National Holocaust remembrance day Netherlands

[pieter]

Amsterdam mayor condemns ‘shameful’ Holocaust and coronavirus comparison

January 30, 2022


Floral tributes at the ceremony. Photo: Robin Utrecht ANP/HH

Amsterdam mayor Femke Halsema has spoken of the shamefulness of comparing the ‘systematic murder’ of Jews, Roma and Sinti to the coronavirus restrictions, in a speech to mark Holocaust Rembrance Day in the Netherlands. It is ‘shameless to equate the coronavirus pandemic with the systematic exclusion and murder of the Jews, Roma and Sinti,’ she said. It is ‘shameless to abuse the Star of David here in Amsterdam on Dam Square for effect, just to get attention.’ Halsema made the comments at the mirrored monument Nooit meer Auschwitz (Auschwitz never again) in Amsterdam on Sunday. This week it is 77 years since concentration camp was liberated. ‘Being fed up with coronavirus, our frustrations and our differences of opinion should not get in the way of our vigilance, and the undeniable fact that we live in freedom and can make choices here and now,’ Halsema said. Some 107,000 of the 140,000 Jews in the Netherlands were transported to concentration camps and 102,000 of them were killed. This year’s ceremony was again low key because of the coronavirus restrictions, and the traditional silent march did not take place for the second year in a row. Last December, judges in Amsterdam ordered far right Dutch politician Thierry Baudet to remove tweets in which he compares the current coronavirus regulations to the Holocaust, and to stop using photographs from the Holocaust to make his point.

Cheers,
Pieter

[pieter]

Folks,

Despite the limited presence of survivors, second and third generations of Dutch Jews, Dutch Sinti and Roma, Dutch political prisoners, and the Dutch LGBTTTQQIAA (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Transsexual, 2/Two-Spirit, Queer, Questioning, Intersex, Asexual and Ally) community the speeches were very strong and moving. Especially of the representative of the Sinti and Roma community, Zoni Weisz, who survived the war as a Sinti child. He lost his mother, sisters and brother, among others. They were transported to the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp and gassed. Zoni Weisz was a very sophisticated and educated speaker at the remembrance ceremony this morning. It was good that with that fact he erased the image of primitive 'Gypsies', the popular name for Sinti and Roma.


Zoni Weisz (born Johan Weisz; 4 March 1937) is a Sinto Holocaust survivor from the Netherlands working in the Dutch floral industry. ( en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoni_Weisz )

Weisz said he survived the war with "the help of a good Dutch police officer" and described the last time he saw his family on the train heading to the extermination camp. "This image will forever be burned into my retina. I was alone, as a child of 7 you lost everything and you fall into an unfathomable deep hole." He called for lessons to be learned from history. "Our task is to create the conditions for minorities to live in security and peace."

With emotion in his voice and in exellent standard Dutch and quite well spoken he told about the terrible fate of Dutch Sinti and Roma in the Zigeunerfamilienlager, Section B-IIe of the Auschwitz II-Birkenau concentration camp, where Romani families deported to the camp were held together, instead of being separated as was typical at Auschwitz. Zoni Weisz spoke about the medical experiments with Sinti and Roma children in Auschwitz-Birkenau.

Weisz was the oldest of four children of Jacoba and John Weisz from Zutphen, Netherlands. In May 1944, the family was ordered by the Nazis to be deported to the Westerbork transit camp with other Sinti and Roma during the Porajmos (Romani genocide or the Romani Holocaust). Zoni made a brief escape with his aunt, but they were quickly found and arrested. They were then deported to the Auschwitz concentration camp.

The rest of his family were sent on a deportation train to Auschwitz, but a Dutch police officer and member of the Dutch resistance put Weisz on a separate train that allowed him to eventually escape to his grandparent's home for the remainder of the war. His mother and siblings were all killed at Auschwitz, while his father was killed at the Mittelbau-Dora camp.

Josef Mengele



Josef Mengele was a physician who worked at Auschwitz, a concentration camp. His research subjects were better fed and housed than other prisoners and temporarily safe from the gas chambers. He established a kindergarten for children who were the subjects of experiments, along with all Romani children under the age of six. The facility provided better food and living conditions than other areas of the camp and even included a playground. When visiting his child subjects, he introduced himself as "Uncle Mengele" and offered them sweets. However, he was also personally responsible for the deaths of an unknown number of victims. Author Robert Jay Lifton describes Mengele as sadistic, lacking empathy, and extremely anti-Semitic, claiming that he believed that the Jews should be eliminated entirely as an inferior and dangerous race. Mengele's son Rolf said that his father showed no remorse for his wartime activities. A lack of regulations on his experiments allowed Mengele to perform his experiments freely.


