The year is 1933 and Hitler’s rise to power is imminent. Days earlier and the Nazis had exploited the burning of the Reichstag, home of the German parliament, for votes.

Armed security forces patrolled public buildings. On the streets,  Sturmabteilung (SA) ‘brown shirts’ had their violence legitimised by decree. Political violence and intimidation, however, did not grant Hitler his parliamentary majority. The March 5 elections gave the Nazi Party 43.9 per cent of the vote and 288 parliament seats out 647.

On March 10, 1933, Dr Michael Siegel visited a Munich police station on behalf a client. Dr Siegel was one of roughly 4,000 Jewish lawyers in Germany. They held senior positions in the court system, bar association and justice ministry. In 1933, racist laws pushed saw many lose their jobs. The indignity of this discrimination was was compounded by further arrests and violence.

Dr Siegel had entered a Munich police station on behalf of Max Uhlfelder, the Jewish owner of a large city-centre store. Nazi Party members had taken positions of office in Munich a day earlier. Heinrich Himmler, the SS commander, now commanded the Police Authority. The Swastika flew atop public buildings. Nazi paramilitaries had smashed Mr Uhlhelder’s shop windows and deported him to Dachau concentration camp.

Instead of listening to Dr Siegel’s complaint, the police assaulted him. SA ‘brown shirts’ had perforated Dr Siegel’s eardrum. The force of their punches had broken several teeth. They had cut his trousers from the knee down.

Dr Siegel was then made to walk the streets of Munich bloody and barefooted. Surrounded by ranks of SA paramilitaries, Dr Siegel wore a sign that read: “I will never again complain to the police”.

Some debate the actual wording of the sign. Dr Siegel had told his children that it read: “Ich bin Jude aber ich will mich nie mehr bei der Polizei Beschweren”(I am a Jew but I will never again complain to the Police).

Heinrich Sanden, the photojournalist who immortalised this humiliation, disagreed. Dr Siegel soon became an international symbol of the antisemitic persecution in Germany. He did not learn of the photo until the 1970s.

Despite the growing climate of antisemitic violence and discrimination, Dr Siegel and his family remained in Munich. He had passport revoked in 1934 and reinstated in 1935. Local farmers warned Dr Spiegel about the impending Kristallnacht on November 9, 1938. He fled to Luxembourg and returned some weeks later, only to lose his legal license. Few Germans protested this flagrant discrimination.

At the start of 1939, the Siegel family left their home and found other accommodation. Their new ground floor served as an emergency synagogue,  the Nazis had razed the city’s main synagogue. Dr Siegel’s 18-year-old son Peter and 14-year-old daughter Beate soon emigrated to England.

Dr Siegel and his wife Mathilde sought asylum in Peru but were rejected. In a remarkable stroke of luck, a student teaching Dr Siegel Spanish was a nephew of the Peruvian Minister of the Interior.

The arduous road to Peru began in 1940. They travelled through Lithuania, Siberia, Russia and Japan before arriving in Peru. Dr Siegel took up work in a Lima bookstore. In the post-war years, he worked to establish an embassy for the Federal Republic of Germany in Peru’s capital, Lima. He soon became the Rabbi of the German-Jewish community in Lima. By 1953, Dr Siegel could again practise law in Germany, despite the geographical difference.

Dr Siegel helped German Jewish refugees in Peru and other parts of Latin America.

In 1971, at the age of 89, he received the Grand Cross of Merit of the German Republic ‘in recognition of his exceptional services to the state and people’. He accepted the award on behalf of all German Jews in Lima.

In spite of his growing age, Dr Siegel never stopped pursuing restitution cases. He died in 1979 at the age of 96.

Dr Siegel never forgot the ordeal he faced in Munich. In  a 1987 article, The Association of Jewish Refugees retold the story of Dr Siegel’s life and journey to Peru.

The authors, H.P. Sinclair and M.B. Green, wrote that Dr Michael Siegel had one thought in his mind: ‘I shall survive you all’. And he did. But according to Sinclair and Green, he bore no grudge against the German people. For he had known “too many decent ones for that“.

The post Dr Michael Siegel: the Jewish lawyer who survived Nazi violence and humiliation on March 10, 1933 appeared first on Religious Reader.

