Video - Secrets Of War, Shadows Of The Third Reich: 'The Holocaust Secret'.

On coming to power during 1933 the Nazis began to establish a network of camps. These were initially concentration camps due to the fact that they were used to concentrate enemies and certain groups of people in one place.

Local SS and police forces set up these first camps. However, very soon the Nazi leadership began to develop a systematic and centrally controlled system of camps. Later, as the Nazi regime imposed their influence over countries they occupied, they developed a range of different types of camps. These were concentration camps, transit camps, forced-labour or work camps and extermination camps.

A concentration camp is a place where people are detained or confined without trial. Prisoners were kept in extremely harsh conditions and without any rights. In Nazi Germany after 1933, and across Nazi controlled Europe between 1938 and 1945, concentration camps became a major way in which the Nazis imposed their control. The first concentration camps in Germany were set up as detention centres to stop any opposition to the Nazis by so called ‘enemies of the state’. These people included communists, socialists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, homosexuals, Roma, and so called ‘asocials’.

However, after March 1938, when the Germans annexed Austria into German territory, many thousands of German Jews were arrested and detained in Dachau, Buchenwald and Sachsenhausen concentration camps.

After Kristallnacht (the ‘Night of broken glass’) in November 1938, the Nazis and their supporters arrested many thousands of male Jews above the age of 14 years. They imprisoned them in camps for days or sometimes weeks. They were kept in poor conditions, given little food or water and subjected to brutal treatment and torture. When the German army invaded Poland on 1 September 1939, the SS set up many concentration camps to house Polish political prisoners and many thousands of Polish Jews. Many of the inmates of these camps were subjected to increasingly poor conditions. In addition they were subjected to forced labour, the result of which was often death.

During the German invasion of the Soviet Union the Nazis began the first mass killings of Jews. Between June and September 1941, the Einsatzgruppen supported by local collaborators murdered hundreds of thousands of Jews across Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia and the Soviet Union. Having observed the killings, Adolf Eichmann ordered a more efficient method of killing the Jews of Europe be developed.

The Nazis established six extermination camps on Polish soil. These were Chelmno (December 1941-January 1945), Belzec (March-December 1942), Sobibor (May-July 1942 and October 1942-October 1943), Treblinka (July 1942-August 1943), Majdanek (September 1941-July 1944) and Auschwitz-Birkenau (March 1942-January 1945).

The first of these camps, Chelmno, was established to exterminate the Jews of the Lodz ghetto and the surrounding area, and 5,000 Roma. The facility contained three gas vans in which victims were murdered. Only two Jews survived the camp.

After the Wannsee Conference of 1942, the Germans established death camps at Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka. Their sole purpose was murder. They were set up near railway lines to make transportation of the victims easy. As they were purely killing centres, there were no selections. The victims were sent directly to the gas chambers.

A concentration camp to house Soviet prisoners of war and Poles had been established at Majdanek, close to the Polish city of Lublin, during 1941. In the spring of 1942 gas chambers and crematoria were added, turning Majdanek into an extermination camp that would murder 78,000 people. Auschwitz-Birkenau, the most infamous of the Nazi death camps, was a massive concentration, forced labour and extermination camp at the centre of a network of more than 40 satellite camps. Upwards of 80 per cent of those Jews transported to Auschwitz-Birkenau were selected for immediate death.

Those who were selected for work were set on a whole range of tasks. These included sorting and processing the possessions of everyone who arrived at the camp and heavy manual work. Some Jewish prisoners were put into units called Sonderkommandos, whose role was to work in the gas chambers and crematorium. They were kept apart from the rest of the camp prisoners, but were also sent to their deaths in the gas chambers after a few weeks or months of work.

The majority of those selected for any kind of work would die within weeks or months of their arrival from lack of food, disease or overwork.

The Nazis set up a number of transit camps in occupied lands. After being rounded up, Jews were imprisoned in transit camps before being deported to a concentration camp, labour camp or one of the six Nazi extermination camps in Poland.

Examples of transit camps include Drancy in France, Mechelen in Belgium, and Vught and Westerbork in the Netherlands.

More on the camps can be read here.

More info on the Holocaust and the concentration camps can be found here.

Video - Dr. Edy Cohen analyzes Mahmoud Abbas' book "The Other Side: The Secret Relationship Between Nazism and Zionism"

Related:

Abbas' book reveals: The 'Nazi-Zionist plot' of the Holocaust. (Ynet).

Abbas' statement that there was no persecution or harassment of Jews in Arab countries is particularly painful to Dr. Edy Cohen.

