1918 | Although 120,000 Jews fought in the Reich army during the First World War, and more than 12,000 fell on the field of honor or horror of the Great War, they are accused of being responsible for the German defeat. No more, no less.
1919 | The first racist phrases can be heard: The Jews are our misfortune. Anti-Semitic passion is intertwined with Germany’s political debacle and the inflation of a nation emerging defeated from a devastating conflict. Someone has to take the blame: the Jews, those “traitors.”
1922 | Germany’s most influential Jewish politician and foreign minister, Walther Rathenau, is shot dead by members of the Junge Nationale Partei Deutschland. Extremist groups find a large following. These various young parties unite, changing their names to Stosstrupp Hitler München and Nationalsozialistische deutsche Arbeiter Partei.
Despite strong warning signs, many Jews believed in peaceful coexistence with the German people. The Weimar Republic meant a new beginning, a new constitution, and it was hoped that human goodwill would prevail.
Mein Kampf
1926 | Publication of Adolf Hitler’s work, which unambiguously states his objectives. Jews are described as rats, eating the bread of the Arians and spreading serious diseases among the German population. Raten sind zum ausroten Rats are to be exterminated!
Nobody took him seriously. The political class is not wary of this snarling little corporal. It will take him only five years to achieve his sinister goals. In many cities, paramilitary groups are forming into troops. At first, they help the local police to make people feel safe, then they take over from the forces of law and order.
1928 The Nazis win only 2.8% of the vote. Albert Einstein declares that the psychic illness of the masses has swept the country.
1930 | He who kills a Jew does a good deed! And … from now on, I believe I am acting in accordance with the Almighty in defending myself against the Jews, I am fighting for the Lord’s work. These phrases are taken from the hate speeches of Adolf Hitler, who continually points out that he is for the peace and security of the German people.
1932 | To ensure Germany’s security, Theodor Eicke is appointed Sturmbandführer. He is ordered by the Reich Chancellor to form a special troop of 17,000 specially selected young people. These soldiers must renounce all spiritual references, their only faith being in the Führer, to whom they swear loyalty even unto death.
To house the Führer’s opponents, a detention center is built at Dachau in Bavaria. Special troops begin terrorizing the German population and deporting those who resist them.
1933 | In January of that year, Hitler came to power. Three months later, on April1, 1933, the German population was invited to boycott Jewish stores.
In a radio broadcast, pastor and theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer says: Ein Führer kann auch ein Verführer sein ( A guide can also be a seducer). He writes a book in opposition to Hitler’s theses: L’église devant la question juive. The Protestant Church of Germany, Deutsche Christen, invites Protestants to take part in the great hour that has just dawned, and to recognize in the Führer a divine mission entrusted to the church.
The Protestant Church in Germany splits up
– Twelve thousand pastors remain in charge of Deutsche Christen. They accept unconditional submission to Adolf Hitler’s theses.
– Six thousand pastors represent the Confessing Churches of Germany, opposed to any concession between political and religious power. For them, Sola scriptura, Scripture alone, is the supreme authority. The political and philosophical injunctions of the National Sozialisten Deutschlands or the Nazis are not compatible with a spiritual and moral reading of the Bible. In July, these pastors were dismissed from the civil service, which meant they no longer received a salary and lost their apartment.
German intellectuals and university professors disappeared. Several were found murdered. With no news from several friends and his house looted by the Nazis, Albert Einstein decided to flee Germany. After a few months in Belgium, he set sail for America.
Night of the Long Knives
1934 | Various personalities lead the parties in the Bundestag. Several parties have armed militias. They eliminate troublemakers without the slightest scruple. On the night of June 29, 1934, the terrible Night of the Long Knives, Hitler attacks and executes his political allies and friends, General Rhöm and several hundred other leading figures. Two months later, Field Marshal von Hindenburg died. Adolf Hitler and his Kamaraden take over all the important positions of power. A dictatorship was established.
Middle East
The port of Haifa is inaugurated. It allows many ships to dock. A long jetty divides the harbor, protecting ships from wind and waves.
Thanks to new, better roads, road transport expands. Six companies join forces to offer the public a high-quality regional service, and Egged is inaugurated.
