Category: Jerry’s Blog and Articles

Written by Jerry Elman, May 10, 2023

Forgiveness is a complex issue that we all face throughout our lives. The situations and magnitude of the harm or hurt make the question even more complex. Things happen daily. We forget something we promised. A breakup. Emotional hurt. Cheating. Stealing. Lying. Abusing. Road rage. Raping. Robbing. Physical harm. Killing. The list can go on forever! These are the things that individuals do that hurt other individuals. The magnitude and impact can be all over the map.

Then there are organizational things. Cruel jokes and pranks. Harassment and bullying. Abuse of children. Bullying. Sexism, Racism, and hate of others within the organization because they are different. Lower pay for women. Promotions only for white men (or only for white Christian men). Organization politics. Organizational norms that are unfair, unjust, and even cruel. Religious organizations that violate their values and practice hypocrisy. A leadership team or board that looks the other way when crimes are committed, or employees are mistreated or harmed. A corporate board lets a CEO destroy a company, impacting tens of thousands and an entire community, and then adds to the injustice by paying the CEO a huge “golden parachute.” This stuff happens every day to lots of people.

Then there are systemic things within society at large. Systemic Racism, Sexism, and hate of others who are different. Policing that creates the fear of being pulled over and shot because you are Black. A legal system that applies differently depending on who you are. Education, healthcare, and other systems that apply to people differently because of who they are. Hunger and lack of housing for those who are the most vulnerable. Voting rights apply differently depending on who you are. Others control the body of someone they don’t even know. You can only read books approved by others. Again the list can go on!

Then add war, genocide, and the Holocaust! How can forgiveness apply in such horrors and mass killings of people? How can anyone expect Ukrainians to forgive and forget as their families and entire country get destroyed? Even when there is peace, how can they ever forgive the Russians?

As a Second Generation Holocaust Survivor, I have lived with the question of forgiveness all my life. For most Holocaust survivors, the question of forgiving the Nazis and their collaborators was always a non-starter. How do you forgive people who deliberately destroyed your family, town, country, and people? How do you forgive all you endured to survive? How do you forgive ghettos, slave camps, and death camps? Gas chambers and incinerators? For most Holocaust survivors, it was a cruel question even to ask. “Do you forgive the Nazis? “Most responses were no, let them burn in hell!” And that was a kind response!

Those who did not experience the Holocaust or have family connections to those who did are often shocked at the refusal to forgive, especially after all these years. Religion is one of the biggest drivers of unconditional forgiveness. People are judged as not being “good” if they don’t forgive.

But shouldn’t the focus be in reverse? Shouldn’t there be accountability for what the Nazis did? Shouldn’t individual Nazis show remorse, do something to make the world better, and earn forgiveness? Not just for the Holocaust but for any injustice.

Our society looks down on any emotional response to being wronged or harmed. To express anger and not forgive is looked down upon. To be sad and cry is also looked down upon. But humans are emotional beings. Not expressing our feelings and emotions is dishonest and unhealthy in many ways. Society views “strong people” as those who suppress their emotions. So silence is the acceptable response. And when horrible things happen in our society, that is the typical response, silence. And then we question why everyone is silent! Crazy shit!

Then add to this craziness that there is hypocrisy when it becomes personal and not someone else. Then it ok for “me” to be angry at others, but others better not dare to be angry with me if I do something to wrong them!

We all go through this. Someone screws us over, and they then project and reverse things where they get pissed because we are pissed at them! How dare we! Reversing things is most common in abusive or harassment-based relationships. (Abuse or harassment can be physical, mental, financial, or a combination. The perpetrator blames the victim in these relationships, and the abuse worsens.

Meanwhile, the media and our society love stories of forgiveness. Holocaust survivors forgiving Nazis. Rape victims forgiving rapists. Black families forgiving the white murderers of their children and siblings. Parents and victims forgiving clergy who molested their children. An employee forgiving a boss who harasses or bullies them. A family member who forgives another family member for stealing from them. A woman forgiving her partner who who keeps beating her. People forgiving the very people who spew hatred against them because of their color, sexual preferences, or religion.

I want to point out that there is a big difference between anger and hate. Anger is justified and deserves acknowledgment and respect. Hate consumes people and is destructive to everyone. We all can cross that line and must pull ourselves back when we do.

Again, I am not saying that no one should ever forgive the person who harmed or wronged them unconditionally. People should have free will. If forgiveness is healing for them, it’s not on any of us to tell them they’re wrong. However, it is on us to tell each other that celebrating these forgiveness stories can be a feel-good choice that mutes our obligation to look hard at what needs to be fixed in our world, organization, business, house of worship, family, etc.

When employees are mistreated by those who hold power over them, forgiveness is not warranted until the employer takes action to acknowledge the mistreatment and fix the situation. When someone is a victim of domestic violence and abuse, that should be a crime with criminal system consequences. But the system does not work that way. The victim does not owe their abusive partner forgiveness unless they own up to their problem, seek help and overcome it.

When bad cops mistreat Blacks, forgiveness will not drive the systemic change needed to stop the mistreatment and killing. Anger drives change and is justified for those who choose the path of anger to drive that systemic change. Note that I am talking about anger as being justified, not violence! Violence just makes people no different than the bad cops! Violence is destructive to all, just like hate.

When Brandt Jean, the brother of Dallas police shooting victim Botham Jean, told his brother’s killer, former police officer Amber Guyger, that he forgave her and hugged her in the courtroom, the media celebrated.

But when a relative of a murdered Black person reacts with anger instead of hugs and biblical sentiments, the public response is often furious. For example, after the New York City police officer who killed Eric Garner with an illegal chokehold apologized, a reporter asked Garner’s widow, Esaw, whether she forgave him. She responded, “Hell, no!” A national news headline accused her of “Lashing Out at the Cop.” But that “Hell, no” was completely justified. Anger in the face of injustice is warranted. That anger is a demand for justice and change!

If anger can help us understand our place in the world and drive us to better the world we occupy, then anger serves a positive purpose. The most important feature of anger, properly directed, is the recognition that a wrong has occurred that needs to be fixed. To the extent that one’s anger motivates one to right wrongs, anger can be the correct tool for achieving justice.

Anger is also tied to self-respect. Anger recognizes that one deserves just treatment. Anger demands just treatment

Eva Mozes Kor, a Holocaust survivor who, in 2015, very publicly forgave a Nazi, has been celebrated as a hero. She was among the many pairs of Jewish twins upon whom Dr. Josef Mengele did terrible medical experiments.

Fifty years after the Holocaust, she connected with a Nazi doctor who’d worked at Auschwitz. At her urging, he wrote a letter of apology; she then wrote him a letter of forgiveness. A short BuzzFeed video about her has been viewed almost 200 million times. How noble! How marvelous!

Kor, who’d long spoken to schools and synagogues about the Holocaust, decided that for the 50th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, she wanted to reach out to a former Nazi doctor she’d seen in a documentary that she’d also appeared in. She said she wanted him to write that letter as proof to future generations that the Holocaust was no myth or exaggeration.

The doctor did as she asked, writing, “I am so sorry that in some way I was part of it. Under the prevailing circumstances, I did the best I could to save as many lives as possible. Joining the SS was a mistake. I was young. I was an opportunist. And once I joined, there was no way out.”

This was a terrible apology. It doesn’t take responsibility. It doesn’t offer specifics (“in some way, I was part of it”). It offers excuses (“I did the best I could” and “I was young”). The doctor did have a choice. Other “young” (and even old) people joined the resistance, hid Jews in their basements and attics and barns, and even elected to stand by passively without actively taking steps to join the Schutzstaffel, the top-tier political soldiers of the Nazi Party, as this doctor did.

Kor, however, was happy with the apology. And if she was happy, who are we to argue? Forgiveness is a choice. But the media and the world celebrated her forgiveness. While Kor was now happy, other survivors were mortified. Many were then also approached to forgive. They refused. Were they wrong to refuse? I say no, they were not!

