Sophie Scholl (1921-1943)

1. Sophie Scholl (1921-1943) Sophie Scholl was a member of the non-violent resistance group the White Rose that was opposed to Nazi rule in Germany. In the early summer of 1942, Sophie participated in the production and distribution of the anti-Nazi political resistance leaflets of the White Rose. She was arrested on February 18, 1943, while distributing the sixth leaflet at the University of Munich. In the People's Court on February 21, 1943, Sophie was recorded as saying "Somebody, after all, had to make a start. What we wrote and said is also believed by many others. They just don't dare express themselves as we did." With the fall of Nazi Germany, the White Rose came to represent opposition to tyranny in the German psyche and was praised for acting without interest in personal power or self-aggrandizement. It is certain that today every honest German is ashamed of his government. Who among us has any conception of the dimensions of shame that will befall us and our children when one day the veil has fallen from our eyes and the most horrible of crimes ... reach the light of day? From the first leaflet of the White Rose Since the conquest of Poland three hundred thousand Jews have been murdered in this country in the most bestial way ... The German people slumber on in their dull, stupid sleep and encourage these fascist criminals ... Each man wants to be exonerated of a guilt of this kind, each one continues on his way with the most placid, the calmest conscience. But he cannot be exonerated; he is guilty, guilty, guilty! — From the second leaflet of the White Rose. [5] Her last words were "Die Sonne scheint noch," meaning "The Sun still shines." This was a metaphor for God and her commitment to hope for the future.

2. Hans and Sophie Scholl were German teenagers in the 1930s. Like other young Germans, they enthusiastically joined the Hitler Youth. They believed that Adolf Hitler was leading Germany and the German people back to greatness. Their parents were not so enthusiastic. Their father, Robert Scholl, told his children that Hitler and the Nazis were leading Germany down a road of destruction. Later, in 1942, he would serve time in a Nazi prison for telling his secretary: “The war! It is already lost. This Hitler is God's scourge on mankind, and if the war doesn't end soon the Russians will be sitting in Berlin.” Gradually, Hans and Sophie began realizing that their father was right. They concluded that, in the name of freedom and the greater good of the German nation, Hitler and the Nazis were enslaving and destroying the German people. They also knew that open dissent was impossible in Nazi Germany, especially after the start of World War II. Most Germans took the traditional position, that once war breaks out, it is the duty of the citizen to support the troops by supporting the government. But Hans and Sophie Scholl believed differently. They believed that it was the duty of a citizen, even in times of war, to stand up against an evil regime, especially when it is sending hundreds of thousands of its citizens to their deaths. The Scholl siblings began sharing their feelings with a few of their friends, Christoph Probst, Alexander Schmorell, Willi Graf, as well as with Kurt Huber, their psychology and philosophy professor. One day in 1942, copies of a leaflet entitled “The White Rose” suddenly appeared at the University of Munich. The leaflet contained an anonymous essay that said that the Nazi system had slowly imprisoned the German people and was now destroying them. The Nazi regime had turned evil. It was time, the essay said, for Germans to rise up and resist the tyranny of their own government. At the bottom of the essay, the following request appeared: “Please make as many copies of this leaflet as you can and distribute them.” The leaflet caused a tremendous stir among the student body. It was the first time that internal dissent against the Nazi regime had surfaced in Germany. The essay had been secretly written and distributed by Hans Scholl and his friends. Robert Freisler pronounced his judgment on the three defendants: Guilty of treason. Their sentence: Death. They were escorted back to Stadelheim prison, where the guards permitted Hans and Sophie to have one last visit with their parents. Hans met with them first, and then Sophie. Hansen writes: Another leaflet appeared soon afterward. And then another. And another. Ultimately, there were six leaflets published and distributed by Hans and Sophie Scholl and their friends, four under the title “The White Rose” and two under the title “Leaflets of the Resistance.” Their publication took place periodically between 1942 and 1943, interrupted for a few months when Hans and his friends were temporarily sent to the Eastern Front to fight against the Russians. The members of The White Rose, of course, had to act cautiously. The Nazi regime maintained an iron grip over German society. Internal dissent was quickly and efficiently smashed by the Gestapo. Hans and Sophie Scholl and their friends knew what would happen to them if they were caught. People began receiving copies of the leaflets in the mail. Students at the University of Hamburg began copying and distributing them. Copies began turning up in different parts of Germany and Austria. Moreover, as Hanser points out, the members of The White Rose did not limit themselves to leaflets. Graffiti began appearing in large letters on streets and buildings all over Munich: “Down with Hitler! . . . Hitler the Mass Murderer!” and “Freihart! . . . Freihart! . . . Freedom! . . . Freedom!” The Gestapo was driven into a frenzy. It knew that the authors were having to procure large quantities of paper, envelopes, and postage. It knew that they were using a duplicating machine. But despite the Gestapo's best efforts, it was unable to catch the perpetrators.

3. One day, February 18, 1943, Hans' and Sophie's luck ran out. They were caught leaving pamphlets at the University of Munich and were arrested. A search disclosed evidence of Christoph Probst's participation, and he too was soon arrested. The three of them were indicted for treason. On February 22, four days after their arrest, their trial began. The presiding judge, Roland Freisler, chief justice of the People's Court of the Greater German Reich, had been sent from Berlin. Hanser writes: He conducted the trial as if the future of the Reich were indeed at stake. He roared denunciations of the accused as if he were not the judge but the prosecutor. He behaved alternately like an actor ranting through an overwritten role in an implausible melodrama and a Grand Inquisitor calling down eternal damnation on the heads of the three irredeemable heretics before him. . . . No witnesses were called, since the defendants had admitted everything. The proceedings consisted almost entirely of Roland Freisler's denunciation and abuse, punctuated from time to time by half-hearted offerings from the court-appointed defense attorneys, one of whom summed up his case with the observation, “I can only say fiat justitia. Let justice be done.” By which he meant: Let the accused get what they deserve. Freisler and the other accusers could not understand what had happened to these German youths. After all, they all came from nice German families. They all had attended German schools. They had been members of the Hitler Youth. How could they have turned out to be traitors? What had so twisted and warped their minds? Sophie Scholl shocked everyone in the courtroom when she remarked to Freisler: “Somebody, after all, had to make a start. What we wrote and said is also believed by many others. They just don't dare to express themselves as we did.” Later in the proceedings, she said to him: “You know the war is lost. Why don't you have the courage to face it?” In the middle of the trial, Robert and Magdalene Scholl tried to enter the courtroom. Magdalene said to the guard: “But I'm the mother of two of the accused.” The guard responded: “You should have brought them up better.” Robert Scholl forced his way into the courtroom and told the court that he was there to defend his children. He was seized and forcibly escorted outside. The entire courtroom heard him shout: “One day there will be another kind of justice! One day they will go down in history!” His eyes were clear and steady and he showed no sign of dejection or despair. He thanked his parents again for the love and warmth they had given him and he asked them to convey his affection and regard to a number of friends, whom he named. Here, for a moment, tears threatened, and he turned away to spare his parents the pain of seeing them. Facing them again, his shoulders were back and he smiled. . . . Then a woman prison guard brought in Sophie. . . . Her mother tentatively offered her some candy, which Hans had declined. “Gladly,” said Sophie, taking it. “After all, I haven't had any lunch!” She, too, looked somehow smaller, as if drawn together, but her face was clear and her smile was fresh and unforced, with something in it that her parents read as triumph. “Sophie, Sophie,” her mother murmured, as if to herself. “To think you'll never be coming through the door again!” Sophie's smile was gentle. “Ah, Mother,” she said. “Those few little years. . . .” Sophie Scholl looked at her parents and was strong in her pride and certainty. “We took everything upon ourselves,” she said. “What we did will cause waves.” Her mother spoke again: “Sophie,” she said softly, “Remember Jesus.” “Yes,” replied Sophie earnestly, almost commandingly, “but you, too.” She left them, her parents, Robert and Magdalene Scholl, with her face still lit by the smile they loved so well and would never see again. She was perfectly composed as she was led away.

4. Robert Mohr [a Gestapo official], who had come out to the prison on business of his own, saw her in her cell immediately afterwards, and she was crying. It was the first time Robert Mohr had seen her in tears, and she apologized. “I have just said good-bye to my parents,” she said. “You understand . . .” She had not cried before her parents. For them she had smiled. No relatives visited Christoph Probst. His wife, who had just had their third child, was in the hospital. Neither she nor any members of his family even knew that he was on trial or that he had been sentenced to death. While his faith in God had always been deep and unwavering, he had never committed to a certain faith. On the eve of his death, a Catholic priest admitted him into the church in articulo mortis, at the point of death. “Now,” he said, “my death will be easy and joyful.” That afternoon, the prison guards permitted Hans, Sophie, and Christoph to have one last visit together. Sophie was then led to the guillotine. One observer described her as she walked to her death: “Without turning a hair, without flinching.” Christoph Probst was next. Hans Scholl was last; just before he was beheaded, Hans cried out: “Long live freedom!” Unfortunately, they were not the last to die. The Gestapo's investigation was relentless. Later tried and executed were Alex Schmorell (age 25), Willi Graf (age 25), and Kurt Huber (age 49). Students at the University of Hamburg were either executed or sent to concentration camps. Today, every German knows the story of The White Rose. A square at the University of Munich is named after Hans and Sophie Scholl. And there are streets, squares, and schools all over Germany named for the members of The White Rose. The German movie The White Rose is now found in video stores in Germany and the United States. Richard Hansen sums up the story of The White Rose: In the vogue words of the time, the Scholls and their friends represented the “other” Germany, the land of poets and thinkers, in contrast to the Germany that was reverting to barbarism and trying to take the world with it. What they were and what they did would have been “other” in any society at any time. What they did transcended the easy division of good-German/bad-German and lifted them above the nationalism of time-bound events. Their actions made them enduring symbols of the struggle, universal and timeless, for the freedom of the human spirit wherever and whenever it is threatened.

