Remembering The Holocaust-A Real Time In History-Part 1a

 Nadene Goldfoot                                                 

Auschwitz-Birkenau- January 21, 2026Auschwitz-Birkenau-Concentration Camp 

International Holocaust Remembrance Day Tuesday, January 27

9 Shevat 5786/ 2026

Aushwitz was established in June 1940 where they did poison gas experiments.  It was the punishment camp, set up for Polish political prisoners, later used on Jews.  

„Arbeit macht frei” - work will set you free - is the inscription over the gate of the German Nazi Auschwitz I concentration camp, one of the most recognizable visual icons of the German Nazi concentration and extermination camp Auschwitz-Birkenau, which for the world is a symbol of the crimes of World War II. 

Jews arriving in Auschwitz off packed trains

The sign at the entrance of Auschwitz: Work will make you free:

It became of place of gassing people to death.

We remember as a nation the Holocaust every year in Israel.  How can people forget ancestors who suffered and died at that time while Nazi Germany tried to exterminate all the Jews in the world starting with their own country and their neighbors.  They managed to snuff out 6 million of us.  I was so lucky;  my paternal grandparents had moved to the USA before 1924 when the USA's door for Jews was barely open so I was born in the USA.  In 1934 life was beginning to become very grim for Jews in Germany.  

In 1934 Germany, Jewish people faced escalating legal discrimination, economic exclusion, and social isolation as the Nazis solidified power. Jews were losing jobs, property, and participation in public life through laws like the Civil Service Law, while facing economic boycotts, restricted education, and forced name changes, all pushing them out of German society and towards emigration or persecution. 

This is what my mother and father would have faced if living in Germany

• Exclusion from Professions: The Civil Service Law (from 1933) and subsequent decrees excluded Jews from government, university, and other state positions, with Jewish tax consultants losing licenses.
• Economic Strangulation: Jewish businesses were denied market access, banned from advertising, and lost government contracts; membership in the German Labor Front became mandatory for workers, but Jews were banned from it, effectively blocking private sector jobs.
• Educational Restrictions: Quotas severely limited Jewish student admissions to public schools and universities.
• Forced Assimilation & Identity: Jews with non-Jewish first names were forced to adopt "Israel" (men) or "Sara" (women). It was to identify them.  Wearing the star of David would not be enough.  
  
     Jews couldn't get out of Germany or other sites after 1939, then rounded up to be slaughtered.  The "doors closed" for German Jews to flee in stages, but effectively by late 1941, when Nazi Germany made emigration illegal for Jews still in the country and revoked their citizenship, while other nations had already largely shut their borders due to restrictive immigration policies and economic fears, trapping most remaining Jews inside Nazi-controlled territory for the Holocaust. 
• Invalidation of Passports: Passports of East European Jewish immigrants were invalidated, creating grounds for deportation.
• Physical & Social Separation: Signs forbidding Jews from public spaces like health spas appeared, and the Gestapo (secret police) was established to enforce Nazi rule. 

                                                          Overall Impact

By 1934, the systematic persecution aimed to strip Jews of their rights, property, and presence in German society, creating immense pressure for them to leave the country, though the Nuremberg Laws in 1935 would formalize racial separation even further.  

The Nuremberg Laws   ^ⓘ) were antisemitic and racist laws introduced in Nazi Germany on 15 September 1935 at a special session of the Reichstag during the annual Nuremberg Rally of the Nazi Party. The legislation comprised two measures. The Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honour prohibited marriages and sexual relations between Jews and Germans and barred Jewish households from employing German women under the age of 45. The Reich Citizenship Law restricted citizenship to people of "German or related blood", reducing others to state subjects without full rights.

Jews realized they were doomed, yet developed that optimism of saying it would all blow over and the government would get rid of Nazi power.  Many were older people, not used to change, not ready to pick up and run away, so much like the many Jews of Spain in 1492 who also were threatened and had to hide their Jewish beliefs and meld in with the society as Catholics.  They became today's anusim.  

My uncle Werner was born in 1916 and raised in Westerburg, Hildesheim, Niedersachsen Germany.  He had been picked up by the Gestapo or police and put in Aushwitz for hitting his cow with a stick gently as they walked the dirt path together to the barn.   Luckily, it was at a time before it became the gas chambers;  and though treated horribly, beaten and humiliated as they forced him to eat raw pig meat, his family managed to scrape up all the money they had to get him  out. His passport was issued from Stuttgart.   I think he was the last Jew, boarding a ship on May 4, 1939 from Boppard, Germany.  His whole family, parents, 16 year old red-headed sister, aunts, uncles, all were wiped out. His father had served in the German army in WWI  and was a decorated soldier in the service of the Kaiser, but was forced to scrub the streets because he was a Jew.  Many wore their uniforms while doing this to show people they had been good citizens.  