A decade later, Kor also forgave Auschwitz’s accountant. (he counted the killing, not just the money!) She publicly held his hand and graciously allowed him to kiss her cheek. She wrote a book, The Power of Forgiveness, which came out in 2021 (she died in 2019, but a colleague finished it in her name). In the book, she describes her healing process: She wrote down all the bad words she wanted to say to Dr. Mengele, and once she ran out of words, she realized she’d also run out of anger; she was able to forgive. She decided to write a letter.

“I, Eva Mozes Kor, a twin who as a child survived Josef Mengele’s experiments at Auschwitz fifty years ago, hereby give amnesty to all Nazis who participated directly or indirectly in the murder of my family and millions of others.

I extend this amnesty to all governments who protected Nazi criminals for fifty years, then covered up their acts and covered up their cover-up.

I, Eva Mozes Kor, in my name only, give this amnesty because it is time to go on; it is time to heal our souls; it is time to forgive, but never forget.”

She asked the United States, German, and Israeli governments to stop investigating Nazis and to open all their files to survivors so they could perhaps read about what had been done to them and learn useful information for their medical records. (Her twin, who had also survived, had terrible health problems; it would have been helpful to know what substances had been injected into her body.)

Kor read the following out loud on the ramp to the gas chambers at Auschwitz:

“I am healed inside. Therefore, it gives me no joy to see any Nazi criminal in jail, nor do I want to see any harm come to Josef Mengele, the Mengele family, or their business corporations. I urge all former Nazis to come forward and testify to the crimes they have committed without any fear of further prosecution.

Here in Auschwitz, I hope in some small way to send the world a message of forgiveness, a message of peace, a message of hope, a message of understanding.”

The press and public ate this up. But just as the footage of Brandt Jean hugging and forgiving his brother’s killer dismayed plenty of Black people, Kor’s actions again horrified many other Holocaust survivors.

As Holocaust scholar Deborah Lipstadt (now President Biden’s Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Antisemitism) noted, “I watched them grimace as audiences gave her standing ovations and the media described her as someone ‘who found it in her heart’ to forgive, the implication being that survivors who did not follow her lead were unable to rise above their resentment. Survivors told me they felt they were being depicted as hardhearted, while Kor was being celebrated as the hero, someone bigger than they.”

In her book, Kor says she did her forgiving in her own name only … but calling for amnesty for Nazis can’t be considered acting merely for herself. “I know that most of the survivors denounced me, and they denounce me today also,” she says in the video. “But what is my forgiveness? I like it. It is an act of self-healing, self-liberation, and self-empowerment. All victims feel hopeless, feel helpless, feel powerless. I want everyone to remember that we cannot change what happened … but we can change how we relate to it.”

This is true. In the book, Kor elaborates on how forgiveness made her “free to discover that she had power over her own today and tomorrow, again and again. It hurt no one. It doesn’t hurt me. And it is free. Everyone can accomplish it.” She then adds, “Also, there are no side effects. It works. But if you do not like feeling like a free person, it is possible to return to your pain and hatred anytime.”

Again, our addiction to these narratives of forgiveness is problematic because these narratives enforce the status quo. They make us feel better about a world rife with inequality and injustice.

Kor’s statement was fine until that last sentence … which is judgmental and dismissive. Kor’s strategy of writing a letter to someone who harmed you, calling them all kinds of names, and then never sending the letter could work beautifully for some people. But her insistence that it will work for everyone is very simplistic.

To a woman who was raped and found it impossible to forgive her rapist, Kor suggested, “Write the letter again. And again. There’s no limit. Maybe you need to write it ten times, maybe 20. You might even need to write 100 letters.”

But couldn’t doing this also prove more hurtful than helpful to many trauma survivors? Is the expectation of accountability, remorse, and change before forgiveness wrong and unreasonable?

Many people admire Kor and find her generosity of spirit beautiful because of the belief forgiveness leads to a just world. What gets overlooked is that only accountability, consequences, and change lead to a just world. The status quo leads nowhere new or different!

My mother lived her life angry and bitter. Forgiving would have never changed that. Forgiving would have never brought her family and past life back. Forgiving would not have fixed her depression and PTSD. She wanted justice and accountability. She wanted to get her teen years back. She wanted the hate of Jews to end. She wanted to be treated with dignity and respect as an immigrant in a new country who spoke with an accent. An expectation that she forgive would have made her mental state even worse.

My father, my most important mentor, told me forgiveness is important if forgiveness is earned, whether it be the Holocaust or even a small injustice in anyone’s life. But to forgive when it is not earned only tells those who wronged you that they can get away with it with no consequences. And that, over time, leads little injustices to grow into big ones. And they keep growing until accountability is demanded and obtained or something huge and horrible happens.

My parents did forgive many people associated with the Holocaust and in their subsequent lives. But that forgiveness was earned by accountability and change. There were many people they never forgave accordingly.

I have forgiven most of the people who hurt me in numerous ways. They were people who owned up to what they did and then improved the situation or world. I don’t waste my time on those who refuse to be accountable or at least meet me halfway. But I will check in occasionally with these people to let them know I am still here, angry, and still expect accountability. That is not going away. “Never Forget” applies to a lot of things.

The bottom line is that silence and forgiveness without accountability and change will not improve the world for anyone. That is when history usually repeats itself for us as individuals and society.

Blog 23-7, written by Jerry Elman

Second Generation Holocaust survivors hold a special place in the world. Yet few of us have ever felt that way. So many of us have lived lives believing the exact opposite.

The horrors our parents lived through are in our DNA. The many relatives we never knew and never had the opportunity to grow up with left a deep hole in our development and the family support structure we needed.

So many of us grew up having conflict with a parent or even both parents, which we never understood. Some of us grew up feeling we were not loved. Many of us grew up with guilt we never understood. Many of us felt a need to be our biggest critics and believed we needed to be more than perfect at everything we did! We always felt we were being judged and held to a high standard that was so hard to achieve. Many of us were held to low standards because our self-esteem was lost.

We suppressed our feelings growing up with all this baggage. We did not understand. And by the time many of us did understand, our parents were gone before we could have that important “discussion” with them. They did not have closure with their parents, and we did not have closure with them!

Today, most of our parents have passed away. Much of their stories may still be unknown. Their families are unknown. Their hometowns and heritage are unknown. We have few pictures, and many pictures we do have may contain people we still can not identify. All we know is they were a family member or friend who perished. Many of these pictures have Yiddish written on the back, which will tell us all about the picture if translated.

I had the opportunity to find my parents’ stories—at least a big part of it. Even with my book, so many of their stories remain unknown. I know little about my family members who perished in the “Shoah,” the Hebrew reference to the Holocaust.

Since writing my book, I have spent considerable time researching the bigger picture of the Shoah and how an entire nation (Germany) mobilized all its government and industrial resources to kill people in numbers that remain unimaginable even today! How other nations worldwide were, at a minimum, silent and, at a maximum, active participants in the killing.

I have discovered facts and information of horrors even many survivors did not know had taken place. The story of the Shoah gets worse the more you dig into it.

One would think that the more I learn about the horrors, the more depressed, sad, or guilty I would feel. At first, I feared that. That is probably why it took over 30 years for me to gain the courage to do it.

And the result is I feel stronger emotionally. My self-esteem is the strongest it’s ever been. And I feel free of something that held control of me most of my life.

I have also realized something I never thought about before. My brother and I were born out of the ashes of the destruction of our families. We were born out of the horrors our parents endured. And we had the opportunity to live our lives as Jews!

Despite all the efforts of Hitler, the Nazis, the German war machine, and the collaboration of much of the world to annihilate all the Jews in the world, our parents survived, and we are here. Hitler did not survive. The Nazi killing machine was destroyed. The world rebuilt. Israel was born. And we are here as Second Generation Survivors born and living our lives despite all of Hitler’s efforts to prevent our existence from ever happening.

