March 10
BULGARIA:
Bulgaria marks its Holocaust Remembrance day
Bulgaria marks Holocaust Remembrance day on March 10. The ceremony will be
attended by Parliament speaker Tsetska Tsacheva and other MPs who will gather
before the memorial by the National Assembly, commemorating the 68th
anniversary of the rescue of Bulgarian Jews.
The Council of Minister had declared March 10, by dint of a resolution on
February 13 2003, as Holocaust Remembrance Day and the "Day of the Salvation of
the Bulgarian Jews and of the Victims of the Holocaust and of the Crimes
against Humanity".
The event is initiated by the Bulgarian Jewish Association Shalom, and the
Sofia Regional Jewish Organisation, the private television channel bTV
reported.
The solemn ceremony will be opened by Maxim Benvenisti, president of Shalom, in
the presence of schoolchildren from the 134th secondary school Dimcho
Debelyanov.
The anniversary will be commemorated also by the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences
in the presence of Israeli ambassador to Bulgaria, Noah Gal Gendler, as well as
representatives of religious organisations and NGOs.
During World War Two, Bulgaria, an ally of Germany, successfully managed to
save the Jewish population in Greater Bulgaria from deportation and death,
although Jews in other areas under Bulgarian jurisdiction, Macedonia and
Thrace, were sent to their deaths.
Bulgaria also adopted various discriminatory laws against Jews at the behest of
Berlin. Anti-Semitic laws modelled on the Nuremberg laws were approved by MPs
in Sofia, and in December 1940, Bulgaria's National Assembly adopted the
Defence of the Nation Act.
Bulgaria's Jews were saved from deportation and death when the then-deputy
speaker of Parliament, Dimitar Peshev, and Bulgarian Orthodox Church leaders
Sofia Metropolitan Stefan and Plovdiv Metropolitan Kiril, stood up in 1943
against intentions to send Bulgarian Jews to concentration camps.
The Holy Synod of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church sent an official letter to
Boris, to the National Assembly, and to the Cabinet demanding that there be no
deportations. It is widely accepted that in the process, Bulgaria saved about
50 000 Jews from deportation.
At the Yad Vashem memorial in Israel to the Holocaust, 14 Bulgarians are listed
as Righteous Among the Nations, including the then-deputy speaker of
Parliament, Dimitar Peshev, and Bulgarian Orthodox Church leaders Sofia
Metropolitan Stefan and Plovdiv Metropolitan Kiril, who were prominent in the
campaign against the deportations.
(source: The Sofia Echo)
MACEDONIA:
Macedonia opens Holocaust memorial centre
A memorial museum devoted to Macedonian Jews who were victims of the Holocaust
during World War II opened on Thursday in the capital Skopje.
The inauguration ceremony was marked by symbolical placing of three urns with
ashes of Macedonian Jews killed in the Treblinka concentration camp in Poland,
where 7,148 of them lost their lives after being deported there in 1943.
The urns were carried by Macedonian soldiers who marched through the centre of
Skopje followed by several hundred people.
"The lessons of the Holocaust in your country must serve as en early warning
system to those of your neighbours, where anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial
are resurgent," Shimon Samuel of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre said at the
ceremony.
The memorial centre, built in an area once populated by the Jewish community,
was inaugurated in the presence of Macedonian President George Ivanov, Israeli
Deputy Prime Minister Moshe Ya?Alon and officials and diplomats from
neighbouring countries.
"The only surviving member of the 81-strong Misrahi family was my father,"
Viktor Misrahi, one of the rare survivors, told AFP.
"Today, the ashes of our people were brought back here from Treblinka and they
will remain here, at their home," he added.
Only an estimated 200 Jews live in Macedonia today, most of them in the capital
Skopje.
(source: Agence France-Presse)
GERMANY:
Publisher dusts off missing chapter in Hans Fallada's Alone in
Berlin----Bestseller set in Nazi Germany and published in communist era is to
have controversial chapter reinstated
The newly discovered chapter of Hans Fallada's Alone in Berlin depicts the
Quangels as grateful to Hitler, seen here at the 1936 Olympics. Photograph:
Getty Images
More than 60 years since Hans Fallada's international bestseller Alone in
Berlin was published, readers will be able to digest the unabridged version for
the first time.
Germany's Aufbau publishing house recently dug out Fallada's original
manuscript from its archive, only to find there was an extra chapter, and a
rather different story. They decided to reprint the novel as Fallada originally
wrote it.
Based on fact, Alone in Berlin tells the bleak story of a working-class couple,
Otto and Anna Quangel, in wartime Berlin. Crushed by the news that their son
has been killed at the front they begin a resistance campaign, distributing
anti-Nazi postcards. Hounded by the Gestapo, the couple are finally tried and
executed.
