March 14

The liquidation of the Podgorze Ghetto in Krakow was completed on this date in 1943, marking the conclusion of a three-year project to render the Polish city the “cleanest” in the land. This racial cleansing was conceived by Hans Frank, who was appointed generalgouvenour after the German invasion of September 1939. Jews had been living in Krakow since the middle of the 13th century, when they were invited there by King Boleslav, who granted them unprecedented religious freedoms and guarantees of personal safety; during the following century, as European nations expelled their Jewish populations, many fled to Poland. By mid-March 1943, Nazi Germany had obliterated that 600-year history.

A deportation order issued in May 1940 dispersed tens of thousands of Jews into the suburbs, small towns and countryside; more were expelled later that fall, with the remaining numbers relocated from the historic Jewish quarter to a dilapidated, overcrowded ghetto in the district of Podgorze. In June and October 1942, the new ghetto was thinned as thousands were shipped to the nearby Belzec death camp, where nearly 450,000 Jews would eventually perish. During the second deportation, all the children from the orphanage were taken to the outskirts of town and shot along with their teachers and curators.

On 13 March 1943, Podgorze was sealed off and the last 6000 Jews were evacuated or shot. The “workers” from Ghetto A -- mostly men -- were transferred to Plaszow, a labor camp were workers were forced to exhume, cremate, and scatter the remains of previous victims from mass graves. The women, children and elderly of “Ghetto B” were cleared out on March 14 and embarked for Berkenau, where 1500 were immediately put to death in Krema II, the gas chamber that became operational that very day. After Podgorze was “cleansed,” Jewish prisoners were trucked in to collect the property left behind.

Among the survivors from Krakow was Roman Polanski, the film director whose wife Sharon Tate would eventually be murdered by the Manson family.

September 25

In the pantheon of sadists who emerged from the second World War, the SS officer Klaus Barbie was among the worst. In his capacity as head of the Gestapo in German-occupied occupied Lyon, France, Barbie oversaw the interrogation, torture, deportation and murder of thousands of French civilians.

When he arrived at Lyon in 1942, Barbie was tasked with breaking the Resistance and liquidating the city of its Jewish population. Aided by right-wing French citizens who deplored Jews and communists with equal relish, Barbie settled into his mission with a zeal that had already made him notable within the ranks of the SS. While serving in his previous post in Amsterdam, for instance, Barbie had personally executed two ice cream peddlers, one of whom he bludgeoned to death with an ashtray.

In France, Klaus Barbie presided over the torture and murder of Jean Moulin, one of the great leaders of the Resistance; his men also captured nearly four dozen Jewish children who had found refuge in Izlea, a small village near Lyon. The children, whose location was disclosed by a French informant, were seized while drinking their morning chocolat and immediately shipped to the concentration camp in Drancy, where all of them perished in the ovens. Those two episodes were simply the of notorious of his crimes. More numerous, of course, were the mundane, daily atrocities that turned Barbie into a human monster. His unit’s police work was defined by “reinforced interrogation” techniques, carried out in the appropriately named Hotel Terminus. There, members -- alleged or real -- of the Resistance were beaten mercilessly in the interest of gathering intelligence; when physical violence (including rape) did not work, detainees were sometimes left alone with the mutilated bodies of previous “suspects.” Barbie himself participated directly and enthusiastically in the proceedings. He often brought his pet cat with him.

As one of Barbie’s victims recalled later,

[I] was strung up by the hands and feet, then suspended by a pole and immersed in cold water. And the strangest thing was that everything was normal. Here you were hanging naked over a bathtub while a secretary typed, and people told jokes, and someone smoked, and someone munched on a sandwich, and someone else looked out the window.

As Vichy France collapsed, Barbie contracted a venereal disease that quite likely saved his life. While Lyon fell and Barbie’s associates were captured, the Gestapo chief himself was bound homeward for treatment.

After the war, Barbie was put to use by the British as well as by the United States, whose CIA helped the war criminal escape to Bolivia, where he lived for more than three decades before at last being extradited in 1983. After standing trial for crimes against humanity, Barbie received a conviction and life sentence in 1987. A little more than four years later, on 25 September 1991, Klaus Barbie died of leukemia.

