Replies

November 13, 1943:

November 11: "At the Theresienstadt, Czechoslovakia, camp/ghetto, on the 25th anniversary of Germany's defeat in World War I, the Germans assemble all 47,000 Jews in a large square for an ill-organized census.
It lasts for 18 hours in a chilly rain.
Some of the Jews die during the census or soon after.
November 13: "A Jew named Fritz Lustig makes an unsuccessful attempt to escape from the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp."

Kurt Waldheim

"The career of Kurt Waldheim demonstrates the ease in which some individuals moved between civil society and Nazism.
When the United States Justice Department put him on its Watch List as a suspected war criminal in 1987, the shroud of secrecy Waldheim had placed over his past quickly unraveled.

"Kurt Waldheim entered law school at the University of Vienna in 1937.
Following the Anschluss, he joined the Nazi Students' Association and became a Storm Trooper.
Waldheim participated in the French and Russian campaigns as a Wehrmacht soldier and was wounded in December 1941.

"Waldheim's service in the Balkans from 1942 to 1945 provided him with direct knowledge of the atrocities committed against Yugoslav partisans.
Although he personally did not participate in the killings, an Austrian commission investigating his role ruled that he was close to persons who issued and carried out atrocities and that he did nothing to disrupt them.

"After the war Waldheim immediately distanced himself from his Nazi past.
He joined the Austrian diplomatic service in 1945, served as foreign minister from 1968 to 1970, and was named the secretary general of the United Nations in 1971.
Although publicly discredited, Waldheim has yet to openly confront his past."

"This circular encourages Palestinians to make contributions to rescue efforts of European Jews.
An excerpt of the text: 'Children of Israel, listen!
Listen to the voice that cries out for help.
Remember our brothers at every moment, when you study and when you rest, when you eat and when you play.
Join together as one individual to rescue and support [our brothers].' "

"Jews seeking to emigrate to Palestine without permission had to evade a British Navy intent on preventing their entry.
In late November 1943, Jews aboard three ships seeking to enter Palestine were detained and sent to a camp on the island of Mauritius.
Committed to caring for their own, the detainees established a hospital.
The nurses and doctors faced many challenges, including an outbreak of typhus."

Thanks for refreshing my memory on Kurt Waldheim.....and especially posting his pic....

I’m no fan of Kurt Waldheim and I detest the UN. That stated, his wartime record has been greatly inflated. He served in the Wehrmacht (as did the vast majority of Austrian men his age during WWII) not the Waffen SS. He was primarily a desk officer assigned to intelligence work. Unless fight armed partisans is considered a war crime, I do not think he would fall into the category of being a major Nazi war criminal.

So Waldheim went to law school? When I was in law school in 1981, one day my Civil Procedure professor turned the class over to a Holocaust survivor. He did this every year. The survivor spent an hour telling us what he had to do to be the only member of his family to survive Auschwitz. Being a history buff, I knew about the Holocaust and wondered what the point of the presentation was. At the end of the presentation, Professor Harvey went to the podium, and all he said was “Your duty as lawyers is to make sure this never happens again.” That’s when I realized what the Rule of Law and the role of the legal profession was all about. Obviously, I never forgot that lecture. Professor Harvey did that presentation every year until about 1995.

Apparently, Waldheim never took Civil Procedure from Professor Harvey.

Also, unfortunately, the vast majority of my classmates walked out of the lecture convinced “that can’t happen here.” And that’s exactly what the average German of 1928 would have said if you described the coming Holocaust to them.