Josef Mengele, German physician and SS captain. He was the most prominent of a group of Nazi doctors who conducted medical experiments that often caused great harm or death to the prisoners. In November 1943 Mengele became "Chief Camp Physician" of Auschwitz II (Birkenau). Many of those subjected to Mengele's experiments died as a result or were murdered in order to facilitate post-mortem examination.


Josef Mengele, 1943. APMA-B (Archives of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum) Collections


Jozef Mengele with other high ranking SS-officers in Auschwitz-Birkenau

On 10 December 1942, Heinrich Himmler issued an order to send all Romani (German: Zigeuner, "Gypsies") to concentration camps, including Auschwitz. A separate camp was set up at Auschwitz II-Birkenau, classed as Section B-IIe and known as the Zigeunerfamilienlager ("Gypsy family camp"). The first transport of German Roma arrived on 26 February 1943, and was housed in Section B-IIe. Approximately 23,000 Roma had been brought to Auschwitz by 1944, of whom 20,000 died there. One transport of 1,700 Polish Sinti and Roma were killed in the gas chambers upon arrival, as they were suspected to be ill with spotted fever.

Roma and Sinti prisoners were used primarily for construction work. Thousands died of typhus and noma due to overcrowding, poor sanitary conditions, and malnutrition. Anywhere from 1,400 to 3,000 prisoners were transferred to other concentration camps before the murder of the remaining population.

On 2 August 1944, the SS cleared the Gypsy camp. A witness in another part of the camp later told of the inmates unsuccessfully battling the SS with improvised weapons before being loaded into trucks. The surviving population (estimated at 2,897 to 5,600) was then killed en masse in the gas chambers. The murder of the Romani people by the Nazis during World War II is known in the Romani language as the Porajmos (devouring).

One of the few survivors was Margarethe Kraus, who was subjected to medical experimentation and whose parents were murdered. She was subsequently moved to Ravensbruck.

[pieter]

When Rolf Mengele questioned his father, the ‘doctor’ of Auschwitz


Rolf Mengele, the son of SS-Hauptsturmführer (Captain) and physician during World War II, Josef Mengele (1911 – 1979). Josef Mengele is mainly remembered for his actions at the Auschwitz concentration camp, where he performed deadly experiments on prisoners, as a member of the team of doctors who selected victims to be killed in the gas chambers and as one of the doctors who administered the gas.

For his part, Josef Mengele awaited his son’s visit to his hideout in a suburb of Sao Paulo with much anticipation, prepared for the only inquisition in his life. “You wish to have a dialogue,” he wrote to Rolf. “Very well…”

The omens were not promising. In one letter, Mengele told his son: “I do not have the minutest inner desire to justify, or even excuse, any decisions, actions or behaviour regarding my life….my tolerance has its limits.”

Nonetheless, Mengele, now 65 and with little to do except fret about his health, his finances, and post-war Germany, urged Rolf to make his stay a lengthy one. It was not “easy for me to express how much I look forward to that meeting” he wrote.

Mengele’s instructions to the family’s trusted go-between, Hans Sedlmeier, and to Rolf about the secret visit resembled a set of military orders. He insisted Rolf travel on a “dumb man”, his coded reference to a false passport; if at any stage Rolf suspected he was being followed after arriving in Sao Paulo, he was to return to his hotel “to hang around town for a few days”, and then travel back to Germany without coming anywhere near his father.

Mengele asked Rolf to bring with him a Latin-English dictionary, parts for his German electric razor, some tape recordings and copies of two books by the Augustan poet Ovid:Tristia and Epistulae ex Ponto, in which Ovid lamented his eternal exile from Rome, just as Mengele did from Germany.

He also requested a book by his friend “Uli”, Colonel Hans Ulrich Rudel, Hitler’s most decorated Luftwaffe ace who Mengele had befriended in Argentina in the 1950s and who’d just caused uproar in the Bundestag having autographed copies of his book at a Luftwaffe air base.

“Naturally, the whole mob of characterless subservients which nowadays tyrannises Germany tear into him,” fumed Mengele, referring wistfully to the fact that even Israel could now teach Germany a lesson in national pride and military strength. Sadly, replied Sedlmeier, most German bookshops no longer carried “Uli’s” wartime exploits.

