December 13, 1941:
"The last six Jews living in Warendorf, Germany, are deported to Riga, Latvia, and killed."
" 'It's hard to recognize,' said Shimon Srebnik, 'but it was here.
They burned people here.'
Srebnik, 47, had returned to Chelmno, a place he first saw in the summer of 1944 when he was sent there from the Lódz Ghetto at the age of 13.
The SS assigned Srebnik to a work detail.
Shot and left for dead by the fleeing Nazis as Soviet troops approached in January 1945, Srebnik was one of the very few Jews who survived the killing center.
"Situated in Poland, about 50 miles west of Lódz, Chelmno was the first Nazi extermination camp.
More than 150,000 Jews and about 5000 Gypsies were murdered there.
Chelmno's victims perished in special mobile gas vans that piped deadly engine exhaust fumes into the trucks' hermetically sealed interior compartments.
Chelmno operated from December 1941 to March 1943.
It reopened in the spring of 1944 during the liquidation of the Lódz Ghetto.
"That September the Nazis tried to obliterate the evidence of mass murder by exhuming the mass graves and burning the remains.
'A lot of people were burned here,' Srebnik recalled. 'Yes, this is the place. No one ever left here again.' "
December 14, 1941:
- "A Jewish ghetto at Kharkov, Ukraine, is established.
- " In the Warsaw Ghetto, a German policeman opens fire on a Jewish funeral procession, killing two mourners and wounding five other people."
"The Christian churches of Germany remained publicly silent in the face of the Nazi annihilation of Europe's Jews.
Unlike the protest of the Nazi "euthanasia" policy, which Catholic intervention succeeded in halting, there was no public outcry from the churches when Jews were "evacuated," and no official church condemnations were issued when news of atrocities in the East reached Germany.
"Both the Protestant (or Evangelical) Church and the Catholic Church yielded to Nazi pressure that restricted many church functions, closed most religious schools, and sent the few who did preach anti-Nazi sermons to concentration camps.
The majority of the clergy avoided dangerous topics, and church doors consequently remained open.
There was also considerable sympathy among Catholic and Protestant clergy for Hitler's traditional nationalist and conservative values, and especially for the Nazis' anticommunist crusade.
"Additionally, some leading figures of both churches maintained antagonistic attitudes toward Judaism and, in fact, harbored antisemitic sentiments that made them unwilling to protest the regime's treatment of the Jews. Both churches willingly handed over genealogical records that helped the Nazis determine Jewish ancestry as defined by the Nuremberg Laws.
"Some Catholic Church leaders were publicly antisemitic.
A pastoral letter written in 1941 by Archbishop Konrad Gröber blamed Jews for the death of Jesus, and implied that their current terrible fate was not only justified but was a "self-imposed curse."
"In view of the continued Nazi persecution of the churches, Catholic leaders preached submission in order to ensure survival. Papal announcements deplored the persecution but extended only prayer to non-Aryan victims of the Nazis.
Catholic bishops spoke out against the SS killings in the East, but most decried the murders only of 'Christian' Poles and Slavs.
Only a few clerics publicly denounced the extermination of the Jews.
"Protestant Church leadership traditionally supported the authority of the state.
Many clergy sympathized with Hitler's nationalism, and had long viewed the Jews as enemies of Christianity.
Of course, the nazified segment of the Protestant Church, known as the Deutsche Glaubensbewegung (German Christians' Faith Movement), under Reich Bishop Lüdwig Müller, fully supported the regime's attack on Jews.
With its mix of Christianity and Nordic paganism, this official 'Reich Church' regarded racial 'mongrelization' as immoral. Dissenting Protestants, organized as the Bekennende Kirche (Confessing Church), opposed Nazi interference in church affairs but were silenced by Nazi coercion after the imprisonment and 're-education' of 700 ministers.
"One of the few German religious leaders who took up the Jews' cause was Pastor Heinrich Grüber, head of a Protestant organization that aided Jewish converts to Christianity.
In 1940 Grüber was imprisoned for protesting the deportations of Jews.
Notably, Protestant Bishop Theophil Wurm of Württemberg, in a 1943 memorandum to Nazi authorities, futilely demanded 'an end to putting to death members of other nations and races.' "
December 15, 1941:
- "On this first day of Chanukah, 15 Jews are shot to death in the courtyard of the Warsaw Ghetto prison.
- "Latvian gentiles Yanis Lipke and Janis Briedys are able to smuggle ten Jews out of the Riga Ghetto.
Lipke plans to construct a Jewish hiding place beneath his home."
"Eminent historian Simon Dubnow espoused Jewish cultural nationalism, or Autonomism.
In various books, including the massive World History of the Jewish People, Dubnow described Jews of the diaspora as linked through the centuries by their unique cultural and spiritual lives, an achievement that he argued should culminate in autonomy.
Born in Belorussia, Dubnow moved to Berlin in 1922, but with Hitler's rise he left Germany in 1933 for Latvia.
Confined in the Riga (Latvia) Ghetto, the 81-year-old historian was among those shot on December 8, 1941."