5. Oscar Schindler • Born 1908 in Austria-Hungary. • Born into a Catholic family. • Grew up in a wealthy family. • Aged 19 he married Emilie but had many affairs. • He drank a lot and gambled. • When World War 2 started he saw a chance to make money. • Became involved with the black market and underworld. • Befriended many Nazis and joined the Nazi party. • Opened a factory in which he used Jewish workers because they were cheap. • The factory produced enamel goods and ammunition. • During the war he got to know his workers well. • As he got to know them he became disturbed by what was happening to them. • Schindler treated his workers well, unlike the way they were treated by the Nazis. • He made sure they were fed and looked after. • He bribed Nazi officials in order to protect his workers. • When Jews were transferred to concentration camps he set up a factory compound where his Jewish workers could live and wrote a list of all the workers he needed so that they would be spared. • He later moved his factory to Switzerland and was able to take most of his workers with him. • He was able to save around 1100 Jews from almost certain death. • After the war he ran away to Argentina but came back to Germany in 1958. • He was never again successful in business. • He died in 1974 and was buried in Israel.

6. Oskar Schindler (1908-1974) Oskar Schindler (28 April 1908 – 9 October 1974) was a German industrialist credited with saving almost 1,100 Jews during the Holocaust, by having them work in his enamelware and ammunitions factories located in Poland and what is now the Czech Republic. Schindler was a businessman who wanted to make profit from the Nazi invasion of Poland. He bought a factory in the city of Krakow in Poland that made enamelware (pots and pans), and realised he could get cheap labour by employing Jews. The Jews were not paid anything so the only cost was the bribe to the Nazi guards. In the beginning he was concerned only with making money, but later in the war when he began to get to know the people he employed and to see what was happening to them he went to great lengths to save them at huge cost to himself. He succeeded in saving around 1100 Jews. He used bribery and persuasion to save them from being taken to concentration camps and death camps. His factory was just outside one of the labour camps, Plazow, and he was able to persuade the Nazis to allow his workers to live on the factory site. This meant that he could protect them and make sure they were better looked after than they would have been inside the camp. This included giving them twice as much food as people living in Plazow camp. On one occasion the women who worked for him were accidentally taken By the end of the war Schindler had spent all of his money on trying to save his Jews. This money mainly went on bribes and on buying food from the black market in order to feed them. He emigrated to Argentina and lived there between 1948 and 1958 when he returned to Germany. He went bankrupt and never had success in business after the war. After he died he was buried in Israel, in the Catholic cemetery in Jerusalem. He had asked to be buried here because it was the Jewish homeland and he felt that he belonged with Jews. He is the only former Nazi to be remembered at the Holocaust memorial at Yad Vashem in Israel. A tree was planted in his name and he is remembered as a ‘Righteous Gentile’ (non-Jew). Initially Schindler may have been motivated by money — hiding wealthy Jewish investors, for instance — but later he began shielding his workers without regard to cost. He would, for instance, claim that unskilled workers were essential to the factory. Harming his workers would result in complaints and demands for compensation from the government Oscar Schindler spent millions to protect and save his Jews, everything he possessed. He died penniless. But he earned the everlasting gratitude of the Schindler-Jews. Today there are more than 7,000 descendants of the Schindler-Jews living in US and Europe, many in Israel. Before the Second World War, the Jewish population of Poland was 3.5 million. Today there are between 3,000 and 4,000 left. "I hated the brutality, the sadism, and the insanity of Nazism. I just couldn't stand by and see people destroyed. I did what I could, what I had to do, what my conscience told me I must do. That's all there is to it. Really, nothing more." “In the years '41 and '42 there was plenty of public evidence of pure sadism. With people behaving like pigs, I felt the Jews were being destroyed. I had to help them. There was no choice." "I knew the people who worked for me... When you know people, you have to behave toward them like human beings."

7. Corrie ten Boom • Corrie ten Boom was born in the Netherlands in 1892 • to a Christian family.. • Her parents owned a jewellery shop in Amsterdam. • The shop was in the Jewish part of the town so she got • to know many Jewish people.Her family joined in with Jewish feasts and the studied the • Old Testament together. • She was very inspired by her father’s loving attitude to all people. • During World War 2 she began helping her Jewish neighbours. • Initially she sheltered them when they were being driven out of their homes and later more and more people began to ask her for help so she began to find places for many Jews to hide. • Along with her family she stole many ration cards so that they could feed the people they were hiding. • The Nazis discovered what she was doing when a man pretending to be helping Jews came to ask her for help. He was actually trying to find evidence that she was hiding Jews. • He reported her family to the authorities and they were arrested. • Along with her father and her sister she was taken to a variety of prisons and concentration camps. • Her father quickly died but Corrie and her sister, Betsie, were held together. • They were devout Christians and held secret Bible and worship meetings. • Her belief in God strengthened her throughout her time in concentration camps. • Her sister died in December 1944 but Corrie was released from the camp and lived until 1983. • When she met one of the guards who had treated her so awfully in a concentration camp, she was able to forgive him because of the strength of her Christian faith. Christians believe that God will not forgive them for what they have done wrong if they can’t forgive other people. • After the war she travelled all over the world telling people about her experiences. • She set up homes for people who had survived the concentration camps.

8. Corrie ten Boom (1892-1983) Corrie ten Boom was a Christian who, along with her family worked to save the lives of many Jews during the Nazi era. She was imprisoned in a concentration camp but was released and survived the war. Corrie (short for Cornelia) was born in Haarlem in Holland on 15 April 1892. The youngest child of Caspar and Cornelia ten Boom, she had two sisters, Betsie and Nollie, and a brother Willem. Caspar ten Boom was a watchmaker. When Corrie grew up she became the first women in Holland to qualify as a watchmaker. This is an extract from her life story: One Sunday afternoon, all the young men out on the streets were rounded up by German soldiers and sent to Germany as slave factory-workers. Some were never seen again. From that time onwards, young Dutchmen had to go about secretly or stay in hiding.   The German soldiers also began to smash the windows of shops owned by Jewish people and steal the goods inside. Sometimes the Jewish shopkeepers and their families disappeared as well. At the time, no one knew what happened to them. Now we know that Hitler and the Nazis murdered over six million Jews in Europe. One day there was an order for all the Jewish people in Holland to report to the police. They were told that they must wear a bright yellow star, the "Star of David", on their clothes, wherever they went. The Jews had always been proud of this sign, but now it had become a label that set them apart from other people.   The ten Boom family were very sad about this. They loved the Jewish people because the Bible says that they are God's "chosen people". Jesus Himself was a Jew, and most of the Bible has come to us through the Jews.   Father ten Boom also had a son, called Willem. Willem was a church minister, and had worked with Jewish people for a long time. He had a large house in Hilversum for Jews who had escaped from Hitler's Germany before the war. Now he had to find safer places for them to live.   On a rainy day in November 1941, some German soldiers broke into a fur shop across the road from the ten Boom home. It was owned by a Jew called Mr Weil. The soldiers smashed the windows and took all the furs. Then they threw Mr Weil's clothes into the street.   Corrie ran outside and brought Mr Weil into their home above the watch shop. He told them that his wife was staying with friends in Amsterdam. It was clear that Mr and Mrs Weil could not go back to their home.   As they thought about the problem, Corrie and her sister Betsie both felt they must ask their brother Willem what they should do. Corrie went to his home in Hilversum that afternoon. Willem was out, but his twenty-two-year-old son, Kik, was in. Corrie explained the problem.   "Tell Mr Weil to be ready as soon as it's dark," said Kik.   That evening at nine o'clock Kik rapped on the door, and led Mr Weil away into the dark. About two weeks later, Corrie met Kik again. She asked where he had taken Mr Weil. "If you are going to work with the 'underground', Aunt Corrie, then you must learn not to ask questions," he answered with a smile.   Soon other Jewish people came to the ten Boom home asking for help. Although the family knew it was dangerous, they were all agreed that they must help. They had several spare rooms in the old house, but it was only a hundred yards from Haarlem Police Station! Besides, there was the problem of getting food for people who had no ration cards. Corrie went to talk things over with her brother Willem, but he could not help. He already had so many people who needed hiding-places that he could not deal with any more. "You will need ration cards as well as places to hide your Jewish friends," he said.   "You will have to find your own supply."

