‘I Saw The Horrors’: How Australian Journalists Bore Witness To The Holocaust

The day after Kristallnacht, Berlin, November 1938. Public doman, via Wikimedia Commons

BY FAY ANDERSON

ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF JOURNALISM 

STUDIES, MONASH U NIVERSITY

In the dying days of World War II, startling news about “horror camps” in Germany began to emerge, as Western war correspondents accompanied British and American forces advancing towards Berlin. During the liberation of the camps, soldiers and journalists, including 15 Australian journalists and two artists, encountered thousands of dead. Some victims were in locked rail cars; others were piled in mounds or tossed into pits. Traumatised survivors wandered about the camps, while those too weak to walk remained in stifling huts as their Nazi captors fled.

International Holocaust Remembrance Day is the anniversary of the Soviet liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau Concentration and Extermination Camp on January 27 1945. It is timely, as we commemorate, to reflect on what was known and believed at the time.

As living memory of the Holocaust fades, we need to continue to strive for an accurate reckoning of what took place and account for how it was reported. This obligation is perhaps all the more compelling in the wake of Israel’s relentless and remorseless destruction of Gaza in response to Hamas’ horrific attacks on October 7 2023, which has complicated and perhaps clouded cultural memory of the Holocaust.

Understanding how the press covered the Holocaust illuminates the role of journalism and its contemporary importance. It is not only about looking back.

The Australian press offers a unique dimension to our understanding of the Holocaust. It reveals things about journalism’s complicated engagement with the Nazi’s campaign of extermination, the political and cultural context of the 1930s and 1940s, the comforting myth that emerged after the war that the press “did not know”, and how the Holocaust has influenced modern journalism.

Personal stories were treated as credible. The idea of objectivity was challenged. The importance of visual evidence became widely accepted.

The pre-war coverage

The Australian press coverage of the Third Reich in the 1930s is strikingly reminiscent of how authoritarian figures are characterised today. Hitler was underestimated. He was an object of press fascination and the butt of bemused ridicule.

Throughout the decade, the Australian press published accurate accounts of Hitler’s brand of racial hatred and aggression. It reported his venomous antisemitism and intimidation, the Nuremberg Laws and expropriation decrees, the exodus of Jews and their status as refugees, the infamous pogrom on November 9 and 10 1938 known as Kristallnacht, and the proliferation of concentration camps, a reality in Nazi Germany since 1933.

And yet the coverage was inconsistent, entirely dependent on the will of editors. Widespread coverage did not necessarily translate into empathy or protest.

This was the era of the Immigration Restriction Act – the “White Australia Policy”. A narrow sense of what constituted an Australian national identity informed a discriminatory immigration program predicated on exclusion. The political, cultural and racial values underpinning Australian society complicated the nation’s response to Jewish persecution.

Australia’s discriminatory legislation was hardly unique, but the ambivalent pre-war treatment of Jewish victimisation reflected entrenched anxieties about race. The dehumanising language that has infected current debates about refugees and “border control” in Australia has its antecedents in the 1930s and 1940s.

Jewish refugees were conceived as a problem and a threat. Jewish migrants, particularly those from Eastern Europe, were regarded as clannish and overly “political” (either covertly communist or innately Zionist) and simply not “white” enough. Sections of the national press staunchly defended the national immigration policy, echoing entrenched grievances and pandering to xenophobia. Other editors frequently echoed the pervasive political belief that Jewish refugees and all non-white migrants threatened social cohesion.

In response to the tumultuous events in Germany, several news editors began to campaign (with qualifications) for a relaxation of the restrictive immigration policy. But other publications continued to defend the restrictions, calling on the government to “halt unrestricted Jewish influx”.

Accounts of Nazi terror

Unlike the racial policies and persecution of the 1930s, the mass extermination of the Jews during the war was not committed openly. Despite the secrecy and military priorities, the Australian press published fragmented but frequent wire accounts of “Nazi terror”. Deportations, enforced slavery, executions, ghettos and the establishment of concentration and extermination camps all featured in the press.

The number of articles in Australian daily newspapers recording the killing of Jews increased dramatically in the second half of 1942, after the London-based Polish government-in-exile released a shocking report they had received from the Bund, the Jewish Socialist Labor Party in Warsaw. The report documented the slaughter of 700,000 Jews and stated that “mass extermination” had begun.

The frequency of such articles revealed an editorial willingness to focus on the Jewish plight, despite the fierce competition for news space as the war against the Japanese intensified. Some news outlets, including small regional mastheads, diligently published extensive and accurate coverage of the persecution of Jews throughout the war.

Other publications, however, failed to maintain continuous coverage, despite the agonising enormity of events. Relying for the most part on wire accounts rather than journalists’ eyewitness reports, the news did not always generate sustained interest.

Godfrey Blunden, an Australian war correspondent accredited with Sydney’s Daily Telegraph, was based in the Soviet Union for 16 months. He insisted that his reports on the murder of the Jews in Russia be read and believed.

Blunden suspected there was a resistance to acknowledging what was happening, within the newspaper industry and the wider public. But if the Australian public in Sydney and Melbourne paid close attention, the evidence of the Jewish fate was unambiguous.

Liberation reports

On 22 July 1944, Soviet forces reached Majdanek near Lublin, Poland. The Soviets had invited a phalanx of journalists and photographers, including James Aldridge, a journalist with the Melbourne Herald, to witness the liberation. It was another six months before Auschwitz-Birkenau was liberated.

It is striking that, while the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau has taken on an epochal significance, the event was not regarded as especially significant at the time. The absence of Western journalists and the resistance to acknowledging the Soviet role in the liberation meant that most major newspapers provided only vague details. Many reports were buried in the inner recesses of newspapers or not published at all, suggesting to the public that the revelations were not of central significance and possibly unreliable.

By late April 1945, however, the revelations of the “Final Solution” were no longer deemed secondary by Australian news organisations. Western war correspondents and photographers descended on the newly liberated concentration camps and the newspapers published their harrowing dispatches. The News in Adelaide published Ronald Monson’s searing report under the headline “I saw the Horrors of Belsen camp”.

What can the reporting of the liberation of the camps tell us about the Australian press? The overwhelming preoccupation in the eyewitness accounts was the insistence that the testimony had to be both believed and remembered, and that their role provided moral clarity. It was also apparent that these first-hand accounts by Western journalists were privileged and accepted.

Historians have tended to focus on the impact and representational ramifications of the visual coverage of the concentration camp horrors. But the textual reports were crucial and would have a lasting influence. In Australia, it ushered a new style of journalism: personal and intimate, subjective and emotional. Journalists did not just relate news of the camps; they became central to the story as first-person narrators, eyewitnesses to a vast and terrible crime against humanity.

Another dimension of the reports was the journalists’ self-awareness in recognising the limitations of their professional craft. Although they were cognisant of the Nazi extermination campaign, most had not viewed the physical evidence. They were forced to process their trauma as they gathered information. Reporting difficulties were compounded by a male-dominated work culture that extolled stoicism and emotional detachment.

Objectivity, the cherished principle of reporting practice, was challenged by the camps. Here is the noted war reporter Osmar White (best known for his vivid rendering of Australia’s military campaign in New Guinea), after visiting Buchenwald and moving among its “living dead”:


I cannot now, or ever will be able to write objectively about what I have seen. One cannot observe war for three and a half years as a newspaperman and remain either a sentimentalist or be super sensitive of spectacles of human suffering. Yet what I saw today moved me to physical illness.

