Posts Tagged ‘Auschwitz’
International Holocaust Remembrance Day
Former prisoners of the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp return on Holocaust Remembrance Day
Click here for the series of photos published by the Telegraph.
Auschwitz sign stolen to fund Swedish Nazi terror attacks
The Nazi gang that ordered the theft of the infamous ‘Arbeit Macht Frei’ sign from the gates of Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland planned to sell it to fund violent attacks against the Swedish Prime Minister and Parliament, it was claimed today.
A spokesman for the Swedish security police confirmed that the authorities were taking seriously a threat by a militant Nazi group to disrupt national elections next year.
“We are aware of the information about the alleged attack plans,” said Patrik Peter, the security police spokesman. “We have taken actions. We view this seriously…”
Allegations concerning who ordered the theft, and why, have surfaced today in Swedish newspaper reports after the former leader of a Swedish Nazi group claimed that it had been stolen to order for a collector in England, France or the United States…
The Nazi source said that the money would pay for an attack on the home of Fredrik Reinfeldt, the Swedish Prime Minister who has held the rotating presidency of the European Union for the last six months, and on the Swedish Foreign Ministry, the paper reported.
A third attack allegedly involved plans to bombard Swedish MPs from the public seats of the parliament…
The source allegedly said that five men were to be paid for carrying out the theft. He reportedly insisted that he personally was not guilty of any crime as the deal had not been completed.
I admit I’m surprised. Not about the theft being engineered for sale to a collector. There is no shortage of people with too much money who drape their pitiful egos with art and history.
I wasn’t aware that revanchist Nazis had advanced plans for terror in Western Europe to the stage of attacks upon the institutions of democracy. Quasi-criminal groups like this exist on the fringes of racist and bigoted sects. Both sides of the Atlantic.
At least security services in Sweden appear to keep a broad view – undiminished by the conventional Conservative vision of Middle Eastern terror hiding under every bed.
OTOH – these klowns may just be the Swedish cousins of Michelle Bachman seeking backers for a run at fuehrer.
Stolen! – Auschwitz’ “Arbeit Macht Frei” sign – UPDATED
Thieves have stolen the infamous sign at the entrance of Poland’s Nazi-era concentration camp, Auschwitz, … police and museum staff reported Friday.
“The inscription was stolen early this morning,” museum spokesman Jaroslaw Mensfeld told AFP.
“It’s a profanation of the place where more than a million people were murdered. It’s shameful,” he added.
Whoever did it must have known what he was stealing and how to do it, he added.
The forged iron inscription was not hard to unhook from above the large gates at the entrance, “but you needed to know how,” he said.
Frackin unbelievable.
Care to speculate on the motive, or who would do it?
I have a feeling we’ll all know soon.
UPDATE: Police in Poland have arrested 3 young men who had the sign – cut into pieces – in their possession. No details, yet.
UPDATE: Swedish police have at least one Nazi terrorist in custody.
The soldier who smuggled himself into Auschwitz
Daylife/Getty Images used by permission
Denis Avey is a remarkable man by any measure. A courageous and determined soldier in World War II, he was captured by the Germans and imprisoned in a camp connected to the Germans’ largest concentration camp, Auschwitz.
But his actions while in the camp – which he has never spoken about until now – are truly extraordinary. When millions would have done anything to get out, Mr Avey repeatedly smuggled himself into the camp.
Now 91 and living in Derbyshire, he says he wanted to witness what was going on inside and find out the truth about the gas chambers, so he could tell others. He knows he took “a hell of a chance”…
“You wouldn’t think anyone would think or do that, but that is how I was. I had red hair and a temperament to match. Nothing would stop me.”
He arranged to swap for one night at a time with a Jewish inmate he had come to trust. He exchanged his uniform for the filthy, stripy garments the man had to wear. For the Auschwitz inmate it meant valuable food and rest in the British camp, while for Denis it was a chance to gather facts on the inside…
He talked to Jewish prisoners but says they rarely spoke of their previous life, instead they were focused on the hell they were living and the work they were forced to do in factories outside the camp…
“There were nearly three million human beings worked to death in different factories,” says Mr Avey. “They knew at that rate they’d last about five months.
He says he would ask where people he’d met previously had gone and he would be told they’d “gone up the chimney”.
Part of the historic record so rarely taught in detail, nowadays.
I’ve known a few survivors of Auschwitz. Been there once. Knew one pair of survivors who met inside the concentration camp – and married afterwards.
I’ve known soldiers with the courage to travel beyond the boundaries of humanity like Avey – and spent the remainder of their lives surviving what now is called PTSD. My dearest heroes.
RTFA. Imagine a little of what Denis Avey saw and experienced.
Should Auschwitz be left to decay – and disappear?
Reminder at the edge of Track 17, Grunewald Station, Berlin
Daylife/Getty Images
On the eve of Holocaust Memorial Day, two experts on Auschwitz argue for and against the idea that the former Nazi death camp should be allowed to crumble away.
ROBERT JAN VAN PELT, HISTORIAN AND AUTHOR
Many Auschwitz survivors have told me that a visit to the camp can teach little to those who were not imprisoned there.
Their view is best summarised in the text of Alain Resnais’ celebrated movie Night and Fog (1955), written by the camp survivor Jean Cayrol. As the camera pans across the empty barracks, the narrator warns the viewer that these remains do not reveal the wartime reality of “endless, uninterrupted fear”. The barracks offer no more than “the shell, the shadow”.
Should the world marshal enormous resources to preserve empty shells and faint shadows?