Nationalists marched in Kaunas, a city east of Lithuania’s capitol of Vilnius, to celebrate alleged Nazi collaborators.

Members of defendinghistory.com – a website dedicated to exposing extremism in Lithuania monitored the 16 February march.

The Union of Nationalist Youth of Lithuania organised the march to fall on the anniversary of Lithuania’s declaration of independence in 1918.

Under the banner “We Know Our Nation’s Heroes”were pictures of Adolfas Ramanauskas-Vanagas, Jonas Noreika, Povilas Plechavičius, Kazys Škirpa, Antanas Baltūsis-Žvejas, and Juozas Ambrazevičius-Brazaitis. Individuals accused of direct complicity in the Holocaust or fighting alongside Nazi forces.

The Soviet Union invaded Lithuania in 1940. And within two months had annexed the country. A year later and Lithuania had absorbed Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi tyranny in Poland. This swelled Lithuania’s Jewish population to 250,000 (10 per cent of the population).

Juozas Ambrazevičius-Brazaitis formed a provisional government after Nazi Germany had expelled the Soviets. Nazi Germany had banned the preferred choice of Kazys Skirpa from returning to Lithuania. It lasted for six weeks. Some accuse it of it complicity with the invading Nazi forces. Others would argue that it attempted in vein to restore statehood.

The provisional government had welcomed the Nazi vision for a ‘new Europe’. And its staunch anti-Bolshevism.

Journalist Vidmantas Valiušaitis, however, sought to draw a line between the actions of the provisional government and that of the Lithuanian Activist Front. The antisemitic elements of the latter had denounced Lithuanian Jews as ‘traitors’. And might have been behind the paroxysms of antisemitic violence that began before the arrival of Nazi Germany.

The efficiency of Nazi genocide in Lithuania owes in part to complicity. Lithuanian auxiliaries worked with Einsatzgruppen units to eradicate most Jews in rural Lithuania in August 1941. More than 30,000 of Vilna’s Jews died in Ponar, a wooded area outside the city.

By November of that year, the Nazis had murdered most of the Jews in ghettos of the larger cities. Of the remaining 40,000 or so Jews resided in ghettos. Overcrowding, food shortages, and outbreaks of disease were products of inhumane living conditions.

In response to mass murderer, resistance movements grew across the existing ghettos. In Vilna, Abba Kovner (1918-1988) urged Jews to rise up and fight at a meeting of Zionist youth groups on 1 January 1942. Kovner argued with passion that  “the only reply to the murderer is revolt!” Within weeks of this speech, Zionist youth leaders and Communists formed the Fareynegte Partizaner Organizatsye (United Partisan Organization; FPO).

The FPO had a number of aims: to inspire Jews outside of Vilna to use armed resistance, carry out sabotage and unite resistance groups. Their successes included destroying a German military train and smuggling weapons into the ghetto. They also managed to send emissaries into the Warsaw and Bialystok ghettos to warn them of the genocide.

In 1943, the Nazis cracked down on FPO activities. German police officials threatened to liquidate the Vilna ghetto and its 20,000 inhabitants if they failed to hand over FPO leader Yitzhak Wittenberg. Armed groups within the ghetto had freed Wittenberg from custody but he later turned himself in in light of the group’s decision. He would then take his own life in German custody.

The liquidation of smaller ghettos in other parts of Lithuania took a matter of days to complete. In Švenčionys, in northeastern Lithuania, it took the Nazis and ‘patriot’ collaborators just two days to murder 8,000 Jews. Nazi collaborators saved ammo by smashing the heads of children into trees. Some say the violence had left its own scars upon the trees.

A survivor of this liquidation, Zhenja Gurevich, recalled boarding a train to Kovno. When it arrived at the killing fields of Ponar, many Jews fled into the forests. Gurevich did not escape capture and soon found herself in the Vilna ghetto.

Following the Warsaw ghetto uprising of 1943, the Nazis became more aware of armed resistance in the ghettos. In response, the authority over Lithuania’s ghettos switched to the SS. On 21 June 1943, SS Chief Heinrich Himmler had ordered the liquidation of all ghettos in the Reichskommissariat Ostland. The Ostland was a German civil administration that covered the Baltic states and western Belorussia.

