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 - These 9 Holocaust survivors have come together to send you a message.

These 9 Holocaust survivors have come together to send you a message. It’s unforgettable. Let’s show them we are listening and #WeRemember. pic.twitter.com/uciVuai0Yo

— (((WJC))) (@WorldJewishCong) January 19, 2017

Israeli artist made a website to shame people who take light-hearted 'Holocaust selfies'.

Israeli artist made a website to shame people who take light-hearted 'Holocaust selfies'. (TheLocal).

An Israeli satirist in Germany has launched a website using savage humour and shocking images to publicly shame visitors to Berlin's Holocaust memorial who post light-hearted selfies on social media.

The website by Berlin-based artist and activist Shahak Shapira, 28, is called Yolocaust, combining the words Holocaust and Yolo - hashtag shorthand for "you only live once", and went live this week (www.yolocaust.de).

It features a breathtakingly tasteless collection of photos Shapira says he found posted on social networks such as Facebook, Instagram and Twitter and also dating sites like Tinder and Grindr.

The subjects are dancing, smiling, juggling and even doing yoga at the sprawling maze-like memorial.

Hovering the mouse over each "goofy" picture on the website photoshops in an authentic historical image showing the naked corpses of concentration camp victims.

Shapira says the provocative project is intended as a wake-up call for social media enthusiasts who may be unaware that they are on what many see as sacred ground. It is also timed to mark International Holocaust Remembrance Day on January 27th.

 Answering a list of "frequently asked questions", Shapira addresses issues such as what kind of behaviour is "allowed" at the Berlin site, whose full title is the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe and which he says draws an average 10,000 visitors per day.

"No historical event compares to the Holocaust. It's up to you how to behave at a memorial site that marks the death of six million people," is his tart reply.

He also preempts potential criticism of his use of the distressing images on the site with a bit of gallows humour.

"'Isn't this disrespectful towards the victims of the Holocaust?' Yes, some people's behaviour at the memorial site is indeed disrespectful," he writes.

"But the victims are dead, so they're probably busy doing dead people's stuff rather than caring about that."

Along with the original selfies, Yolocaust includes the comments, hashtags and "likes" from the original social media accounts, including a caption reading "Jumping on dead Jews @Holocaust Memorial".

  Shapira invites people who feel embarrassed by their photo being featured on the page to get in touch and he will remove it.

"Just send an email to undouche.me@yolocaust.de," he quips.

'Warning to Germany' 


Reaction on social media to the website has been largely positive, and it crashed during its first hours online as it drew half a million clicks, according to his representatives. Read the full story here.

Video - Obama's new BFF Khamenei Releases Holocaust Denial Video on International Holocaust Remembrance Day

Video - Obama's new BFF Khamenei Releases Holocaust Denial Video on International Holocaust Remembrance Day.

Khamenei Releases Holocaust Denial Video on International Holocaust Remembrance Day A video titled “Are The Dark Ages Over?” was posted on the official website of Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei on January 27, 2016.

As emphasized on the Facebook page of Iran's military, which ran the story, the video was released on International Holocaust Remembrance Day.

Against the backdrop of images of the Auschwitz death camp, the English subtitles of the Farsi video state that “speaking about the Holocaust and expressing doubts about it is considered to be a great sin,” but that “it is not clear whether the core of this matter is a reality or not.” More here from Memri.

Hmmm........General Dwight Eisenhower was right that some Bastard would show up.

Holocaust: Night Will Fall (2014) - Full length.

Video - The Holocaust as History and Warning.

Quote: "We are very good at murdering, but even better at lying".

A dispatch to Moscow with bone-chilling description of #Auschwitz sent by the Soviet Army upon its liberation pic.twitter.com/cFjzG8qvez

— Yury Barmin (@yurybarmin) January 27, 2015

'Real Change' - US, Canada, Ukraine reject UN resolution condemning glorification of Nazism.

'Real Change' - US, Canada, Ukraine reject UN resolution condemning glorification of Nazism. (RT).

A UN General Assembly committee has passed a resolution “combating glorification of Nazism,” with 126 countries voicing their support. 

Meanwhile, the US, Ukraine and Canada voted “against,” raising eyebrows. Moscow has called the decision “regrettable.”

