Written by zachor_foundation on May 7, 2014
The battle began under strong moonlight as a tremendous burst of artillery fire shattered the silence. The commander of the German forces, Erwin Rommel, was on sick leave in Germany for the first time in his career. Since September, the commander of the British forces, Major General Bernard Montgomery, had been amassing vast reserves along the northern front, and on the southern side he constructed a mammoth dummy stronghold. The ruse succeeded: He attained total surprise when he attacked from
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Written by zachor_foundation on May 7, 2014
The third and last part of the Wannsee Conference (the meeting held in early 1942 in a suburb of Berlin to coordinate the implementation of the “Final Solution”) took place on October 27, 1942. The discussants again debated the way to treat mixed Jewish-“Aryan” marriages and their offspring, the “mixed breeds” (Mischlinge). The proposals included deportation to the East and forced sterilization. In the end, no decision was made, because, it was feared, each of the options would have detrimental
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Written by zachor_foundation on May 7, 2014
Deportations from the Theresienstadt Ghetto to the Treblinka and Auschwitz extermination camps commenced in October 1942. They marked the beginning of a wave of deportations that did not end until the autumn of 1944, when the gas chambers in Auschwitz were shut down. The hopes of Jewish leaders, that the deportations from the Protectorate to the ghetto would spare these Jews from brutal deportation to the East, were proven false. When the transports ended, only 11,000 Jews out of the
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