August 1

On this date in 1492 -- two days before Christopher Columbus commenced his first voyage to the Western Hemisphere -- Spain’s unconverted Jewish population lost its right to remain in the kingdom of Ferdinand and Isabella. According to the edict issued by the crown in late April, malingering Jews would be sentenced to death by hanging. According to the memoirs of an Italian Jew writing in 1495, Isabella was approached at the last minute by the Prior of Santa Cruz, who objected to the expulsion and pleaded with her to reconsider. The queen, unmoved, replied that

"The king's heart is in the hand of the Lord, as the rivers of water. God turneth it withersoever He will." She said furthermore: "Do you believe that this comes upon you from us? The Lord hath put this thing into the heart of the king."

Then they saw that there was evil determined against them by the King, and they gave up the hope of remaining. But the time had become short, and they had to hasten their exodus from Spain. They sold their houses, their landed estates, and their cattle for very small prices, to save themselves. The King did not allow them to carry silver and gold out of his country, so that they were compelled to exchange their silver and gold for merchandise of cloths and skins and other things

On August 1, 1933, Adolf Eichmann began training with an illegal paramilitary group known as the Austrian Legion. Nine years later, on August 1, 1942, Eichmann -- by then a captain and “Transportation Administer” in the SS -- ordered that all Belgian Jews be loaded onto trains destined for Auschwitz, Poland. That very day, Gerhart Reigner, director of the Geneva office of the World Jewish Congress, received a secret telegram from Germany detailing the use of Zyklon B gas in the numerous camps to which expelled Jews were being delivered. When Reigner passed word of the Final Solution to the United States Department of State, his reports were suppressed for months for fear that “interested groups” might demand action.

It is entirely possible that while Reigner stared in disbelief at the August 1 telegram, Anne Frank was composing the last sentence of her remarkable diary:

When everybody starts hovering over me, I get cross, then sad, and finally end up turning my heart inside out, the bad part on the outside and the good part on the inside, and keep trying to find a way to become what I’d like to be and what I could be if . . . if only there were no other people in the world.

Meir Kahane, racist founder of the Jewish Defense League and the terrorist Kach Party in Israel, celebrated his tenth birthday on 1 August 1942. Kahane, a New Yorker who emigrated to Israel in 1971, believed Arabs to be “strangers” in the Holy Land and advised that only their cleansing from Eretz Israel would assure his nation’s survival. On the subject of terrorism, Kahane wrote in 1979 that

[w]e cannot allow the situation to continue. Every victim is a beloved one who leaves behind loved ones and sorrow and tragedy. Every victim is a fellow Jew. Every death and outrage is a Hillul Hashem, a desecration of the name of the L-rd, G-d of Israel. Our apathy, our acceptance of the situation, only guarantees further and worse inflation of terror. It guarantees further deaths, cripples, and agony and anguish. It cannot continue, and it must as long as Arabs are allowed to live and wander freely in the Land. The solution is ultimately only one: The removal of the hostile and dangerous Arab minority from the Land of Israel . . . .

On 1 August 1967, Israel annexed East Jerusalem, contravening the Fourth Geneva Convention. Five thousand Arab residents were driven from the city, their homes destroyed to improve security access to the Wailing Wall.

This is a re-post of last year's entry

May 24

An eager 32-year-old physician and anthropologist started a new job on this date in 1943. After battle injuries cut short his stint with the SS on the eastern front, Josef Mengele was offered the chance to oversee the “Gypsy camp” at Auschwitz-Birkenau -- a position that gave him the opportunity to work with the only group of people he loathed more than the Jews. Among his first decisions at Birkenau, Mengele ordered 600 hospitalized women to be sent to the gas chambers. Nicknamed the “Angel of Death” by those incarcerated at the facility, one of Mengele’s central responsibilities was to stand on the camp’s railroad platform and determine which arrivals would be executed immediately and which would be conscripted as laborers -- and as subjects for his “research.” By all accounts, Mengele carried out this responsibility with special relish, whistling and using a riding crop to sort the living from the dead. Other doctors were unable to perform similar duties without being drunk.

A true believer in Nazi racial ideology, Mengele used his position at Auschwitz-Birkenau to pursue scientific research into anomalies and diseases he considered genetic in origin. He was especially interested in twins, whom he believed held the secrets of heredity. He kept them in a separate barracks he called “the Zoo,” where they were spared from the gas chambers and forced labor but were subjected to the doctor’s perverse and scientifically useless experiments.

During his two years at the camp, Mengele carried out a variety of grotesque experiments on children, dwarfs and people with physical “defects.” He injected the eyes of his subjects with various chemicals to see if iris color could be deliberately altered; he ordered surgical amputations and useless spinal taps; he broke their limbs with a vice; he personally murdered numerous inmates, sometimes for the simple reason that he wished to conduct a dissection; he exposed his subjects to various diseases to see how long they might survive. On one occasion, he sterilized a group of Polish nuns with an X-ray machine.