The resolution, which was initially proposed by Russia and co-authored by 52 states, including Brazil, China, India, and Kazakhstan, deals with measures to fight the glorification of Nazism, neo-Nazism, and other practices that facilitate the escalation of modern forms of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and intolerance.

It condemns any denial of the Holocaust, as well as any form of glorification of the Nazi movement, including honoring former members of the Waffen SS organization. The document also expresses concern over the installation of memorials related to Nazism and “unending attempts to desecrate or destroy the monuments to those who fought against Nazism during World War II.”

A total of 126 member-states supported the resolution, while four countries — the US, Canada, Palau, and Ukraine – voted against it. Another 53 countries, including the European Union nations and NATO members abstained from the vote.

The four votes against the resolution raised questions, with Russia stating that it finds the decision of those countries to reject the resolution “bewildering” and “regrettable.”  Hmmmm........I wonder if the holocaust denial was the breaking point?

Video - LIVE: International March of the Living at Auschwitz

Students from around the world are travelling to Poland to participate in the 2015 international March of the Living at the site of the Auschwitz concentration camp, on Holocaust and Heroism Remembrance Day, Thursday April 16. 

Held every year since 1988, the event is expected to bring together over 20,000 students. They will march along a path between Auschwitz and Birkenau. More here.

Video - Holocaust Remembrance Day (Yom HaShoah) 2015 begins in the evening of Wednesday, April 15. Schindler's List Theme by Itzhak Perlman

In memory of Jacob Slap.

Video - Being A Jew: The Auschwitz & Bergen-Belsen Holocaust Survivor Tibi Ram, Who Fought in Every Israeli War

He perfectly symbolizes “Shoah ve Tkuma”- Holocaust and rebirth. As a holocaust survivor, and one of only two people who participated in all of Israel’s wars, Ze’ev Tibi Ram understands better than anyone the importance of protecting the Jewish state. HT: IDFBlog

Video - Night Will Fall (2014) - An Alfred Hitchcock film - André Singer (Trailer) | BFI release (Full Length).

A dispatch to Moscow with bone-chilling description of #Auschwitz sent by the Soviet Army upon its liberation pic.twitter.com/cFjzG8qvez

— Yury Barmin (@yurybarmin) January 27, 2015

Video - Measure of a Man: Mark Levin Delivers Powerful Radio Performance of Holocaust Memoir.

Video - EU walks out on anti-Israel UN debate * Arab states outraged.

HT: IsraelMatzav.

Video - British Islamist Abu Rumaysah: Hitler Acted to Stop the Evil Doctrine of the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion"

Historic Holocaust Film 'Night Will Fall' Debuts at Last — Had Help From Hitchcock.

Historic Holocaust Film 'Night Will Fall' Debuts at Last — Had Help From Hitchcock. (Forward).

A new film about a forgotten, long-shelved documentary chronicling the Allies’ discovery and liberation of the Nazi concentration camps is offering viewers a restored contemporaneous account of that seminal moment in history.

The original, unfinished documentary has now, 70 years later, been reproduced and completed by the British Imperial War Museums. Titled “German Concentration Camps Factual Survey,” the film was finished based on the shot sheets, script and rushes of the original filmmakers, who were forced by geo-political considerations to stop their work. “Night Will Fall,” the new film about the film, combines raw archive footage from the 1945 documentary — which counted Alfred Hitchcock among its treatment advisers — and contemporary interviews with the now elderly veteran soldiers, former film cameramen, film editors, and Holocaust historians and survivors.

The original work began in the waning days of World War II. British producer Sidney Bernstein, chief of the film section at the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force, had instructed his cameramen to film everything in order to provide undeniable proof of Nazi atrocities.

What is apparent is how unprepared the soldiers were for the horrors that awaited them. For some, the experience has been a lifelong trauma. Many found it difficult to later articulate to the makers of “Night Will Fall” what they saw and what they remembered.

The story behind the initial, incomplete making of the original documentary includes its suppression by the British and American governments as they shifted away from exposing Nazi atrocities and toward restoring and reconstructing West Germany as a bulwark against the perceived new threat from the Soviet Union.