We were not supposed to be conceived. We were not supposed to be born. We were not supposed to have lived on this earth! Yet here we are!

When Janet and I visited Auschwitz-Birkenau last year, I shared my emotions about that visit in a blog. I was not sad. I did not cry. I was not angry. I was defiant!

I stood in front of the main gate looking at “Arbeit Macht Frei,” holding my mother’s silver neckless, which is shown on the cover of my book, declaring to Hilter and the Nazis that I stand here despite all you did to prevent that! Jews prevailed, and you were the ones to die forever etched in history as monsters. The Jewish community worldwide struggles like always but thrives. And after over 2000 years, we have our homeland Israel again.

I realized we need to count our blessings. Because we are here, all Second Gen are special. Our children are special. Our grandchildren are special. And future generations will be special all because our parents survived.

Most of our parents have passed away, no longer here to celebrate our existence. Most of us have not captured our parents’ stories. Their horrors and triumph of surviving. And most 2nd Gen survivors are approaching the age where we see our peers passing away. More and more of us will pass away over time.

We must use our time to celebrate our lives and families. To stop beating ourselves up and feeling sad or insecure about anything. To live our remaining years feeling special because we are!

We must go through all our parent’s things that were filed away or put in closets years ago. The papers, pictures, whatever! Get the Yiddish translated. Not everyone needs to write a book!

Just figuring out the things our parents left us, knowing what they are, where they came from, and passing that on to our children is enough. We cannot leave them things from our parents that they will not know about and toss. Even if it’s just their visa, travel documents, and nothing more, it’s important and must be passed on!

And finally, we must stand up for the lessons learned from the Shoah. As hate rises in America and worldwide, we, the Second Generation, know from our parents where silence and doing nothing leads. We must stand against those who hate Jews. We must stand against those that hate others. Why? Because our parents lived the consequences of a world that sat on the sidelines! We lived the consequences!

We, the Second Generation Survivors, are special! We are the only link left between our parents and our children. Let’s not waste time pulling that link together and passing it on.

Let’s also hold our leaders and the world accountable to stop the rise of hate!

Written by Jerry Elman, April 19, 2023

Yesterday was Yom Hashoah, the annual remembrance of the Holocaust in Israel and among the 16 million Jews in the world today! Yesterday was just another day for most of the other 3 billion plus people!

Holocaust commemorations have a peculiar repeating uniformity to them. For this reason, I have avoided them for years, even as the son of survivors. I taught a class instead as my way to honor and remember the 6 million who perished, along with the survivors, most of whom are no longer with us.

The events seem to go through the motions of remembering something horrible without wanting to understand and really address the realities of what happened and why. Many of the factors that led to the Holocaust exist today! We just look the other way!

The murder of six million Jews was the result of something much bigger than the Holocaust. We are being too simplistic in recognizing and remembering the Holocaust alone!

My problem with Holocaust remembrances and even much of Holocaust education is that they speak of Nazism in simplistic terms as a warning against intolerance and hate. They recall the six million Jews who perished. They focus on the Holocaust and the genocide of millions as a single period or event in history that had a time bounded start and finish.

And every remembrance ends with everyone repeating the words “Never Again” or “Never Forget!” We don’t say, “Never Let It Happen Again!” That makes it much more complicated, which it is! That means doing more than just going to remembrance events!

What truly led to the Holocaust is avoided. Acknowledging that almost every country in the world was complicit in looking the other way while Hitler exterminated the Jews is not part of accepted history and Holocaust education. And worst of all, acknowledging that WW II was a war over power and control of Europe and not in any way associated with saving Jews from extermination is also avoided in most discussions and education about the Holocaust. The war was about occupied countries getting their countries back.

Nowhere in any war strategy or policy documents of any country is it stated that one goal of WW II was to save Jews. Nowhere is it documented that there were any deliberate military actions to stop or slow down the killing of Jews.

The reality is the war had nothing to do with saving Jews! Saving Jews was off-limits in every aspect of the Allies fighting the war. But we won’t talk about that! We won’t teach that. We won’t call it out! When we do try to talk about it, we always sugarcoat it with acceptable excuses.

The harsh reality is that most of the world, not just Nazi Germany, wanted to get rid of the Jews for generations. Hitler and the Nazi leaders knew that from the start. What made them different is that they decided to act on it.

As Europe fought Nazi Germany to get their countries and land back, they looked the other way when it came to the extermination of Jews. Why? The answers to that question are the most important things we need to know and understand. Yet we avoid them because it’s too complex and too offensive to address the question and come up with the true answers.

Jews were not welcome and wanted throughout the world long before WW II. And when Jews had the opportunity to flee Nazi persecution, they were not allowed to enter other countries. When they did flee, most were sent back to certain death. Why? Jews were universally hated. Jews were not wanted in most countries they lived in. They lived in most of these countries only because they were kicked out of other countries before that. And when Jews were killed, no one really cared. Jews were meant to be killed. History has repeated that over and over again!

Not a single Nazi death camp, gas chamber, crematorium, or transportation system to the death camps was ever bombed by the Allies. Often factories just miles from the death camps were bombed, but never a death camp close by!

Leaders at the time said that the best way to save the Jews was to focus on winning the war. But those that said that also knew most Jews would already be dead by the time the war ended. They just needed to do nothing to let it happen!

At the end of the war, the leaders were not surprised about how many Jews were killed. They were surprised about how many survived! And they did almost nothing to help those who survived. The countries they fled were still focused on killing them, so they could not go back. No other countries wanted them! They were forced to stay in the same concentration camps with a new label, “stateless refugees!”

So what do we make of these harsh truths when we remember the Holocaust each year? What do we tell and teach in Holocaust education? What do we really do to ensure this never happens again? We say “never again” or “never forget” at an event. And then we go on with our daily lives.

Remembering the Holocaust as a killing event, as genocide alone, downplays the long history of Jewish persecution and ignores the Holocaust’s deeper roots in favor of simplistic moral lessons. It focuses on the gas chambers and crematoriums instead of the broader truth and history. A truth that even exists in today’s world!

We refuse to use terminology that people can understand and calls out exactly what happened then and still happens today! Instead, we call it “antisemitism!” What the hell is that? It takes one to two paragraphs to define what antisemitism is.

It’s a term a German “Jew hater” created in 1879 that deliberately avoids saying, “I hate Jews!”

What is a Semite? A Semite is not really a Jew by definition. The whole term is fabricated for a hateful political agenda by a non-Jew! So why do we embrace this ridiculous term? It drives me crazy!

We need to call it what it is, “Jew Hate!” We teach entire courses of study on it many times just because the term antisemitism is not understood! It comes down to one thing and one thing only. There are lots of people who hate Jews! Always have and always will! People don’t want Jews living among them! Always have and always will! And worst of all, people want Jews gone! Always have and always will.

Let’s cut to the chase! If we stop using the term antisemitism, explaining and understanding it becomes plain and simple! Understanding and eradicating the “hated of Jews” needs to be the focus. That is the real lesson and remembrance of the Holocaust. That is what the six million who perished would want us to focus on in remembering and honoring them!

My personal focus on discussing, writing about, and teaching the Holocaust is focused on understanding and addressing “Jew Hate!” Unless we address Jew-hate as the focus, we will never prevent another Holocaust!

The Full Story!

There is a more detailed telling of the Holocaust, one that recognizes that the 20th century was already among the bloodiest periods in Jewish history before the start of the Nazi genocide. This includes the flight of millions of Jews out of Europe and the way those who remained were delivered to the Nazis by Western immigration quotas and collaboration.

It is a story that begins not in 1939 or 1941 but in 1880.