9.    On her way back to Haarlem, Corrie thought hard. How could she get ration cards? How could she find families who were willing to risk hiding a Jewish person? She began to pray. As she did so, a name flashed into her mind - Fred Koornstra. His daughter used to belong to one of Corrie's girls' clubs. Yes, didn't he work in the office where ration cards were issued? But would he help? Could he be trusted? Again she prayed, and then felt certain that she should go and see him.That evening she called on Fred. Could he help?   "Quite impossible," he replied. "Those cards are counted over and over again. There is no way I could take any - unless there was a robbery! Perhaps I know the very man...."   "Don't tell me any more," said Corrie. "It wouldn't be safe."   A few days later Fred Koornstra called at the watch shop. He had a black eye and some bruises. The "robbery" had been very true to life! But he had the ration cards.   Soon Corrie realised that through her girls' clubs, and through the watch shop, she knew half the people in Haarlem. Each time she needed to ask someone for help, she prayed, and then she seemed to know whether it would be safe or not. This was important, for many Dutch people did not want to run the risk, and some were actually helping the Germans in return for more money and food, and good jobs.   One evening Kik took Corrie to a big house in Haarlem to meet a group of Dutch "underground" workers. These people worked secretly against the Germans to help the Allies (countries like Britain and France who fought on the same side as Holland in the Second World War). If a British aeroplane was shot down by the Germans, the underground workers would try to rescue the pilot. If they found out about a train carrying ammunition meant for the Germans, they blew up the train. If Dutch people were arrested, they tried to free them. Corrie recognised an old friend of her father's among the underground workers. The ten Booms called him Pickwick because he reminded them of a picture of a character in Charles Dickens' book Pickwick Papers.   Pickwick told the others that Corrie was helping the Jews in Haarlem, and one by one they told her how they could help.   "I can get you false identification papers," said one.   "I can get you an official government car, if you need one," said another. Then she met an oldish man with a wispy beard. He turned out to be an architect.   "This is Mr Smit," said Pickwick. (Of course this was not his real name. "Smit", like "Smith" in England, is a very common name in Holland, and it was safer for underground workers to be called Smit!)   "What you need," said Mr Smit, "is a secret room in your home, in case the Gestapo raid your house looking for Jews. I will come and visit you to arrange it." (The Gestapo were the hated German police.) "This is a perfect house for a secret room," said Mr Smit when he came. The ten Boom house was a very old house, with all kinds of unexpected corners and spaces in it.   "The room should be as high up as possible, to give your people time to hide if there is a raid," he said. In fact he chose Corrie's own little room at the top of the house.   He then marked off a space about 75 centimetres from the end wall.   "This is where the false wall will come," he explained. "I cannot make the room any bigger, but several people will be able to get in."During the next few days, a number of "customers" came to the shop, each bringing tools and materials hidden in harmless-looking bags or boxes.   When it was finished, not even Corrie could have guessed that there was anything behind that stained old wall, with a bookcase against it. None of it looked new. Somehow the workmen had made the new wall look a hundred years old! Mr Smit was very pleased with the result.   "They will never find this," he said. "But now you must practise getting your 'guests' in there in the shortest possible time. And they must leave nothing behind in the house to show that they are here. If they are eating a meal, their cups and plates must be hidden. If it is at night, even the mattresses on their beds must be turned over so that there is no 'warm spot' for the Gestapo to find."

10.    By now they had four regular guests and often other members of the underground as well. So there had to be many practices. In the end they managed it in just over a minute.   To give them a little time, one of the guests fixed up an alarm system with a buzzer and several push-buttons, including one near the door of the shop. Corrie and Betsie were found out and arrested and taken to Ravensbruck concentration camp. This was worse than any other prison they had been in. The first two days they had to sleep out in the open. It poured with rain, and the ground became a sea of mud. Then they were packed into a huge barrack-room. It had been built to house 400 people, but there were now 1400 prisoners in it. They had to sleep on straw mattresses filled with choking dust and swarming with fleas. Even the guards did not like going into the barrack-room because of the fleas.   Roll-call was at half-past four in the morning. There were 35000 women in the camp, and if anyone was missing they were counted again and again. So it often went on for hours. If the prisoners did not stand up straight the women guards beat them with riding whips.   The work was extremely hard. Corrie and Betsie had to load heavy sheets of steel on to carts, push them for a certain distance, then unload them. All the time the guards shouted at them to work faster. One night as they were lying on their bunks, Betsie whispered to Corrie, "I can see a house, somewhere in Holland. It is a beautiful house with a large garden. There is a large hall with a carved wooden staircase. We are going to look after people who have been hurt in the war, until they can live a normal life again. Corrie, I believe God is going to give us a house like this."   Later on, Betsie had another vision. This time she saw a concentration camp in Germany. But there was no barbed wire in this camp, and there were no guards. All the buildings were painted a cheerful green. It was a camp for German people that had been hurt by the evil of Hitler, even people like the guards at Ravensbruck, who had been taught to be so cruel.   "Corrie," she said, "we must tell people how good God is. After the war we must go around the world telling people. No one will be able to say that they have suffered worse than us. We can tell them how wonderful God is, and how His love will fill our lives, if only we will give up our hatred and bitterness." Once again it was roll-call. The women stamped their feet to keep warm. Suddenly Corrie heard her name: "Prisoner ten Boom, report after roll-call."   What was going to happen? Was she going to be punished? Or shot?   "Father in heaven, please help me now," she prayed.   When she reported, she was given a card stamped "Entlassen", which means "Released". She was free! She could hardly believe it. She was given back her few possessions, some new clothes and a railway pass back to Holland. After a long, hard journey, she arrived back among friends in her own country.   Afterwards she learned that she had been released by mistake. A week after her release all the women of her age in the camp were killed. After the war a Christian relief organisation in Germany asked her to help run a camp for refugees and people who had been made bitter by their experiences of life under Hitler. It turned out to be just like the concentration camp Betsie had seen in her vision! Again Corrie passed on the message of God's love and forgiveness. Corrie worked for forgiveness and reconciliation between former enemies. At one meeting soon after the war, one of the former SS guards at the camp came up to her and asked to shake her hand. To start with, she had a very big problem with this, but then found that she was able to forgive the guard. She later wrote about how important forgiveness was. In her rehabilitation work with victims of the Holocaust and other camp survivors, she found that only those who were able to forgive, could made a good recovery and begin to live again.

11. Raoul Wallenberg - As a Swedish diplomat, Wallenberg attempted to help save the Jews from the fate that Eichmann had arranged. At a dinner in Budapest, Hungary, Wallenberg tried to persuade Eichmann to cease his policy of the destruction of Jews. World War II was almost at an end, and Wallenberg asked that the killing be stopped, as it was inevitable that the Nazi Party would lose. Eichmann declined to stop exterminating Jews, but Wallenberg would not stop defending them. In 1944, he went back to Budapest to save the lives of thousands of Jews. He was able to obtain a Swedish passport for some 20,000 Jews.

12. Adolf Hitler (1889-1945) Hitler as a child Young Adolf attended church regularly, sang in the local choir and spent hours playing 'cowboys and Indians' and revelled in the westerns penned by Karl May. He grew up with a poor record at school and left, before completing his tuition, with an ambition to become an artist or architect. Alois Hitler (Adolf’s father) had died when Adolf was thirteen and Klara, his mother, brought up Adolf and his sister, Paula, on her own. A neighbour of the Hitler family later recalled:'When the postmaster asked him one day what he wanted to do for a living and whether he wouldn't like to join the post-office, he replied that it was his intention to become a great artist ...' His only boyhood friend, August Kubizek, recalled Hitler as a shy, reticent young man, yet he was able to burst into hysterical fits of anger towards those who disagreed with him. The two became inseparable during these early years and Kubizek turned out to be a patient listener. He was a good audience for Hitler, who often rambled for hours about his hopes and dreams. Sometimes Hitler even gave speeches complete with wild hand gestures to his audience of one. Hitler would only tolerate approval from his friend and could not stand to be corrected, a personality trait he had shown in high school and as a younger boy as well. During his lifetime, Hitler was very secretive about his background. Only the dimmest outline of his parents emerges from the biographical chapters of Mein Kampf. He falsified his father's occupation, changing him from a customs official to a postal official. He repulsed relatives who tried to approach him. One of the first things he did after taking over Austria was to have a survey carried out of the little farming village of Dollerscheim where his father's birth had been recorded. As soon as it could be arranged the inhabitants were evacuated and the entire village was demolished by heavy artillery. Even the graves in the cemetery where his grandmother had been buried were rendered unrecognisable. To fulfil his dream, Hitler in 1909 moved to Vienna, the capital of Austria, where the Academy of Arts was located. To his own surprise he failed to get admission. Within a year he was living in homeless shelters and eating at charity soup-kitchens. He spent his time reading anti-Semitic tabloids and pamphlets available at the newsstands and at local coffee shops. He had declined to take regular employment and took occasional menial jobs and sold some of his paintings or advertising posters whenever he could to provide sustenance.  Hitler didn't get much out of it - but in 1999 two paintings and a line drawing by Hitler - completed between 1911 and 1914 - were sold at auction for a total of $131,000. By Hitler’s own accounting, he painted between one and three watercolours a day during his Vienna years. If one assumes he painted only one painting a day, and only three days a week, then the minimum number he would have painted would be six hundred, which is remarkably close to Hitler's own recollection over a thousand. Adolf Hitler already showed traits that characterized his later life: inability to establish ordinary human relationships, intolerance and hatred of especially the Jews, a tendency toward denunciatory outbursts, readiness to live in a fantasy-world and so to escape his failure. He learned to loathe brilliant, charming, cosmopolitan Vienna for what he called its Semitism. More to his liking was homogeneous Munich, his real home after 1913. To this man of no trade and few interests World War I was a welcome event - it gave him some purpose in life.