Journalists accepted and at times embraced the Australian brand of journalistic swagger. But their humbling experience of the camps encouraged a gentler, more empathetic form of reporting, one that allowed the survivors’ humanity to emerge.

Other accounts, however, seemed to revel in the horror and reduce the victims to anonymous caricatures. The immense linguistic and representational challenge of communicating a crime as big as the Holocaust was one thing; the tendency to minimise, distort and even deny the known facts was another.

In Australia, there is evidence that some news outlets recognised the camps as the terrible consummation of an incremental anti-Jewish policy. Yet doubts about the revelations of the Nazis’ extermination campaign persisted. Brian Penton, the editor of the Daily Telegraph, was moved to issue a damning editorial in April 1945, headlined “You Must Believe It Now!”. Significantly, some newspapers presented the graphic concentration camp photographs as the ultimate proof of the Nazi atrocity, though photographs of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau would not be published in Australian newspapers until the Nuremberg trials began in November 1945.

For all the prejudices and insecurities that infiltrated the national reckoning with the Holocaust, the Australian coverage compares favourably to that of the British and American press. In Australia, there was not a pervasive tendency to universalise or conflate the Jewish plight with other populations – a tendency that negated the fact that Jews were systematically targeted.

Postwar coverage

Australian coverage of the Holocaust was marked by numerous examples of tenacious reporting and courageous editorial commitment to publishing the truth. But it was also marred by degrees of editorial indifference, denial and disbelief, and the selective and self-serving exercise of memory.

The most disturbing example was the myth, propagated by some Australian newspapers at the time, that the annihilation of European Jewry was something of a surprise. The press were inconsistent for most of the war in their treatment of the genocide. Arguably a greater failure was the coverage of the victims after their liberation from the camps.

The treatment of the revelations in Australia varied according to the editors. Some, like Brian Penton, published frequent accounts on the brutalities committed against Jews. Others treated these as isolated incidents, burying such reports or, worse still, omitting the Jewish experience entirely. The evidence and memories were distorted in the postwar debates in Australia about Jewish migration.

Jewish persecution did not cease with the end of the war, nor did the survivors’ suffering end with their liberation. Unfortunately, the robustness of the Australian coverage of the long ordeal did not extend to its aftermath. The documented atrocities quickly faded from public consciousness. The survivors’ stories and faces seemed paradoxically to be confined to the moment of their liberation.

The sensational war trials refocused attention on the Jewish plight, but were quickly forgotten and overtaken by other events. News practices and priorities, which relegated the Holocaust to old news, diminished the Jewish fate and diluted public sympathy.

This, in turn, influenced attitudes to Jewish refugees at the very time the federal Labor government was launching Australia’s postwar immigration program. The partial obfuscation of Jews as the key targets of the Nazi regime was useful to those who sought to exclude Jewish migrants. Widespread resistance to acknowledging the extent of their mistreatment led to the revival of antisemitic tropes and stereotypes, uncomfortably redolent of Nazi sentiment.

Access and reporting

Nonetheless, as the years passed, the liberation of the concentration camps became one of the defining memories of the war for the journalists themselves. Holocaust consciousness and the journalists’ pride in their role as witnesses to the truly calamitous events had taken hold by the 1970s. There was also a growing acknowledgement of the Jewish people’s immense contribution to Australia.

Tragically, International Holocaust Remembrance Day this year will be marked in Australia in the wake of the horrifying Bondi Beach massacre, and amid increased and emboldened antisemitism and online disinformation.

The Holocaust had a profound influence on Australian journalism and, more specifically, the coverage of genocide. But in one way, it did not change reporting. The representation of crisis and conflict in the media continues to be determined by who does the seeing and who does the telling. More importantly, it is shaped by the political agendas of editors and media owners, and by politics itself.

If journalists are silenced or denied access, and if press organisations refuse to cover a story (or if they provide a skewed rendering), humanitarian crises become a secondary story at best. This is seen most recently and starkly in Gaza today, with Israel’s tight control of the conflict’s narrative by limiting entry into Gaza itself, preventing independent journalism and regaling journalists with carefully curated versions of events.

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Stalin’s Postwar Terror Targeted Soviet Jews – In The Name Of ‘Anti-Cosmopolitanism

A plaque in Russia commemorates the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, whose leaders were executed in August 1952. Adam Baker/Flickr via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY

BY WENDY Z. GOLDMAN

PROFESSOR OF HISTORY,

CARNEGIE MELLON UNIVERSITY

Many Americans know of Josef Stalin’s Terror of the late 1930s, during which more than 1 million people were arrested for political crimes, and over 680,000 executed.

Fewer know about the repressions that began after World War II and ended with Stalin’s death in 1953. Much like the repressions of the 1930s, they involved fabricated plots, arrests, coerced confessions and purges. Unlike the Terror of the 1930s, they were accompanied by a wave of state-sponsored antisemitism – including the purge of Jews from multiple occupations and unwritten quotas that limited their professional and educational opportunities.

The abolition of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee on Nov. 20, 1948, and the arrest and execution of its members was central to this postwar assault. The committee’s elimination was accompanied by an “anti-cosmopolitan” campaign emphasizing Russian nationalism, Soviet patriotism and anti-Westernism. In certain ways, the campaign served as the mirror image of anti-communist and jingoistic propaganda in the United States at the time.

“Rootless cosmopolitan” became code for “Jewish,” and dismissals swept the arts, sciences and media. The Ministry of State Security arrested Jewish industrial leaders for sabotage and, in 1953, fabricated “the Doctor’s Plot,” which accused a group of predominately Jewish doctors who treated Kremlin officials of trying to assassinate Stalin and other party leaders.

The very idea of an antisemitic campaign following the massive Soviet losses in World War II presents an enigma. Of the 6 million Jews murdered in the Holocaust, almost 2 million were murdered by the Nazis on Soviet soil. Why would Soviet leaders, who fought a bitter and costly war to defeat fascism, choose to attack the very group that the Nazis tried to annihilate?

My forthcoming book, “Stalin’s Final Terror: Antisemitism, Nationality Policy, and the Jewish Experience,” addresses this difficult question.

Clashing with the state

The Soviet state created the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee in 1942 to aid the war effort at home and abroad. Its chairman, Solomon Mikhoels, was a renowned Yiddish actor and director of the State Yiddish Theater – one of the many cultural and scientific luminaries who led the committee.

The committee made an enormous contribution to the war effort, sending thousands of articles about fascism, the Jewish war experience and the Red Army for publication in the foreign press. Mikhoels and writer Itsik Fefer toured the United States, Mexico, Canada and Great Britain, where they were welcomed by rapturous crowds and raised millions of dollars.

In 1943, as the Red Army began liberating Soviet territories from German occupation, the committee was inundated by letters from surviving and returning Jews. Committee leaders tried to help people reclaim their homes, to distribute foreign aid and to identify and commemorate sites of Nazi war crimes. They wrote to Stalin suggesting the creation of a Jewish national republic in Crimea to replace destroyed communities in Ukraine, Belorussia and Russia.

But the state deemed these unsanctioned activities expressions of “bourgeois Jewish nationalism.” Some Communist Party leaders even insinuated that the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee was being used by spies, and advocated its elimination.