Jews began their mass flight from Europe following the assassination of Czar Alexander II in 1881, an event that sparked mass popular pogroms in the Russian Empire and saw new laws enacted against its already oppressed Jewish subjects. These pressures from above and below slowly increased, culminating in the massacres of the Russian Civil War of 1918-21, which claimed the lives of well over 100,000 Jews.

Most Jews who fled westward in the six decades that preceded the Holocaust went to the United States. Their story is often swallowed up in the larger tale of American immigration, of millions of other Europeans seeking a new life and opportunities in America. But the Jews were not like the Poles, Italians, or Germans who arrived with them at Ellis Island.

Polish and German families sent their young men ahead of the family to establish themselves and make the family’s arrival more comfortable. Italians who found the immigrant life too difficult returned to their home country in large numbers.

Jews behaved differently. Once they decided to leave, they sold everything, boarded ships, and arrived on America’s shores as whole families. They knew they would not be returning. They were fleeing Jew-haters and had nowhere to return to.

Most European immigrants returned to their home countries in huge numbers between 1908 and 1925: 57% of Italians, 40% of Poles, 64% of Hungarians, 67% of Romanians, and 55% of Russians.

Among Jews, the figure was just 5%! The Jews stuck it out in America through thick and thin, prosperity and recession. Other immigrants were seeking a better life; the Jews were running away to save their lives!

As the decades passed, Europe continued to become uninhabitable to Jews. Between the antisemitic May Laws passed by the czar in 1882 and the Nuremberg Laws passed by the Nazis in 1935, many more European states implemented an ever-tightening regime of restrictions on Jewish work, citizenship, and education that would keep Jews out of professions, universities, and ultimately entire countries.

In the summer of 1938, before any German occupier forced their hand, Poland passed a law stripping citizenship from any Jew who hadn’t lived in Poland for the previous five years.

The Nazis, fearful the move would leave them saddled with now-stateless Polish Jews, rounded up 17,000 of them living on German soil and drove them to the Polish border, where they lived in a kind of stateless limbo, refused entry to either Germany or Poland, until the start of the war.

During the standoff, Poland turned to Britain, the US, and the League of Nations, demanding they offer new homes to the unwanted deportees. Poland’s deputy ambassador to London, Count Jan Balinski-Jundzill, warned that terrible consequences awaited the Jews if the West refused. Poland would have “only one way of solving the Jewish problem — persecution.”

It was the same story once the war was underway. Romanian dictator Ion Antonescu didn’t need Nazi propagandists to convince him that the Jews were a problem that needed solving. After the Nazi declaration of war on the Soviet Union, he was thrilled by the opportunity offered by the chaos engulfing Europe. “Romania needs to be liberated from this entire colony of bloodsuckers who have drained the life essence from the people,” he declared of the country’s Jews. “The international situation is favorable, and we can’t afford to miss the moment.”

As the pressure on the Jews grew, so did Western fear of them flooding in as refugees.

In 1910, when the US had already absorbed some two million East European Jews, New York Immigration Commissioner William Williams ended his annual report with a warning: “The time has come when it is necessary to put aside false sentimentality in dealing with a question of immigration and to give more consideration to its racial and economic aspects and in deciding what additional immigrants we shall receive, to remember that our first duty is to our country.”

American immigration officials working under Williams began turning back more and more Jews arriving in New York, even as the killings and persecution grew worse in Eastern Europe. Despite these efforts, the Jews kept coming.

In 1921, the US Congress decided to act. It passed the Emergency Quota Act and the 1924 Quota Act, severely reducing Jewish immigration from over 120,000 per year to under 3,000 a decade later.

America, and after it, Britain, Canada, Argentina, and countless other nations, systematically closed their doors to the Jews and kept them closed right through the Holocaust, even when everyone already knew of the extermination underway throughout the European continent.

The Holocaust, in other words, was understood by the Nazi leadership as a German solution to a problem “felt by the entire world.”

No one wanted the Jews; all sought ways to be rid of them. It was only when the West closed its doors — when the Jews became “undeportable” — that Europeans began to contemplate and even embrace the radical Nazi solution to what many saw as everyone’s shared problem. Millions of people could be snuffed out of existence by the German “Final Solution” because they were unwanted everywhere and protected by no one.

This is a contentious point in today’s Europe, but a true one nonetheless. Many nations protested that they did not actively join in the murders. But few can claim they did not restrict Jews’ lives, persecute them, hand them over to their executioners and prevent survivors from returning to their homes after the war. All took part in the larger cleansing, even if only some took the responsibility of direct killing upon themselves.

There were, of course, countless “individual” Europeans who risked life and limb to save Jews, and even some political and religious leaders who did so. But these are almost everywhere exceptions. No major social or political group anywhere in Europe rallied collectively to the Jews’ defense.

The Germans planned and initiated the Holocaust. Germany under the Nazi regime bears the “ultimate culpability” for the genocide. But German efforts could not have succeeded without the massive collaboration — and in fact, in the few places where such help was denied them, they failed.

In Belgium, the Nazis were able to round up nearly two-thirds of the Jews of Flemish Antwerp (65%), where local police collaborated with the occupiers. In French-speaking Belgium, where officials and citizens refused to help, the figure was almost half (37%).

In Hungary, the government enthusiastically deported 437,000 Jews to Auschwitz in the summer of 1944 in an operation totally run by Hungarians. These deportees were rural Yiddish-speaking Jews from the Hungarian provinces.

When the Nazis demanded Budapest’s assimilated, middle-class Jews, the Hungarian government balked. Its refusal left the Nazis helpless to implement any large-scale killing in the capital. Most of Budapest’s Jews survived the war.

The same pattern emerges in Romania, Bulgaria, Greece, and elsewhere. Greek collaboration allowed the Nazis to exterminate the Jews of Salonica, while Greek refusal to help meant the same could not be done to the Jews of Athens. The genocide policy was successful only when locals cooperated.

Locals cooperated in most places, resulting in six million Jews being murdered. Imagine how many fewer Jews would have been murdered if locals did not cooperate with the Nazis!

This long, slow, purposeful destruction of European Jewry — the transformation of Europe into a continent literally uninhabitable to Jews — didn’t begin with WW II and didn’t end with its conclusion.

After V-E Day, the now all-but-forgotten story of the Jewish DPs, the “displaced persons” who would languish for years on German soil, imprisoned behind barbed wire by the American and British occupation forces for the simple reason that no one on Earth would take them in. My parents were caught in the middle of this, which I highlight in my book.

It was a postscript to the Holocaust that, for many survivors, the deepest truth was revealed: Auschwitz was not the exception to the European Jewish experience but merely its logical conclusion. Auschwitz was a means to achieve the desired result!

The fall of the 3rd Reich left millions of people displaced on German soil from across the European continent. With the war over, the Allies pivoted from a war footing to occupation and reconstruction. Their first priority was to repatriate anyone who could manage the journey home.

Allied soldiers would collect the wandering millions at checkpoints throughout Germany and deliver them to processing sites established in nearby towns. Millions hitchhiked, stole bicycles or vehicles, or simply walked to their former homes in France, Holland, Italy, Belgium, Poland, and elsewhere.

By October 1, more than 2 million Soviets, 1.5 million French, 586,000 Italians, 274,000 Dutch citizens, almost 300,000 Belgians and Luxembourgians, more than 200,000 Yugoslavs, 135,000 Czechs, 94,000 Poles, and tens of thousands of other European displaced persons had been sent home.

Yet as 1945 drew to a close, the Allies came to realize that some of the war’s survivors, the so-called “last million,” could not go home. For one reason or another, they had no home to return to.

Hundreds of thousands of Polish Catholics were afraid of what awaited them in their violence-wracked, Soviet-dominated country. Hundreds of thousands more Ukrainians, Lithuanians, Estonians, and Latvians could not return to countries now under Soviet rule because of their active collaboration in the Nazi war effort and occupation regimes.

