Adolf and Maria Althoff #Righteous during World War Two 1/n Darmstadt, Germany… Summer 1941 – Adolf Althoff and his wife, Maria, directed the well-known Althoff circus during World War II. The circus, which included
2/n approximately 90 performers, traveled throughout Europe and spent the summer of 1941 near Darmstadt. At one particular show, Irene Danner, a young Jewish acrobat from Darmstadt, was among the visitors. She was a descendant of a German-Jewish circus family. Although Adolf knew
3/n that including a Jew in the circus was prohibited, he offered Irene a position, provided her with a pseudonym and false identity papers, and essentially disguised her Jewish identity for the duration of the war. During her time in the circus, Irene fell in love with another
4/n acrobat, Peter Storm-Bento. When she later became pregnant, Adolf and Maria ensured that she received adequate medical care. On March 20, 1942, deportations from Darmstadt began, followed by additional deportations in September 1942 and February 1943.
Photos: Irene Danner
5/n Though Irene’s grandmother was deported, her mother, Alice, and her sister, Gerda, escaped to the safety of the Althoff circus. The Althoffs agreed to provide refuge for Alice and Gerda as well. Adolf and Maria were fully aware of the dangers associated with hiding Jews.
6/n They knew that the circus could be searched at any moment and that their employees could betray them. Fortunately, Adolf had contacts in nearly every city who usually warned him of pending searches. Despite a few close calls, Irene, Alice, and Gerda all survived the war.
Gerhard Kretschmar, baby victim of the T4 Nazi euthanasia program
Murdered #OTD July 25, 1939
1/n On July 14, 1933, the Nazi government instituted the “Law for the Prevention of Progeny with Hereditary Diseases". People with disabilities were sterilised from this point on.
2/n In the autumn of 1939, things changed dramatically: 'Operation T4' started. From now on, murder through euthanasia became commonplace.
The first to die was a five-month-old baby boy called Gerhard Kretschmar. Gerhard’s father, Richard Kretschmar, considered his severely
3/n disabled child to be a ‘monster’, and he soon approached his local physician with the request that the baby be ‘put to sleep’ for his own good. After the doctor refused, Kretschmar wrote directly to Adolf Hitler, asking the Führer to overrule the doctor.
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The #Righteous during World War Two
Lorenzo Perrone
The mason who saved Primo Levi 1/n Born in 1904 in Fossano, in the province of Cuneo, Lorenzo Perrone saved the life of the famous writer Primo Levi when the two men found themselves in Auschwitz.
2/n Levi, who lived in Turin, worked as a chemist specializing in paints and varnishes. In 1943, in the early days of the occupation of Italy by the Germans, he joined a group of partisans in his native Piedmont. Arrested during a raid by the Fascist Republican militia
3/n on December 13, 1943, he was imprisoned in Aosta until January 20, 1944. He was then transferred to the Fossoli camp and deported on February 22, 1944. After his arrival in Auschwitz, he was sent to the Buna-Monowitz camp and assigned to forced labor in the I.G. farben.
1/n Born in Poland as Henryk Goldszmit, Korczak was a paediatrician, author of children’s books and pedagogue. During the Holocaust, he refused sanctuary multiple times in order to stay with the
2/n children of an orphanage he was director and founder of, Dom Sierot.
Korczak stayed with the children throughout their transport to Treblinka extermination camp, and is thought to have met his death there with 12 members of Dom Sierot’s staff and next to 200 orphan children.
3/n When World War II broke out, Korczak showed interest in becoming a volunteer in the army of Poland, however was too old to enlist, and therefore stayed with his children at the orphanage. The number of children in Dom Sierot drastically increased during these early stages of
How French notaries benefited from Jewish property in the Holocaust
1/n After 10 September 1940 the Vichy government allowed the appointment of administrators to manage Jewish enterprises.
The Vichy law of 22 July 1941 determined that such monies were to be deposited with
2/n the Caisse des Depots et Consignations (CDC), a French public sector financial institution. The economic ‘aryanization’ was gradual and had both French and German elements. The initial discriminatory ‘statute of the Jews’ was an initiative and decision of Vichy.
3/n Initially the German decrees were only applied in German-occupied Northern France. From 22 July 1941 the economic aryanization was extended to unoccupied Southern France. In Paris and its surroundings about 31,000 files were opened.
How four fearless young women who survived a Nazi death camp exposed the horrific experiments they were subjected to in coded letters using urine as invisible ink
🧵 1/n
However, the sordid details of the experiments were
2/n broadcast to the world after the women sent coded letters to their families in which they described their horrific treatment in invisible ink concocted from their own urine. One of these heroines was a Polish woman called Krystyna Czyz whose hometown of Lublin was invaded by
3/n German troops in September 1939 when she was just 15 years old. Under the supervision of Karl Gebhardt, the personal doctor to SS leader Heinrich Himmler, Nazi doctors began dragging inmates into their labs to conduct sick medical tests. Among the 74 human
THE VEL D’HIVER ROUND UP STARTED 1/n
On 16 and 17 July 1942, a raid and mass arrest was carried out in Paris by French police. 13,152 Jewish men, women and children were detained. Most of the
2/n captives in Paris were taken to the Vélodrome d’Hiver (Vel d’Hiv) in the 15th Arrondissement of Paris, near the Eiffel Tower. The Vichy government, which ruled Nazi-occupied France, was under pressure to accept orders from Berlin regarding their Jewish population.
3/n The Vel d’Hiv round up was part of a series of raids in 1942 to arrest Jews across the country, under the codename ‘Operation Spring Wind’ (Operation Vent printanier). This operation focused on ‘foreign or stateless Jews’, meaning the French Jewish population were initially