Nazi forces began deporting Jews from the Vilna ghetto to Estonia. Estonian security forces assisted in the arrests and deportations. The FPO gathered around 100 armed members to resist. Some had escaped and reentered the ghetto hoping to inspire a mass revolt that did not arrive. As the spectre of liquidation drew near, their leader Abba Kovner and others escaped. They later joined Soviet partisan missions to liberate Vilna in 1944.

If the complicity of others underpinned genocide, what of Ambrazevičius-Brazaitis? He did sign an order to build a concentration camp and establish a ghetto in Kaunas. Others maintain he was a staunch anti-Nazi upon leaving the provisional government. According to BNS, four members of that provisional government ended up in concentration camps.

In 2012, the deep trauma of the Holocaust re-entered the Lithuanian political debate. The then government had set aside 30,000 litas ($11,000) for the burial and repatriation of Brazaitis. Former Prime Minister Andrius Kubilius had defended this move in spite of understandable outrage from Jewish voices. Kubilius cited a 1975 investigation from US Immigration that absolved Brazaitis of pro-Nazi complicity. A number of liberal intellectuals had condemned Kubilius’s plan.

Up to 95 per cent of Lithuania’s Jews died as a result of the Holocaust. Their Jewish culture, including its own unique dialect of the Yiddish language, was almost lost to the winds of history. Crushed by the racist, antisemitic totalitarianism of Nazi Germany and its complicit allies.

The post Lithuanian neo-Nazi march celebrates Nazi collaborators appeared first on Religious Reader.

Our growing presence on Facebook means our work reaches new audiences daily. This growth benefits our service users who may want to contact us about a case. Or appeal to individuals who remain concerned about anti-Muslim hate.

Growth allows for disagreement and a range of opinions. That is welcome. Hate speech is not.

We recently highlighted how Nazi ideology influences some to dehumanise Muslims in Britain. This generated a great deal of discussion. Some, however, ignored the crux of the article to suggest that Muslims are Nazis. Some compared Islam to Nazism. Others posted Holocaust denial and antisemitic hate speech.
Examples included:

‘muslims are new nazi’s’

‘nothing wrong with nazis‘

‘A bit like islam then‘

‘Still no proof that a single person Jew or Gentile was ever gassed by the Germans’

‘Holocaust did happen.. BUT not 6 million that’s a lie it’s been proven wrong’

‘ISIS are exactly like the Jews only apartheid fake state of Israel’

‘The Nazis waffen ss were the most culturally diverse army of its time. Hitlers respect for other races is well documented.’

‘Nice try K****, I can see right through tour lies. The National socialist party had no problems with other races, they wanted to abolish the corrupt Jewry that was ruining Germany’

‘the national socialists (NAZIs) were not racist’

As an organisation, we’ve always prided ourselves on speaking out against all forms of hate. It remains heartening that some individuals challenged this sort of hate speech.

Our dedicated staff cannot always monitor every comment posted on our Facebook. So we ask our supporters to stay vigilant and continue to challenge hate speech and report it when found.

Reporting hate speech to Facebook remains an easy task if you know how to do it. Make us aware of racist comments via email at info@tellmamauk.org or call us in confidence on 0800 456 1226.

Counter-speech can also be a powerful tool when confronting these abusive comments. It only takes a few working together to challenge online hate speech. Whether it’s reporting abuse or correcting willful distortion – your voice matters.

Together we can help counter those who abuse Facebook’s platform to spread hate.

Come join us online in saying #no2h8 as we extend our gratitude to those who made us aware of the above hate speech. The comments have been removed and reported.

The post Help us challenge hate speech on Facebook appeared first on TELL MAMA.

Our growing presence on Facebook means our work reaches new audiences daily. This growth benefits our service users who may want to contact us about a case. Or appeal to individuals who remain concerned about anti-Muslim hate.

Growth allows for disagreement and a range of opinions. That is welcome. Hate speech is not.

We recently highlighted how Nazi ideology influences some to dehumanise Muslims in Britain. This generated a great deal of discussion. Some, however, ignored the crux of the article to suggest that Muslims are Nazis. Some compared Islam to Nazism. Others posted Holocaust denial and antisemitic hate speech.
Examples included:

‘muslims are new nazi’s’

‘nothing wrong with nazis‘

‘A bit like islam then‘

‘Still no proof that a single person Jew or Gentile was ever gassed by the Germans’

‘Holocaust did happen.. BUT not 6 million that’s a lie it’s been proven wrong’

‘ISIS are exactly like the Jews only apartheid fake state of Israel’

‘The Nazis waffen ss were the most culturally diverse army of its time. Hitlers respect for other races is well documented.’