The missing chapter 17 reveals a side of the Quangels only hinted at in the
first version. "No one suspected that the original in our archive differed from
the published version," says René Strien, the director of Aufbau.
Yet the changes were considerable. Handwritten corrections on the original
manuscript show that chapter 17 was completely cut, and the style and politics
of the novel consistently toned down.
"The first edition was more tame, more black and white. There are more shades
of grey in this original edition," said Strien. "But remember, Aufbau was an
East German publisher and there was censorship back then. A communist should be
a marvellous person, a Nazi should be bad."
Founded in 1945, Aufbau became the major publishing house in postwar East
Germany and specialised at first in communist and anti-fascist literature.
The changes shift the reader's understanding of the story, according to the
Penguin editor Adam Freudenheim. "I was surprised to read the new chapter," he
said. "It was clear in the existing version that they are not heroic resisters,
it's the death of their son that causes them to search their consciences. But
this is more dramatic. There's not just good and evil."
Fallada's original portrayal of the Quangels is more ambivalent. At the start,
they are an average German family, settled into the political status quo.
Chapter 17 depicts them as actively taking part in national socialist society.
They are grateful to Hitler that Otto has work as the foreman in a furniture
factory. His wife admires the Führer and volunteers for the National Socialist
women's league – details deleted from the published edition.
It is only after they lose their son that the couple turn against the regime.
"This is really exciting," said Manfred Kuhnke, a Fallada researcher and old
family friend. "These are substantial changes. Fallada didn't want flawless
anti-fascists. He would never have taken this chapter out."
Linguistically, the original also brings you closer to the writer, according to
the critic Hajo Steinart. "It's grittier, more authentic, we're learning more
about the author's state of mind," he said.
Fallada's life was troubled by mental illness and addiction. He died shortly
before the novel was published and it is not clear whether he ever proofread
the corrections. Aufbau says the first edition may even have been the version
Fallada wanted.
"It's not as if the poor British readers have the wrong book," said Strien.
"They are both legitimate versions."
The reprint will initially only be available in Germany but Penguin said it was
considering a reprint with the rediscovered chapter 17 as an appendix.
The novel has been translated into 20 languages and sold more than 300,000
copies in the UK alone. In Germany, it is called Jeder stirbt für sich allein
(Everyone Dies Alone).
(source: The Guardian)
****************
A Hero in His Own Mind----Hitler Biography Debunks Mythology of Wartime Service
After analyzing recently found documents about Adolf Hitler's days as a soldier
in World War I, historian Thomas Weber has concluded that he was not the hero
he was later made out to be and that his radicalization shouldn't necessarily
be attributed to his wartime experiences.
The blood streaming out of his right temple had formed a large pool on the
floor. Adolf Hitler, the dictator and the greatest mass murderer of all time,
had taken his own life with a bullet from his pistol in the catacombs of his
bunker in Berlin. It was a well thought-out death.
In death, Hitler looked more like a man who had stepped out of the past. He
wore a simple, field-gray military coat bearing only two medals -- the wound
badge and the Iron Cross First Class -- both of which were from World War I.
Throughout his life, Hitler was proud of these medals because they had been
"soiled with the dirt of France and the mud of Flanders."
Hitler's "political will," dictated shortly before he committed suicide on
April 30, 1945, was meant to convey the message that he, as a man of the
people, had been deeply influenced by these early experiences. It spoke about
how, beginning in 1914, he had served as a "volunteer" and made his "modest
contribution to the First World War, which had been forced upon the German
Reich."
Previously, Hitler had boasted about having "risked his life, probably every
day" and having always "looked death in the eye." In other words, by his own
account, he was a hero who "as if by a miracle" had remained healthy, defying
the hail of bullets and remaining steadfastly fearless in the "most
unforgettable and greatest time of my earthly life."
One widespread theory holds that Hitler's World War I experiences are what
radicalized him and set him on the path toward becoming a committed and
merciless anti-Semite. According to this reading, World War I can be viewed as
the original catastrophe of the 20th century. For example, in his book "The
Dictators," British historian Richard Overy concluded that: "The war made
Hitler, as the revolution made Stalin." And his fellow Briton Ian Kershaw
believes that Hitler's worldview became more sharply defined at the time.
Joachim Fest, whose magnum opus "Hitler" has become the authoritative
biography, was also convinced of this causal relationship in the dictator's
life.
Useful Lies
One newcomer holds a completely different view -- and one that will undoubtedly
trigger much discussion. Thomas Weber, a 37-year-old historian from the western
German city of Hagen who teaches at the University of Aberdeen, in Scotland,
examined a group of documents that -- astonishingly enough -- had remained
virtually untouched under layers of dust in Bavaria's main state archive. The
find includes documents relating to Hitler's regiment, brigade and division,
court documents complete with witness testimony, and confiscated letters that
had been sent with the field post -- a treasure trove for any researcher.