He was born in Lebanon and served for many years in a variety of positions in the Israeli intelligence community. He is also the son of Chaim Cohen, one of the leaders of the Jewish community in Lebanon, who was kidnapped and murdered along with several colleagues in March 1985 by Hezbollah, which claimed that they were Mossad agents.

Dr. Cohen is today involved with organizations working to gain compensation for Jewish refugees who fled Iran and the Arab countries. He was also a research fellow at the International Institute for Holocaust Research at Yad Vashem. His areas of research include the cooperation between Arabs and Nazis, the life of Grand Mufti of Jerusalem Haj Amin al-Husseini, and the ideology of radical Islam.

Dr. Cohen: "Throughout the book, Abbas presents his thesis, which is actually an indictment against Zionism and its leaders, from David Ben-Gurion and onwards. In effect, Abbas accuses them of being criminals who collaborated with the Nazis and those responsible for the destruction of their people during the Holocaust.

"Abbas claims they deliberately thwarted many missions to save the Jews, inflamed hatred of the Jews by governments in order to fuel vengeance against them and expand the mass extermination - all the while collaborating with the Third Reich."

At the start of the book, entitled "The Other Side: the Secret Relationship Between Nazism and Zionism", Abbas ponders the identity of the other side, the secret partner to the crimes that took place during World War II.

He writes that Western countries "outlined a plan for the final framing of the results of the war, and everything that derives from these. … (T)hey accused the leaders of Nazism of all the crimes that occurred during that war, and persecuted those of them who were still alive, for an unlimited period, without any statute of limitations… thus these countries only dealt with half of the truth, and neglected - deliberately – the second half."

That "second half "of the responsibility for the events of the war is shared by the Zionist movement, who according to Abbas collaborated with the Nazis.

"When one discusses declared Zionist thought … we find that the Zionists believe in the purity of the Jewish race, just as Hitler believed in the purity of the Aryan race. Zionism calls for a fundamental and final solution to the Jewish Question in Europe via their immigration to Palestine. Hitler also calls for this and implements this … David Ben-Gurion defined the Zionist movement as solely a movement of immigration, and anyone who doesn't immigrate is a heretic and not considered a Jew," wrote Abbas.

And why did the heads of the Zionist movement need to connect with the Nazi leadership? The reason, according to Abbas, is that Zionism did not inspire great enthusiasm among the world's Jews before World War II.

For example, he writes: "The Jews of Europe in general and the Jews of Eastern Europe in particular did not adopt Zionism and did not believe in it. The national home for the Jews did not interest them at all. Therefore when the Holocaust was wrought upon them, the free world ignored their fate. But the first to ignore them were the Zionists who lived in Jerusalem, those whose lust for power had blinded them."

Dr. Cohen: "A complete reading of the text of the book shows that according to Abbas, Zionist leaders saw the persecution and harassment of (Jews) as desirable and acceptable – in order to force them to go to Israel. In his opinion, all measures were acceptable to achieve this goal - including collaboration with the Nazis."

In this context, writes Abbas: "It is well known that the motivation of anti-Semitism is persecution and repression, and this is definitely desirable for the Zionist movement. The conclusion from these ideas is that every racist in the world was given the green light, and first and foremost Hitler and the Nazis, to do with the Jews as they wish, as long as it ensures Jewish immigration to Palestine. The Zionist movement did not suffice with just giving a green light – but demanded even more victims, in order to be equal with the victims of other people in the war. This because it believes that raising the number of victims will increase its stock at the end of war, when the spoils are divided."

Thus, according to Abbas, the reason why the Zionist movement refused to act to save thousands of Jews from these countries during the Holocaust was a desire to "increase the amount of victims and receive privileges at the end of the war." Read the full story here.

Abu Mazen's Zionist Nazis https://t.co/USKN7rbjw8

— MFS - The Other News (@MFS001) September 10, 2016

Dr. Edi Cohen is a researcher of the Middle East and native of Lebanon. He has served as research fellow at the Yad Vashem International Institute for the study of the Holocaust and today is a research fellow at the center for international media at Bar-Ilan University.

His research focuses on: Arab-language Nazi propaganda and collaboration between Arabs and the Nazis. Dr. Cohen is active in organizations working to return stolen and expropriated property to Jews from Arab countries and Iran.

The author thanks Ami Dgani of "Palestinian Media Watch" for checking the Arabic translations and his helpful comments.

English translation by Avi Woolf.

The Holocaust Conspiracy Theory at the Heart of Mahmoud Abbas’s Worldview - https://t.co/DVv2ZkpgKj

— MFS - The Other News (@MFS001) September 10, 2016

@MFS001 Highly interesting study showing beyond doubt what a thug + liar Abbas is. PA promotes denial too of course https://t.co/ouccCLWjOL

— Helene Keller-Lind (@keller_lind) September 10, 2016

Video - Flashback Dec 7, 2006. Question to Zarif : Did 6 million Jews die in the atrocities?