Israel inaugurates the Weizmann Institute in Rehovot, a new international center for teaching, research and development in irrigation and agriculture.
On Mount Scopus in Jerusalem, inauguration of the Hadassah medical research center and hospital.
1935 | The Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, through its founder Saïd Ramadan, makes contact with Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem. Together, they organized the Arab uprising in Palestine! Its main aim was to oppose Jewish immigration. They questioned the Balfour Declaration.
Germany
The courageous attitude of Basel theologian Karl Barth is worthy of note: author of the fundamental text of Christian opposition to Nazi ideology, he was stripped of his professorship at the University of Bonn and expelled from Germany for refusing to swear an oath to the Führer.
Not satisfied with controlling the streets and public squares, the Nazis invited themselves into the bedrooms: it was forbidden to have sexual relations with a Jewish man or woman.
1936 | A decree signed by Reinhard Heydrich introduced the yellow star throughout Germany. All Jews had to wear it whenever they went out in public.
SS special troops imprison and deport. Five new detention camps are built: Mauthausen, Sachsenhausen, Buchenwald, Flossenburg (1938) and Ravensbrug (1939). The first victims of Nazism were German! Estimates put the number of Germans deported at thousands.
The November 15 issue of Kommende Kirche, the newspaper of the Catholic Church, states: God sent Hitler to the rescue of the German people. He is God’s spokesman. To help Hitler in his task is to serve God, to sabotage his work is to serve the devil. Bishop of Bremen, Heinz Weidemann,
Middle East
Trouble broke out between Arabs and Jews. Religious issues and questions relating to the holy sites and their exploitation were the cause of friction. Mass immigration was also a bone of contention. To maintain order, England sent 20,000 soldiers to Palestine.
The British, the Mandatory Power in Palestine, held power in the Middle East. Under pressure from the Arab nations, they issued the White Paper limiting Jewish immigration. At a time when they were being persecuted more and more in Germany, when they felt the pincer grip, the Jews could no longer leave for the Promised Land.
Near Lydda, an 800 m. long runway complex is inaugurated. The control tower and hangars are missing. But Lod airport is capable of handling DC4 transport aircraft.
As tensions rise and persecution increases in Europe, so do the numbers of immigrants. Thousands of young people walk clandestinely across Europe to reach the Mediterranean. There, they board illegal immigration boats. The British are trying to stem the flow of refugees.
Jewish persecution
1937 | Jews concentrated in ghettos.
71,000 disabled or psychologically weak people of German nationality are eliminated. They are unworthy of the strong, powerful and healthy Arian race! They are parasites, like the Jews.
For those citizens who were beginning to see the reality of the situation, it was too late to oppose the Nazi regime of terror. The Nazis have seized power, imposing their ideas on the Jews and the entire German population. The text by German pastor Martin Niemöller says it all:
The silence of slippers is more dangerous than the sound of boots!
When they came for the communists, I didn’t say anything, I wasn’t a communist.
When they came for the Jews, I didn’t say anything, because I wasn’t Jewish.
When they came for the trade unionists, I didn’t say anything because I wasn’t a trade unionist.
When they came for the social democrats, I didn’t say anything, because I wasn’t a social democrat.
When they came for me, there was no one left to protest (imprisoned in Sachsenhausen in 1937).
Judeophobia is on the rise in the Arab world. Iraq forbids its Jewish nationals to work in ministries and banks. At the same time, in a total paradox, Baghdad forbade Jews to leave the country. Relations with Palestine and the teaching of Hebrew were banned. Many Nazi dignitaries visited Lebanon, Egypt, Iran, Iraq and Jerusalem.45
1938 | Hatred of Jews grows in the Muslim world. Any Muslim who plunges a knife into the entrails of a Jew secures himself a place in paradise.46 These calls for violence left over 120 people dead in various Near and Middle Eastern capitals, including Beirut, Aden, Baghdad and Damascus.
Tensions are also being felt in Jewish-Palestinian relations in the land of Canaan. Many Arabs forbid their children to attend Jewish-run training centers.
