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Click on an image to see a larger, more detailed picture.
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| 1943: Death and Resistance |
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pg. 428 |
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SS General Theodor Eicke was commandant of the Dachau concentration camp. Before his death in a plane crash on the Eastern Front on February 16, 1943, he founded and trained the SS Death's Head units and served as inspector general of concentration camps. Second only to Heinrich Himmler in his influence over the concentration-camp system, he ordered that the ironic phrase Arbeit Macht Frei (Work Will Set You Free) be posted in the concentration camps. He sought to make SS men hard and merciless; those who did not fit such criteria were to be sent off "to live in a monastery."
Photo: Ullstein Bilderdienst
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This document calculates the value of work done by prisoners in a Nazi concentration camp. Detailed records weighed the cost of "maintaining" human life against the wealth produced by each individual, which suggests that the concentration camps were principally run as slave-labor operations. Yet, the Nazis' desire to exterminate all Jews often overrode even the most brute sort of economic practicality.
Photo: Muzej Revolucije Narodnosti Jugoslavie / United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Photo Archive
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Peter Bergson (Hillel Kook) led a dissident group of Zionists known in the United States as the Emergency Committee to Save the Jewish People of Europe. During the war the Bergson group placed ads in newspapers and staged theatrical presentations to educate Americans about the "Final Solution." Their willingness to employ sensationalist tactics to rouse sympathy for Europe's Jews was deplored by the conservative leaders of the American Jewish community.
Photo: Corbis-Bettmann U731984ACME>1
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February 13, 1943: Amon Leopold Goeth becomes commandant of the Plaszów concentration camp.
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February 13, 1943: The Jews of Djerba, Tunisia, are forced to pay ten million francs to the German authorities.
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February 13, 1943: The New York Times reports that the Romanian government is offering the Allies Romanian ships to transport 70,000 Jews anywhere the Allies wish. A departure tax to cover the transportation costs is all that is required. The U.S. State Department dismisses the offer. The British Foreign Office rejects the offer, fearing that it is a piece of blackmail that marks the start of Germany and her satellites in Southeastern Europe unloading all of their unwanted nationals (read Jews) on other countries (read the Allies). To Britain, Palestine is out of the question as a destination. The only way to help the Jews, the Allies maintain, is by an Allied victory; See February 16, 1943.
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| 1943: Death and Resistance |
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pg. 428 |
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The Holocaust Chronicle
© 2009 Publications International, Ltd.
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