Hmmmm.......Without having any role in it?

Himmler Documentary 'Decent One' Reflects Evil of Banality.

A recently discovered cache of hundreds of personal letters, diaries and photos belonging to the Nazi Gestapo chief seems to reveal a thoughtful, loving husband and devoted father to his daughter. The documents first found in the Himmler family house in 1945 were hidden in Tel Aviv for decades and sold to the father of the Israeli documentary filmmaker, Vanessa Lapa. Through readings of Himmler's and his family's most personal writings and rarely seen restored film footage from key German archives, Lapa has fashioned a fascinating case study: a portrait of the man responsible for some of the worst atrocities of the Second World War, who thought of himself in heroic terms.

Himmler Documentary 'Decent One' Reflects Evil of Banality.HT: Forward.

'Decent One' Shows How Ordinary Men Could Become Monsters.

Hannah Arendt’s embattled phrase, “banality of evil,” describing Nazi master murderer Adolf Eichmann, may go a long way to illuminate his colleague in Hitler-era genocide, Heinrich Himmler.

The documentary “The Decent One,” based on a cache of memorabilia including letters, diaries, and photos belonging to this proud Nazi, somehow private since the war, shows him foremost a Catholic family man with a job to do.

Read straightforward in voiceover over black and white archival footage, Himmler’s words, written to parents, wife Marga, and mistress Hedwig, take us into his mindset without judgment or irony.

Filmmaker Vanessa Lapa’s deft juxtaposition of pictures some familiar, as in heaped up bones, with his romantic musings on how these times will be deemed, (“As to what is said about us: These German soldiers — they were decent,”), with Jonathan Sheffer’s evocative score in background, effect a retelling of this history in riveting detail.

The idealistic Himmler rose through the Nazi ranks and further rose to the occasion of mass murder proclaiming it only right, and a duty: “A master race must be able to eliminate those who are inferior.” His early anti-Semitism, from pre-war letters, is, like the old joke, only slightly more than is appropriate, as when he depicts an attractive dancer he met in a café: “There was nothing Jewish in her behavior. She deserved respect.” 

He is not keen on homosexuals either, but “the Jews are our misfortune.” Fast forward to the building of concentration camps, a creative solution. He may have experienced a pang of conscience about sending a stolen fur and gold bracelet back home to family, Jewish wealth that should have gone to the Reich. The term “decent” (entshtendlich) — his, sprinkled often in his words — becomes a refrain of self-proclaimed honor.

In Germany’s defeat, Himmler took cyanide two days after capture by the British. Interviewed in 1945, Marga, pained only by her husband’s infidelity, claims he never talked about the camps. Weren’t you interested? Shouldn’t you have asked? Asks an off-screen interrogator.

His daughter Gudrun carried on the important work, assisting Nazi war criminals through the “Silent Aid” organization. Villains rarely think they are bad. In Gudrun’s case, being politically incorrect may just be a way to stay a daddy’s girl, connected to the man and Fatherland she idolized. Himmler’s papers’ remarkable postwar journey could make another movie. This one is a bracing reminder of how monsters are made of ordinary men.

“The Decent One” opens October 1 at Film Forum in NYC.

Regina Weinreich is the author of Kerouac’s Spontaneous Poetics, editor of Kerouac’s Book of Haikus, and co-producer/director of the documentary, “Paul Bowles: The Complete Outsider.” She writes frequently on Holocaust subjects.

Himmler did have 'friends' The photo is inscribed by Himmler: "To his eminence the Grand Mufti, 4 VII 1943, in remembrance H Himmler"

Abbas having a PhD in Holocaust denial accuses Israel of ‘genocide’

Arafat's  great'uncle' Amin el Husseini,  the grand Mufti of Jerusalem 

Abbas having a PhD in Holocaust denial accuses Israel of ‘genocide’ (ToI).

Palestinian leader invokes Auschwitz during emergency meeting; PLO calls for world’s protection

The Palestinian Authority moved to join the International Criminal Court in The Hague on Wednesday, accusing Israel of committing genocide against the Palestinians amid Israel’s military campaign to stem rocket fire from the Gaza Strip

PA President Mahmoud Abbas called a crisis meeting of the Palestinian leadership in the afternoon with the intention of signing paperwork to apply to join the ICC in The Hague and other international organizations.

Abbas charged Israel with committing “genocide” in Gaza during its Operation Protective Edge, which has so far killed 43 Palestinians.