Evian Conference
The Evian International Conference on the Jews, held from July 6 to 14, 1938, was proposed by U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt to help Jews persecuted by the Germans. The meeting was held behind closed doors at the Hôtel Royal in Evian, on the shores of Lake Geneva. 32 countries were present to affirm their refusal to open their ports to German Jews, euphemistically described as refugees. The Australian delegate says: ” In the present circumstances, Australia can do no more… We don’t have a significant racial problem, and we don’t want to import one.
The German press reported on the conference: Jews for sale; even at low prices, nobody wants them. Hitler is quoted as saying: ” It was shameful to see the democracies dripping with pity for the Jewish people, and remaining unmoved when it really came to helping them. “47
Crystal Night
On the night of November 9, 1938, stores and everything else belonging to Jews could be looted, and all shop windows smashed, hence the name Kristallnacht. No police or security agents intervened. Hundreds of synagogues burned down, 7,500 stores were devastated, around a hundred Jews died, rapes were not recorded, but 30,000 Jews were arrested, convicted, mistreated and tortured before being released.
The objective pursued by the organizers of Kristallnacht was to demonstrate the SS forces’ ability to act, or not to act, simultaneously throughout Germany. They are the leaders, the masters of the country.
The lack of reaction from European governments was proof that friends had disappeared. Now it was time to save one’s skin. Thousands of Jews fled, leaving everything behind. Immediately, the Nazis seized buildings and apartments. Some escapees reach the Swiss border via Austria. If they had no family to take them in, the arrested fugitives were turned back towards the border from Swiss territory. A Swiss officer allows around 3,600 to enter the country. Denounced, Captain Paul Grüninger is degraded, tried and dismissed. He says: I did what my conscience asked me to do.48 Thanks to his civic courage, this righteous man prevented many lives from ending up in one Nazi camp or another. Arrested, Paul Grüninger never found an interesting job. He died in 1972, and was not rehabilitated as a righteous man until 1995.
Egypt
1939 | In August, Egyptian President Ali Maher’s cabinet included Germanophile ministers from both the Nazis and the Muslim Brotherhood. Various youth movements, such as the Blue Shirts, a royalist territorial army, and the Muslim Brotherhood’s religious militias, create a riotous atmosphere in Arab cities. They threw explosives into synagogues, looted and massacred, set fire to stores and even tied up Jews to throw them under streetcars. More than 600 Jews were killed.49
The last salute
The liner Saint Louis, with 940 Jews on board, officially left Hamburg in July for the Promised Land. The British refusal to dock forced the captain to change course. He crossed the Atlantic to dock in Havana. Disembarkation forbidden! Even America and Canada refused to welcome the fugitives, closing their doors. Finally, the ship returned to Europe. With the exception of a handful of passengers who had swum away from the galley during stopovers, all found themselves in Europe. With the exception of six, they end their days in the death camps of Germany.
The war
From the start of the invasion of Poland on September1, 1939, Nazi death squads, the Einsatzgruppen, massacred Jews by the hundreds of thousands. To avoid wasting the ammunition needed for combat, the Nazis designed coaches that released exhaust fumes into the passenger compartment. All along the route, with doors closed and windows shielded, the passengers suffocated by absorbing carbon monoxide. Corpses are unloaded along the roadside.
As soon as the Soviet Union was invaded, extermination techniques had to become more effective. In large cities, the population was rounded up to receive food vouchers. Jewish-sounding names were invited to join the left-wing group. They receive picks and shovels for community service. During the excavation work, the Einsatzgruppen rape the girls and women, who undergo numerous passes before going to their deaths. Once the pit has been dug, the innocent victims line up to be shot, their bodies falling into the hole.
The Shoah
1940 | The entire Waffen SS consists of 17,000 young men sworn to the Führer. Armed with rifles, machine guns and revolvers, they hunted down and killed the Jews. For three and a half years, day and night, their only task was to exterminate them. The aim of Hitler and his officers’ Final Solution (Endlösung der Juden Frage) was to eradicate the Jews not only from Germany, but from all conquered countries. A vast administrative organization was set up. Ghettos were built, concentration camps and extermination camps with crematoria were set up, and transportation was organized, with the ultimate aim of exterminating a people: all the JEWS. This operation became known as the Shoah (Hebrew for catastrophe).
The SS Charlemagne Infantry Brigade was made up of 7,300 French volunteers, led by officers from the French military academy of St-Cyr. The result of the Vichy government’s shameful armistice with Nazi Germany.