13. So Hitler went to Munich, Germany and when World War I began in 1914, he volunteered for service in the German army. Hitler was twice decorated for bravery, but only rose to the rank of corporal. When World War I ended Hitler was in a hospital recovering from temporary blindness possibly caused by a poison gas attack.  The Versailles Treaty that ended the war stripped Germany of much of its territory, forced the country to disarm, and ordered Germany to pay huge reparations. When the army returned to Germany the country was in despair. The country was bankrupt and millions of people were unemployed. In 1920, Hitler joined the National Socialist German Workers Party known as the Nazis. The Nazis called for all Germans, even those in other countries, to unite into one nation; they called for a strong central government; and they called for the cancellation of the Versailles Treaty. Hitler became leader of the Nazi party and built up membership quickly, mostly because of his powerful speaking ability. In 1930, a worldwide depression hit Germany and Hitler promised to rid Germany of Jews and Communists and to reunite the German speaking part of Europe. In July 1932, the Nazis received about 40% of the vote and became the strongest party in Germany. On January 30,1933, President Paul von Hindenburg appointed Hitler Chancellor of Germany. Once in this position, Hitler moved quickly toward attaining a dictatorship. When von Hindenburg died in 1934, Hitler already had control of Germany. Adolf Hitler's war with the Jews now stepped up in pace. Whereas before, anti-Semitic rhetoric helped the Nazis get elected, now they had the power to put some of their ideas into action. In April 1933, Jews were banished from government jobs, a quota was established banning Jews from university, and a boycott of Jewish shops enacted. In 1935, the infamous Nuremberg Laws were passed. These classed Jews as German "subjects" instead of citizens. Intermarriage was outlawed, more professions were closed to Jews, shops displayed signs reading, "No Jews Allowed." Harassment was common. In another attempt to purge Germany of her Jews, a roundup of Jews with Polish citizenship was enacted in October 1938. These Polish Jews were herded like cattle and dumped at the Polish border, where the Poles kept them in no-man's land. One deported family wrote to their son who was studying in Paris, Herschel Grynszpan. When he heard of the torments his parents went through, he resolved to avenge them and shot a German official, vom Rath, stationed in Paris. This small rebellion was a perfect opportunity for Adolf Hitler and his henchmen to rise up in indignation. The Nazis called for demonstrations, and violence erupted across Germany for two days. Stores were destroyed, synagogues burned, and twenty thousand Jews arrested.  The riots came to be known as Kristallnacht - the Night of Glass, for all the broken glass. Adolf Hitler had always been straightforward about his plans for the Jews. His dream of a racially "pure" empire would tolerate no Jews. He announced at different occasions the "annihilation of the Jews" living in the territory under his control. With these statements Hitler threatened to use the Jews as hostages to prevent the Western powers from intervening on the continent. It clearly included the possibility of Genocide. Hitler avoided giving a clear written order to exterminate Jewish civilians. He avoided speaking openly about killing in his entourage. However, there is clear evidence that he was deeply involved in the anti-Jewish policy during the war, particularly when it reached a murderous stage. In general, Hitler's comments on the Jewish question reveal his essential commitment to radicalise persecution to the extreme.

14. Hitler was fully responsible for the order for the mass executions in Poland in 1939 and 1940. He was also actively engaged in setting up plans for a Jewish reservation in Poland and he backed the Madagascar plan. He was continually preoccupied with further deportations and deportation plans. In 1941 Hitler ordered the extermination of the Jewish-Bolshevist intelligentsia and the elimination of every potential enemy in the occupied Eastern territories. He was fully aware of mass executions of Jewish civilians in these territories. In mid September 1941 Hitler ordered the beginning of mass deportations from Germany to ghettos in Eastern Europe. During Autumn 1941 and the following Winter, when preparation for the Final Solution in Europe were in full swing, Hitler spoke at various occasions openly about the annihilation of the Jews in Europe. It can be ruled out that the massive preparations for the systematic murder of European Jews in extermination camps in Poland, undertaken in spring and summer of 1942, were taken without his consent or his knowledge. Private diaries of Nazi propaganda maestro Joseph Goebbels and Gestapo chief Heinrich Himmler unearthed from the secret Soviet archives show that Adolf Hitler personally ordered the mass extermination of Jews on December 12, 1941 during a meeting of Nazi German regional governors in the chancellery. Goebbels told his diary: "With regards to the Jewish question, the Fuhrer decided to make a clean sweep." And from a number of letters and speeches of Himmler it becomes clear, that the Reichsführer SS referred to the Holocaust as a task he had to carry out on the behalf of the highest authority in the Third Reich - Adolf Hitler. In the final hours of his life, Adolf Hitler hastily dictated a Political Testament that he left for the German people. The document was little different from many speeches and articles he had written before. After causing the destruction of huge areas of Europe, demanding the sacrifice of millions of lives in pursuit of his political ambitions, and ordering the murder of millions of others, Hitler showed no remorse. Instead, he blamed the Jews for the war he himself had started. With Germany lying in ruins after six devastating years of war, and with defeat imminent, the Nazi dictator decided to take his own life. But before doing so, he wanted to thank the one who'd remained completely loyal to him until the very end. Early on the morning on April 29, 1945, in a civil ceremony in his bunker, Hitler married his mistress of many years, Eva Braun. The next day a little after 3:30 p.m., they bit into thin glass vials of cyanide. As he did so, Hitler also shot himself in the head with a 7.65 mm Walther pistol.

15. Heinrich Himmler (1900-1945) was the most powerful man in Nazi Germany after Hitler; Reich Leader of the SS, head of the Gestapo and the Waffen-SS, and minister of the interior. His obsession with "racial purity" led to the idea of killing the Jews. He was captured after the war, but committed suicide in May 1945, before he went on trial Quotes From the speech of ReichsfŸhrer-SS Himmler, speaking to SS Major-Generals, Poznan, October 4 1943. One basic principal must be the absolute rule for the SS man: we must be honest, decent, loyal, and comradely to members of our own blood and to nobody else. What happens to a Russian, to a Czech, does not interest me in the slightest. What the nations can offer in good blood of our type, we will take, if necessary by kidnapping their children and raising them with us. Whether nations live in prosperity or starve to death interests me only in so far as we need them as slaves for our culture; otherwise, it is of no interest to me. Whether 10,000 Russian females fall down from exhaustion while digging an anti-tank ditch interest me only in so far as the anti-tank ditch for Germany is finished. We shall never be rough and heartless when it is not necessary, that is clear. We Germans, who are the only people in the world who have a decent attitude towards animals, will also assume a decent attitude towards these human animals. But it is a crime against our own blood to worry about them and give them ideals, thus causing our sons and grandsons to have a more difficult time with them. When someone comes to me and says, "I cannot dig the anti-tank ditch with women and children, it is inhuman, for it will kill them", then I would have to say, "you are a murderer of your own blood because if the anti-tank ditch is not dug, German soldiers will die, and they are the sons of German mothers. They are our own blood". Letter from ReichsfŸhrer-SS Himmler to the Higher SS and Police Chief in the Ukraine, Kiev, September 7 1943. Dear Pruetzmann, Infantry general staff has special orders with regard to the Donetz area. Get in touch with him immediately. I order you to cooperate as much as you can. The aim to be achieved is that when areas in the Ukraine are evacuated, not a human being, not a single head of cattle, not a hundredweight of cereals and not a railway line remain behind; that not a house remain standing, not a mine is available which is not destroyed for years to come, that there is not a well which is not poisoned. The enemy must really find completely burned and destroyed land. Discuss these things with Stampf straight away and do your absolute best. Extract from Himmler's address to party comrades, September 7 1940. If any Pole has any sexual dealing with a German woman, and by this I mean sexual intercourse, then the man will be hanged right in front of his camp. Then the others will not do it. Besides, provisions will be made that a sufficient number of Polish women and girls will come along as well so that a necessity of this kind is out of the question. The women will be brought before the courts without mercy, and where the facts are not sufficiently proved--such borderline cases always happen--they will be sent to a concentration camp. This we must do, unless these one million Poles and those hundreds of thousands of workers of alien blood are to inflict untold damage on the German blood. Philosophizing is of no avail in this case. It would be better if we did not have them at all-- we all know that--but we need them.