“It’s genocide — the killing of entire families is genocide by Israel against our Palestinian people,” he told the meeting of Palestinian leadership at his Ramallah bureau. “What’s happening now is a war against the Palestinian people as a whole and not against the [terrorist] factions.”

“Shall we recall Auschwitz?” he added.

“We know that Israel is not defending itself; it is defending settlements, its main project,” Abbas continued. “We are moving in several ways to stop the Israeli aggression and spilling of Palestinian blood, including talking to Egyptian President [Abdel Fattah] el-Sissi and UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon.”Read the full story here.


One of the less savory aspects of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas’s biography is that he has a PhD in Holocaust denial–literally. His 1982 dissertation, published as “The Other Side: the Secret Relationship Between Nazism and Zionism,” famously argues that the Zionists collaborated with the Nazis in order to spur more Jewish immigration to Palestine. “The Zionist movement,” it explains, “led a broad campaign of incitement against the Jews living under Nazi rule, in order to arouse the government’s hatred of them, to fuel vengeance against them, and to expand the mass extermination.” The Zionists, the work asserts, were the Third Reich’s “basic partner in crime.” It also claims that the figure of six million dead has been exaggerated for political gain, and suggests one million as a more reasonable estimate. Abbas has never unreservedly repudiated the document, and has in fact regularly reaffirmed its core argument, saying in 2013 that he had “70 more books that I still haven’t published” proving the Zionist-Nazi partnership
Related: The Myth of Israeli Collective Punishment

NAZI "Reichsführer SS" Heinrich Himmler's missing archive emerges in Israel.

The 'Great Mufti' el Husseini and "Reichsführer SS" Heinrich Himmler

NAZI "Reichsführer SS" Heinrich Himmler's missing archive emerges in Israel. (DieWelt).

"Die Welt" exclusive: 69 years after Heinrich Himmler's suicide his private letters and photographs have surfaced in Israel.

They provide insight into the life of one of the main orchestrators of the Holocaust.

"Die Welt" obtained copies of the previously unpublished documents that have been kept in the private home of an Israeli Jew for a very long time. Eventually they came into the possession of a private archive and are now stored in a bank vault in Tel Aviv. 

In addition to the letters Himmler wrote to his wife Margarethe (Marga) from 1927 to five weeks before his suicide in 1945, there are many previously unknown photographs, and the estate of Himmler's foster son and other papers such as recipe books.

According to the German Federal Archive's (Bundesarchiv) expert assessment, there is verifiable proof that the documents are authentic. 

President Michael Hollmann told "Die Welt": "We are sure about these documents." In the expert opinion of the world's most important institution dealing with the written legacy of the "Third Reich", it says: "There is no reason to doubt the authenticity of the documents in Tel Aviv. "

Read and see the full story here.

75th anniversary of the infamous 'Kristallnacht' new accounts how it Shocked Foreign Diplomats.

Here, a member of the SA posts a sign on a Jewish shop urging Germans not to buy from Jews. 

75th anniversary of the infamous 'Kristallnacht' new accounts how it Shocked Foreign Diplomats.HT: Spiegel.

In the days surrounding Nov. 9, 1938, the Nazis committed the worst pogrom Germany had seen since the Middle Ages. To mark the incident's 75th anniversary, an exhibition in Berlin gathers previously unknown reports by foreign diplomats, revealing how the shocking events prompted little more than condemnation.

Consul-General Robert Townsend Smallbones had already seen much of the world. He had been in Angola, Norway and Croatia, and he had spent eight years in Germany with the British diplomatic corps. Despite the Nazi dictatorship, the 54-year-old held Germans in high esteem. They were "habitually kind to animals, to children, to the aged and infirm. They seemed to me to have no cruelty in their makeup," Smallbones wrote in a report to the British Foreign Office.

Given his impression of the Germans, the representative of the British Empire was all the more astonished by what he experienced in early November 1938. In Paris, Herschel Grünspan, a 17-year-old Jewish refugee from the northern German city of Hanover, had shot the German diplomat Ernst vom Rath in an act of protest against Hitler's policies regarding the Jews. At first, the Nazis only hunted down Jews in the Hesse region of Germany, surrounding Frankfurt. But, after Rath's death on Nov. 9, the pogroms spread throughout the German Reich, where synagogues were burned, Jewish shop windows were smashed and thousands were taken to concentration camps and mistreated.