The minister of state security, V.S. Abakumov, convinced Stalin that Mikhoels was spying for Jewish organizations in the United States, but Mikhoels was too well known at home and abroad to be arrested. In January 1948, Mikhoels was lured to a house on the outskirts of Minsk, crushed by a truck and dumped on a deserted road.

The murder, disguised as an accident, signaled a turning point in the government’s policy toward Soviet Jews. In November 1948, the government abolished the committee as “a center of anti-Soviet propaganda.” Fifteen of its leaders were arrested over the following months. The state shuttered the Yiddish publishing house, press, theaters, literary journals and writers association, and arrested hundreds of Yiddish cultural figures.

Unbowed in court

The Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee’s leaders were charged with bourgeois nationalism, treason and espionage. Tortured in prison and kept in cramped, freezing cells, they were forced to confess.

The Ministry of State Security hoped to stage a public show trial, but as soon as the physical coercion stopped, the defendants began to retract their confessions and write letters of protest. The evidence was based on these extracted confessions, and the state feared an international outcry.

After the group had already spent more than two years in prison, the case was reopened. M.D. Riumin, the new head of the investigatory unit, was intent on showing that the defendants directed Jewish nationalist organizations that infiltrated the government at every level. After new interrogations, an indictment was drawn up, sent to Stalin and approved by the Politburo.

A secret trial began in May 1952. Despite being physically broken, the defendants presented a powerful rebuttal.

Solomon Lozovskii, an old revolutionary and former deputy foreign minister, shredded the state’s accusations. Historian Iosif Iuzefovich retracted his confession and told the court that after numerous beatings, “I was ready to confess that I was the pope’s own nephew, acting on his direct personal orders.” Boris Shimeliovich, the director of a leading Moscow hospital, testified that he had received over 2,000 blows to his buttocks and heels. Even the chairman of the court began to doubt the charges.

Yet the defendants were convicted. Thirteen of the 15 were executed on Aug. 12, 1952. The executions were later commemorated as “The Night of the Murdered Poets, though only five of the victims were poets. Solomon Bregman, a labor leader, died in prison; Lina Shtern, a renowned scientist, was sentenced to exile.

After Stalin’s death, the defendants were exonerated. The case only became public, however, in 1988, when the country began a full reckoning with the Stalin era.

The final Terror

How do we explain this final Terror?

Jews had benefited enormously from the revolution in 1917, which eliminated czarist oppression, granted them equal rights and opened new educational and employment opportunities. They entered professions and held leading posts in the Communist Party. They were considered an official nationality, like Ukrainians, Uzbeks, Armenians and hundreds of other groups in the new Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

Yet after the war, the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee’s efforts to help Jewish survivors and commemorate the Holocaust were not acceptable to the state, which minimized the singularity of Jewish wartime experiences. The government identified advocacy solely on behalf of Jews, either at home or abroad, as "bourgeois nationalism” or Zionism.

Amid the intensifying Cold War, the government sought to mobilize popular support by resurrecting Russian nationalism, once an anathema to socialist revolutionaries. It reestablished many czarist discriminatory policies, creating obstacles to Jewish advancement and education. Despite the government’s initial support for the new state of Israel, it blocked the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee from participating in Jewish international organizations, which it viewed as a conduit for Western spies and Jewish nationalism.

Some historians believe that Stalin was preparing a larger Terror, including the deportation of the Jewish population, but his plans were disrupted by his death in 1953. Others disagree, asserting a lack of evidence.

Yet one point is worth pondering: Using the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, Riumin aimed to build a larger case that would have targeted Jews in every institution for treason. He never succeeded, however, in staging a public trial or launching a wider hunt for enemies throughout the government.

The courage of the defendants thwarted Riumin’s venomous ambition. They testified bravely about their abuse and exposed the falsity of the charges. Revolutionaries committed to the struggle against fascism, they held firm to the end.

READ ORIGINAL STORY HERE

View From The Hill: Two Years Of A Distant War Have Brought Much Damage To Australian Society

Executive Council of Australian Jewry co-CEO Alec Ryvchin (centre) joins protestors as the hold placards of Israeli hostages following a press conference marking the two-year anniversary of the Hamas terrorist attacks against Israel. Bianca De Marchi/AAP

BY MICHELLE GRATAN

PROFESSIONAL FELLOW,

UNIVERSITY OF CANBERRA

Two years ago, who would have imagined the police and the Palestine Action Group (PAG) would be fighting in court over whether demonstrators should be allowed to rally outside the Sydney Opera House?

Indeed, 24 months ago, who would have thought we’d have (or need) designated “envoys” to combat antisemitism and Islamophobia in Australia?

On Tuesday’s second anniversary of the Hamas atrocities in Israel, it is sobering to reflect how much damage this horrific Middle East conflict, which has cost tens of thousands of lives, most of them Palestinian, has done to Australia’s own society.

In Fitzroy in Melbourne, pro-Palestinian graffiti appeared to mark the anniversary: “Glory to Hamas”, “Oct 7, do it again”, “Glory to the martyrs”.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese described this as “terrorist propaganda” that was “abhorrent,” saying those responsible “must face the full force of the law”.

On Wednesday, the issue of Sunday’s proposed protest outside the Opera House will be back in court. The police don’t want the protesters’ march to be allowed to end in the tight space at the Opera House, citing dangers to safety.

The lawyer for the PAG said on Tuesday: “If the police application is conceded to, the ramifications for the right to protest in Australia will not be confined to the Opera House, but for a wide variety of protest activities”. The group argues the issue is a constitutional one.

In the past two years, this faraway conflict has done substantial harm to Australia’s social cohesion, raised questions about the future of multiculturalism, and produced serious divisions about where lines should be drawn on limiting free speech and the right to protest. The response of institutions, universities in particular, has been tested and in some cases found wanting.

NSW Labor Premier Chris Minns gave a flavour of the cross pressures when speaking on Sydney radio on Tuesday.

“We’ve moved significant changes to hate speech laws in New South Wales and we’ve done it because we recognise we live in a multicultural community and yes, you’ve got a right to freedom of speech but someone else has a right not to be vilified or hated on the basis of their race or religion. All of those laws are currently being challenged in the High Court because of the implied freedom of political communication.”

As hope, however tentative, is glimmering that the peace plan advanced by United States President Donald Trump just might bring a real breakthrough in this terrible war, the fissures it has produced in Australia seem as sharp as ever.

In two years, the Australian Jewish community has been embattled, with attacks on synagogues and other Jewish places, and many individuals deeply frightened for their own and their families’ safety. Iran’s intervention, behind at least two attacks, sought to stoke division.

In that time, the determination of Palestinian supporters has been steadfast, with regular weekend demonstrations maintained throughout.

The conflict has fractured the Australia-Israel relationship, with the Albanese government increasingly critical of Israel’s unrelenting prosecution of the war, and the Netanyahu government turning on Australia.

This culminated with Australia’s recognition of a Palestinian state at the United Nations during the prime minister’s recent trip. The recognition was the end of Labor’s internal journey, which commenced many years before this war began.

The Greens Party have been at the left edge of the political spectrum.

The Australian community was divided about Palestinian recognition: an Essential poll published in late September showed 34% in favour, and 30% against.