‘Nice try K****, I can see right through tour lies. The National socialist party had no problems with other races, they wanted to abolish the corrupt Jewry that was ruining Germany’

‘the national socialists (NAZIs) were not racist’

As an organisation, we’ve always prided ourselves on speaking out against all forms of hate. It remains heartening that some individuals challenged this sort of hate speech.

Our dedicated staff cannot always monitor every comment posted on our Facebook. So we ask our supporters to stay vigilant and continue to challenge hate speech and report it when found.

Reporting hate speech to Facebook remains an easy task if you know how to do it. Make us aware of racist comments via email at info@tellmamauk.org or call us in confidence on 0800 456 1226.

Counter-speech can also be a powerful tool when confronting these abusive comments. It only takes a few working together to challenge online hate speech. Whether it’s reporting abuse or correcting willful distortion – your voice matters.

Together we can help counter those who abuse Facebook’s platform to spread hate.

Come join us online in saying #no2h8 as we extend our gratitude to those who made us aware of the above hate speech. The comments have been removed and reported.

The post Help us challenge hate speech on Facebook appeared first on TELL MAMA.

Our growing presence on Facebook means our work reaches new audiences daily. This growth benefits our service users who may want to contact us about a case. Or appeal to individuals who remain concerned about anti-Muslim hate.

Growth allows for disagreement and a range of opinions. That is welcome. Hate speech is not.

We recently highlighted how Nazi ideology influences some to dehumanise Muslims in Britain. This generated a great deal of discussion. Some, however, ignored the crux of the article to suggest that Muslims are Nazis. Some compared Islam to Nazism. Others posted Holocaust denial and antisemitic hate speech.
Examples included:

‘muslims are new nazi’s’

‘nothing wrong with nazis‘

‘A bit like islam then‘

‘Still no proof that a single person Jew or Gentile was ever gassed by the Germans’

‘Holocaust did happen.. BUT not 6 million that’s a lie it’s been proven wrong’

‘ISIS are exactly like the Jews only apartheid fake state of Israel’

‘The Nazis waffen ss were the most culturally diverse army of its time. Hitlers respect for other races is well documented.’

‘Nice try K****, I can see right through tour lies. The National socialist party had no problems with other races, they wanted to abolish the corrupt Jewry that was ruining Germany’

‘the national socialists (NAZIs) were not racist’

As an organisation, we’ve always prided ourselves on speaking out against all forms of hate. It remains heartening that some individuals challenged this sort of hate speech.

Our dedicated staff cannot always monitor every comment posted on our Facebook. So we ask our supporters to stay vigilant and continue to challenge hate speech and report it when found.

Reporting hate speech to Facebook remains an easy task if you know how to do it. Make us aware of racist comments via email at info@tellmamauk.org or call us in confidence on 0800 456 1226.

Counter-speech can also be a powerful tool when confronting these abusive comments. It only takes a few working together to challenge online hate speech. Whether it’s reporting abuse or correcting willful distortion – your voice matters.

Together we can help counter those who abuse Facebook’s platform to spread hate.

Come join us online in saying #no2h8 as we extend our gratitude to those who made us aware of the above hate speech. The comments have been removed and reported.

The post Help us challenge hate speech on Facebook appeared first on TELL MAMA.

Our growing presence on Facebook means our work reaches new audiences daily. This growth benefits our service users who may want to contact us about a case. Or appeal to individuals who remain concerned about anti-Muslim hate.

Growth allows for disagreement and a range of opinions. That is welcome. Hate speech is not.

We recently highlighted how Nazi ideology influences some to dehumanise Muslims in Britain. This generated a great deal of discussion. Some, however, ignored the crux of the article to suggest that Muslims are Nazis. Some compared Islam to Nazism. Others posted Holocaust denial and antisemitic hate speech.
Examples included:

‘muslims are new nazi’s’

‘nothing wrong with nazis‘

‘A bit like islam then‘

‘Still no proof that a single person Jew or Gentile was ever gassed by the Germans’

‘Holocaust did happen.. BUT not 6 million that’s a lie it’s been proven wrong’

‘ISIS are exactly like the Jews only apartheid fake state of Israel’

‘The Nazis waffen ss were the most culturally diverse army of its time. Hitlers respect for other races is well documented.’