Finally, on 10 October, Rolf boarded a charter flight to Brazil armed with his own passport, a false passport which he had stolen from a friend to whom he bore a likeness, and $5,000 in cash for his father from the Mengele family.

Sedlmeier meanwhile sent Mengele a word of warning about how Rolf represented a generation of German youth whose ideology and values were wholly different from his own: “The world, especially here with us, has changed tremendously,” wrote Sedlmeier. “And these changes have passed you by… the preconditions that you take as a basis for all actions and thoughts simply no longer exist. The concepts of the old days, which unfortunately — yes, I use the word ‘unfortunately’ — are no longer valid.”

After spending the night in Rio de Janeiro, Rolf boarded a commuter plane to Sao Paulo, and then took three different taxis before arriving at the house of an Austrian couple, Wolfram and Lisolette Bossert, who had sheltered Mengele for years and were now Brazilian citizens. The final leg of the journey was accomplished in the Bosserts’ old Volkswagen, ending at 5555 Alvarenga Rd, a dusty, potholed street. Rolf said the property resembled “more of a hut” than a house.

The man standing at the gate with tears in his eyes to greet Rolf was a shadow of the “Uncle Fritz” he had met 21 years earlier. “The man who stood before me,” said Rolf “was a broken man, scared creature”. Although they embraced, Rolf felt he was in the presence of a stranger.

Mengele graciously gave Rolf his bed, whilst he slept on the floor. When the questioning began, Rolf adopted a conciliatory but lawyerly approach, getting his father to state his case, drawing out his evidence in chief to inform his cross examination to come. “I told my father I was interested in hearing about his time in Auschwitz. What was Auschwitz, according to his version of events? Did he have a role in the things he was charged with?”

According to Rolf, his father strayed into philosophical and pseudo-scientific verbiage, evading the essential points and justifying his racist views, which included a detailed critique of pre-historic evolution.

Then came Rolf’s cross examination. If his father felt so certain of his ground, why had he not turned himself in? “There are no judges, only avengers,” replied his father.

How could he explain that many crippled and deformed people had brilliant minds? “My father couldn’t give a proper answer to that. He just waffled on and on.”

What precisely was his evidence that some races were superior to others? “Here most of his arguments were sociological, historical and political” said Rolf. “They were quite unscientific.”

Wasn’t such an attempt to categorise races immoral and deeply inhuman? “He knew this was my route into Auschwitz and what he did there. He knew I hadn’t accepted what he’d been saying.”


Children in Auschwitz-Birkenau which were the victims of doctor Jozef Mengele's experiments

In the 14 days that Rolf spent with his father, he learned a lot about him — the fact that he spoke Latin and Greek, that he was mentally alert — and also about his dark side — his mood swings, his talk of suicide, his depression and his temper. But he learned nothing at all about what his father actually did at Auschwitz, beyond his claim that he “had to do his duty, to carry out orders” and that he had “not invent(ed) Auschwitz”.

Mengele explained to his son that the “Selektions” were analogous to a wartime field hospital where doctors had to make near instantaneous decision on who to save and who to let die. “People were arriving infected with disease, half dead,” his father said, claiming to have done his best to save people by selecting “as many able to work as possible”.

Mengele even claimed that “twins in the camp owed their lives to him” and that he “personally had never harmed anyone in his life”.


These are some of the Jewish children subjected to horendous medical experiments at Auschwitz.

Sensing his son’s incredulity, Mengele became angry. “Don’t tell me that you, my only son, believe what they write about me?” he shouted. “On my mother’s life, I have never hurt anyone.”

Rolf said: “These allegations, these facts, left me speechless. I tried to tell him that his presence in Auschwitz alone was unacceptable to me. I was hoping he’d say ‘I tried to get a transfer to the front. I did this; I did that.’” But he didn’t. “Unfortunately, I realised that he would never express any remorse or feeling of guilt in my presence.”

Eventually father and son agreed no useful purpose would be served by continuing the discussion. “There was no point in going on,” explained Rolf. “I had to resign myself to that fact. He did promise to write everything down. He kept saying that if I had time to study what he meant, I might see his point.” But Mengele never did, saying he couldn’t take the risk in case the document one day fell into the hands of the authorities.

Their farewell at Sao Paulo airport was a brief and formal affair, Mengele too preoccupied with his fear that someone might be watching. “We shall try to meet again very soon, all of us,” were his last words. But Rolf knew he would never see his father again. While he had resolved not to turn him in, he had no desire to develop a relationship. A month later, Mengele wrote to his son, thanking him for coming out to see him after so many years’ absence. “Now I can die in peace,” he wrote.

