VUGHT, the SS concentration camp in The Netherlands 1/n During World War II, Camp Vught was the only SS concentration camp outside of Nazi Germany and the territory annexed by Nazi Germany. Unlike other 'foreign' camps, Vught was set up on the model of camps in Nazi Germany ⬇️
1/n After the opening on January 13, 1943, the first emaciated prisoners from Kamp Amersfoort arrived in Vught. At that time, Vught was still under construction. The Nazis also called the camp itself Konzentrationslager Herzogenbusch. During World War II, the camp served as a
2/n transit camp for 12,000 Jews and also as a camp where political prisoners, black marketers, gypsies, resistance fighters, hostages, homosexuals, and Jehovah's Witnesses were held.
Relatively speaking, the regime in Vught was mild, at least compared to the concentration camps
3/n and Nazi death camps on Polish territory. But this did not mean that there were no atrocities in the camp. At least 751 people died in Camp Vught. Of these, 329 were executed at the shooting site just outside the camp. Others died of disease, hunger and exhaustion.
4/n In May 1943, a camp segment separated by barbed wire was established, especially for women. In this women's camp were female resistance members, also Jewish women and the spouses and children of hostages.
As in other camps, atrocities also occurred in Camp Vught.
5/n The best known is the bunker drama of January 15, 1944. In this, 74 women were locked up in a cell of 9 square meters for 14 hours, in which ten people were killed.
The various children's transports that departed from Vught to the extermination camps were also horrifying.
6/n In June 1943, for example, more than 1,250 children (aged 0 to 16), with one or both parents, left Vught via Camp Westerbork to the Polish extermination camp Sobibor.
7/7 In less than a year and a half, more than 32,000 people pass through the gate of 'Konzentrationslager Herzogenbusch'. On September 5 and 6, 1944, all remaining political prisoners are deported to camps in Germany. The English liberators find an empty camp on October 27.
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The Day in Jewish History the Jewish Community of Crete was Lost at Sea
🧵1/n
At dawn on May 20, 1944, the Jews of Crete were arrested by the German army of occupation. Most of them lived in the Jewish quarter, in the Old Town of Chania, and were taken to the prisons of Agia.
2/n They were held there in inhumane conditions, as described by their (non-Jewish/Christian) friends who tried to contact them. Many had nothing to wear other than the clothes they were in at the time of their arrest.
3/n From Agyia they were transported to Heraklion by trucks. They were then forced to board the Nazi-flagged commandeered ship Tanais, which also contained local resistance fighters and Italian prisoners of war.
1/n Richard Stern enlisted in the German Army as a teenager and was awarded the prestigious Iron Cross for his distinguished service during World War I.
Later, Hitler would send the Hanseatic Cross to Stern for his war merit not realizing Stern was a Jew.
2/n Starting in 1927, Stern looked after his sister Martha and became the legal guardian of her son Rudolf.
On April 1, 1933 the day Nazis launched the boycott of Jewish owned businesses, there is a famous image taken of Stern in front of his Cologne bedding store.
3/n He is wearing his Iron Cross next to the Nazi guard there to prevent Germans from entering.
Stern arrived in the United States as the age of 40 in 1939. He lived in Queens and worked as a bus boy. On October 13, 1942, still not a citizen and at the age of 43 he enlisted in
1/2
“You’ve known for a long time that my greatest wish is to be a journalist, and later on, a famous writer. We’ll have to wait and see if these grand illusions (or delusions!) will ever come true, but till now I’ve had no lack of topics.
2/2
In any case, after the war I’d like to publish a book called The Secret Annex. It remains to be seen whether I’ll succeed, but my diary can serve as the basis.”
Anne Frank
Diary, 11 May 1944
3/ Anne's wish came true on 25 June 1947 when her book was published:
“The Secret Annex. Diary letters from 14 June 1942 - 1 August 1944”.
3,000 copies were printed for the first edition.
“I... saw our books fly into the twitching flames and heard the corny little tirade of the wily little liar. Funeral weather hung over the town. It was disgusting."
Erich Kästner about the book burning on Berlin's Opernplatz on May 10, 1933
2/n on May 10, 1933, university students burned over 25,000 volumes of “un-German” books, presaging an era of state censorship & control of culture. On the evening of May 10, in most university towns, right-wing students marched in
3/n torchlight parades “against the un-German spirit.”
The scripted rituals called for high Nazi officials, professors, university rectors, and university student leaders to address the participants and spectators.
At the meeting places, students threw the pillaged & “unwanted”
OTD, May 9, 1945, Theresienstadt was liberated
"For us the victory had come too late, much too late" 1/n When liberation came to Thereisenstadt, many hardly noticed. One moment the SS guards were there, and then they disappeared. “Our prison guards left us without a stir”,
2/n wrote Käthe Stark, “of which we were completely unaware.” Only a few days later, when the Red Army troops arrived, did the inmates really feel that they had been liberated. Yet for many survivors liberation was too much to bear. In an interview, one of the pioneers of
3/n recording Holocaust testimony, in 1946, Nechama Epstein-Kozlowski, a Polish Jew who had endured a succession of ghettos and camps, explained how liberation did not mean the end of her grief:
‘I didn’t have anybody, all alone. All night I lay and cried, “What will I do now?
February 18, 1943 1/n Hans Scholl and his sister Sophie (born 9 May 1921) , the leaders of the German youth group Weisse Rose (White Rose), are arrested by the Gestapo for opposing the Nazi regime.
2/n The White Rose was composed of university (mostly medical) students who spoke out against Adolf Hitler and his regime. The founder, Hans Scholl, was a former member of Hitler Youth who grew disenchanted with Nazi ideology once its real aims became evident.
3/n As a student at the University of Munich in 1940-41, he met two Catholic men of letters who redirected his life. Turning from medicine to religion, philosophy, and arts, Scholl gathered around him like-minded friends who also despised the Nazis, and the White Rose was born.