‘Nice try K****, I can see right through tour lies. The National socialist party had no problems with other races, they wanted to abolish the corrupt Jewry that was ruining Germany’

‘the national socialists (NAZIs) were not racist’

As an organisation, we’ve always prided ourselves on speaking out against all forms of hate. It remains heartening that some individuals challenged this sort of hate speech.

Our dedicated staff cannot always monitor every comment posted on our Facebook. So we ask our supporters to stay vigilant and continue to challenge hate speech and report it when found.

Reporting hate speech to Facebook remains an easy task if you know how to do it. Make us aware of racist comments via email at info@tellmamauk.org or call us in confidence on 0800 456 1226.

Counter-speech can also be a powerful tool when confronting these abusive comments. It only takes a few working together to challenge online hate speech. Whether it’s reporting abuse or correcting willful distortion – your voice matters.

Together we can help counter those who abuse Facebook’s platform to spread hate.

Come join us online in saying #no2h8 as we extend our gratitude to those who made us aware of the above hate speech. The comments have been removed and reported.

The post Help us challenge hate speech on Facebook appeared first on TELL MAMA.

The story of Jan Karski’s bravery in the Second World War came to life in a recent documentary in his native Poland.

Sławomir Grünberg’s ‘Karski and the Lords of Humanity‘ (Karski i władcy ludzkości), blends archival footage, animation, and interviews to retell a story of wartime heroism.

Born in the Polish city of Łódź in 1914, the youngest of eight Catholic children, Jan Romuald Kozielewski later adopted the nom de guerre of Karski. The city exposed a young Karski to multiculturalism. He found himself living alongside Germans, Jews, Russians and Poles. That exposure to Jewish life created an affinity within Karski.

Academic pursuits helped him join Poland’s diplomatic service. When interning for the foreign minister, he found himself in Nuremberg, Germany. Karski saw the Nazi propaganda rallies in 1933 and the toxicity of Nazi antisemitism. It created a deeper sympathy for their plight and a sense of foreboding.

Other diplomatic assignments brought him to London and Paris.

But the outbreak of war brought a career change as he enlisted in the army in 1939. In a few short weeks, invasions from German then Soviet troops divided Poland.

The Soviets arrested Karski and placed him in a detention camp; but a lucky escape meant he avoided execution. A fate other Polish officers did not escape.

After returning to Warsaw, he joined Poland’s Underground State as a courier. A photographic memory and language skills made Karski a valuable asset.

A courier’s job was to cross enemy lines and liaise between Polish forces and Western allies. But in 1940, while on a mission in Slovakia, the Gestapo captured Karski. Under the pain of torture, and fearing he might reveal secrets, he slashed his wrists and ended up in hospital. Karski was later smuggled out of hospital and able to resume his work.

Against that backdrop, it had taken the Nazis less than a year to enclose Warsaw’s main Jewish areas in barbed wire. The birth of the Warsaw Ghetto in 1940 gave way to first mass deportations of Jews to death camps in 1942.

In that same year, Karski received the most important mission of his life – to travel to England and expose the plight of Jews in Poland.

Before departing, he met with various underground factions, including the Jewish Zionist and the Jewish Socialist Bund movements. The underground leaders informed Karski that the Nazis had deported more than half of the 500,000 Jews inside the Warsaw Ghetto to death camps, where roughly 1.8m had already died. Their final message to Karski was simple: “Our entire people will be destroyed“.

In August 1942, resistance groups smuggled Karski into the Warsaw Ghetto. From inside he observed emaciated Jews struggling to survive. He also posed as a guard at the Izbica transit camp, where he observed the mass transportation of Jews to death camps.

Karski received a hollow key that contained microfilm evidence of genocide in Nazi-occupied Poland. He crossed Europe on local rail networks at a great personal risk before arriving in London.

But others did not welcome Karski’s evidence of genocide. Superior Polish diplomats worried that it would undermine their own appeals for international support.

Worse still was British indifference. In 1943, he met with Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden. Eden had retorted “that Great Britain had already done enough by accepting 100,000 refugees”.