The conflict has shattered what used to be a bipartisan Middle East policy, when both main parties strongly supported Israel and also backed a two-state solution for a long-term Middle East settlement.

Over the past two years, the Coalition has been strongly pro-Israel, accusing the Labor government of deserting an ally and failing to deal robustly with antisemitism in this country.

Opposition leader Sussan Ley used her parliamentary speech on Tuesday’s anniversary to home in on the government’s policy towards Israel.

“To our great shame, under the leadership of the Albanese Labor government, Australia has not stood with the people of Israel, nor with the United States, as they have sought to dismantle Hamas and establish the conditions for peace”.

The local rifts that have come to the surface in Australia were there well before October 7 2023. The war caused them to widen dramatically and explode.

Even if, and when, this conflict subsides, it will leave fractures, anger, bitterness and fear within sections of the Australian community.

Whatever healing takes place almost certainly won’t be complete. For governments, federal and state, intractable policy challenges will remain.

READ ORIGINAL STORY HERE

The 5 Big Problems With Trump’s Gaza Peace Plan

Israel launched scores of airstrikes on Gaza City last weekend as Trump foreshadowed a peace plan was on the way. Yousef Al Zanoun/AP

BY IAN PARMETER

RESEARCH SCHOLAR, MIDDLE EAST STUDIES, 

AUSTRALIAN NATIONAL UNIVERSITY

The 20-point plan announced by US President Donald Trump at a joint news conference with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu comes close to living up to Trump’s hype. It is a bold attempt to address all of the issues that need to be resolved if there is to be lasting peace in Gaza.

Could it work? Both sides are tired of the war. Throughout history, quite a number of wars have simply come to an end when both sides were too exhausted to continue. Two-thirds of Israelis want the war to end, and though polling of Palestinians is difficult, they clearly want the devastation and suffering in Gaza to stop, too.

So, this plan, despite its limitations, could come at the right time.

However, there are many outstanding questions about the feasibility of the plan and to what extent it is likely to be successful. Given the Middle East’s violent history, it’s impossible to be optimistic at this point.

Here are five main reasons for concern.

1. Trust is lacking

There’s zero trust between both sides right now. And several aspects of the plan are so vague, there is a big risk both sides could accuse the other of breaking their promises.

The last ceasefire between the two sides only lasted two months before Netanyahu backed out, blaming Hamas for not releasing more hostages before negotiations on the next phase could proceed.
2. The plan is asymmetrical

The deal favours Israel more than it does Hamas. Hamas is essentially being asked to give up all of the remaining Israeli hostages it holds and all of its weapons at the same time, rendering it entirely defenceless.

Hamas, with its lack of trust in Israel and Netanyahu, in particular, may fear the Israeli leader could use this as an opportunity to attack it again without worrying about harming the hostages.

Hamas was also not invited to negotiate the terms of the agreement. And it now faces an ultimatum: accept the terms or Israel will “finish the job”.

Given the asymmetry of the plan, Hamas may decide the risks of accepting it outweigh the potential benefits, despite its offer of amnesty for Hamas fighters who lay down their arms.

Israel is being asked to make some compromises in the plan. But how realistic are these?

For example, the deal envisions a future when the Palestinian Authority (PA) can “securely and effectively take back control of Gaza”. Netanyahu has previously said he would not accept this.

Likewise, it would also be very difficult for Netanyahu to accept “a credible pathway to Palestinian self-determination and statehood”, as outlined in the plan. He has firmly rejected this in the past, most recently in his defiant address to the UN General Assembly last week.

3. Important details are lacking

The implementation strategy of the plan is extraordinarily vague. We know nothing at this stage about the “International Stabilisation Force” that would take the place of the Israeli military after it withdraws from Gaza.

Which countries would participate? It would obviously be a mission fraught with danger to the personnel involved. Netanyahu has previously mentioned an Arab force taking over in Gaza, but no Arab states have yet put their hands up for this.

There is also no timeframe in the plan for the Palestinian Authority reforms, nor any details on what these reforms would entail.

Presumably, there would need to be new elections to install a credible leader in place of current President Mahmoud Abbas. But how that would be done and whether the people of Gaza would be able to take part is still unknown.

In addition, the details of the civil authority that would oversee the reconstruction of Gaza are very unclear. All we know is that Trump would appoint himself chair of the “Board of Peace”, and former British Prime Minister Tony Blair would also somehow be involved.

This board would need the absolute confidence of the Netanyahu government and Hamas to be effective. Trust is always in short supply in the Middle East.

4. No mention of the West Bank

The West Bank is clearly a flashpoint. There are disputes and clashes every day between the Israeli settlers and Palestinian residents, which are only likely to get worse.

Just last month, the Israeli government gave final approval to a controversial plan to build a new settlement that would effectively divide the West Bank in two, making a future, contiguous Palestinian state unviable.

The West Bank must be central to any overall settlement between Israel and Palestine.

5. Israel’s right-wing cabinet remains an obstacle

This could be the ultimate deal breaker: the hardline right-wing members of Netanyahu’s cabinet, Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir, have said they will not accept anything less than the complete destruction and elimination of Hamas.

And although Hamas would be disarmed and politically sidelined under this plan, its ideology would remain intact, as would a significant number of its fighters.

So, does it have a chance?

If Hamas accepts Trump’s plan, we could soon have the answers to several of these questions.

But it is going to require a great deal of work by the United States to maintain the pressure on Israel to stick to the deal. The chief Palestinian mediators, Qatar and Egypt, would also need to maintain pressure on Hamas so it doesn’t breach the conditions, as well.

Netanyahu is likely assuming there will be sufficient off-ramps for him to get out of the agreement if Hamas doesn’t live up to it. Netanyahu has already done this once when he backed out of the ceasefire in March and resumed Israel’s military operations.

In his forceful speech to a partially empty UN General Assembly hall last week, Netanyahu didn’t indicate he was thinking of walking away from any of the red lines he had previously set to end the war. In fact, he condemned the states recognising a Palestinian state and vowed, “Israel will not allow you to shove a terror state down our throats.”

Given this, Netanyahu would not have agreed to Trump’s plan at all if the US leader hadn’t put pressure on him. At the same time, Trump said at his news conference with Netanyahu that if Hamas fails to live up to the agreement or refuses to accept it, Israel would have his full backing to finish the job against Hamas.

This promise may be enough for Netanyahu to be able to persuade Smotrich and Ben-Gvir to support the plan – for now.

READ ORIGINAL STORY HERE

‘There’s No Such Thing As Someone Else’s Children’ – Omar El Akkad Bears Witness To The Destruction Of Gaza And The West’s Quiet Assent

BY CLARE CORBOULD

ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF HISTORY AND

ASSOCIATE HEAD (RESEARCH) OF THE

SCHOOL OF HUMANITIES AND SOCIAL

SCIENCES, DEAKIN UNIVERSITY

Omar El Akkad does not want you to look away. An award-winning journalist and novelist, El Akkad was born in Egypt, lived as a teenager in Qatar and Canada, and migrated as an adult to the US, where he now lives with his family in the Pacific Northwest.

His essay collection, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, draws on his life, from childhood to new fatherhood. He combines these reflections with a sharp grasp of modern history to examine responses in the west to “the world’s first livestreamed genocide” in Gaza.

Finding that response wanting, he urges readers to watch, listen, reflect and act.