In his book "Hitler's First War" (published in German for the first time this
week), Weber uses these documents to help rebut the widely held views about
Hitler's early years and demystify certain legends about them. For example,
Weber concludes that the unit Hitler served with was by no means a sort of
precursor to the Nazi Party, as some have claimed. In fact, as Weber and his
researchers discovered, only 2 percent of the soldiers in that unit would later
go on to join the Nazi Party.
What's more, Weber finds that Hitler was never the front-line soldier that he
and the Nazi propagandists would later make him out to be. Instead, he says
that this historical whitewashing was a highly political act in the run-up to
the so-called Machtergreifung, the Nazi seizure of power. Indeed, as historian
Gerd Krumeich writes, this was necessary because there was "hardly any other
overlapping of the opinions of society at large and the so-called Nazi
'revolution'" that was as solid as their shared opinion of the legacy of World
War I and all the dramatic events associated with it. In reality, however,
Hitler spent almost the entire four years of World War I a few kilometers
behind the main battle line and therefore often outside the most dangerous
areas. His job as a runner also meant that he was by no means in the "midst of
bombardment."
According to Weber's provocative conclusion, Hitler's political identity was
hardly burned into his consciousness by traumatic experiences at the front. In
fact, Weber writes, Hitler was "confused" when he returned from the war, and
his political identity "could have still developed in different directions."
Debunking the Hitler Mythology
Hitler was already 25 when he became a soldier, and he was presumably a
deserter. In May 1913, the sinister painter of postcards went to Bavaria
"almost certainly in an attempt to dodge the Austrian draft," Weber writes. But
now, surrounded by the cheering and patriotic frenzy at the beginning of World
War I, he was drawn to battle -- a struggle, as Hitler wrote, that "was not
forced upon the masses, by God, but was desired by the entire people." Hitler
was assigned to the Bavarian reserve infantry regiment No. 16 (RIR 16),
commanded by Colonel Julius List. According to Weber, RIR 16 was not the
volunteer regiment it has been described as, and List's regiment was not
teeming with students, artists and university graduates, as many Nazi
propagandists would later claim.
In fact, the share of budding and real academics among the roughly 30 percent
of the army made up of volunteers was only marginal. Instead, a
disproportionately large number of Jews volunteered to defend "the Fatherland"
and, as Weber concludes, it's unlikely that any of them suffered from
anti-Semitic treatment. On the contrary, the Kaiser's officers were apparently
anxious to make it possible for Jewish soldiers to practice their faith on the
front.
In late October 1914, the poorly trained and inadequately equipped regiment
experienced its "baptism by fire" during battles for the Flemish village of
Gheluvelt. With dramatic exaggeration, Hitler claimed that he was the only
survivor in his platoon, which seems unlikely. According to the records, 13 men
in his company died on Oct. 29. In "Mein Kampf," Hitler wrote that this battle
was only the "beginning," adding: "It went on in much the say way, year after
year, but horror had replaced the romance of the battlefield."
After Gheluvelt, Hitler served as a courier, usually outside the firing range
of artillery and machine guns, embedded in the relatively comfortable rear
echelon, a place where soldiers even had set amounts of time off. These were
conditions "like paradise," Weber writes, in the eyes of the soldiers at the
front, who were constantly confronted with death.
Fostering the War Hero Myth
After his failed putsch attempt in 1923 and a brief time in prison, Hitler and
his minions cleverly used the supposed wartime experiences of the would-be
World War I hero to win more votes on his way to the top. "It was thus really
in the period of 1925 to 1933 that the myth of the List Regiment took center
stage in Hitler's rhetoric," Weber writes.
Former comrades published highly sugar-coated versions of their memories under
titles like "With Adolf Hitler in the Bavarian RIR 16 List" and "Adolf Hitler
in the Field, 1914-1918." One author wrote glowingly that it was only from the
ranks of this regiment "that the man could have come who became the guide to a
new era and this undisputed, natural leader." Even in a children's book, Hitler
was described as "always one of the bravest soldiers in every battle."
Anyone who objected to this falsification of history was mercilessly persecuted
-- and sent to a concentration camp. Hugo Gutmann, for example, one of the
regiment's Jewish officers, fell into the clutches of the Gestapo in 1937 and
was imprisoned for two months for "contemptuous, derogatory and untrue comments
about the Führer."
The same lieutenant had seen to it that Hitler, like all runners, was decorated
with the Iron Cross First Class -- and told an opponent to the Nazi regime
about that fact. It was the same medal Hitler was wearing when he committed
suicide.
(source: Spiegel Online)
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