A Long Delayed Gift For Holocaust Survivors

This next story has a mixture of happiness with heartbreak, as much of the information that is being made available publicly after 60 years, may well have brought families together, if it had been released many years ago. I feel a little bit of pleasure for the victims, and some shame due to my heritage, whenever I read anything about efforts to assist Holocaust survivors in finding what happened to their families. I say only a little bit of pleasure, because they have suffered so much, that empathy brings sorrow with the knowledge that comes from such efforts.
I am very proud of my German heritage (except when it is about the Holocaust), and My relatives in Germany during the War, were for the most part just "Good" Germans who did nothing to help or hinder Jews, some who were soldiers, were just fighting for "their" country, but there was at least one confirmed SS sergeant, in our family, who participated in the killings. It is that bit of family "relations" that makes me feel bad, for not just the murdered, but for the survivors, who lost everything, and everyone, because of the actions of this loathsome person, and by the inactions of my other relatives. And while they were distant relatives I cannot disavow them, while still avowing the ancestry that I do admire, such as Johannes Kepler the Astronomer, whose Kepler's Three Laws of Motion, are still taught in schools.

Anyway~~ on to this interesting story from Yahoo News, which was written by Melissa Eddy of the Associated Press, titled, Lost in the Holocaust: experts plumb newly opened archive~~
A mother and child separated. A father's war wound. An uncle's name on a list.

The unrelated and disparate items are among the discoveries made by 40 Jewish genealogists who spent the past week plumbing a trove of Nazi documents made public after 60 years.

For genealogists of Jewish families, the Holocaust is both a tragedy and a black hole, because so many of the 6 million Jewish victims disappeared without a trace. For years, researchers hoping to fill the gaps have longed to dive into the more than 50 million documents held in this German spa town and entrusted to the International Tracing Service, or ITS.

LINK TO FULL STORY AND RESOURCES

Buchenwald's 70th Anniversary

This is an important story to be READ by everyone, to remember that there was a HOLOCAUST in the former Nazi republic, and that detractor's and liers should be made to understand what happened during World War II.

Therefore I was very pleased that Leaders of the city of Weimar, a cradle of German culture and democracy, vowed Saturday to fight racism and far-right extremism as part of ceremonies marking the 70th anniversary of the opening of the nearby Buchenwald concentration camp.

As part of ceremonies at the camp, where some 56,000 people perished behind its barbed wire fences or in incoming transports, Weimar city council members and survivors signed a statement pledging to honor victims' memories by fighting extremism.

We are aware of our responsibility to keep the memory alive and pass it down from one generation to the next, the statement says.

The Weimar's history is inextricably linked to the establishment of Germany's first democratic republic there and several cultural giants whom it nurtured, including Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Friedrich Schiller, but during World War II its name was tarnished due to its proximity to the Nazi camp.

The Formal ceremonies are to be held at the camp on Sunday, where archivists plan to hand survivors of the camp a memorial book listing, as completely as possible, all those who died at Buchenwald. The book, which contains some 38,000 names is the result of years of painstaking research.

BUCHENWALD

Suffering Did Not End For Holocaust Survivors

There is a must read story on yahoo news about the plight of the Jews who were “freed” from the concentration camps after World War II. The Associated Press has been access to the International Tracing Service in the central German town of Bad Arolsen, which is the repository of 16 miles of shelves, containing documents concerning the Jews and other displaced persons. There is also some 3.4 million names on its’ card index of persons who sought refugee relief.
The story reports that these people were treated just as bad by the liberators , as they had been by the Nazi’s, except as one presidential envoy stated “we are not exterminating them”.
I started reading this story as I like history and It is increasingly difficult to find accurate historical documents, and you cannot read approved history books, because they usually distort history to fit their political beliefs.
Many of these people had to stay in the same camps or other hastily set up camps for another brutal winter, with thousands dying daily from hunger, disease, and exhaustion. They were despairing of their situation and many had lost most or all of their families in the death camps.
The reports states that between 500,000 and a million Germans participated in the extermination of the concentration camp victims fewer than 15% were prosecuted and many received displaced person status and came to America among other countries, while many countries refused to allow them entry. Great Britain refused them entry into Palestine as there was a ban on Jewish immigration to the Israeli-state in waiting. Ireland would not allow unmarried mothers into their mostly Catholic country, others rightfully feared returning to the Soviet controlled nations they were from, many Nazi’s made it through with the truly displaced persons into America and no one really looked into it more closely until 1979 when the Justice Department created the Office of Special Investigations to chase former Nazi’s in this country and has successfully prosecuted 104 cases, but many more need to be resolved.
I hope that this huge archive will be digitized at some time so everyone can access it and see how bad these people were treated during the war and after.
I hope you will read the story and send comments to our elected representatives to perhaps provide funds so that this information can be made available. Just the other day I heard a man on the radio making the absurd comment that there was never a Holocaust and that it was a fairy tale made up to allow Jews to get special treatment when they were trying to form the state of Israel. It is morons like that who are particularly dangerous for they often find weak minded people who will believe this type of “truth”. Whether it be David Duke going to the summit on Holocaust myths in Iran to the skinheads defacing synagogues, or even some evangilist’s who preach that Jews will be punished for having killed Christ, even though he too was a Jew. I guess they missed that part of the bible.
Anyway the point of this is to make sure we do not allow this myth of the Holocaust to take hold. There are fewer and fewer people who fought in World War II and liberated the camps as advancing age and death takes these witnesses from us. The documentation must be protected and disseminated, lest as we see in Darfur, and other nations around the world where history is repeating itself and millions are dying as genocide occurs. There is definitely not enough news coverage of this type of story and hopefully as the AP digs into the archives more reporting will be done and more of that time in history can be understood.
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