As someone whose parents migrated to the west for the freedoms and opportunities it would afford their children, El Akkad has an acute sense of the past events, ideas and structures that have shaped the present. He pays keen attention to the legacies of colonial rule.

Witnessing history

El Akkad’s descriptions of atrocity are not easy to read. Nor is his blunt demand to do something. Yet the force of his observations and the bite of his prose make it hard to turn away.

His purpose is akin to many famed witnesses in history. Contemporaneous statements about violence often serve later as testimony in determining what happened, who was responsible, and what recompense is due.

Think of George Orwell on propaganda in Spain. Or British journalists Gareth Jones and Malcolm Muggeridge exposing famine in 1930s USSR, while other western communists looked away. Or Victor Klemperer’s diaries, published after the war, which tracked how the Nazis twisted everyday speech.

Above all, this kind of testimony guards against future claims of innocence, against the reassuring assertion that “they didn’t know what was going on” or “they were of their time”.

Less well-known to Australian readers may be American journalist Ida B. Wells, but El Akkad’s fire and fury also brought her to mind. In the 1890s, Wells fiercely attacked lynching in her own newspaper, the Memphis Free Speech. She investigated specific instances of ritualised mob violence.

Wells also catalogued how news outlets told those stories. They minced words to protect the perpetrators, while smearing the reputations of the dead, who were always named.

El Akkad also pays close attention the way the violence in Gaza is framed and described. He observes how reporters use the passive voice, which not only hides the names of killers but implies mass death came about by accident or magic. “Palestinian Journalist Hit in Head by Bullet During Raid on Terror Suspect’s Home,” read one Guardian headline, he notes.

Both Wells and El Akkad show how victims of racist and colonial violence are cast as already guilty. With lynching, the pretext was often an accusation of rape, though that was rarely the actual spark. Far more common were disputes between men over land, pay, labour organising, business competition or voting drives.

In the case of Gaza, the media mimics the claims of Israeli politicians, its military and allies of both. They all cast civilians as terrorists or terrorists-in-waiting, even children. The words clean the consciences of onlookers. They launder harm as if it were cash.

Modes of resisting

As the book’s title, which began life as a viral tweet, goes: One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This.

Bearing witness to the atrocities and the gutless responses, El Akkad reminds liberal readers that if Gaza had happened in the past, they would condemn the violence. What’s more, they would imagine that, had they been alive at the time, they would have firmly resisted the wrong or even taken a heroic stance against it.

One blistering passage will hit very close to home for Australian readers:

I read an op-ed in which a writer argues that the model for Palestinian-Israeli coexistence is something like Canada’s present-day relationship with the Indigenous population, and I marvel at the casual, obvious, but unstated corollary: that there is an Indigenous population being colonized, but that we should let this unpleasantness run its course so we can arrive at true justice in the form of land acknowledgments at every Tel Aviv poetry reading.

As well as diagnosing the problem, El Akkad surveys and evaluates modes of resisting what is happening in Gaza. He discards as ineffective the old appeal to westerners’ self-interest. Pointing out that horrors they permit elsewhere will eventually come for them just doesn’t work.

His essays were written between the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, and August 2024, when the US presidential campaign was in full swing. Much of his energy goes to addressing the “lesser of two evils” debate about voting in a democracy where the options are far right and, at most, centre-a-bit-left. Only from a relatively protected position, he observes, could one vote for the Democratic Party on the grounds that the other side “would be so much worse”.

Making this case, El Akkad says, rests on a quiet assent to mass death. He calls this a “reticent acceptance of genocide” and asks liberals in the United States (and by implication in other western democracies) to examine their consciences.

The remedying action El Akkad proposes is widespread negation, or “walking away”. People, en masse, must refuse to accept that the meagre promises of the less conservative political parties are the best options on offer.

This will require sacrifices. El Akkad provides examples of people he admires: the writer who refused a prize from an organisation that had been silent about Gaza; the teacher brave enough to talk with teenage students about the intolerable rate of children and civilians (not “noncombatants”) dying. Most starkly, he writes of Aaron Bushnell, the US Air Force veteran, whose last words before setting himself on fire outside the Israeli embassy in Washington D.C. were “free Palestine”.

Systematic violence

Like Wells, El Akkad links systematic violence to the structures that underpin the modern world. Chief among them is capitalism. Real change, he suggests, will come when enough of us, to use the old 1960s parlance, “drop out”, though he prefers “negation”, a word that that implies there is something to defy.

It is time, he argues, for a well-educated western citizenry to say “enough”. Our phones are smart enough; we are (collectively) rich and sated enough.

It might be hard at first, but we will learn that “maybe it’s not all that much trouble to avoid ordering coffee and downloading apps and buying chocolate-flavored hummus from companies that abide slaughter”.

Doing so might just halt a genocide. In time, this kind of collective action might also stop other looming calamities, not least climate collapse. El Akkad’s steady focus throughout the book on the death, maiming and immeasurable psychic injury to the children of Gaza makes that case feel urgent.

If that sounds hyperbolic, El Akkad might ask what children you had in mind when you flinched from his diagnosis and prognosis. Your answer likely turns on the location, colour and wealth of the children you have in mind. Children in Tuvalu, for example, know he is not exaggerating.

In one of the book’s most arresting lines, El Akkad asks: “How does one finish the sentence: ‘It is unfortunate that tens of thousands of children are dead, but …’”

Better, he suggests, that we all behave in a way whose ethics is grounded in the claim: “there’s no such thing as someone else’s children.”

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American Liberators Of Nazi Camps Got ‘A Lifelong Vaccine Against Extremism’ − Their Wartime Experiences Are A Warning For Today

American liberators rolling into the Mauthausen concentration camp on May 5, 1945, as photographed by prisoner Francesc Boix. Sgt. Harry Saunders is standing on the left fender. Francesc Boix/Courtesy of Collections of the Mauthausen Memorial

BY SARA J. BRENNEIS

ANDREW W. MELLON

PROFESSOR OF SPANISH,

AMHERST COLLEGE

When American soldiers liberated the Mauthausen Nazi concentration camp in Austria 80 years ago this May, Spanish prisoners welcomed them with a message of antifascist solidarity.

The Spaniards hung a banner made from stolen bed sheets over one of Mauthausen’s gates. In English, Spanish and Russian, it read: “The Spanish Antifascists Greet the Liberating Forces.”

Both American servicemen and Spanish survivors remember the camp’s liberation as a win in their shared fight against extremism, my research on the Spanish prisoners in Mauthausen finds. They all understood the authoritarian governments of Nazi Germany, Italy and Spain as fascist regimes that used extremist views rooted in intolerance and nationalism to persecute millions of people and imperil democracy across Europe.

World War II, the Holocaust and the horrors of Nazi violence have no modern equivalent. Nevertheless, extremism is now threatening democracy in the United States in recognizable ways.

As the Trump administration executes summary deportations, works to suppress dissent, fundamentally restructures the federal government and defies judges, experts warn that the country is turning toward authoritarianism.

As a scholar of the Mauthausen camp, I believe that understanding how American soldiers and Spanish prisoners experienced its liberation offers a valuable lesson on the real and present dangers of extremism.

‘We knew then why we had to stop Hitler’

In 1938, the Nazis established Mauthausen, a forced labor camp in Austria, with an international prisoner population. My research shows that the Nazis murdered 16,000 Jews and 66,000 non-Jewish prisoners at Mauthausen between 1938 and 1945, including 60% of the roughly 7,200 Spaniards imprisoned there.