Director André Singer has referred to the making of “Night Will Fall” as an all-consuming journey, an exploration of the role of the moving image, both then and now.

Singer has termed it “an enormous privilege” to interview “the soldiers who first entered the camps, the cameramen who lifted their cameras and filmed, the editors who viewed the footage, and the victims who suffered there and who were recorded on film in the first, unbelievable moments when rescue finally came.”

“Night Will Fall” opened in British cinemas in September after premiering in the United States at the Telluride Film Festival in August. The film’s American producer, Marie Therese Guirgis, has said that it will be released here in 2015, but no date has been confirmed.

It was as the war was drawing to an end that Britain and the United States set up a joint film department. Its mandate was to produce short propaganda films to support the war effort, and later to assist in the task of dealing with a defeated Germany. Headed by Bernstein, the new unit recorded the atrocities that the soldiers — many of whom were newly trained as cameramen — encountered at the point of liberation.

In 1945, as the numerous reels arrived in London, and editors faced the momentous task of processing the material, Bernstein began to plan a full-length documentary. Speaking in 1984, he explained that his instructions had been to film everything, providing undeniable proof of what had happened. He wanted the film to serve as “a lesson to all mankind.”

For the material to be used as evidence in war crimes trials, the project required filming in a very specific way. According to historian Toby Haggith, one of the difficulties of filming the atrocities as evidence was the need to get close to victims. This contrasted with the tradition of previous combat cameramen, Haggith explained, who had shied away from representing or recording scenes of people who had been brutalized or killed.

As he saw the scope of the task grow, Bernstein decided to approach his friend Alfred Hitchcock for ideas. Credited as treatment adviser, the legendary director’s brief input was to be his only foray into documentary filmmaking.

It took 70 years, but as Bernstein’s last recorded note to his editor, Peter Tanner, predicted, “One day you will realize that it has been worthwhile.” Hmmm....sadly 'Never again' has been empty words and Jew hatred is seen flourishing all over the world again....fanned by Islamic extremism

Polish Jews Split Over Exhuming Jewish Victims of Nazi era Polish Pogrom.

Source picture here.

Polish Jews Split Over Exhuming  Jewish Victims of Nazi era Polish Pogrom. HT: Forward.

In September 1941, a group of villagers wielding axes and other tools descended upon the homes of their Jewish neighbors and murdered every last one, according to testimonies gathered by Holocaust scholars.

Not much else is known about the massacre in Wasosz, a village 100 miles east of Warsaw, including basics like the number of victims. Current estimates range widely, from 180 to 1,200.

In an effort to provide conclusive forensic evidence about the massacre, in July a Polish prosecutor asked Jewish community leaders for permission to exhume the bodies. The plan has split the community, with some passionately supporting what they see as a last chance for justice and others claiming it would violate the dignity of the dead and Jewish religious law, or halachah.

“Once the bodies are in the ground, halachah teaches us they are not to be disturbed except when it is done to protect the dignity of the dead or to save lives,” Polish Chief Rabbi Michael Schudrich told JTA. “I and other rabbis and the leadership of the Jewish community in Warsaw, among others, feel neither stipulation applies to Wasosz. A desire to clarify history is not enough.”

Piotr Kadlcik, president of the Union of Jewish Religious Communities in Poland, the country’s main Jewish umbrella group, called Schudrich’s position “a serious mistake, with detrimental implications.”

“We have tools to determine details about both victims and perpetrators in a matter which is still a criminal matter,” said Kadlcik, who is seeking an exhumation followed by Jewish burial of the human remains. “If we let this chance go, the case of Wasosz will become history – an unclear one and subject to falsification.”

In a move to undermine opponents to exhumation, Kadlcik has requested an opinion from Rabbi Yakov Ruza, a prominent authority in Israel on forensic medicine. Polish prosecutors have also reviewed the Israeli law that permits exhumation in cases involving a murder investigation, Kadlcik said.

Meanwhile, the Polish Institute of National Remembrance – the government body whose prosecutor, Radoslaw Ignatiew, initiated the investigation of Wasosz – is holding off on any exhumation until at least 2015 while the issue is discussed within the Jewish community.