               The George Washington, Werner's ticket to New York.   They were only able to get him out and he, arriving in New York as a butcher, could not help, either.  Later in life he suffered emotionally from this trauma.                                       

                        This cartoon was from Iran  

Yes, top leaders of the Islamic Republic of Iran, including Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, have a well-documented history of denying or casting doubt on the Holocaust. The Iranian regime, under the guidance of its supreme leaders, has used Holocaust denial and distortion as a tool to advance its anti-Israel and anti-Zionist agenda, often framing it as a "fabricated story" or questioning its magnitude. 

Well-known Holocaust deniers include authors and pseudo-historians like David Irving, political figures like Pat Buchanan, notorious white supremacists such as George Lincoln Rockwell, and contemporary figures like B.o.B and Dan Bilzerian, alongside academics who promoted denial, such as Arthur Butz. These individuals, often promoting antisemitic ideologies, spread misinformation claiming the Holocaust didn't happen or was exaggerated, using tactics from campus ads (Bradley Smith) to books. 

• George Lincoln Rockwell: Founder of the American Nazi Party, openly espoused Holocaust denial as part of his racist agenda.
• Pat Buchanan: A political commentator and author who has questioned aspects of the Holocaust narrative.
• Arthur Butz: A professor who wrote The Hoax of the Twentieth Century, a foundational text for modern Holocaust denial.
• Bashar al-Assad, the Syrian dictator whose regime was recently toppled, engaged in Holocaust denial in 2023
• Resource:
  Book: The Holocaust-A History of the Jews of Europe During the Second World War by Martin Gilbert
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Holocaust

How Nazism Gained Power in Germany:; Himmler and His SS Squad

 Nadene Goldfoot                                                   

                                1938 in Germany,  Nazis parading down the street

In 1919 the German Workers' Party added the words, "National Socialist" to its name and in 1921, Adolf Hitler became its leader.  Until 1923 it was largely restricted to Bavaria and only became a mass movement in the economic depression at the end of the 1920's.

 On 15 March, 1931, Nazi Party officials were told,:  "The natural hostility of the peasant against the Jews, and his hostility against the Freemason as a servant of the Jew, must be worked up to a frenzy."  6 months later, on the eve of the Jewish New Year, squads of young Stormtroopers attacked Jews returning from synagogue.  3 youths beat up an elderly Jewish gentleman with their fists and rubber truncheons, 5 other young men stood around to protect them.  The strong helping the strong to attack the weak- became the hallmark of Nazi action. 

  At the last free election in Weimar, Germany in 1932, it was the country's largest party, although not a majority (37% of the votes).  It achieved power on January 30, 1933, after which it used every method to become the country's only party----a position it ruthlessly maintained until the end of World War II in 1945.  

World War I began after the assassination of Austrian archduke Franz Ferdinand by South Slav nationalist Gavrilo Princip on June 28, 1914. The spark that set off World War I came on June 28, 1914, when a young Serbian patriot shot and killed Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire (Austria), in the city of Sarajevo. The assassin was a supporter of the Kingdom of Serbia, and within a month the Austrian army invaded Serbia. As a result of the military alliances that had formed throughout Europe, the entire continent was soon engulfed in war. Because European nations had numerous colonies around the world, the war soon became a global conflict.  It's much like it is today, which is what can happen with Ukraine with Russia waiting on its border. Other countries like USA, NATO will get into the defense posture.  

 World War I, which lasted from 1914 until 1918, introduced the world to the horrors of trench warfare and lethal new technologies such as poison gas and tanks. The result was some of the most horrific carnage the world had ever seen, with more than 16 million military personnel and civilians losing their lives.  You'd think that Germany had had enough killing. They started WWII by invading, claiming they needed more room.  

Tomorrow is International Holocaust Day when we stop to remember  how people backed the slaughter of 6 million Jews in Europe.  Their goal actually was to kill all the Jews in the world wherever they lived.  I was one of the lucky ones to have been born in the USA at the time.

Jews had been citizens of Germany, but by 1933, the year before I was born, Adolf Hitler's National Socialist Party assumed power in Germany.  Their military was the main strength of this party; divided between the traditional army, navy, and air force of the Germany state which they called the Wehrmacht, and the horrid SS, something new in countries being a paramilitary organization loyal  to only  Hitler and his Nazi Party.  It became clear that it was not only crazy and most dangerous, so much so that a few sane Germans even tried to assassinate Hitler but of course, failed.                       

                                           Himmler, 1942

Hitler gave Heinrich Himmler and the SS powers to imprison all political opponents of Hitler's  3rd Reich, which meant that certain lawyers, homosexuals, gypsies,  mentally handicapped, Catholic priests, and ALL Jews were to be imprisoned.  