The infamous bargain
With the Jews, we have to make money for the Reich. This was the idea of a senior officer, who called the president of Berlin’s Jewish communities. For a certain sum of money, he offered to allow Jews to leave freely for Palestine! Shocked at first, the Chief Rabbi hesitated, asking which Jews? The ones you choose,” replied his interlocutor. Given the disastrous situation, he decided that the community would pay so that the young people could leave. And so it was that some 1,500 young people were saved, boarding two ships in Vienna bound for Eretz Israel via the Black Sea, and arriving at their destination.
The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem at Hitler’s house
On several occasions, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem traveled to Germany to meet the Führer. The Führer equipped him with weapons, but above all with powerful radios. The Mufti’s legion was mainly involved in sabotage and espionage. The Grand Mufti wanted to buy troops called Die Arabische Wehrmacht. But Germany’s main need was to know the movements of British troops in Egypt and Iraq.
It is estimated that the Nazi Muslim Legion numbered around 24,000 soldiers and officers. The Handschar division numbered 20,693 men and the Kama mountain section 3,400. They fought in the Balkans, Greece, Turkey and the Urals.
To reinforce the Eastern Front, 1,400,000 Iranian, Iraqi and Syrian volunteers join the German army.
1941 | From September 29 to 31, 1941, over 33,000 Jews were murdered in a suburb of Kiev. The Babi Yar massacre was an infamy. German army cameraman Willy Wolf protested against the bestiality of his fellow citizens, who acted as if they had no wives or sisters. He was degraded, imprisoned and sent back to Germany. Sentenced, he waited to be shot by a firing squad. During an Allied bombing raid, a bomb breached his cell, enabling him to escape. According to his testimony, he said: ” God even directs bombs.
Despite the heavy secrecy imposed by the Germans around the Final Solution, information was circulating in occupied Europe, not least thanks to Swiss diplomats. For example, Franz Rudolf von Weiss, Berne’s Consul General in Cologne, was one of the first, along with René de Weck, Swiss diplomat in Bucharest, to sound the alarm: ” The treatment meted out to the Jews of Eastern Europe exceeds all description“.50
1942 | This is the year of the great massacre that will see several million Jews disappear in the flames of catastrophe, the Shoah.
The Nazis thought they had kept their final solution to the Jewish question a closely guarded secret. At the end of July 1942, with the gas chambers of the extermination camps in Poland in full swing, the terrible information was disclosed by German industrialist Eduard Schulte.
Gerhart Riegner, representative of the World Jewish Congress in Switzerland, learned of this on August 1, 1942, one day before he sent his famous telegram to the World Jewish Congress in New York and to the American and British consulates in Geneva. In it, he explained that the Nazis had a plan to exterminate all three to four million Jews in the occupied countries at once, after deportation and concentration in the East. Those concerned were warned, but did not believe it! Two years later, Rudolf Vrba, hero of Je me suis échappé d’Auschwitz (I escaped from Auschwitz ), vehemently warned again, but was generally met with the same incredulity. Nevertheless, the authorities at least began to be made aware of what was going on. The debate continues to this day as to whether everyone really knew…
Like a well-thought-out, organized machine, the horror of horrors works. Every night, every day, trains carry men, women and children to death camps, where they are exploited, abused and killed. 51
Rome’s silence
1943 | They resist the Nazis’ inhuman orders with conviction, welcoming, caring for and saving fellow Jews. Having acted in accordance with their beliefs, they opposed the Brown dictatorship. More than two thousand priests, parish priestsand pastors paid with their lives for obedience to God rather than to men.52 At the end of 1942, priests, parish priests and parishioners were waiting for a courageous and official reaction from their spiritual authority, a word from the Pope condemning the German exactions. Not a word, not a hint, not at Easter, not at Christmas 1943. Disillusionment for many parishioners.
Despite the softness of the official church, local believers and spiritual leaders often act with courage and dedication, at the cost of their own lives.53 Papal cowardice and that of the entire Catholic hierarchy, which has never condemned Nazi actions, is felt as a betrayal of the essence of the faith, not only by Jews, but also by Protestants, Evangelicals and many Catholic believers!