The debate has ramifications well beyond an internal Jewish dispute over halachah and forensics. In the background are echoes of Jedwabne, an earlier investigation of another wartime mass murder of Jews by Poles.

The opening of that probe in 2001 was a watershed moment for Poland, according to Joanna Michlic, a historian at Bristol University, who wrote a 43-page paper chronicling how the debate split the Catholic Church, generated ultranationalist protests featuring anti-Semitic hate speech, led to the replacement of a memorial plaque that blamed the Germans for the murders and, finally, yielded the first admission by a Polish president of Polish guilt.

Before Jedwabne, Holocaust-era crimes by Poles were taboo because they undermined the communist narrative that all Poles were equal victims of Nazism. The subject remains divisive today because it undermines the current government’s focus on Polish wartime heroism and resistance to totalitarianism.

From a forensic perspective, the dig in Jedwabne was inconclusive. Though an excavation of the site revealed some human remains, it never progressed to include exhumation – as per understandings reached between Polish authorities and rabbis, including Schudrich.

Without exhumation, it was impossible to answer such basic questions as how many people died, which in turn left the door open to revisionism in far-right circles. Several nationalist lawmakers, clergymen and journalists continue to dispute Polish complicity.

“Jedwabne was ultimately a missed opportunity,” Jan Gross, the Princeton historian whose research triggered the 2001 debate, told JTA. “Some important findings were recovered, but questions persisted because the probe was interrupted before basic facts could be recovered.”

For Kadlcik, Wasosz is a chance to correct the opportunity missed at Jedwabne.

“For the ultranationalists, the bottom line from Jedwabne is as follows: The Jews made accusations but hid behind their religious laws at the first attempt to corroborate,” Kadlcik said. “Well, this time we need to settle this and serve justice.”

But Schudrich also drew painful lessons from the Jedwabne probe.

“The entire place was littered with human remains – not just the area where we thought the bodies lay,” he said. “So as soon as the digging began, we saw bones fused together in fire, earrings of little girls. We found children’s bones. To any reasonable person, that settled any doubts there may have been about a massacre. There is no justification to violate the dignity of the dead.”

As for serving justice, Schudrich said, “The perpetrators will get justice from God. The small minority that refuses to face reality and historical evidence, no exhumation is going to change their minds.” Hmmm....The truth must be known, so we learn from our past , NEVER AGAIN.

Archeologists Find Gas Chamber at Sobibor Nazi Death Camp

Archeologists Find Gas Chamber at Sobibor Nazi Death Camp. Dig Uncovers Well-Preserved Nazi Horror. HT: Forward.

An archaeological dig at Sobibor has uncovered the Nazi death camp’s gas chambers.

The excavations in Poland have been going on since 2007, and thousands of inmates’ personal items have been found at the site. They include rings, pendants, earrings, jewelry, perfume bottles, medicine cases and food utensils, Yad Vashem said Wednesday.

The water well used at Sobibor’s Camp 1, in which an uprising by inmates took place, also was discovered. The well also contained the personal items of Jewish inmates.

David Silberklang, senior historian at the International Institute for Holocaust Research and editor in chief of Yad Vashem Studies, called the discovery of the gas chambers “a very important finding in Holocaust research.”

“There were no survivors from among the Jews who worked in the area of the gas chambers. Therefore, these findings are all that is left of those murdered there, and they open a window onto the day-to-day suffering of these people,” he said in a statement.

“We will now be able to know more precisely what the process of murder was in the camp, and what the Jews went through until they were murdered. Additionally, finding the gas chambers and their capacity will enable us to estimate more precisely the number of people murdered in Sobibor.”

Archaeologist Yoram Haimi said the staff was “amazed at the size of the building and the well-preserved condition of the chamber walls.”

The Sobibor camp operated between April 1942 and October 1943, during which time some 250,000 Jews were murdered there. In the wake of the camp uprising on Oct. 14, 1943, the Germans decided to dismantle the camp, bulldozing it and leaving no signs that it was a former death camp.
Until now, researchers used survivor testimony for details about the camp.

"DISGUSTING" - Nazi Veteran Buried with Full Honors in Estonia.

"DISGUSTING" - Nazi Veteran Buried with Full Honors in Estonia.(RN).