Miklos Nyiszli, Mengele’s pathologist, described in a 1945 deposition the calm manner in which his colleague exterminated his subjects

In the work room next to the dissecting room, 14 gypsy twins were waiting . . . and crying bitterly. Dr. Mengele didn't say a single word to us, and prepared a 10 cc. and 5 cc. syringe. From a box he took evipan, and from another box he took chloroform, which was in 20 cubic-centimeter glass containers, and put these on the operating table. After that, the first twin was brought in . . . a 14-year-old girl. Dr. Mengele ordered me to undress the girl and put her on the dissecting table. Then he injected the evipan into her right arm intravenously. After the child had fallen asleep, he felt for the left ventricle of the heart and injected 10 cc. of chloroform. After one little twitch the child was dead, whereupon Dr. Mengele had it taken into the corpse chamber. In this manner, all 14 twins were killed during the night.

After the war, Mengele fled to South America, where he lived out the remainder of his life as a fugitive in Argentina and Brazil. In February 1979, the Angel of Death suffered a stroke and drowned while swimming in the Atlantic Ocean.

March 14

The liquidation of the Podgorze Ghetto in Krakow was completed on this date in 1943, marking the conclusion of a three-year project to render the Polish city the “cleanest” in the land. This racial cleansing was conceived by Hans Frank, who was appointed generalgouvenour after the German invasion of September 1939. Jews had been living in Krakow since the middle of the 13th century, when they were invited there by King Boleslav, who granted them unprecedented religious freedoms and guarantees of personal safety; during the following century, as European nations expelled their Jewish populations, many fled to Poland. By mid-March 1943, Nazi Germany had obliterated that 600-year history.

A deportation order issued in May 1940 dispersed tens of thousands of Jews into the suburbs, small towns and countryside; more were expelled later that fall, with the remaining numbers relocated from the historic Jewish quarter to a dilapidated, overcrowded ghetto in the district of Podgorze. In June and October 1942, the new ghetto was thinned as thousands were shipped to the nearby Belzec death camp, where nearly 450,000 Jews would eventually perish. During the second deportation, all the children from the orphanage were taken to the outskirts of town and shot along with their teachers and curators.

On 13 March 1943, Podgorze was sealed off and the last 6000 Jews were evacuated or shot. The “workers” from Ghetto A -- mostly men -- were transferred to Plaszow, a labor camp were workers were forced to exhume, cremate, and scatter the remains of previous victims from mass graves. The women, children and elderly of “Ghetto B” were cleared out on March 14 and embarked for Berkenau, where 1500 were immediately put to death in Krema II, the gas chamber that became operational that very day. After Podgorze was “cleansed,” Jewish prisoners were trucked in to collect the property left behind.

Among the survivors from Krakow was Roman Polanski, the film director whose wife Sharon Tate would eventually be murdered by the Manson family.

January 27

Today is international Holocaust Remembrance Day, marking the anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz camp by troops from the Soviet First Army in 1945. When the Soviet forces arrived that day, they found a mere 7000 prisoners remaining at the three Auschwitz facilities. Most of those who remained were desperately ill and dying. The rest of the camp -- as many as 60,000 people -- had been evacuated on January 18, forced to march west in unfathomably cold weather to the city of Wodzislaw. A quarter of the marchers died along the route, shot by SS soldiers for falling behind or collapsing from exhaustion in the snow.

When Soviet troops entered Auschwitz, an 18-year old Hungarian Jew named Bart Stern was among the first survivors they found. Unlike most of his comrades, Stern was healthy, having avoided the death march by hiding out from German troops in a large bread bin. Then -- when the Polish and Ukrainian prisoners in his old barracks refused to let him back in -- Stern spent his nights hiding in one of the crematoria, surrounded by dead bodies, until January 27.

Otto Frank, the father of the famous diarist Anne, was also among those who remained at Auschwitz on that day. He was the only member of his family to survive. Since its construction in 1940, the Auschwitz facility had received roughly 1.3 million prisoners, 90% of whom had been killed.

Six years after the liberation of Auschwitz, the United States tested a 1-kiloton, air-delivered atomic weapon at Frenchman Flats. IT the first atmospheric nuclear test conducted at the Nevada Test Site. Over the next decade, several dozen additional atmospheric tests were carried out in Nevada, with the largest -- a 188-kiloton shot -- taking place in 1958, a year in which the US detonated an average of one nuclear blast for every week of the year.

Photo from Reuters