For the 1st time in modern history, anti-Semitism became a Western governmental policy.  It had happened earlier in Biblical days during Queen Esther and King Ahasueros of Persia, when Haman set out to have all Jews slaughtered, which is why we have a holiday of Purim to remember it by.  The killing had actually started when Queen Esther was informed and able to speak to her husband who stopped it. The king, so the story goes, didn't know his wife was Jewish.   

In Germany, Jews had become foreigners in their own country, with a series of new laws for everyone to learn.  Jews had lost their legal rights and were forced out of their businesses from trade and industry. No one was allowed to speak out against Hitler.  if they did, they disappeared-killed.                                         

Eugenics poster entitled "The Nuremberg Law for the Protection of Blood and German Honor." The illustration is a stylized map of the borders of central Germany upon which is imposed a schematic of the forbidden degrees of marriage between Aryans and non-Aryans and the text of the Law for the Protection of German Blood. The German text at the bottom reads, "Maintaining the purity of blood insures the survival of the German people."  Doesn't this remind you of White Power we have seen today?  

The Nuremburg Race Laws were enacted on September 15, 1935.  They forbade acts with Jews such as marriage, sex and everything relating between people such as Jews forbidden to employ Gentile domestic servants or to hoist the German flag.  Jews had to immediately wear a star of David on their clothing to identify them as Jews. Who was a Jew in the 1st place?  Someone who had at least 2 Jewish grandparents.   Penalties included fines and prison with hard labor.  They should have all walked out then; they knew they were being persecuted, but the situation made it almost impossible to do so. 

                                               

                Himmler and Rudolf Hess in 1936, viewing a scale model of Dachau                                                 concentration camp                                           

Residents in Graz, Austria, watch as the Jewish cemetery’s ceremonial hall burns. —US Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of Dokumentationsarchiv des Oesterreichischen Widerstandes

Germans pass by the smashed windows of a Jewish-owned shop. The aftermath of Kristallnacht (Night of Broken Glass) 9-10 November 1938, the German anti-Semitic pogrom, when over 200 Synagogues were destroyed and thousands of Jewish homes and businesses were ransacked. 

Universal History Archive/Getty Images....this November will be 84 years ago.  Anti-Semitism has been the worst this past year since then.  

Kristallnacht, November 9-10, 1938, the night of the broken glass, took place all over Germany whereby Jewish shops were broken into and the glass on the shops all were broken.  It's a reference to the broken windows of synagogues, Jewish-owned stores, community centers, and homes plundered and destroyed that night. Instigated by the Nazi regime, rioters burned or destroyed 267 synagogues, vandalized or looted 7,500 Jewish businesses, and killed at least 91 Jewish people. They also damaged many Jewish cemeteries, hospitals, schools, and homes as police and fire brigades stood aside.

My uncle, Werner Oster's father, Ferdinand, Jewish and a veteran of WWI, was attacked and forced to scrub the street with something like  a tooth brush.  He wore his WWI uniform while doing this, hoping to shame the Nazis-and the crowd.  

Kristallnacht was a turning point in Nazi anti-Jewish policy that would culminate in the Holocaust—the systematic, state-sponsored mass murder of the European Jews. Jews were suddenly finding themselves excluded from an economic life.  Before the Nazi catastrophe, 7,502  Jews were living in Nuremberg, which was a center of the anti-Semitic movement.  No Jews were left there by 1942.  

                                               

Heinrich Himmler had concentration camps to imprison people, administered  by notoriously cruel "Death's Head Units."  All those in SS, including their military arm of the Waffen SS and concentration camp supervisors, wore the insignia of a skull on their caps.  These special Death Heads also wore a special skull and crossbones badge on their right collar.

The war began in 1939 with thousands forcibly deported from Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia.  The SS operated on its own, exterminating Hitler's enemies and all those said to be racially impure, basically the Jews and Gypsies.  Nobody spoke out.  6 million Jews were slaughtered before the Nazis of Germany were stopped.  

What happens in one place affects another.  On 15 April 1936, just over 5 weeks after the Przytyk pogrom against Jews in Poland, the Palestinian Arabs began a General Strike in protest against Jewish immigration into Palestine.  Violent acts against Jewish property and against individuals culminated in the killing of 2 Jews  in Tulkarm on the 1st day of the strike.  On April 19th, 9 Jews were killed in Jaffa, and on April 20th a further 5.  Within a month, 21 Jews had been killed in Arab attacks.  6 Arabs had been killed by the British police.  No Arabs had been killed by Jews.  This in turn had its affect on the emigration from Germany.

Reference:

https://www.ushmm.org/information/exhibitions/online-exhibitions/special-focus/kristallnacht

Book:  Killing the Jews by Bill O'Reilly & Martin Dugard, the hunt for the worst war criminals in history. 

The New Standard Jewish Encyclopedia 

page 32, The Holocaust by Martin Gilbert