16. By 17 June 1936 Himmler had successfully completed his bid to win control of the political and criminal police throughout the Third Reich, becoming head of the Gestapo in addition to his position as Reichsfuhrer of the SS. A very able organizer and administrator, meticulous, calculating and efficient, Himmler's astonishing capacity for work and irrepressible power-lust showed itself in his accumulation of official posts and his perfectioning of the methods of organized State terrorism against political and other opponents of the regime. In 1933 he had set up the first concentration camp in Dachau and in the next few years, with Hitler's encouragement, greatly extended the range of persons who qualified for internment in the camps. Himmler's philosophical mysticism, his cranky obsessions with mesmerism, the occult, herbal remedies and homeopathy went hand in hand with a narrow-minded fanatical racialism and commitment to the 'Aryan' myth. In a speech in January 1937 Himmler declared that 'there is no more living proof of hereditary and racial laws than in a concentration camp. You find there hydrocephalics, squinters, deformed individuals, semi-Jews: a considerable number of inferior people.' The mission of the German people was 'the struggle for the extermination of any sub-humans, all over the world who are in league against Germany, which is the nucleus of the Nordic race; against Germany, nucleus of the German nation, against Germany the custodian of human culture: they mean the existence or non-existence of the white man; and we guide his destiny'. Himmler's decisive innovation was to transform the race question from 'a negative concept based on matter-of-course anti- semitism' into 'an organizational task for building up the SS'. Racism was to be safeguarded by the reality of a race society, by the concentration camps presided over by Himmler's Deaths Head Formations in Germany, just as during World War II the theories of 'Aryan' supremacy would be established by the systematic extermination of Jews and Slavs in Poland and Russia. Himmler's romantic dream of a race of blue-eyed, blond heroes was to be achieved by cultivating an elite according to 'laws of selection' based on criteria of physiognomy, mental and physical tests, character and spirit. His aristocratic concept of leadership aimed at consciously breeding a racially organized order which would combine charismatic authority with bureaucratic discipline. The SS man would represent a new human type - warrior, administrator, 'scholar' and leader, all in one - whose messianic mission was to undertake a vast colonization of the East. This synthetic aristocracy, trained in a semi-closed society and superimposed on the Nazi system as a whole, would demonstrate the value of its blood through 'creative action' and achievement. From the outset of his career as Reichsfuhrer of the SS, Himmler had introduced the principle of racial selection and special marriage laws which would ensure the systematic coupling of people of 'high value'. His promotion of illegitimacy by establishing the State-registered human stud farm known as Lebensborn, where young girls selected for their perfect Nordic traits could procreate with SS men and their offspring were better cared for than in maternity homes for married mothers, reflected Himmler's obsession with creating a race of 'supermen' by means of breeding. Himmler's notorious procreation order of 28 October 1939 to the entire SS that 'it will be the sublime task of German women and girls of good blood acting not frivolously but from a profound moral seriousness to become mothers to children of soldiers setting off to battle' and his demand that war heroes should be allowed a second marriage expressed the same preoccupation. The small, diffident man who looked more like a humble bank clerk than Germany's police dictator, whose pedantic demeanour and 'exquisite courtesy' fooled one English observer into stating that 'nobody I met in Germany is more normal', was a curious mixture of bizarre, romantic fantasy and cold, conscienceless efficiency. Described as 'a man of quiet unemotional gestures, a man without nerves', he suffered from psycho-somatic illness, severe headaches and intestinal spasms and almost fainted at the sight of a hundred eastern Jews (including women) being executed for his benefit on the Russian front.

17. Subsequent to this experience, he ordered as a 'more humane means' of execution the use of poison gas in specially constructed chambers disguised as shower rooms. The petty-bourgeois eccentric whose natural snobbery led him to welcome old aristocratic blood into the SS, revived a web of obsolete religious and cosmological dogmas linking new recruits to their distant Germanic ancestors. He cultivated the 'return to the soil' and the dream of German peasant- soldier farms in the East while at the same time proving himself a diabolically skilful organizer of rationalized modern extermination methods. For Himmler, the SS was at one and the same time the resurrection of the ancient Order of the Teutonic Knights with himself as grand master, the breeding of a new Herrenvolk aristocracy based on traditional values of honour, obedience, courage and loyalty, and the instrument of a vast experiment in modern racial engineering. Through this privileged caste which was to be the hard core of German imperial dominion in Europe, the nucleus of a new State apparatus would emerge with its tentacles impinging on all spheres of life in the expanded Third Reich. By recruiting 'Aryans' of different nationalities into his Waffen-SS Himmler envisaged the creation of 'a German Reich of the German Nation' based on the feudal allegiance of its communities to the lordship and protection of the Fuhrer, embodying a Germany that would become the centre of a higher political entity. In October 1939 Hitler appointed him Reichskommissar fur die Festigung des Deutschen Volkstums (Reich Commissar for the Strengthening of Germandom) and he was given absolute control over the newly annexed slice of Poland. Responsible for bringing people of German descent back from outside the Reich into its borders, he set out to replace Poles and Jews by Volksdeutsche from the Baltic lands and various outlying parts of Poland. 'Gentlemen, it is much easier in many cases to go into combat with a company than to suppress an obstructive population of low cultural level, or to carry out executions or to haul away people or to evict crying and hysterical women.' It was Himmler's master stroke that he succeeded in indoctrinating the SS with an apocalyptic 'idealism' beyond all guilt and responsibility, which rationalized mass murder as a form of martyrdom and harshness towards oneself. 'One principle must be absolute for the SS man: we must be honest, decent, loyal, and comradely to members of our own blood and to no one else. What happens to the Russians, what happens to the Czechs, is a matter of utter indifference to me. Such good blood of our own kind as there may be among the nations we shall acquire for ourselves, if necessary by taking away the children and bringing them up among us. Whether the other peoples live in comfort or perish of hunger interests me only in so far as we need them as slaves for our Kultur. Whether or not 10,000 Russian women collapse from exhaustion while digging a tank ditch interests me only in so far as the tank ditch is completed for Germany. We shall never be rough or heartless where it is not necessary; that is clear. We Germans, who are the only people in the world who have a decent attitude to animals, will also adopt a decent attitude to these human animals, but it is a crime against our own blood to worry about them and to bring them ideals. I shall speak to you here with all frankness of a very grave matter. Among ourselves it should be mentioned quite frankly, and yet we will never speak of it publicly. I mean the evacuation of the Jews, the extermination of the Jewish people.. . . Most of you know what it means to see a hundred corpses lying together, five hundred, or a thousand. To have stuck it out and at the same time - apart from exceptions caused by human weakness - to have remained decent fellows, that is what has made us hard. This is a page of glory in our history which has never been written and shall never be written.'

18. Joseph Mengele(1911-1978?) SS physician at Auschwitz, notorious for pseudo-medical experiments, especially on twins and Gypsies. He "selected" new arrivals by simply pointing to the right or the left, thus separating those considered able to work from those who were not. Those too weak or too old to work were sent straight to the gas chambers, after all their possessions, including their clothes, were taken for resale in Germany. After the war, he spent some time in a British internment hospital but disappeared, went underground, escaped to Argentina, and later to Paraguay, where he became a citizen in 1959. He was hunted by Interpol, Israeli agents, and Simon Wiesenthal. In 1986, his body was found in Embu, Brazil. In 1943 Mengele replaced another doctor who had fallen ill at the Nazi extermination camp Birkenau. On May 24, 1943, he became medical officer of Auschwitz-Birkenau's "Gypsy camp". In August 1944, this camp was liquidated and all its inmates gassed. Subsequently Mengele became Chief Medical Officer of the main infirmary camp at Birkenau. He was not, though, the Chief Medical Officer of Auschwitz — superior to him was SS-Standortarzt (garrison physician) Eduard Wirths. It was during his 21-month stay at Auschwitz that Mengele achieved infamy, and it is for this period that he is referred to as the Angel of Death. Mengele took turns with the other SS physicians at Auschwitz in meeting incoming prisoners at the ramp, determining who would be retained for work and who would be sent to the gas chambers immediately. Mengele took his turn as the selector on the ramp, but unlike most of the other selectors, he arrived sober. With a small flick of his finger or riding crop, a person would either be sent to the left or to the right, to the gas chamber or to hard labor. Mengele would get very excited when finding twins. The other SS who helped unload the transports had been given special instructions to find twins, dwarfs, giants, or anyone else with a unique hereditary trait like a club foot or heterochromia (each eye a different color). Mengele's seeming omnipresence on the ramp stemmed not only from his selection duty, but his additional appearance when it was not his turn as selector to ensure twins would not be missed. As the unsuspecting people were herded off the train and ordered into separate lines, SS would shout "Zwillinge!" ("twins!"). Parents were forced to make a quick decision. Unsure of their situation, already being separated from family members when forced to form lines, seeing barbed wire, smelling an unfamiliar stench - was it good or bad to be a twin? Some parents did announce their twins. Some relatives, friends, or neighbors would announce the twins. Some mothers tried to hide their twins. The SS and Mengele would search through the surging ranks of people in search of twins and anyone with unusual traits. While many twins were either announced or discovered, some sets of twins were successfully hidden and walked with their mother into the gas chamber. Which was the right decision - to announce or not to announce their twins? I don't think there necessarily was one. Approximately three thousand twins were pulled from the masses on the ramp, most of them children; only around two hundred survived. When the twins were found, they were taken away from their parents.