The Spanish prisoners were committed antifascist resistors sent there in 1940 and 1941. Known as Republicans or Loyalists, they had fought against Francisco Franco in the Spanish Civil War and Adolf Hitler in World War II.

The young men with the 11th Armored Division of the U.S. Army who liberated Mauthausen would never forget the moment they discovered the camp. It was May 5, 1945, just days before the war ended in Europe. A platoon led by Staff Sgt. Albert J. Kosiek was repairing bridges in this tucked-away corner of Austria when a Swiss Red Cross delegate alerted them to a large Nazi concentration camp nearby.

Mauthausen’s international survivors were among the Nazis’ last prisoners to be freed.

George Sherman was a 19-year-old tank gunner from Brooklyn when his patrol found Mauthausen. He was Jewish and had read about the Nazi camps in Europe in the Army’s newspaper.

Still, seeing a concentration camp with his own eyes was alarming.

“The piles of bodies” struck him, he remembered in an oral history recorded for the University of South Florida in 2008. So did “these people walking around like God knows – skeletons and whatnot.”

Sgt. Harry Saunders, a 23-year-old radio operator from Chicago, also remembered the moment he saw the Mauthausen survivors. They were men and women of all nationalities.

“The live skeletons, the people that were in the camp, it was indescribable, it was such a shock,” he said in a 2002 interview for the Mauthausen Memorial’s Oral History Collection in Vienna.

One of the Spanish prisoners at Mauthausen, Francesc Boix, had stolen a camera from the SS in the chaotic moments before the camp’s liberation. Boix photographed Sgt. Saunders rumbling into the concentration camp on an armored car.

Saunders kept that photograph for the rest of his life. It captured a moment of clarity for him.

“When we liberated Mauthausen, we really knew then why we had to stop Hitler and why we really went to war,” he said in the interview.

Frank Hartzell, a technical sergeant with the 11th Armored Division, was 20 when he helped to liberate Mauthausen. He turned 100 this year. We met in mid-March 2025 and discussed his wartime experience.

“What I saw and experienced appalled me,” Hartzell told me.

The outrage has stayed with him for 80 years.

‘Starved and crippled but alive’

The American liberators toured the gas chambers and the crematory ovens in Mauthausen.

Maj. Franklin Lee Clark saw the dead stacked up in “piles like cord wood to the point that they had to bring in bulldozers and make mass graves,” and took photos to document it.

Soldiers from the 11th Armored Division directed locals to bury the men and women murdered by the Nazis. The local Austrians claimed they had not known about their town’s concentration camp. But a farmer who lived nearby had been upset about all the dead bodies visible from her property. She filed a complaint asking the Nazis either to stop “these inhuman deeds” or do them “where one does not see it.”

The American liberators made sure that the townspeople could no longer look away from the murderous rampage carried out in their backyards.

While Boix was taking photos of American soldiers during liberation, the soldiers were taking photos of the welcome banner the Spaniards had painted.

On the back of one snapshot, a Signal Corps soldier typed out his impressions of their message: “I really know what that word (antifascist) means. We liberated these prisoners in the Mauthausen concentration camp near Linz, Austria. They were Poles, Hungarians and Spanish Loyalists (remember the Loyalists?). They had men and women in this camp. Starved and crippled but alive.”

After Mauthausen was liberated, the freed Loyalists set to work documenting the Nazis’ crimes. Along with his countrymen Joan de Diego, Casimir Climent and others, Spanish survivor Joaquín López Raimundo compiled lists of Mauthausen victims and their Nazi captors. Using the Nazis’ own typewriters, they spent two weeks listing the names and personal details of Spanish victims of Mauthausen and of the SS who had killed them.

The result was page after page of evidence they handed over to American war crimes investigators and the International Red Cross.

Boix, meanwhile, gave the Americans hundreds of photo negatives he had rescued from the camp’s photography lab.

Boix later testified about these images in the war crime trials at Nuremberg and Dachau. He described seeing the Nazis beat, torture and murder their victims in Mauthausen and then photograph the bodies. For 2½ years, Boix stole the photographic evidence of their crimes.

He “could not keep those negatives because it was so dangerous,” he testified at Dachau, so he “hid them in various places until the liberation.”

A lifelong vaccine against extremism

For the American liberators, their up-close view of the horrors of Mauthausen and their interactions with the Spanish antifascist survivors was a lifelong vaccine against extremism.

They witnessed how a fascist leader tore the world apart. They saw with their own eyes the death and destruction of political extremism.

When I interviewed Hartzell, he expressed concern that the United States is going down a dangerous path.

“The USA today is not the USA I fought and came close to dying for,” Hartzell told me.

As American Mauthausen liberator Maj. George E. King warned an interviewer in 1980:

“This is the lesson we have to learn: It could happen here.”

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Book Review: “Fear No Pharaoh” — How American Jews Accommodated Slavery

BY DAVID MEHEGAN

One might suppose from its title that this excellent work of history is the stirring story of Jewish Americans battling the beast of slavery before and during the American Civil War. Actually it’s more the opposite — how a great proportion of Jews accommodated themselves to, ignored, defended, and made excuses for, even profitably participated in, the trade and ownership of human beings.

Independent scholar Richard Kreitner concentrates on six Jewish figures: two proslavery, one doubtful but publicly equivocal, and three opposed. Outside those six, it seems that most of the Jewish voices in the story, especially but not solely in the South, are either enthusiastic supporters of slavery, slaveholders themselves, or at least tolerant of its continuation. Theirs is the previously untold story of this book.

Slavery’s two most prominent Jewish apologists are Judah P. Benjamin, a Louisiana planter who became secretary of state of the Confederacy and the closest confidante of Jefferson Davis, and traditionalist New York Rabbi Morris Jacob Raphall. The slippery Benjamin, a slaveholder whose Judaism was virtually invisible, made no religious argument. But Raphall gave a famous sermon in January 1861 strongly supporting slavery as consistent with biblical teaching. Addressing abolitionists, he asked, “Does it not strike you that you are guilty of something very little short of blasphemy?” The silent doubter is Issac Mayer Wise of Syracuse, who maintained that while slavery was repellant, Jews should take no side but avoid the national quarrel lest they attract unwelcome attention.

The three opponents include reformist Baltimore Rabbi David Einhorn, who fiercely identified the slave power with Egypt, the biblical enslaver of the Hebrews. To endorse chattel slavery, he thundered, would “prove the greatest triumph of our adversaries and our own destruction.” Next there was August Bondi, a refugee from Prague who joined John Brown’s campaign in “Bleeding Kansas” and later served in the Union Army. The third Jewish enemy of slavery is Ernestine Rose, whose public campaigning for atheism and feminism was as fiery as her abolitionism.

There were no opinion polls in ante- or postbellum America, so it is impossible to know definitively what the mass of Jewish Americans thought about slavery. That said, Kreitner’s narrative shows that Jews in general apparently were no more intolerant of the Peculiar Institution than any other Americans – notwithstanding their spiritual and national history of liberation from bondage.

