase.
Ironically, all the other Hanovers left Wurzburg in the 1930s, and survived; Ruth was trapped in Holland, with an amputated leg; Amichai in a novel recounts how she skipped to the train after her prosthetic leg was confiscated. Remember her as a symbol of history, like the suitcase.
I also assumed it was Grunewald, since the story came from Berlin. I recommend the website: www.guyshacher.com for more on Grunewald and more.
But:
From Jewish Telegraphic Agency, intended for distribution and reproduction:
BERLIN (JTA) – Nearly 80 years after the last train sent Jews to almost certain death from the main railway station in Wurzburg, a memorial to those who perished was dedicated in the German city.
The memorial, designed by artist Matthias Braun, features a collection of suitcases, backpacks and assorted travel gear made of stone, ceramic and other materials.
The luggage – its owners unseen – stands in front of the main station. Nearby are information steles with historical photos.
In a modern twist, one can scan QR codes on the luggage to learn about the Jewish population and history of each town that had someone deported on a train to the Theresienstadt concentration camp outside Prague, in then-Czechoslovakia.
Each sculpted suitcase has a twin in one of those towns.
Josef Schuster, president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany and a Wurzburg resident, told Germany’s main Jewish weekly, the Juedische Allgemeine, that the memorial was likely the first in Germany to feature related monuments “at the central place of remembrance and in the local communities.”
Schuster, in fact, inspired the idea to have a memorial with separate branches, according to the newspaper.
The last major deportation from the Wurzburg station took place in June 1943.
Before the Holocaust, the Lower Franconia region reportedly had the highest density of Jewish communities in Germany. Between 1941 and 1944, some 2,069 Jews were deported from the area to Theresienstadt.
For the project, local artists were asked to create a symbolic piece of luggage in all 109 towns in Lower Franconia that had prewar Jewish communities. So far, 69 towns have participated.
One suitcase does not refer to a particular town. It is open and contains the poem “Little Ruth,” by the Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai, whose family fled Germany in the 1930s. The verse is dedicated to his childhood friend Ruth Hanover, who was murdered in the Sobibor death camp in Nazi-occupied Poland.
Another component of the memorial is an ongoing youth education project, started in 2018, that focuses on lessons to be learned from the history.
Funders include the city of Wurzburg and other local towns. The total costs are expected to reach 250,000 euros (about $280,000).
Due to social distancing measures designed to hinder the coronavirus pandemic, only about 50 people attended the ceremony – the legal limit for now. It was livestreamed on the website of the project initiators, DenkOrt Deportationen.
Wuraburg is midway between Frankfort and Nuremberg and has a streetcar system:
Würzburg has a tram network of five lines with a length of 19.7 kilometres (12.2 miles).
The proposed Line 6 from Hauptbahnhof (Main Station) to Hubland university campus via Residenz is scheduled to be completed after 2018.
I hope to add "Little Ruth" when posted on the poet's website.
I'm assuming the station you refer is Grunewald, which has several memorials for some years now.
http://www.dark-tourism.com/index.php/germany/15-countries/individual-chapters/249-platform-17-monument-grunewald-berlinUni.
I can relate somewhat to the poet since my very best friend and second cousin, same age and a look alike, Jonti Wilkes, went down with the Athena in September 1939 after a U-boat attack.
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