And then there were the Jews, the survivors of the slave labor camps within Germany, and over 200,000 survivors flowing in from the East who had tried returning home and been pushed out by violent neighbors and even pogroms carried out by those who’d felt nothing but relief at their disappearance. Instead of welcoming their Jewish neighbors and friends back, they proceeded to “finish the job,” killing tens of thousands of surviving Jews. In my book, I speak in detail about the pogrom my mother and her family survived after returning to Sokoly. Seven of the twenty-one surviving Jews were killed, and the rest fled.

In 1946, the US and Britain established the International Refugee Organization, tasked with resettling the last million in new homelands. The IRO quickly got to work marketing the remaining DPs to Western and Latin American nations with dire shortages of postwar laborers to help rebuild their economies.

Over the course of 1946, over 700,000 DPs would be offered new homes by IRO member nations — a generosity of spirit that came with one immense caveat. The IRO nations then quickly closed shop and left the camps, leaving behind the last 250,000 DPs to spend the next two years imprisoned by their liberators. These were, of course, the Jews.

It was no mere oversight that left the Jews trapped in the land of their murderers and sometimes in the very concentration camps from which they had been “liberated.” It was not ignorance of the problem or the chaos of a frenzied reconstruction that left them ignored by the world as the years passed.

Even as they languished, a frenetic debate was underway in America. Many voices, including Jewish groups and Christian denominations, called to lift the old quotas and let these last survivors into America. But a coalition of midwestern Republicans and southern Democrats in Congress adamantly refused. The Jews, it was said, were closet communists.

Quotas for Eastern Europe, the nations from which the Jewish DPs hailed, remained astonishingly low in the immediate post-war period: 6,524 per year from Poland, 386 from Lithuania, 236 from Latvia, and 116 from Estonia. The 250,000 Jewish survivors would remain “stateless” with nowhere to go. They would remain in the camps, viewed as a burden to the rest of the world. Many believed that if Hitler were allowed more time, this burden would not exist!

The birth of the State of Israel in May 1948 finally provided a place for these Jews to go. They were openly welcomed to Israel. There is only one response when people question the need for a Jewish state. Without a Jewish state, Jews would continue to live in a world where no one wanted them. There would be nowhere to go when facing persecution.

Losing our Jewish state, Judea, to the Romans was the beginning of the long history of Jewish persecution and killing. This history is why there are only 16 million Jews in the entire world today. Compare that to over 3 billion of everyone else living in the world today!

The Holocaust is too large and complex to allow for only a single narrative of what it means. To the West, including many Western Jews, it is usually understood as a cautionary tale about the terrible results of human intolerance. To drive home this point, teenagers are taken to see museums, death camps and to see cattle cars.

But a study of the broader context in which the Holocaust took place — without which it could not have taken place — upends this easy moral narrative. Preventing another Auschwitz won’t prevent another Holocaust! Auschwitz was just a means to something much bigger and longer in time.

One answer begins to take form only when one steps back from these totems of Holocaust commemoration, from the camp incinerators and Ukrainian killing fields, the Nazi rallies, and the partisan fighters’ resistance poems. It emerges from a close reading of what came before the genocide, the suffering, and the marginalization that are now forgotten. It is so much more than just remembering that six million Jews perished. The real question is, how did that happen? Then we start talking about the real answer!

The Nazis were less original than anyone wants to admit. The propaganda machines, the anti-Jewish legislation, the dream of a Jew-free Europe — in all these, the Nazis were copying ideas and policies laid down by others, by forebears and neighbors. Where they did innovate, especially in the technology of the genocide, their success depended on the eager collaboration of many Europeans in almost every nation and province of the continent. The United States was also an eager collaborator.

For all its incomprehensible horror, the focus on the murder itself paradoxically serves as a kind of psychological soothing, a way to forget how dozens of nations, including the free peoples of the West, were willing participants in the vast, generations-long corralling of millions of helpless Jews to their ultimate destruction.

The Nazis were ultimately defeated, but not before they had won their war against the Jews of Europe. It’s a point that might seem monstrous at first glance but becomes unavoidable when one looks at the longer history in which the Holocaust is embedded: To the nations whose Jews were destroyed, that destruction came as a relief.

The politics of Europe had been gripped by the Jewish question for three generations, an anxiety that was only removed when the Jews, too, were removed. In Eastern Europe after the war, many surviving Jews were not allowed back to their homes or treated better than before. In the West, any meaningful exploration of the broader context and culpability of the nations of Europe and the West was quickly set aside in favor of a thin, unthreatening moralism that we accept and recognize each year at events that make us feel better.

Jews are pretty much alone to remember that when their brethren stood before the gas chambers and then furnaces, no other nation or religion, class, or institution reached out a hand in rescue. Seven previous decades of European and Western politics joined in unison to shove them into those gas chambers and furnaces.

This is the world’s harsh reality before, during, and after the Holocaust. This is what we must remember. This is what we must teach.

The focus of events like Yom Hashoah and reciting “never forget” or “never again” must be something much bigger than the Holocaust itself. We must remember the Jewish experience over thousands of years, where history repeats itself over and over again! Our focus must be on breaking this historical cycle and creating a world where Jew hate no longer exists as an acceptable norm. We cannot prevent genocide without eliminating its root causes. And yes, we know the root causes.

Blog 23-5, March 23, 2023, Written By Jerry Elman

I have researched the role of German companies and industrial leaders in facilitating the Holocaust. My biggest learning is that this was not unique and has been a norm throughout history and continues today. Money and power always have and always will become the focus, even when evil things are happening. This is my cynical learning and makes the challenge of “never again” an even higher mountain for us all!

I hope you take the time to read this entire article. It is important and relevant to our lives today and our children, grandchildren, and beyond.

This is my second blog covering the military-industrial complex that enabled the Third Reich to orchestrate the Holocaust.

Blog 23-3 covered the role of J.A. Topfs, who designed and built the industrial incinerators used in the Nazi death camp crematoriums.

I.G. Farben, also called “Hell’s Cartel,” was the single pivotal company without whom Hitler could not have implemented his industrialized mass-killing factories during the Holocaust.

I.G. Farben was formed in 1925 as a conglomerate of eight leading German chemical manufacturers, including Bayer, Hoechst, BASF, Agfa, and others. By 1938, the company had 218,090 employees.

I.G. Farben Headquarters Building 1931

I.G. Farben became the world’s largest chemical company. They produced and fed the German war machine the critical raw materials and chemicals to be self-sufficient in fighting World War II. Without I.G. Farben, Hitler could not have started and sustained World War II and implemented the “Final Solution.”

I.G. Farben’s products included synthetic dyes, nitrile rubber, polyurethane, prontosil, chloroquine, and synthetic fuel using coal liquefaction. This synthetic fuel, along with the production of synthetic rubber, powered the Wehrmacht, the Nazi war machine.

I.G. Farben invented the nerve agent Sarin during World War I. The most horrible of their many contributions to World War II and the Holocaust was the poison gas Zyklon B which facilitated the killing of millions in the Nazi gas chambers.

Prior to World War II, I.G. Farben scientists made fundamental contributions to all areas of chemistry and the pharmaceutical industry.

Several I.G. Farben scientists made important discoveries and were awarded Nobel Prizes.

Notably, I.G. Farben scientists discovered the first sulfa antibiotic, which fundamentally reformed medical research and opened a new era in medicine.

Otto Bayer discovered the polyaddition for the synthesis of polyurethane in 1937.

Carl Bosch and Friedrich Bergius were awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1931 “in recognition of their contributions to the invention and development of chemical high-pressure methods.”

Gerhard Domagk was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1939 “for the discovery of the antibacterial effects of prontosil.”

Kurt Alder was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1950 for his “discovery and development of the diene synthesis.”

Prior to 1933, I.G. Farben employed many Jewish scientists, and one-third of its board members were Jewish. Far-right newspapers of the 1920s and early 1930s accused it of being an “international capitalist Jewish company.”