TALLINN, January 10  – Estonia granted a burial with full military honors Friday to a decorated Nazi SS veteran who distinguished himself in combat against Soviet troops during World War II.

Harald Nugiseks, the last surviving Estonian recipient of Nazi Germany's Knight's Cross, died on January 2 at the age of 93.

The history of Estonian collaboration with the Nazis is subject of widespread revulsion in neighboring Russia, but is viewed by many in the Baltic nation as having been a necessity for achieving national independence.

Nugiseks was buried at the Estonian Soldiers Memorial Church in the city of Tori. The ceremony was attended by Brigadier General Meelis Kiili, commander of the Estonian Defense League, retired high-ranking military officers and local officials.

Estonian Defense Minister Urmas Reinsalu earlier expressed condolences to the relatives of the deceased Nazi veteran saying that Nugiseks “was a legendary Estonian soldier whose tragedy was that he could not fight for Estonian freedom in an Estonian uniform.”

Nugiseks joined the Germans as a volunteer in 1941 and later served a soldier in the 20th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS (1st Estonian).

He was one of four Estonian recipients of the Third Reich's highest award for battlefield bravery.
Nugiseks became a prisoner of war after his division surrendered in 1945. He was sent to a labor camp in Siberia, from which he returned in 1958.

After Estonia regained its independence in 1991, Nugiseks was given honorary captain rank by the Defense Forces.

An estimated 80,000 Estonians are believed to have fought alongside Nazi German forces during World War II.

Russia has repeatedly condemned glorification of Nazism in Estonia, where reunions of Nazi veterans and parades in honor of former Waffen-SS soldiers are held annually.Hmmm....May God give him his eternal punishment.

The Holocaust in Estonia

Soviet-era Estonian era sources estimate the total number of Soviet citizens and foreigners to be murdered in Nazi-occupied Estonian Soviet Socialist Republic to be 125,000.

The bulk of this number consists Jews from Central and Western Europe and Soviet prisoners-of-war killed or starved to death in prisoner-of-war camps on Estonian territory.

The Estonian History Commission estimates the total number of victims to be roughly 35,000, consisting of the following groups:

• 1000 Estonian Jews,
• about 10,000 foreign Jews,
• 1000 Estonian Roma.
• 7000 other Estonians.
• 15,000 Soviet POWs.

Video - Holocaust Survivor Breaks 70-Year Silence to Tell of Young Friend Experimented Upon by Mengele at Auschwitz

Holocaust Survivor Breaks 70-Year Silence to Tell of Young Friend Experimented Upon by Mengele at Auschwitz. HT: Matzav.

Auschwitz survivor Iby Knill, 90, ended 70 years of silence to keep a promise she made on the first night she spent at the death camp, in July 1944, when a frail teenage twin crawled over to her and begged, “if you live, please tell our story,” the UK Daily Mail reported on Friday.

Knill had repressed the awful memories of the camp her whole life until four years ago, when she enrolled in a university course in theology, in Leeds, UK, where she now lives. The class was discussing whether the Holocaust was a result of evil or sin, and the professor said that “only a person who was there could answer that question,” to which Knill responded simply, “I was there.”

The admission opened the floodgates and, fulfilling her promise to the unknown girl, she decided to write her memoirs.

Remembering her first night at Auschwitz, she said: “The girl told me that her and her sister were going to be experimented on. She said they were then going to be gassed and therefore exterminated.”

“She made me promise to tell the story of the camps, if I were to live. Of course I said yes, but after the war was over it didn’t seem right to talk about what had happened,” she told the Daily Mail. “There, you were one of a number, and it came down to how long you could survive.”

A documentary was made from her memoirs, ‘The Woman Without a Number,’ by film and television student Robin Pepper, 22, at Teesside University. Pepper and fellow students Mark Oxley, 26, and Ian Orwin, 22, made the documentary after reading her book in just one day.

About the film, ‘Iby Knill: An Auschwitz Promise,’ Knill said: “Robin has done a marvelous job, and I am very happy with the film. It goes some way towards fulfilling the promise I made to the twin all those years ago.”

Pepper said, “It was an honor to work with Iby. She is an amazing lady, and we are really pleased we have helped her keep that promise she made so long ago.”