The Warsaw Ghetto
As soon as Poland was conquered, the Germans forced Jews to wear a yellow star and live in the Jewish streets of central Warsaw. In 1940, the Germans designated this area as an epidemic and contagion zone. To prevent contact with the rest of the population, the district was cordoned off by 18 kilometers of meter-high walls and barbed wire. 440,000 Jews lived in the ghetto, awaiting deportation to the Arbeitslager (labor camps). By 1942, 6,000 to 8,000 Jews were leaving the ghetto every day for the gas chambers.
The young people refused and organized resistance. They rose up in January 1943. Hitler ordered the destruction of the ghetto. The 1,100 Jewish fighters, aged 13 to 23, held out for four months against 2,100 well-armed Wehrmacht soldiers. 13,000 people died of starvation, in the fighting or in collapsed buildings. Armored tanks systematically set fire to and destroy house after house. The commitment of the Jews was exemplary, especially in the midst of a cruel famine. For three weeks, water and sugar were their only sustenance. All refused deportation, preferring to die with dignity. On May 16, 1943, the fighting stopped, the ghetto was annihilated, and Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler sent a telegram to Führer Adolf Hitler with the words: Warschau ist judenrein Warsaw is cleared of Jews.
Switzerland in turmoil
1944 | The country is completely surrounded by Axis forces. Swiss authorities were divided on the best course of action. For some, taking in Jews and fugitives meant incurring Hitler’s wrath, or even risking a German invasion. For others, it’s a matter of taking in these poor, hungry and often sick people. Numerous citizens defied the bans imposed by the authorities, giving of their lives, their money and their time in an exemplary commitment:
From 1939 to 1945,
295,381 people will cross the border into Switzerland and find refuge there.
– 103,869 internees, deserters, prisoners of war and escapees.
– 55,018 civilian refugees / including 21,588 Jews
– 9,909 emigrants / including 6,654 Jews
– 59,785 foreign children
– 251 political refugees
– 66,549 border residents temporarily accommodated, until the battle is over.
Some, having received the necessary care, food and strength, left the country. Nearly 28,000 Jews were taken in until the end of hostilities.54
A Swiss diplomat distinguishes himself by saving 62,000 Jews from extermination. The ambassador in Budapest, Carl Lutz, gave Swiss passes, saving many people from the extermination camps. With simple permits and the courage to confront SS officers, including Adolf Eichmann himself, Carl Lutz committed himself to saving lives. What an example! During his lifetime, this Swiss ambassador never received the honors he deserved.
Switzerland is accused of washing the dirty gold of Nazi victims. The BIS International Yield Bank is located in Basel. It handles transactions between central banks. Through its director Mc Kittrick, the BIS is the financial interlocutor between the Berlin Reichsbank and other international financial institutions. It is the BIS that organizes the transport of gold. …These transfers were paid for in looted gold. They then enabled the Basel bank to credit its shareholders with a dividend in regular, honest Swiss francs. A veritable Nazi gold-laundering operation.55 It was the Reichsbank’s second-in-command, Emil Puhl, … who received the gold taken from the victims of the death camps, kept the sordid accounts and melted it down into ingots mixed with commercial gold.56
The end of hostilities
1945 | In his speeches, Führer Adolf Hitler always spoke of peace and said he was acting for security! On May 8, 1945, the Second World War came to an end. The result was a Germany transformed into a gigantic field of ruins, a battered Europe and a desolate world.
Balance sheet
– 40 million civilians died
– 20 million soldiers died.
– 15 million injured.
– 2 to 3 million orphans
Christian victims of Nazism 1933-1945
A Protestant figure of resistance to the ideology of the German dictatorship, Dietrich von Bonhoeffer was executed on April 9, 1945, hanged in the Flossenburg camp in Bavaria. Hitler hated not only Jews, but Christians as well, and the latter also paid a heavy price as victims of Nazism.
Martin Niemöller, will survive seven years in camp! His phrase, The silence of slippers is more dangerous than the sound of boots, went around the world. More than 140 pastors died in indifference and solitude. But all remained faithful to their spiritual conviction, unafraid of the one who kills the body.