When Hitler became Chancellor of Germany in 1933, the company began a process of Aryanization. By 1938 all Jewish employees had been dismissed, and the Jews on the board were forced to resign. The company leadership saw the opportunity to make massive profits and seek political power as Hitler developed plans for eventual war.

Hitler wanted Germany to become self-sufficient in all industrial and war supplies. Hitler believed Germany’s dependence on other countries and the British blockage caused Germany’s defeat in World War I. Hitler saw I.G. Farben as the company that could make self-sufficiency a quick reality.

I.G. Farben became the largest German government contractor as Hitler’s plans evolved into the late 1930s. Senior Farben executives also assumed key positions in the German government. They developed the industrial effort to use slave labor in German factories to expand quickly to support the war effort and make record profits.

As Hitler built concentration camps, first in Germany and then in Poland, the company relied on slave labor from concentration camps, including 30,000 from Auschwitz. They built their own factory and concentration camp at Auschwitz, named Auschwitz III. By 1943, one-half of I.G. Farben’s workforce of 330,000 was Jewish slave labor. All slave labor was worked to death, with long hours, little food, poor sanitation, and prevalent diseases. The average life span for a slave worker was nine months. Upon death, they were replaced with new slave workers.

I.G. Farben Plant at Auschwitz III Concentration Camp

I.G. Farben was deeply involved in medical experiments on inmates at Auschwitz and the Mauthausen concentration camps through its Bayer subsidiary. Much of Joseph Mengele’s work was staffed by people from Bayer.

As it became clear Germany was losing the war, and the Allies were approaching, the company destroyed most of its records. In September 1944, Fritz ter Meer, a member of IG Farben’s supervisory board and future chair of Bayer’s board of directors (after the war), and Ernst Struss, secretary of the company’s managing board, are said to have made plans to destroy company files in Frankfurt in the event of an American invasion. As the Russian Army approached Auschwitz in January 1945 to liberate it, I.G. Farben reportedly destroyed the company’s records inside the camp. By spring 1945, the company had burned and shredded 15 tons of paperwork.

The Allies seized the company at the end of the war in 1945. US authorities put its directors on trial. The I.G. Farben trial saw 23 directors tried for war crimes and 13 convicted.

By 1951, however, all 13 were released from prison early after the U.S. military instituted good time credits in its war crime program and the cold war with the Soviet Union began.

What remained of I.G. Farben in the West was split in 1951 into its six constituent companies, then again into three: BASF, Bayer, and Hoechst. These companies continued to operate as an informal conglomerate and played a major role in the West German rebuilding effort.

Following several later mergers, the main successor companies became Agfa, BASF, Bayer, and Sanofi, all well-known companies across the world today, including the US.

While many people, especially Jews, remain angry and unforgiving, even today, of the industries that supported Hilter, sadly, this was not a unique situation. Throughout history, industrial and corporate leaders have almost always chosen the path of profits and power over doing what is right. Money and power destroy moral compasses! It was no different under Hilter’s rule. It is no different in today’s world. Industrial and corporate leaders always have and always will focus on profits over evil, with some exceptions.

Even American companies did and still do the same. Most American industrial giants and their leaders supported Hitler as he rose to power. Most did business with him up to the start of World War II. And many found ways to do business with the Third Reich even while America was at war with Germany using third parties and intermediaries.

Today American companies ignore and even accelerate climate change for profits. Pharmaceutical companies price gouge those in need of medications and even flood the market with opioids and other medications that kill people, all for profit.

Railroads make record profits and force their employees to work in unsafe conditions. Railroads choose profits over preventing derailments of hazardous materials, knowing people will get sick and even die.

Much of today’s inflation is caused by deliberate greed through made-up shortages and supply chain issues. Monetary policy is not the primary cause of inflation. Greed is! These are just a few examples of today’s realities of corporate greed.

Again, I want to emphasize this is nothing new. This is how it’s always been throughout history. We have to look at this from that perspective, especially if we are ever serious about stopping it.

Standard Oil remained partnered with I.G. Farber before, during, and after the war through intermediaries. Standard oil was one of the few that could produce tetraethyl lead gas which was key to providing fuel for large numbers of military vehicles and equipment needed by the German Army to wage war. Not only did Standard Oil sell tetraethyl lead gas to the Nazi regime, but they also taught the Germans how to manufacture it themselves knowing when the war started, they would no longer be able to export it to Germany. Some say this effort by Standard Oil was the most important of any support provided to Hitler.

In 1933, International Business Machines began providing Germany punchcard machines that were precursors to modern computers and databases. Documents show that as late as 1941, IBM was working with the Reich to liquidate Jews from Holland. IBM employees were training SS personnel how to use their machines to record the movement, sorting, and mass execution of large numbers of undesirables, at times right in the headquarters of death camps.

In 1935, GM built a factory in Berlin for the purpose of building “Blitz” trucks for the German “Wehrmacht.” Ford began building similar trucks around the same time, but GM was the number one producer of vehicles vital for the quick conquests of Poland, France, and much of the Soviet Union. Albert Speer, the German minister of armaments and war production, claimed that the rubber GM supplied was the key to the ability of the Germans to wage war the way they did. Inevitably when America declared war on Germany, the Reich seized GM’s German production facilities. GM continued assistance through third parties.

Hitler read Henry Ford‘s biography along with the book “The International Jew,” also written by Ford. Hitler also kept a portrait of Henry Ford in his office. In 1938, Hitler gave Henry Ford the Grand Cross of the Supreme Order of the German Eagle. This was the highest honor Nazi Germany could give any foreigner, representing Adolf Hitler’s personal admiration and indebtedness to Henry Ford. Hitler did not seize Ford’s factory in Cologne, Germany when war was declared with the US. Hitler made sure the Ford factory was provided with Russian slave labor.

Before America declared war on Germany, Alcoa Aluminum Company sent much of its raw aluminum to Germany. This allowed Alcoa’s German plant to make sixty percent more aluminum products than America. When the US’s involvement in the war began, there was a massive aluminum production shortage in America for the war effort. Alcoa essentially sold the Germans much of the material needed to build their war machines at the expense of American war production.

General Electric worked with J. A. Topf to help design and build the industrial incinerators used in the death camp crematoriums. The U.S. Government caught and fined GE for working with the Nazis, but the American company continued doing business with the Nazis and profited from the war. The fine was insignificant compared to the profits from violating the law.

F.W. Woolworth was an early supporter of Hilter. What was significant about Woolworth’s interaction with Hitler was a horrible thing that Woolworth did that ultimately lent legitimacy to the Nazi’s hatred of Jews. Woolworth fired all of its Jewish employees in the US. This won them the designation “Adefa Zeichen,” an award reserved for companies that were “pure Aryan.”

Dow Chemical provided major support to Hitler. This included raw materials and American technological innovations in refining oil.

The Chase Manhattan Bank, J.P. Morgan, and Citibank‘s form of colluding with the Reich was particularly heinous. They agreed to seize the bank assets of wealthy Jews captured by the Nazis and then turn those assets over to the Nazis.

MGM Studios assisted the Nazis with developing and filming their propaganda films. After the invasion of Poland and the beginning of World War II, MGM arranged to continue to release their Hollywood films in German theaters working through a third party.

So what does all this mean?

We cannot be naive about what motivates and controls people’s behaviors and moral compasses. Good people become evil under the right conditions! I have lived my life assuming those who get caught up in evil for money and power are outliers, not the norm. I now know otherwise!

I have learned that we can never forget as individuals and as societies! Both are critical! History shows everything is forgotten two or three generations later. When those who lived through horror and evil pass away, we begin forgetting as a society, as a world. And then history does start repeating itself again. The same history of hate returns. The same history of greed and power returns.