In London, Karski met Szmul Zygielbojm, of the Jewish Socialist Bund, and member of the Polish government in exile, to detail active resistance in the Warsaw Ghetto.

Zygielbojm questioned Karski’s intentions because he was not Jewish. Only after explaining his role as courier for the Jews in Warsaw and their plight did Zygielbojm calm down. He interrupted Karski’s testimony by replying “You’re not telling me anything I don’t already know”.

After arriving London in 1942, Zygielbojm had microfilm evidence of genocide in Nazi-occupied Poland. The information made its way to the Telegraph newspaper – who revealed the use of gas chambers as tools of genocide since 1941.

Yet, in spite of its headline “Germans murder 700,000 Jews in Poland,” the story only made page five of a six-page newspaper.

In 1943, the Allies agreed to a secret conference to discuss the plight of European Jewry in Bermuda. It lasted nine days and began on the same day as the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. The Allies denied the Joint Distribution Committee and the World Jewish Congress entry.

A fog of indifference clouded the conference. Neither government referenced the “Final Solution”. The U.S. government sent a low-level delegation and refused to reduce strict quotas to let in more Jewish refugees. From a British perspective, there was a refusal to aid Jewish migration to Palestine.

The only success was to create a refugee centre in North Africa; but that took more than a year to establish.

Britain and the United States “ruled out the possibility of taking in Jewish refugees from Nazism” fearing that the Nazis would accept.

On 11 May 1943, as the Nazis murdered more than 10,000 Jews to crush the second Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. The Nazis then deported the remaining 56,000 Jews to the Treblinka death camp. The added failure of the Bermuda Conference compounded Zygielbojm’s misery. He took his own life in a final protest against Holocaust indifference.

After the war, Karski spoke about the impact of Zygielbojm’s death.

Karski arrived in the United States in the middle of 1943. He spoke with President Roosevelt (and other officials) of the Nazi’s genocide but their reaction was of disbelief. It took the U.S. government six months to establish the War Refugee Board – to assist those displaced by Axis tyranny.

After the war, Karski settled into a professorship at Georgetown University, in Washington DC (until his retirement in the 1980s). He did not speak about his wartime activities until Claude Lanzmann’s 1985 documentary, Shoah.

Yad Vashem recognised Jan Karski as Righteous Among the Nations in 1984. In 1992, he suffered the tragedy of his wife taking her own life. He married Pola Nirenska, a dancer and choreographer in 1965, the daughter of an observant Jewish father. The Nazis murdered her family.

In 1994, Karski became an honoury citizen of Israel. In his speech he stated:

“This is the proudest and the most meaningful day in my life. Through the honorary citizenship of the State of Israel, I have reached the spiritual source of my Christian faith. In a way, I also became a part of the Jewish community… And now I, Jan Karski, by birth Jan Kozielewski – a Pole, an American, a Catholic – have also become an Israeli”.

Jan Karski died on 13 July, 2000, at the age of 86.

The post Jan Karski: the Catholic spy who warned about the Holocaust in 1942 appeared first on Religious Reader.

The English Defence League: Challenging Our Country and Our Values of Social Inclusion, Fairness and Equality. A detailed report on key leaders within the English Defence League, their funders and those that formulate its strategy. This report is a damning insight into a group that promotes a non-racist image, yet those aligned and linked to it hold views that are openly discriminatory against all Muslims and some speak the same language of the British National Party – the language of exclusionism, of non-equal human rights and of the need to ‘send people back.’ These values go contrary to what our country stands for and what we as a nation are about. We are about Fairness, Freedom, Hard Work, Equality and Social Inclusion. We are a modern Britain and a modern nation born from hard work and fairness!

Please Note:
We would like to clarify that Mark Israel, described in paragraph 4.9. of our report on the English Defence League as “a former volunteer with the Board of Deputies’ Community Security Trust (CST)”, has not been a CST volunteer for many years; and that CST (a separate organisation from the Board of Deputies) has repeatedly condemned the EDL, for example in the following posts on the CST Blog:

• https://thecst.org.uk/blog/?p=555
• https://thecst.org.uk/blog/?p=686
• https://thecst.org.uk/blog/?p=963
• https://thecst.org.uk/blog/?p=1602
• https://thecst.org.uk/blog/?p=1956