Some were fanatical supporters of slavery. Charleston editor Jacob N. Cardozo, an ancestor of Supreme Court Justice Benjamin Cardozo, called slavery “a harmonizing bond of union and sympathy” endangered chiefly by, writes Kreitner, “the masters’ overly indulgent treatment of their bondsmen. He called for ‘reduc[ing] the standard of comfort of our slaves in order to ensure slave owners ‘receive a fair remuneration of living profit on our capital.’” Fellow Charlestonian Benjamin Mordecai “kept his own slave pen next to his warehouse and once purchased $12,000 worth of human beings in a single sale; in 1840 he put forty people, including three children, up for sale at one time.”

“The country’s 150,000 Jews,” Kreitner writes, served in the Civil War “in both blue and gray uniforms, filling the ranks from lowliest cannon fodder to … generals – in all some six thousand Jewish men would serve in the Union forces, about half that number in the Confederate ranks…. On both home fronts, Jews contribute to relief organizations and gathered donations …. Women knitted clothes and bandages, nursed the wounded, filled sandbags for fortifications, rolled and filled cartridges for rifles. Rabbis exhorted their congregants to join the fight and said Kaddish over the slain.”

Then as now, pious souls found ways to harmonize their religious beliefs with financial or political interests (much as do such present-day political Christians as Franklin Graham, Mike Johnson, and JD Vance). Jews are and were no different.

In the antebellum period, many Jews were urban immigrants from central or western Europe (the masses of hoi polloi from the eastern shtetls poured in long after the Civil War). Some (such as Bondi) were veterans of the failed European rebellions of 1848 and many were educated. Einhorn, Rose (daughter of a Polish rabbi), Bondi, Benjamin, Wise, and Raphall (son of a Stockholm banker) were all immigrants.

While they often began life in America as peddlers, many became shopkeepers, rabbis, lawyers, or other prosperous economic players who found themselves tolerated – South as well as North — as they never had been in Europe. They and their progeny could live, speak, and worship freely without fear of pogroms. Not only tolerated, but in America they were not the lowest class of society as they had been in Europe: the slaves were lower. Indeed in the South, Jews were admitted to the blessed caste of whiteness.

After emancipation, writes Kreitner, “Southern Jews were as resentful over the end of slavery as their neighbors … even more worried about what it might mean for the future. The mere existence of Black bondage, whether they had directly profited from it or not, had eased Southern Jews’ acceptance into antebellum society. They feared its abolition would … make their lives in the South more insecure.”

As it turned out, their fears were not misplaced. After the war, the Jews, blamed by many for the defeat and poverty that dogged the South long afterward, suffered a surge of vicious antisemitism that continued and crested notoriously in the Jim Crow era with the 1915 Atlanta lynching of Leo Frank. Jews were among those persecuted by the Ku Klux Klan.

Skillfully researched and written as this book is, I was puzzled by the title, Fear No Pharaoh, which seems to suggest a heroic resistance to slavery. There are a few resisters here, but that is far from the main thrust of the narrative. Did the publisher insist on this title to dispel any suspicion of antisemitic overtones?

Kreitner’s account is vivid, dramatic, peopled with many more closely observed characters than the six protagonists. The irony of hypocrisy is thick on every page. Although he strives to consider the moral problem of chattel slavery as its antebellum apologists did, in the context of their time and circumstances, yet in his tone a restrained edge of indignation is evident.

As a McGill University undergraduate, Kreitner wrote a paper “on the handful of Jewish abolitionists who, drawing on their own people’s history of enslavement and oppression, felt they could not keep silent while others suffered the same.” That there were so few, however, and that the American experience of slavery seldom came up at present-day Passover seders he attended, “continued to gnaw at me” over time. “Given that the point of the holiday is to commemorate the Jews’ liberation several thousand years ago,” he writes, “did it not make sense to consider how slavery also shaped the country in which we lived?” So he undertook to research and relate this time in history, which he does not view as a relic of the distant past. “Even for the huddled masses who arrived decades after the Civil War, even for those of us who are their descendants, the experience of living as Jews in America has been shaped by the legacy of slavery and by the ideas and laws devised to defend and then replace it,” Kreitner writes, “They protect and threaten us still, in this otherwise blessed land.”

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Holocaust Survivor Wants You To Know How Nazis Took His Brother’s Life. And How An Angel Saved His

Manfred Goldberg displays a photograph of himself with his mother Rosa and younger brother Herman. (AP Photo/Kirsty Wigglesworth)

BY DANICA KIRKA

LONDON (AP) — Manfred Goldberg was just 13 years old when — stripped to his skin and shuffling toward an SS guard at a Nazi labor camp in Latvia — a man leaned over his shoulder and whispered the secret that saved the young Jew’s life.

“If he happens to ask you your age, say you are 17,’’ the man told him.

Goldberg followed the advice and the guard directed him to the group selected for slave labor. It was only later that he realized that the younger prisoners were sent to die because the guards believed anyone under 17 was too young to work profitably for the Nazi war machine.

“I sometimes think of that man as an angel who was sent to save me,’’ Goldberg said. “I never saw him again.’'

Monday’s ceremony marking the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz is more than a moment to remember some 6 million Jews who died in the Holocaust. It is a reminder that the number of survivors is dwindling, leaving fewer and fewer people to bear witness to the Nazi genocide at a time when Holocaust denial and antisemitism are on the rise.

“I’m only a drop in the ocean,’’ he said in an interview at the Jewish Care Holocaust Survivors’ Centre in London. “But I’ve made up my mind that as long as God gives me the strength, physical and mental, to continue doing it, I have committed myself to keep on doing it. So that’s why I’m here at age 94, speaking to you.”

This is his story.

Nazi rise

Manfred was born in Kassel, a city of about 220,000 in central Germany. Just 3 years old when the Nazis came to power in 1933, he didn’t realize how the country was changing until he enrolled in the Jewish primary school nearby.

By then, the Hitler Youth, an organization that was outwardly similar to the Boy Scouts but was used to indoctrinate children in Nazi ideology, had begun to spread hatred of the Jews.

“They lay in wait of us sometimes, to ambush us and assault us or curse us,” Goldberg said.

The children had been warned: Run or face more trouble.

As the Nazis systematically excluded Jews from public life, they first tried to deport Goldberg’s father, then threatened to send him to a concentration camp. Manfred’s mother, Rosa, pleaded for time to get him a visa to emigrate.

She heard diplomats at the British Embassy in Berlin might help, so she traveled 200 miles to see them. There she found Frank Foley, a British secret agent whose embassy job was cover for his spying activities and who ultimately authorized visas for more than 10,000 Jews to escape Germany.

“I believe he was a man with a heart,’' Goldberg said.

Foley gave Goldberg’s father an emergency visa and told his mother that the rest of the family could follow in the coming weeks. But 10 days later, on Sept. 1, 1939, the Nazis invaded Poland. The family was split apart.
Wearing the star

As war raged, Germany stepped up anti-Jewish laws.

Jews were required to wear a yellow six-pointed star outdoors, and could only buy food in certain shops. When the shops ran out, Jews were out of luck.

One day, Goldberg’s mother told him to put on his bookbag, which covered the star on his jacket, and go with her to a non-Jewish bakery. Standing across the street, she gave him a handful of coins and told him to run into the shop, ask for a loaf of bread, put the money on the counter and grab the bread before anyone could stop him.

“I was 7 or 8 years old. I just did as she asked me to,’’ he said. “But in retrospect, I realize how serious the situation must have been. She probably would have been going hungry, but she couldn’t bear to see her children suffer hunger.’'