19. Once the SS guard knew we were twins, Miriam and I were taken away from our mother, without any warning or explanation. Our screams fell on deaf ears. I remember looking back and seeing my mother's arms stretched out in despair as we were led away by a soldier. That was the last time I saw her.1 As the twins were led away to be processed, their parents and family stayed on the ramp and went through selection. Occasionally, if the twins were very young Mengele would allow the mother to join her children in order for their health to be assured for the experiments. After the twins had been taken from their parents, they were taken to the showers. Since they were "Mengele's children," they were treated differently than other prisoners. Besides the obvious, suffering through medical experiments, the twins were often allowed to keep their hair and allowed to keep their own clothes. The twins were then tattooed. They were given a number from a special sequence.2 They were then taken to the twin's barracks where they were required to fill out a form. The form asked for a brief history and basic measurements such as age and height. Many of the twins were too young to fill the form out by themselves so the Zwillingsvater ("Twin's Father") helped them. (This inmate was assigned to the job of taking care of the male twins.) Once the form was filled out, the twins were taken to Mengele. Mengele asked them more questions and looked for any unusual traits. Each morning, life for the twins began at six o'clock. The twins were required to report for roll call in front of their barracks no matter what the weather. After roll call, they ate a small breakfast. Then each morning, Mengele would appear for an inspection. Mengele's presence did not necessarily connote fear in the children. He was often known to appear with pockets full of candy and chocolates, to pat them on the head, to talk with them, and sometimes even play. Many of the children, especially the younger ones, called him "Uncle Mengele."3 The twins were given brief instruction in makeshift "classes" and were sometimes even allowed to play soccer.4 The children were not required to do hard work and had jobs like being a messenger. Twins were also spared from punishments as well as from the frequent selections within the camp. Conditions for the twins were one of the best in Auschwitz, until the trucks came to take them to the experiments. Experiments Generally, every day, every twin had to have blood drawn. Blood, often in large quantities, was drawn from twins' fingers and arms, and sometimes both their arms simultaneously. The youngest children, whose arms and hands were very small, suffered the most: Blood was drawn from their necks, a painful and frightening procedure.5 It was estimated that approximately ten cubic centimeters of blood was drawn daily.6 Besides having blood drawn, the twins were to undergo various medical experiments. Mengele kept his exact reasoning for his experiments a secret. Many of the twins that he experimented on weren't sure for what purpose the individual experiments were for nor what exactly what was being injected or done to them. Each morning, the twins would wonder what was in store for them that day. Would their number be called? If yes, then the trucks would pick them up and take them to one of several laboratories.

20. MeasurementsThe twins were forced to undress and lay next to each other. Then every detail of their anatomy was carefully examined, studied, and measured. What was the same was deemed to be hereditary and was different was deemed to be the result of the environment. These tests would last for several hours. Blood tests included mass transfusions of blood from one twin to another. In attempts to fabricate blue eyes, drops or injections of chemicals would be put in the eyes. This often caused severe pain, infections, and temporary or permanent blindness. Shots and DiseasesMysterious injections that caused severe pain. Injections into the spine and spinal taps with no anesthesia. Diseases, including typhus and tuberculosis, would be purposely given to one twin and not the other. When one died, the other was often killed to examine and compare the effects of the disease. Various surgeries without anesthesia including organ removal, castration, and amputations. One day, my twin brother, Tibi, was taken away for some special experiments. Dr. Mengele had always been more interested in Tibi. I am not sure why - perhaps because he was the older twin. Mengele made several operations on Tibi. One surgery on his spine left my brother paralyzed. He could not walk anymore. Then they took out his sexual organs. After the fourth operation, I did not see Tibi anymore. I cannot tell you how I felt. It is impossible to put into words how I felt. They had taken away my father, my mother, my two older brothers - and now, my twin.7 Dr Miklos Nyiszli was Mengele's prisoner pathologist. The autopsies became the final experiment. Dr. Nyiszli performed autopsies on twins whom had died from the experiments or whom had been purposely killed just for after-death measurements and examination. Some of the twins had been stabbed with a needle that pierced their heart and then were injected with chloroform or phenol which caused near immediate blood coagulation and death. Some of the organs, eyes, blood samples, and tissues would be sent to Verschuer for further study. Josef Mengele was a doctor at Auschwitz, he performed experiments, made selections, and is responsible for sending thousands of people to the crematorium. As a person he was "split", one side of him was the heartless, uncaring, medical-atrocities side, while the other was a gentle, almost human side. When these two side overlapped was when Mengele was most horrible. Often when taking small children to the gas chamber, he would give them candy and make a game out of, "walking to the chimney". Another example of false kindness is well put in the words of Moshe Offer, a test subject of Mengele. "They took X-rays of us, then Doctor Mengele came in. And he gave us sweets. He wore a white gown, but beneath it you could see the SS trousers. He gave us candy, and then gave us some horribly painful injections." One can not help but wonder what kind of a person could ever consider doing things so horrible, much less carry them out. Who could ever kill an innocent child by injecting chloroform into their heart, causing the blood to coagulate and kill the child. Who could ever imagine sewing a set of twins together to try and make siamese twins? These acts just seem to be out of the human realm. Yet Josef Mengele did all of these acts, and more. When the Nazis realized that the Allied forces were getting closer, the Nazis covered up their deeds by destroying most of the gas chambers and the pathology lab next to them that was occupied by the "doctor" Mengele. We may never know the extent to which the experiments went.

21. Elisabeth Abegg, born on May 3, 1882, was a first cousin of William Abegg , the well-known Social Democratic statesman. She grew up in Strassbourg, the capital of Alsace, which was also the home town of Albert Schweitzer, the great Alsatian theologian, humanist, musician, and medical doctor. His Christian-universalistic teaching, centering on the equality of man and the sanctity of human life, had a life-long influence on Abegg. As a history teacher at the fashionable Berlin girls’ school, the Luisen Mädchenschule, Abegg endeavored to impress her humanistic beliefs on her students, many of whom came from Jewish homes. After Hitler’s accession to power, she soon came into conflict with the newly Nazi-appointed director of the Luisen Mädchenschule and had to move to another, less fashionable school. In 1940, she was forced to retire prematurely following a denunciation. Marked by the authorities as politically unreliable, Abegg was once summoned by the Gestapo for interrogation. She could not be deterred, however, from maintaining contact with her former Jewish students and friends. With the deportation to the East of Anna Hirschberg, her close friend of forty years, she understood the true import of the Nazi persecution of the Jews. Although it was too late to save her friend, Abegg felt she could still be instrumental in saving other Jews from the murderous clutches of the Gestapo. For that purpose, she turned the three-and-a-half-room apartment that she shared with her eighty-six-year-old mother and invalid sister Julie into a temporary shelter and assembly point for Jews who had gone underground. Working with her friends in the Quaker movement, Abegg helped her many Jewish protégés by offering them temporary accommodation in her own home or directing them to hiding places elsewhere. She skimped on her own food and that of her sister in order to supply them with food-ration cards; she also invited them each Friday to special meals in her house and procured forged papers for them. Most of those who knocked on her door asking for help were complete strangers. All this activity took place under her neighbors’ noses, even though some tenants in the apartment house were active Nazis. Abegg did not hesitate to take even further risks. In one case Liselottte Perles, the director of the day-care center in Berlin, could not decide whether to go into hiding with her nine-year-old niece, Susie. Abegg visited them in late January 1943, in the “Jews’ House” to which they been moved. Three of the apartments had already been sealed off after the residents had been deported to the East. Abegg succeeded in persuading them that it was time to go underground, and, indeed, it was the last possible moment, as this was the eve of the last large Gestapo round-up of the Jews of Berlin. In another case, Abegg offered her own jewelry for sale in order to organize the smuggling of Jizchak Schwerzenz into Switzerland. Some of the survivors who remained in contact with her after the war dedicated to Abegg on her seventy-fifth birthday, in 1957, a mimeographed collection of memoirs entitled “When One Light Pierced the Darkness.” On May 23, 1967, Yad Vashem decided to recognize Elisabeth Abegg as Righteous Among the Nations. “I found Mrs. Abegg to be a person whom we could turn to in any distress, and indeed we did so. Besides offering spiritual help and succor, which in itself was so important at that time, Mrs. Abeg also provided material help. Thus, for example, she kept the young girl Eva Fleishmann in her home and found hiding places for others including myself. When Eva Fleishmann was forced to leave Berlin, she found a hiding place for her with a family of farmers in Eastern Prussia. Besides finding lodging and hiding places she also saw to it that we received hot meals. I would come to her house to eat a hot meal about twice a week, and I was not the only one to do so, as she also invited children from our group to her house to eat a hot meal. Besides she provided us ration cards without which it was totally impossible to obtain food. In addition, she also gave us financial assistance. Mrs. Abegg was undoubtedly in contact with other people. Thus is clear to me from the number of food cards she collected and the sums of money she obtained for us. She also contributed her own funds – and thus for example she financed my escape to Switzerland by selling her own jewelry…” http://www.holocaust-heroes.com/quakrs.html