Fast forward 15 months to early February 1979, Sao Paulo’s hottest month. To cool off, Mengele went with his friends, the Bosserts, to a beach at Bertioga. He was in a foul mood, complaining about the heat and his l ife in general. In the late afternoon, he took a dip in the gentle Atlantic waves. Ten minutes later he was fighting for his life. A stroke had paralysed one side of his body. By the time rescuers pulled him ashore he was dead. And there his body lay until darkness fell when the police arrived to take it to the morgue.


Rolf’s first reaction to news of his father’s death was relief. “I basically had a conflict that could never be resolved,” he said. “On the one hand, he was my father; on the other hand, there were these allegations, these horrific pictures of Auschwitz. I was very relived that this solution came about and not another — like maybe a trial, as important as it might have been.”

News of Mengele’s death was kept secret by the family and he was quietly buried under a false name, Wolfgang Gerhard, on a hillside at Embu some 30 miles outside Sao Paulo.

However, in 1985, during a raid on Hans Sedlmeier’s house, the German Federal Police found a letter from Wolfram Bossert. The Brazilian Police were informed and the Bosserts were arrested. Under interrogation, they divulged the location of the grave and the body was exhumed.

On 21 June, Mengele’s bones and his skull were paraded before an eager audience on the 20th floor of the Sao Paulo Police HQ. All the measurements matched those in the meticulous records kept by the SS: his height (174cm), a tell-tale gap between his two upper front teeth, and his broken left finger. “Is there any doubt at all that this is Josef Mengele?” asked a reporter from America’s ABC News. “Absolutely none” replied the forensic odontologist from New York.

As the New York Times commented, Mengele had come to “symbolise the entire Nazi killing project.” And, yes, he eluded justice. Yet, he did serve a sentence of sorts, biding his time in a succession of seedy hideouts, a nasty, embittered, lonely old man, consumed by self-pity and a growing list of painful ailments — knowing his name will forever personify evil.


Hungarian twins Yehudit and Lea Csengeri (above) were among the subjects of brutal experiments by Mengele (below). Ultimately, the girls survived the abuse as well as the war. (United States Holocaust Museum, Courtesy of Yehudit Csengeri Barnea)

[pieter]

Anna Maria (Settela) Steinbach (23 December 1934, Buchten – 31 July 1944) was a Dutch girl who was gassed in Nazi Germany's Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp. Initially identified as a Dutch Jew, her personal identity and association with the Sinti group of the Romani people were discovered in 1994.

Steinbach was born in Heksenberg (now part of Heerlen, in southern Limburg) as the daughter of a trader and violinist. On 14 May 1944, a razzia against the Romani was organized in the whole of the Netherlands.[1] Steinbach was arrested in Eindhoven. That very same day, she arrived with another 577 people in Westerbork concentration camp. Two hundred seventy-nine people were allowed to leave again because although they lived in trailers, they were not Romani. In Westerbork, Steinbach's head was shaved as a preventive measure against head lice. Like the other Romani girls and women, she wore a torn sheet around her head to cover her bald head.

On 19 May Settela was put on a transport together with 244 other Romani to Auschwitz-Birkenau on a train that also contained Jewish prisoners. Right before the doors were being closed, she apparently stared through the opening at a passing dog or the German soldiers. Rudolf Breslauer, a Jewish prisoner in Westerbork, who was shooting a movie on orders of the German camp commander, filmed the image of Settela's fearful glance staring out of the wagon. Crasa Wagner was in the same wagon and heard Settela's mother call her name and warn her to pull her head out of the opening. Wagner survived Auschwitz and was able to identify Settela in 1994.

On 22 May the Dutch Romani, among them Steinbach, arrived in Auschwitz-Birkenau. They were registered and taken to the Romani section. Romani who were fit to work were taken to ammunition factories in Germany. The remaining three thousand Romani were gassed in the period from July to 3 August. Settela Settela Steinbach, her mother, two brothers, two sisters, aunt, two nephews and niece were part of this latter group. Of the Steinbach family, only the father survived; he died in 1946 and is buried in the cemetery of Maastricht.

[karl]

Pieter

This was a very well researched presentation of the interview by Rolf Mengele of his father Josef Mengele. Being it was a true account of the activities of Josef Mengele and his medical experiments using Children as his subjects was both terrible and beyond the scope of understanding let alone to be justified.

Karl