Other martyrs of the German Confessing Church
– Hans von Dohnányi, born in 1902 in Vienna and executed on April 8 or 9, 1945 at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp.
– Carl Goerdeler, born in 1884, executed on February 2, 1945 in Plötzensee prison,
– Paul Schneider, born 1897, died July 18, 1939 at Buchenwald.
Catholic clergy
– Erich Klausener, Düsseldorf January 25, 1885 – Berlin June 30, 1934
– Father Kolbe, who died in Auschwitz on August 14, 1941. He had taken the place of another condemned man, a family man.
– Gabriel Piguet, born 1887 in Mâcon, died July 3, 1952 in Clermont-Ferrand, was Bishop of Clermont-Ferrand. Imprisoned at Strutthof and Dachau. He was awarded the Righteous Among the Nations medal by Yad Vashem on June 22, 2001.
– Bernhard Lichtenberg, born in 1875, prelate of Berlin, died on November 5, 1943, in unexplained circumstances.
– Clemens August von Galen, 1878, died in Münster on March 22, 1946.
And many thousands of unknown evangelical men and women faithful to their God. All of them helped Jews, orphans, people in distress. In one way or another, they all opposed the dictatorship of Nazi hatred.
The survivors
The sight of the concentration camps presented to the soldiers of the liberating troops did not leave anyone indifferent. Some soldiers faint before the horror of piles of bodies, prisoners quickly executed by the guards before fleeing. Heaps of human flesh under which survivors cry out for help. Thousands of people, skeletal but alive, sick and starving, haunt the premises. An Allied command center receives this message from the officer who discovered the Buchenwald deportation camp: ” There are no words to describe the horror my unit has just discovered.
Death toll in concentration camps
| 5’913’300 | Jews, including 1.5 million under the age of 16, |
| 1’745’000 | political prisoners, Soviet prisoners, terrorists, opponents, saboteurs, airmen. |
| 470’000 | gypsies, |
| 255’000 | forced laborers from various countries |
| 71’000 | disabled |
| 16’000 | psychiatric cases and homosexuals |
| 3’000 | evangelicals, Bible students, Jehovah’s witnesses |
| 2’300 | Protestant pastors and members |
| 1’900 | Catholic clergy |
| 8’477’500 | died in the various camps + all the unknowns. |
The 433,000 surviving Jews, sick and emaciated, required immediate and intensive care. 80,000 died as a result of the deportation, because they were too weak and too ill, and help arrived too late. Allied doctors, the Geneva Red Cross and its organization of thousands of committed and dedicated nurses, doctors and volunteer educators provided exemplary care for these traumatized camp survivors.57
The return
Barely back on their feet, the Displaced Persons (survivors of the Shoah) are asking themselves the question: where to go? Many Jews are returning to where they grew up and lived before their arrest and deportation. What could be more normal? They hope to meet another surviving family member or friend. Disillusionment!
If the house has not been destroyed by bombing or fighting, it is occupied by other families. A quarter century of anti-Semitism doesn’t disappear overnight. Even neighbors, recognizing one or other Jew, chase them away. These rats must not be allowed to return to the Germanic population.
Discussion is impossible. Those who turn to their city’s authorities are rejected, as they have no formal papers to back up their words. The town clerk was a Nazi, he can no longer be one outwardly, but inwardly nothing has changed. The same goes for the judicial authorities. Two decades of primary racism against Jews cannot be erased in a few months. It will take decades of education for anti-Semitism to disappear, or at least diminish.
The worst rumors circulate. To survive, Jews drink the blood of children. An anti-Semitic heresy that has survived the centuries, even though the Torah given by Moses 3,500 years ago forbids the consumption of blood! In July 1946 in Kielce, 42 Jews liberated from an extermination camp were massacred for this reason.
For tens of thousands of Jews, having survived the horror of the camps, the illusion of a return to their former lives is over. Without papers, without proof, they cannot assert their rights, their heritage is ignored. They live in the impossibility of anyone doing them justice. Alive but starving, poor, without dignity, without rights and stateless: this is the appalling second death of the deportees!
That same year, Saïd Ramadan founded the Arab armed wing of the Muslim Brotherhood movement in Palestine, with the aim of fighting the Zionists and preventing Jewish immigration.