22. QUAKERS' HUMANITARIAN EFFORTSASSISTED THOUSANDS OF REFUGEES The Quakers - more formally known as the Religious Society of Friends - have a long and distinguished history of supporting social causes as well as responding to any assault on humanity. When they arrived in America during the colonial period, the Quakers befriended the Indians instead of fighting them. And as early as 1688 protested against slavery and by 1787 no member of the society was a slave owner. They also played a prominent role in supporting the agenda during the women's rights convention held in Seneca Falls, N.Y. in 1848.The sect, which emphasizes human goodness, gained international attention with its humanitarian efforts during World War I and its aftermath. When the German army smashed into the Marne Valley in France in 1917 and leveled every building, the Quakers dispatched their own army of 100 volunteers to build portable houses in the devastated region. They also sent over a large number of tractors, plows, reapers and threshing machines to help the farmers get back on their feet. In addition, they built "the finest maternity hospital" in the city of Chalon-sur-Marne and presented it to the French government.Even though the war ended in 1918, the Quakers continued to offer aid in critical situations. In the summer of 1919, the American Friends Service Committee sent a mission to war-ravaged Germany to determine the extent of relief required. The mission found that after four years of fighting, plus the Allied blockade, more than one million German children were on the verge of starvation.With the swift help of Herbert Hoover, who was then in charge of the American Relief Administration, Friends immediately dispatched workers and food to centers throughout Germany. The situation was so desperate - feeding over one million famished children daily - that the Quakers continued to provide them food for four years. In many German cities, the streets where their Child Feeding Centers were established after the war are still affectionately referred to as "Quakerstrasse."During the early years of Hitler's Third Reich, the Quakers established a reputation for their willingness to assist Jews or anyone else who sought refuge in Nazi Germany. In fact, the Quakers and the Jehovah Witnesses are the only churches which extended help to Jews in distress as a formal church policy. Hard on the heels of the Kristallnacht's warning signals in 1938, they funded Jewish immigration from Germany. They also responded to the growing problem of caring for thousands of children and infants whose parents were shipped to detention or concentration camps by taking an active role in the Kindertransport.More than 10,000 Jewish children from Nazi Germany and Austria were whisked to safe havens in England by the Kindertransport operation during 1938 and 1939. Ruth Vogel Schwartz, originally from Dresden, Germany, remembers her father's reaction following the violence of Kristallnacht in November, 1938. "When my father saw the burning synagogues and the looted stores, he knew he had to act quickly to save himself and his family," she recalled. "At that time, the Society of Friends was organizing transports to bring children from the potential war zones to safety in England, where sympathetic families would care for them."She adds that she and her brother were accepted to join the transport and poignantly remembers those last few hours spent with her father. "We joined dozens of children on the rail station platform. Representatives of the Quakers arranged the loading of luggage, took constant roll calls and moved groups of children in front of the specific railroad cards they would occupy." She was sheltered in a children's camp near Harwich, England and was claimed by her family at the end of the war.

23. The good works of the Quakers provided them with a unique opportunity to help detained or incarcerated Jews. Early in 1940, the Vichy government authorized the Quakers, as well as Unitarians, the YMCA and the Swiss Red Cross, to enter the detention camps in southern France - Gurs, Rivesaltes and Argeles -- to carry on their humanitarian work among the refugees. The new mission gave the Quakers greater lattitude and freedom of movement in assisting Jews, frequently helping to smuggle them out of the camps and seek safety across the Swiss border. It also has been reported that some Quakers actually took up residence in the internment camps and provided the much needed food and supplies to those scheduled for deportation.The Quakers far-reaching hand of assistance penetrated into many segments of the refugee rescue operation: In cooperation of Pastor Andre Trocme of Le Chambon village in France, which provided a safe haven for 5,000 Jews, the Quakers established a boarding house for the refugees' children. A "Quaker Outpost" was opened in Lisbon, Portugal to assist the unending tide of refugees pouring through the last open port in Europe. Additional outposts were established in Casablanca and Geneva. In a joint effort with OSE (Oeuvre de Secours aux Enfants, the principal Jewish organization dealing with the safeguard of children), the Quakers smuggled refugee children out of the Gurs detention camp in southern France, led them on the long trek north to Switzerland and then sneaked them across the border to safety. In America, Quaker hostels were open for refugees in Bryn Mawr, PA, Sky Island in Nyack, NY and at Scattergood in West Branch, Iowa. Staff and volunteers offered the refugees vocational counsel, gave instruction in English and provided them with job leads. In addition to the organized aid and rescue activity, there were countless Quakers who acted alone in extending a helping hand. Here are several of these heroes and sheroes:ELISABETH ABEGG, a native of Strassburg, Germany, met the legendary Dr. Albert Schweitzer when she was a young girl. A history teacher, she joined the faculty of the Luisen girls' school in Berlin, but was soon fired because of her anti-Nazi opinions. At the age of 50, she took an active role in a Holocaust refugee escape network comprised of Quaker friends and ministers of other denominations. She personally assisted dozens of refugees in Berlin and other parts of Germany. Once a week, usually Fridays, she invited Jews who were in hiding in cellars and condemned buildings to her apartment for a home-cooked meal and a chance to relax.GERHARD and ELSE SCHWERSENSKY, a social worker and kindergarten teacher, respectively, were Quakers who sheltered Jews fleeing the Nazis. Both assisted 15-year-old Lorraine Jacoby who was escaping a roundup. Lorraine moved in with the Schwersenskys, who were also hiding a former employee of Berlin's Jewish communal group. Lorraine later recalled Schwersensky's philosophy: "Their religious beliefs and fierce opposition to Hitler's regime sustained them." She added that as Quakers they had a strong obligation to "take a moral stand and do everything possible to defeat Nazism."KARL and EVA HERMANN were German Quakers who were outspoken pacifists and ciritics of the Nazis. Both were sent to prison for two years because they sheltered a Jewish couple in their home in Mannheim. When Dr. Hermann (he was a physics chemist for I.G. Farben) was elevated to the rank of the Righteous in Israel's Yad Vashem, Mrs. Hermann wrote: "I am fully conscious of the fact that my late husband and I did nothing special; we simply tried to remain human in the midst of inhumanity."After the war, the Quakers organized a Work Camp to house volunteers and students to rebuild the devastated areas of Europe. The camp's concept and principles paved the way for the launching of Vista and the Peace Corps later in the United States.

24. HOLOCAUST BYSTANDERS - THE GERMANS by Alexander Kimel The idea of collective responsibility and collective superiority served the Germans well during the initial victorious stages of the war. German soldiers killed many hostages in reprisal for attacks against the Wehrmacht, they committed many atrocities on the Jews; Jews were robbed, killed, ridiculed, maimed, humiliated by German soldiers of the Wehrmacht. During the war German industrialists used extensively slave labor supplied by the SS, and literally worked them to death, making fortunes on their misfortunes without the slightest compassion or sense of responsibility. Some firms like AEG, realizing that starving people do not produce, gave their slaves an additional bowl of soup, to keep them alive for longer period of time. Other firms like Krupp Enterprises did nothing of this sort, just worked them to death. German farmers used and abused slave laborers, without any remorse. Small German firms operating in the ghettos of Warsaw, Lodz and Krakow, got rich on the almost free Jewish labor and in addition cooperated with the German authorities in inducing the Jews to resettle to the death camps. At the end of the war, when the war fortunes changed, the German changed the rules, the collective responsibility was substituted with individual irresponsibility. Individually the Germans did not know about the atrocities or could prevent them. The Germans were not responsible for the atrocities they did not commit, the individual murderers were not responsible for all the murders committed on orders from above. An order cannot be refused. Suddenly each SS man saved some inmates, each German had a Jewish friend. The lack of response from the German public at the brutalization and humiliation of the Jews, gave Hitler the green light in proceeding with his policies of terror, brutality and bloody conquests. The enthusiasm of the people, the wild cheering of the masses during the numerous parades, gave Hitler the consensus needed. Hitler lived for the adulation of the masses and any sign of discontent or disapproval in the first stages would put a brake on his plans. The only power that could put the brakes on Hitler's adventurous policies were the German people; the euthanasia program of gassing the German cripples and retarded was cancelled by the negative reaction from the German people, and all the letters written by German clergy. The intervention of the German population stopped the repression of the so called "Mischlinge", people of mixed parentage. It is true that the majority of the German people were not engaged in the persecution of the Jews, and either it was not aware of the extend of the crimes committed or individually could help it. It is also true that the all the Germans had the knowledge of the persecution and mistreatment of the Jews, being told by the German Propaganda and mass media. Pictures of Jews being forced to scrub the pavements of Vienna, pictures of the burning synagogues during the Cristal Night were flashed all over Germany. The Germans were aware of the mistreatment of inmates of the concentration camps, because they were scattered all over Germany, they were aware of the slave labor used extensively in the German Industry and Farming, and they chose to deny the knowledge and remain silent. Mr. Waldheim, the Austrian President accused of war crimes made a statement to the effects that he knew about the crimes and knowledge itself is not a crime. Knowledge itself was not a crime but the silence and acceptance of the crimes is a crime, at least in the moral sense. The tragedy lies in the fact that the German people participated actively or passively in the crimes, and kept silent, giving Hitler a green light to escalate the atrocities. In the film "The World at War" an interesting scene is shown: Two old women return home and viewing the total destruction of their homes, express anger at Hitler: "He promised us to conquer half of the world and this what we got". They did not feel the responsibility for the mass destruction inflicted on Europe, by the German Luftwaffe. In another scene a German woman expresses outrage at the unnecessary, spurious bombing and destruction of Dresden. What about the destruction of Warsaw, Leningrad, London, this was not spurious, this was the outcome of war!