Knill was born in Czechoslovakia but escaped to Hungary in 1942 when the SS began rounding up Jews. Two years later, when Knill was 20, Hungary was occupied and she was transported to Auschwitz.

The Auschwitz death camps also played host to some of the most gruesome Nazi medical experiments, from which few survived, the Daily Mail reported upon, citing Auschwitz.org.

“Nazi Professor Carl Clauberg oversaw the mass sterilization of hundreds of Jewish prisoners by putting chemicals in their Fallopian tubes and exposing their [private areas] to X-rays. The procedures were brutal, often causing infections and radiation burns,” the Daily Mail said.

Some “patients” were used for human medical trials of the drugs Rutenol and Periston, reacting with bloody vomiting and painful diarrhea, while others were experimented on with “no apparent purpose” done “merely for practice - or pleasure,” the newspaper wrote. Doctors deliberately made the lungs of tuberculosis patients collapse and killed others by injecting lethal phenol into their hearts.

One of the most infamous doctors, Josef Mengele experimented on twins and people of different races, even infecting them with contagious diseases to see how their survival rates compared.

Knill spent six weeks in Auschwitz before being transferred to the German labor camp Kaunitz, which was eventually liberated. She later moved to Britain, married British Army major Herbert Knill, and had two children, Christopher Knill, a psychiatrist, 65, and Pauline Kilch, 58, a teacher.Hmmm......Among countless others was my Uncle Jacob Slap and his whole family, only he , his mother and older sister were among the lucky ones to survive.

Pope personally e-mails Jewish leader on Holocaust.

Pope personally e-mails Jewish leader on Holocaust.(TOI).

Francis pens a reflection on the place of God during the Shoah in light of the massacre of 1 million Jewish children.

ROME – Pope Francis has continued to reach out to Jews, this time with a personal email to Menachem Z. Rosensaft, an American law professor who deals with Holocaust and genocide issues.

Francis’s email was a reflection on the place of God during the Holocaust. It was, Elizabeth Tenety wrote in the Washington Post’s On Faith blog, a response to Rosensaft, who had sent the Vatican the text of a sermon he delivered at New York’s Park Avenue synagogue on this topic during this year’s High Holidays.

The son of two Holocaust survivors, Rosensaft is general counsel of the World Jewish Congress and vice president of the American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors and Their Descendants.

In his sermon, which was published in the On Faith blog, Rosensaft had declared, “My parents’ entire immediate families were murdered in the Shoah. My mother’s five-a-and-half-year-old son, my brother, was one of more than one million Jewish children who were killed by the Germans and their accomplices only and exclusively because they were Jewish. Again, what possible transgressions could any of them have committed to cause God to turn away from them?”

How, he asked, “can we believe in God in the aftermath of the Shoah? Shouldn’t an omniscient God have had to know that the cataclysm was being perpetrated? And shouldn’t an omnipotent God have been able to prevent it?”

According to the Post the pope replied, “When you, with humility, are telling us where God was in that moment, I felt within me that you had transcended all possible explanations and that, after a long pilgrimage — sometimes sad, tedious or dull – you came to discover a certain logic and it is from there that you were speaking to us; the logic of First Kings 19:12, the logic of that ‘gentle breeze’ (I know that it is a very poor translation of the rich Hebrew expression) that constitutes the only possible hermeneutic interpretation. Thank you from my heart. And, please, do not forget to pray for me. May the Lord bless you.”

Hmmmm.....

Pope Francis I:  “Jesus is indignant when he sees these things” because those who suffer are “his faithful people, the people that he loves so much.”

Pope Karol Wojtyla:

In order to perceive the true answer to the "why" of suffering, we must look to the revelation of divine love, the ultimate source of the meaning of everything that exists. 

Love is also the richest source of the meaning of suffering, which always remains a mystery: We are conscious of the insufficiency and inadequacy of our explanations. Christ causes us to enter into the mystery and to discover the "why" of suffering, as far as we are capable of gasping the sublimity of divine love. 

In order to discover the profound meaning of suffering . . . we must above all accept the light of revelation. . . . Love is also the fullest source of the answer to the question of the meaning of suffering. This answer has been given by God to man in the cross of Jesus Christ. (SD 13)