I read and posted on Facebook how anti-semitism is now at the same level it was in 1970. In America and the world, we are trending back to the same hateful beliefs of the past. Of the 1930s. Of the days of the Russian Settlement of the Pale! Of the days of the Spanish Inquisition. Of the days of the Romans. Of the days of Jews being slaves in Eqypt as Passover approaches in a few weeks! The same beliefs that have caused war and genocide then. The same behaviors have repeated themselves for over 2,000 years. What does the future bring? Can we control the outcome?

Silence and passiveness is the real threat. The haters are not the real threat. Their power comes from the silence of everyone else. Silence and passiveness are always the reason why history repeats itself.

The haters and those focused on greed are out there again! They are active! They are growing in numbers. And once again, they see those who oppose them using passive words and tactics to stop them. We tell them, “We Remember!” “Never Forget!” And then we think we have now scared the crap out of them! What they see is the reality of our silence and our weakness! They even see our fear of them which gives them even greater power!

Elie Weisel learned the answer in the most brutal and harshest of ways. And he shared the answer many years ago. He told us why history keeps repeating itself better than anyone I know!

“We must take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented. Sometimes we must interfere. When human lives are endangered, when human dignity is in jeopardy, national borders and sensitivities become irrelevant. Wherever men and women are persecuted because of their race, religion, or political views, that place must – at that moment – become the center of the universe.”

― Elie Wiesel

Earlier today, Readers View, a national independent book publishing industry support and promotion organization, announced the 2022 Readers View Literary Award winners. Thousands of books are vetted and reviewed for these annual awards.

“Miracles Through Hell” was the Silver (2nd place) recipient in the Reviewers Choice, memoir/biography/autobiography category and the bronze (3rd place) recipient in the history category.

This announcement is a surprise and honor. These awards give the book credibility that it is worth reading.

I hope more people will read the book because we can never forget the Holocaust. It can only be remembered knowing the horrible details of what happened, why it happened, and how it happened. Without the details and human experiences, the Holocaust will not be remembered and understood, especially with most survivors no longer with us to tell their stories firsthand.

Thanks to everyone who has supported this journey and read the book. Thanks to all of you that follow and read my blog articles.

Please help spread the word with family and friends by recommending the book and forwarding the link to my blog. Thanks again!

Blog 23-4, February 25, 2023. Written by Jerry Elman

Today is a milestone we cannot ignore in America.

Neo-Nazi groups led by the Goyim Defense League have declared today, February 25th, the first annual “National Day of Hate” targeted against Jews in particular.

Police departments and Jewish organizations across the U.S. have braced for antisemitic confrontations and harassment after reports of neo-Nazi groups organizing a national “Day of Hate” today, Saturday, Feb. 25.

As of Friday afternoon, no specific targets or locations have been named online. Instead, law enforcement, anti-terrorism agencies, and antisemitism watchdog groups around the country have noted plans for general action to intimidate and spread fear among Jewish communities.

Jews cannot remain passive when antisemitism is thriving in the United States.

Before the MAGA movement, such an openly declared day of hate would not have been possible. Now it is a new norm in America. As a former President often said, “these people vote and support me.”

Yes, they do! They are the MAGA base most Republican leaders are terrified of and will not condemn! They pander to them for their votes.

The Goyim Defense League has become one of America’s leading neo-nazi Jewish hate groups. They are active in many communities across the United States. One of their primary activities is secretly distributing fliers in Jewish neighborhoods. They also organized support of Kanye West and put up hate banners on bridges in many cities.

Examples of Goyim Defence League Flyers

Within my hometown of Rochester, NY, they distributed their Jewish hate fliers last year in Brighton and, most recently, in Irondequoit, two towns with large Jewish populations.

Too many passive Jewish leaders think avoiding and ignoring the Goyim Defense League and others like them is the best defense. There is a fear of gaining their attention and becoming one of their targets.
I disagree. We must be aggressive in calling them out and making it clear we will not tolerate them. We must not allow them to intimidate us, scare us, or harm us.

The Twitter message below captured Goyim Defense League bullies harassing Jews at the driveway entrance of the Chabad in Orlando, Florida, on February 22nd. Watch the two-minute video. You will be outraged and what you see.

Like all haters, they are bullies. They are cowards! Bullies only bully others when allowed to! We cannot defeat them with passive words and statements. They only understand the strength in our actions.

Jews and non-Jews alike must send a clear message to these hate groups that we know what they are up to and will not tolerate or fear them. We must make them show their true colors as cowards who will run when challenged.

Even the Hitler Nazis of the Holocaust ran away when they were not pointing guns at defenseless victims. When challenged, they were the ones who ran away.

If we truly remember the Holocaust, we must show our strength to these haters. They must fear us, not bully us!

Block 23-3, written by Jerry Elman, February 21, 2023

Nameplate used on ovens/incinerators.

For many, the image remains unforgettable: Oskar Schindler climbs out of his Mercedes-Benz, noticing a flurry of ash drifting down from the sky like snowflakes. With puzzled irritation, he flicked the flakes from his car windshield and his trim, double-breasted suit. Viewers of the movie “Schindler’s List” know that this apparent midsummer snowstorm was really human ash, the incinerated remains of the Jews and others gassed at Hitler’s death camps.

What most viewers do not know is that such ash storms were the patented work of a family business in east-central Germany, J.A. Topf & Sons. During the Holocaust, the company made the ovens used to dispose of the bodies of those murdered at Nazi death camps.

When Allied liberating forces arrived at the Nazi concentration and death camps at the end of World War II, they discovered endless piles of dead bodies waiting to be burned in the incinerators bearing the logo of J.A. Topf & Sons.

J.A. Topf & Sons helped make the Holocaust possible by building incinerators* for Nazi concentration camps. *(I refuse to use the term ovens or crematoria after learning these were deliberately designed high-volume incinerators, not funeral home ovens! These were not crematoriums, as most books and historians refer to! These were incinerators to burn human bodies like trash!)

The infamous German company, based in the eastern city of Erfurt, had collaborated with the Nazis, proudly designing, building, and delivering equipment for the specific purpose of mass incineration of prisoners. Their ghastly engineering made the enormity of the Holocaust possible. If it hadn’t been for Topf incinerators, the Nazis would have had a far harder time killing so many and leaving so little evidence. 

Johannes Andreas Topf, a blacksmith, opened a furnace and heating-equipment foundry in Erfurt, Germany, in 1878. In 1904, Johannes’ son had heard that in Milan, Italy, the city fathers were experimenting with cremation, and it struck him as a good business opportunity. He asked his engineers to work on the burning of corpses and even joined a promotional society called Friends of Cremation.

By the early 1920s, J.A. Topf & Sons sold cremation ovens to cities as far away as Lisbon and Brussels, as well as throughout Germany. By 1931, Johannes’ two grandsons, Ernst and Ludwig Topf, took over the company.

Their lead cremation oven engineer was Kurt Prüfer. J.A. Topf and Sons considered themselves at the leading edge of a new movement to bring dignity to death and reverence to human remains. The cremation oven they developed was lauded in a company brochure as “the purest expression of perfection in cremation technology,” promising an odorless, smokeless dispatch of human bodies, which were burned solely in super-heated air.

Kurt Prüfer

The company’s business flourished. Then Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933. The Nuremberg Laws were enacted, and Jews lost their citizenship, homes, and businesses. Many were arrested. In 1938 came the devastation of Kristallnacht, and then German Jews were rounded up and placed in labor camps like Buchenwald and Dachau. At the same time, the extermination of Jews who did not leave Germany began. In 1939, Germany invaded Poland, and World War II began. Germany now controlled the largest Jewish population in the world, and the Final Solution was implemented.

After Buchenwald was built in July 1937, both Ernst and Ludwig Topf, now members of the Nazi party, could see the concentration camp from their factory office windows. The Nazi SS approached the Topf brothers to provide cremation ovens for the bodies of Jews and others killed in the labor camps. The first order was for Buchenwald. The second order was for Dachau. The Nazi SS were also building and opening death camps in Poland that, expanded the need to cremate victims.