25. Eugene Kogon, a former Buchenwald prisoner, later Professor of Political Science at the University of Munich commented on the German participation in his book "Der S.S. Staat (The Theory and Practice of Hell: ...And yet, there wasn't even one German who did not know of the camps' existence or who believed they were sanatoriums. There were very few Germans who did not have a relative or an acquaintance in camp, or who did not know, at least, that such an one or another had been sent to a camp. All the Germans had been witnesses to the multiform anti-Semitic barbarity. Millions of them been had been present - with indifference or with curiosity, with contempt or downright malign joy-at the burning of synagogues or humiliation of Jews and Jewesses forced to kneel in the street mud. Not a single German could have been unaware of the fact that the prisons were full to overflowing, and that executions were taking place continually all over the country. Thousands of magistrates and police functionaries, lawyers, priests and social workers knew generically that the situation is grave. Many businessman who dealt with the camp S.S. men as suppliers, the industrialists who asked the administrative and economic offices of the S.S. for slave-laborers, the clerks in those offices, all knew perfectly well that many of the big firms were exploiting slave labor. Quite a few workers performed their tasks near concentration camps or actually inside them. Various university professors collaborated with the medical research centers instituted by Himmler, and various State doctors and doctors connected with private institutes collaborated with professional murderers. A good many members of military aviation had been transferred to S.S. jurisdiction and must have known what went on there. Many high-ranking army officers knew about the mass murders of the Russian prisoners of war in the camps, and even more soldiers and members of the Military Police must have known exactly what terrifying horrors were being perpetrated in the camps, the ghettos, the cities, and the countryside of the occupied Eastern territories. Can. you say that even one of these statements is false. In my opinion, none of these statements is false, but one other must be added to complete the picture: in spite of the varied possibilities for information, most Germans did not know because they didn't want to know. Because, indeed, they wanted not to know. It is certainly true that State terrorism is a very strong weapon, very difficult to resist. But it is also true that the German people, as a whole, did not even try to resist. In Hitler's Germany a particular code was widespread: those who knew did not talk; those who did not know did not asked questions; those who did not asked questions received no answers. In this way the typical German citizen won and defended his ignorance, which seemed to him sufficient justification of his adherence to Nazism. Shutting his mouth, his eyes and hears, an accomplice too the things taking place in front of his very door. Knowing and making things known was one way (basically then not all that dangerous) of keeping one's distance from Nazism. I think the German people, on the whole, did not seek this recourse, and I hold them fully culpable of this deliberated omission. It is true that the majority of Germans supported Hitler and accepted or tolerated his insanity and enjoyed his successes. It is also true that the Germans that opposed Hitler were helpless in an environment of a Totalitarian regime. The guilt of the German people lies in the fact that they placed submission to authority above civilized behavior, and did very little to sabotage the insane orders. Sabotaging the orders and simple behaving in a human way could have saved thousands of victims.

26. BYSTANDERS Bystanders may have remained unaware, or perhaps were aware of victimization going on around them, but, being fearful of the consequences, chose not to take risk to help Nazi victims. Cynthia Ozick writes, Indifference is not so much a gesture of looking away--of choosing to be passive--as it is an active disinclination to feel. Indifference shuts down the humane, and does it deliberately, with all the strength deliberateness demands. Indifference is as determined--and as forcefully muscular--as any blow. Claude Lanzmann's documentary, Shoah, provides another portrait of the bystander. At first, bystanders who were interviewed in this documentary engaged in self-deception about the murder of Jews. Only after lengthy questioning did they finally acknowledge that they chose their roles deliberately, even when they could have done otherwise. Pastor Martin Niemoller (1892-1984) Martin Niemöller, one of the founders of the Confessing Church, was imprisoned in Sachsenhausen and Dachau from 1938 to 1945. As a staunch German nationalist and decorated veteran of World War I, he had initially supported Hitler, but soon changed his position. In November 1933 he formed the "Pastors Emergency League," which founded the Confessing Church at a synod in Barmen the following year. That organization soon became an island of resistance to Nazism. A famous poem attributed to Niemoller: They came first for the Communists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Communist. Then they came for the Jews, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a trade unionist. Then they came for the Catholics, and I didn't speak up because I was a Protestant. Then they came for me and there was no one left to speak out for me.. Ironically, Niemoller had delivered antisemitic sermons early in the Nazi regime. He later opposed Hitler and was sent to a concentration camp.

27. Why was the Pope Silent? Written by Alexander Kimel - Holocaust Survivor. There is an ongoing discussion about the role of the Pope, during the Holocaust. There is no doubt that the Pope was fully informed about the extermination process, but refused to protest or even to condemn the Nazi atrocities. In Italy, where the Church opened its door to the persecuted Jews, the Pope did little to warn the Jews about the impeding danger. There is no doubt that the Vatican and the Pope knew beforehand about the impending deportation of the Italian Jews. There is evidence that the German Ambassador to Rome Mollhausen alerted the Vatican about the impending deportation, they believed that a strong stand by the Vatican, could forestall the deportations, but the Pope did not act. It is improbable that an issuance of a strong condemnation or protest by the Vatican and the Church, would have changed the course of the Holocaust, and stopped the atrocities. It is certain that an issuance of a simple pastoral letter, re-stating the simple fact that killing of Jews is a mortal sin, would have a tremendous influence on the Christian population, saved ten of thousand of Jews, and increased the moral authority of the Church. No such letter was issued, and in Poland the peasants kept killing Jews and delivering them to the Gestapo for 2 lbs. of sugar, without being censured by the priests, or the underground Polish authorities. The determination of the policy toward the Jews was left open, it was left to the local Church Hierarchy, or to the individual priest. Some local priest had the courage and wisdom to speak up. The Pope not only did not speak out, but also did not even make an effort to warn the Jews, this could have been easily done through the network of thousand of priests. Why did the Pope fail to act? Was he an anti-Semites, himself? The answer is no. Although the Pope failed to publicly condemn the German atrocities, does not mean that he did not help them . There is documented evidence that the Pope intervened with the Church dominated puppet Governments of Slovakia, Croatia, Hungary on behalf of the their Jewish citizens, but receiving an evasive answer, backed off. In Italy, thousands of Jews were sheltered and hid in convents and Churches, thousands of priests actively helped the Jews, sometimes risking their lives. What was the motivation for this lack of leadership? Suzan Zuccotti, put it succinctly (The Italians and the Holocaust). Outside Italy, a strong papal condemnation of the Holocaust could have an even greater impact. The Jews of Hungary, for example, were still free at the end of 1943. During the spring of 1944, hundreds of thousands were arrested and deported by Hungarian officials who might have been influenced by the Pope open appeal. Suggestions that the Pope was in some way anti-Jewish and therefore insensitive to Jewish sufferings are reprehensible. The Pope may have shared the prejudices of many Christians against Judaism as religion, but there is no evidence that he did not grieve at the violence and horror of the Holocaust. Charges that he acquiesced for personal fear are equally unworthy and lacking in evidence. A third explanation, that the Pope feared bolshevism that he refused to condemn Nazism, comes closer to the truth. Pope Pius XII was almost pathologically afraid of bolshevism. He loudly condemned Russian aggression against Finland, while ignoring German aggression in Catholic Poland. In Rome itself, he so feared a Communist takeover ton October 19 (1943), three days after the roundup (of the Jews), he actually requested the Germans to put more police on the streets.

28. German police, who would also arrest Jews and, for that matter, anti-Fascist Christians, were the last thing the Romans wanted and needed. But the Pope's anti-bolshevism does not adequately explain his reaction to the Holocaust. In fact, as he decided what to do that terrible October, Pope Pius XII faced several overwhelming problems. He knew that a strong public definition and condemnation to the Holocaust - not only might have saved lives - might cause the Germans to occupy the Vatican and to invade churches and monasteries throughout Italy. In Rome alone, more than 450 Jews eventually hid in the enclaves of the Vatican, while more than 4,000 others found shelter in churches, monasteries, and convents. Many thousands more hid in religious institutions throughout the country. Serious disintegration of German-Vatican relations could place these lives in jeopardy, without necessarily, in Pope's view saving others. Second, the Pope feared that a condemnation of the Holocaust might provoke Nazi reprisals against Catholics in German-occupied countries, as well as even more terrifying persecution of the Jews. While it is difficult to imagine any more ferocious persecutions than that already existing, it must be remembered that Catholic churchmen in several countries had been able to secure temporary exemptions from deportation for converted Jews and the children and the Jewish spouses of mixed marriages. ...he did not want to jeopardize these private arrangements, especially when it remained unclear how many lives his condemnation of the Holocaust might save. Third, Pope Pius XII was concerned about his responsible to preserve and protect an institutions as he was about his moral leadership. He was well aware that Hitler toyed with the idea of establishing a rival papacy in Germany. He knew that the Vatican is completely at the mercy of the German troops occupying Italy. Above all, he had reason to believe that a large majority of German Catholics would reject any papal denunciation of the Holocaust. He feared that a threat to excommunicate Catholics who murdered Jews or to place Nazi Germany under the interdict would result in a large-scale defection of German Catholics, and perhaps it would not have occurred. The point he is that the Pope apparently believed it, and his belief influenced his policy.