Smallbones reported from Frankfurt that Jews had been taken to a large building and forced to kneel and place their heads on the ground. After some of them had vomited, Smallbones writes, the "guards removed the vomit by taking the culprit by the scruff of the neck and wiping it away with his face and hair." According to Smallbones' account, after a few hours, the victims were taken to the Buchenwald concentration camp, where many were tortured and a few beaten to death. The prisoners were even forced to urinate into each other's mouths. This was one of the details Smallbones learned from a golfing partner, a German Jew, after the latter's release from Buchenwald.

"I flattered myself that I understood the German character," the consul-general wrote, but added that he had not expected this "outbreak of sadistic cruelty."

The pogroms in November 1938 lasted several days, although history books often refer to the event merely as one "Night of the Broken Glass" (Kristallnacht) because Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels announced on the radio on Nov. 10 that the excesses had ended. Experts estimate that up to 1,500 people died in the days surrounding Nov. 9. It was the worst pogrom in Germany since the Middle Ages.Read the full story here.

Video - Egyptian Kid Journalist Surveys Passers-by's Knowledge of the Holocaust

Video - Egyptian Kid Journalist Surveys Passers-by's Knowledge of the Holocaust.

Following are excerpts from an Egyptian show titled "Anybody Knows?!", which was posted on the Internet on May 19, 2013.

Title: "Anybody Knows?!"

In the studio

Little boy: Welcome to our show. Today, we'll be talking about…

On the street

What is the Holocaust?

Woman: The what?

Little boy: The Holocaust.

Woman: I don't know.

Man: The Holocaust? I've got no idea.

Young man: Give me some options to choose from. In Germany? I've heard about it, but don't know exactly what happened.

Another young man: The what?

Little boy: The Holocaust…

Young man: Holocaust? Can you repeat the question?

Little boy: The Holocaust.

Young man: What Holocaust? I have no idea.

Old woman: I don't know.

Young woman: Why don't you tell me what it is? I told you that I don't know. There's nothing wrong with learning from someone younger than you.

Man: Ah, the Holocaust? You mean Hitler's Holocaust? During the war, he burned [Jews] in crematoria.

Another woman: Hitler captured the Jews and burned and gassed them. He killed many of them. I'm not convinced that this really happened though.

Another man: This is a new term. It's the first time I've heard it in Egypt.

Youth: Either he burned the Jews, or the Jews burned… I don't exactly remember.

Young man: The Holocaust took place during World War II. Hitler rounded up the Jews and put them in things called gas chambers. There are disputes regarding the figures. Some say three million Jews were killed, and others say it was one million. Some question whether it occurred.

In the studio

Little boy: In the Holocaust, lots of people were rounded up and killed.Source: Memri.

A Palestinian mufti and the U.S. election, then and now

The Jerusalem Grand Mufti Amin el Husseini and Reichs Fuhrer Himmler.

A Palestinian mufti and the U.S. election, then and now. (JTA).By Rafael Medoff .
WASHINGTON - A Palestinian mufti has called for violence against Jews, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is demanding Palestinian leaders disavow him and America's presidential race could be affected.That could be the lead sentence of a news report from last week.
Or from 1946.
Sixty-five years ago, another Palestinian mufti, another Netanyahu and another American presidential race likewise intersected in an unexpected round of high-stakes Middle East politics and diplomacy.
At the center of the current controversy is Sheik Muhammad Hussein, the mufti of Jerusalem, who is the Palestinian Authority's senior religious official. In a recent speech Hussein, citing a traditional Islamic text, urged Arabs to "fight and kill the Jews." Later he explained he was "only quoting the words of the Prophet Muhammad."In an American presidential election season, words like those can be explosive. The candidates for the Republican nomination have strongly condemned Palestinian incitement against Israel and criticized the Obama administration for not being more outspoken on the issue. The votes of Jews and pro-Israel evangelical Christians could be decisive in some battleground states in November.
"Whoever wants peace should not permit such incitement and should not allow calls to murder Jews," Prime Minister Netanyahu said, urging the Palestinian Authority to disavow the mufti's remarks.
He said that Hussein's "morally heinous" statements were reminiscent of one of his predecessors, the mufti Amin el-Husseini, who fled to Germany in 1941 and collaborated with the Nazis during the Holocaust. Husseini's pro-Nazi radio broadcasts were beamed from Berlin to the Arab world -- including a March 1, 1944 tirade in which he exhorted his listeners, in language similar to that of last week's controversy, to "Kill the Jews wherever you find them."What is not well known is the impact of the mufti on the 1948 U.S. presidential race.Read the full story here.


(Dr. Rafael Medoff is the director of The David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies and co-author, with Professor Sonja Schoepf Wentling, of "Herbert Hoover and the Jews: The Origins of the 'Jewish Vote' and Bipartisan Support for Israel," which will be published in April.)