Kurt Prüfer worked in this same building that overlooked Buchenwald and drew up plans for what he named the first “mobile oil-heated cremation oven.” It was delivered to Buchenwald for the sole purpose of incinerating Jewish bodies. The incinerator marked a radical departure from the culture and the rules of civic cremation. Human beings were burned in these incinerators like refuse.

J.A. Topf and Sons design group working on human incinerator designs during the Holocaust

Mobile oil-fired ovens installed in Buchenwald, which remain in place today

2 three muffle incinerators were installed in Buchenwald in 1943

Prüfer was proud of the initial success of his design and soon presented the Nazis with a new design featuring two stationary incineration muffles. A muffle is a term used in cremation and refers to the interior oven chamber a body is placed in. This two-muffle model was installed in the Dachau concentration camp in November 1939.

Original Topf two muffle stationary incinerator In Dachau, which remains in place today

The company was so proud of the work that it applied for a patent on the design. They viewed the need for mass killing incineration as a long-term business, and they wanted to keep the competition out of it. Their competitors were now restricted to only building conventional cremation ovens, which up to that time, were in use at some Nazi death camps. Now J.A. Topf had a monopoly on industrialized human incinerators.

After developing the new stationary incinerators for Buchenwald and Dachau, Kurt Prüfer demanded that the Topf brothers give him a bonus for the work he had proudly pursued. His request was granted.

When Nazi leaders decided to make Auschwitz-Birkenau the central work and death camp hub in the Holocaust, Topf’s complicity reached new heights. “Rest assured,” Ernst Topf wrote to the SS, the company will provide a new design for crematoria at Auschwitz that will “improve efficiency,” even taking into consideration the likelihood of “frozen corpses.”

“When SS administrators at Auschwitz-Birkenau discovered they could kill thousands of people at a time using Zyklon B (hydrogen cyanide) in gas chambers, they faced the problem of getting rid of these thousands of bodies. The two muffle incinerators could only incinerate 30 to 36 bodies in 10 hours. Bodies were stacked in large piles waiting to be incinerated.

Original Auschwitz Crematoria I, two muffle Incinerators which remain in place today

Prüfer and his colleagues stood with stopwatches in front of the gas chambers and incinerators at the death camp, timing the gassing death and incineration of thousands of victims. Their goal was to increase the production of both the gas chambers and incinerators. Prüfer aimed to engineer the most efficient and high-volume incineration technique possible.

Topf engineers improved the ventilation systems of the gas chambers so they could kill people faster. They reduced the killing time from one hour to twenty minutes. This then meant the incinerator capacity needed to be increased even further.

On August 19, 1941, Prüfer met with SS construction managers. He presented his design for three muffle incinerators. Crematoriums II and III were built using this design. Each contained five of these three muffle incinerators.

The muffles of the newly designed incinerators were smaller than those for civil crematoria because no space for a coffin was needed, saving space and fuel. Prüfer later designed ovens with muffles large enough for multiple bodies to be burned simultaneously. Later, in Topf & Sons’ instructions on using the incinerators, they advised adding bodies to the muffles at 20-minute intervals as the previous body burned down. Bodies were often pushed in four, five, or even six at once

Construction of Auschwitz-Birkenau three muffle incinerators – Crematoria II

Completed three muffle incinerators – Auschwitz-Birkenau Crematorium II

Prüfer then designed an eight muffle incinerator. Crematoriums IV and V were then each built with two of these eight muffle incinerators. By the summer of 1942, the Nazis incinerated up to 9,000 bodies daily at Auschwitz-Birkenau.

An office feud between Kurt Prüfer and his now senior manager, Fritz Sander, prompted the latter to invent his own design for a death camp incinerator. Sander’s plan for a “Corpse Incineration Oven for Mass Operation” was a replication of “burning in hell.” This new design called for the uninterrupted incineration of bodies in a “production-line” system from the gas chambers through the incinerators.

The design called for the piles of corpses in the gas chambers to be placed onto continuous conveyors that would move the bodies through intense rings of fire in forty-six muffle incinerators. The incinerator would be four stories tall. The body and body fat, in particular, would be used as fuel (instead of coal) to burn other bodies continuously. Human ash would also be removed from the incinerators using conveyors and loaded onto dump trucks for disposal.

In a memo, Sander described the process to the Topf brothers as a superb way of “restoring hygiene” in “war-related conditions.” The Topf brothers quickly approved it with praise. Only Kurt Prüfer took issue with the design (out of competitive spite), claiming that it would not work in practice. He came up with his own alternative and equally deplorable design instead.

According to the Nazi plans, Sander’s design would be used to build massive killing centers that would complete the extermination of all Jews and then begin the extermination of the Polish, Slavic, and Russian populations. Only those of the Aryan race would remain. Not much is written about these extended killing plans that would have been implemented had the Nazis won the war. The mass extermination would not have ended with the Jews!

Time would not allow for constructing these mass killing centers, as the German army was no longer advancing and conquering more nations. They were now retreating on both fronts. The focus became killing Jews as fast as possible using all existing resources. Outdoor burn pits were used when incineration capacity was not enough.

Even after the war, Topf and Sons remained indifferent and unapologetic for their actions. Attempts were made to hold them accountable for their actions after the war. Their statements confirmed they had never once considered the millions of victims of their technology as human beings, and they showed no remorse.

During his interrogation by Soviet forces, Kurt Prüfer calmly lied about his role in the process. When pressed about whether he knew that innocent people were being murdered and burned in his ovens, he eventually replied — “Yes, I knew that.”

Fritz Sander described with some pride his “Corpse Incineration Oven for Mass Operation.” Then he stated, “As a German engineer and employee of the Topf company, I felt it was my duty to help Hitler’s Germany to victory, even if that resulted in the annihilation of people. ” For the rest of his life, Ernst Topf maintained, “No one in our company was guilty of anything at all.”

When Nazi Germany was defeated in May 1945, Ludwig Topf committed suicide by swallowing a cyanide capsule after being informed of his pending arrest by US military officers. In a suicide note, he defiantly declared his innocence, writing: “… if the people want blood, I’ll do it myself. I was always forthright — the opposite of a Nazi — everyone knows it.”

His brother Ernst fled Russian-occupied Germany to the Western occupation zone, where he started a new company. “What was burned in those ovens was already dead,” he told a German court in the early 1960s. “You can’t hold the builders of the ovens responsible for the deaths of the people who were burned in them.”

The investigations into his wartime activities were eventually closed. He was released and went on with his new company and life.

It wasn’t until the publication of the book “Macht ohne Moral” (Power without Morals), written by concentration camp survivor Reimund Schnabel, that the West German public was reminded of the company’s earlier activities. After that, Topf was no longer extended credit. The company soon went bankrupt.

Engineer Kurt Prüfer, meanwhile, died in a Soviet prison camp in 1952.

J.A. Topf & Sons Nazi past was all but forgotten in East Germany after it was nationalized and its name changed to VEB Erfurt Malting and Storage Company, eventually going bankrupt in 1994 after German reunification. It was not until the fall of the Berlin Wall and an attempt by a Topf heir to gain restitution for the East German nationalization of the company that the German public became aware of the company’s dark past.

That was when Hartmut Topf, a great-grandson of company founder J.A. Topf, got involved. He was a journalist and decided to make it his life’s work to research the company’s history and preserve it for future generations. He proposed the company’s building and property be preserved as a memorial site and museum.

Initially, politicians in Erfurt opposed his plan to open a memorial site on the grounds of the former factory. They instead wanted the building torn down. But in the end, Topf and his associates won out, and a place of remembrance was opened on the site of the company’s former administrative offices in 2011. There, a permanent exhibition illustrates the company’s dark history.

Former J.A. Topf and Sons administration building – now a museum and memorial