Then in 1942, the Nazi regime embarked on what it called “The Final Solution,” the systematic execution of European Jews.

When the SS pounded on the door of the Goldbergs’ modest flat, they gave his mother just 10 minutes to pack a suitcase. After three days and three nights on a train without food or water, Manfred, his younger brother, Herman and their mother found themselves in Riga, the capital of Latvia, beginning a nightmare that would take him to five camps over the next three years.

Becoming a number

Manfred lost his name. He became No. 56478.

Soon they arrived at a sub-camp known as Precu, where Goldberg and his mother were put to work. But Herman was too young and stayed behind in the camp when Manfred and Rosa went out to work. The SS came and took the children away. Manfred never saw his brother again.

“The next morning, both my mother and I had to line up and go to work as though nothing untoward had happened,” he said. “The mourning took place internally, but if we had refused to go to work, we would have lost our lives.”

Only months later, Goldberg faced the same fate as his brother when the unknown benefactor whispered in his ear.

As the Nazis began to lose ground on the Eastern Front, they moved their prisoners west to keep them out of Russian hands and continue the killing.

Goldberg was moved to Stutthof, a camp near the Polish city of Gdansk whose front gate became known as the Gateway of Death because so few inmates left alive. More than 60,000 people died at the camp due to typhus, lethal injections and, beginning in June 1944, after they were gassed with Zyklon B, the same compound used in the gas chambers at Auschwitz.

But there was one last horror to come.

With the war in Europe drawing to a close, the Nazis continued to drive the inmates west toward central Germany.

Goldberg and his mother were marched to 25 miles northwest, where hundreds of prisoners were herded onto barges and held offshore for days without food or water. When the SS guards disappeared, the stronger prisoners ripped up planks and used them as oars to paddle the massive boats back to shore.

But just as the inmates landed, the guards returned. First they shot those too weak to escape, and then rounded up those who had made it to shore, including Goldberg and his mother, and started marching them back to Germany.

Then a British tank column arrived.

“Suddenly our armed guards, who moments earlier had still been killing people for not keeping up to speed, turned and ran away in the opposite direction, away from us,’’ Goldberg recalled. “People were jubilant. We’re not under guard. We’re free! We’re free! ... You cannot imagine the joy we felt.’’

After being reunited with his father in England, Goldberg forged a career as an engineer, married and had four children.

For more than 50 years, he refused to tell his story.

He wanted his children to have normal parents, unburdened by the weight of the Holocaust. But about 20 years ago, when he was in his 70s, his synagogue asked him to take part in a remembrance service. His wife, Shary, encouraged him to remember: Who will tell your story when you are gone?

He never looked back.

“Silence never helps the oppressed,’’ Goldberg said. “It always helps the oppressors.”

The best revenge

The living room of Goldberg’s home in London is a testament to all that matters to him, a gallery filled with pictures of children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren and a lifetime of family gatherings. To stand in the room is to see a man who is celebrating the miracle that he was allowed to live.

But there’s also another picture.

It’s a painting of a chubby-cheeked boy with a checkered bowtie and the hint of a smile on his lips. Hung beside the front door, just where it can be seen every time Goldberg steps out into the world, it’s the picture of another boy who didn’t get that chance.

Herman.

Associated Press digital producer Nat Castaneda in Copenhagen, Denmark contributed to this report.

Newly Discovered Photos Of Nazi Deportations Show Jewish Victims As They Were Last Seen Alive

Jewish Germans assemble for deportation in Breslau, Germany, in November 1941. Courtesy of Regional Association of Jewish Communities in Saxony, Germany, CC BY-SA

BY WOLF GRONER

PROFESSOR OF HISTORY,

USC DORNSIFE COLLEGE OF 

LETTERS, ARTS AND SCIENCES

The Holocaust was the first mass atrocity to be heavily photographed.

The mass production and distribution of cameras in the 1930s and 1940s enabled Nazi officials and ordinary people to widely document Germany’s persecution of Jews and other religious and ethnic minorities.

I co-direct an international research project to collect every available image documenting Nazi mass deportations of Jews, Roma and Sinti, as well as euthanasia victims, in Nazi Germany between 1938 and 1945. The most recently discovered series of images will be unveiled on Jan. 27, 2025 – Holocaust Remembrance Day.

In most cases, these are the very last pictures taken of Holocaust victims before they were deported and perished. That fact gives the project its name, #LastSeen.

A few of the images we’ve tracked down were taken by Jewish people, not Nazi officials, offering a rare glimpse of Nazi mass deportations from a victim’s perspective. As descendants of survivors help our researchers identify the deportees in these images and tell their stories, we give previously faceless victims a voice.

A growing archive

The #LastSeen project is a collaboration between several German academic and educational institutions and the USC Dornsife Center for Advanced Genocide Research in the United States. When it began in late 2021, researchers knew of a few dozen deportation images of Jews from 27 German towns that had been gathered for a 2011-2012 exhibition in Berlin.

After contacting 1,700 public and private archives in Germany and worldwide to find more, #LastSeen has now collected visual evidence from 60 cities and towns in Nazi Germany. Of these, we’ve analyzed 36 series containing over 420 images, including dozens of never-before-seen photo series from 20 towns.

Most photographs of Nazi mass deportations from local archives published in our digital atlas were taken by the perpetrators, who documented the event for the police or municipality. That has heavily shaped our visual understanding of these crimes, because they display victims as a faceless mass. When individuals were depicted, it was most often through an antisemitic lens.

We have, however, obtained a handful of images taken from a victim’s perspective. In January 2024, the #LastSeen team shared newly discovered photographs showing the Nazi deportations in what was then Breslau, Germany – today Wroclaw, Poland.

They were sent to us for analysis by Steffen Heidrich, a staff member of the Regional Association of Jewish Communities in Saxony, Germany, who came across an envelope titled “miscellaneous” while reorganizing his archive. It contained 13 deportation photographs – the last images taken of dozens of Jewish victims before they were transported from Breslau to Nazi-occupied Lithuania and massacred in November 1941.

Jewish resistance

Many of these pictures in this series show a large, mixed age group of men and women wearing the yellow star – the notorious Nazi-mandated sign for Jews – gathering outside with bundles of their belongings. Some are taken from a peculiar angle, from behind a tree or a wall, suggesting they were snapped clandestinely.

Given the deportation assembly point for the Breslau Jews, a guarded local beer garden, our researchers knew that only a person with permission to access that property could have shot these pictures.

For these two reasons, we concluded that an employee of the Jewish community of Breslau must have documented the Nazi crimes – most likely Albert Hadda, a Jewish architect and photographer who clandestinely photographed the November 1938 pogrom in Breslau.

Hadda’s marriage to a Christian partially protected him from persecution. Between 1941 and 1943, the city’s Jewish community tasked him with caring for the deportees at the assembly point until their forced removal.

These 13 recently discovered pictures constitute the most comprehensive series illuminating the crime of mass deportations from a victim’s perspective in Nazi Germany. Their unearthing is testimony to the recently rediscovered widespread individual resistance by ordinary Jews who fought Nazi persecution.

Documenting Fulda

Our project has also identified new deportation photos taken in the German town of Fulda in December 1941, during a snowstorm.

Previously, historians knew of only three pictures of this deportation event. Preserved in the city archive, they show the deportees at the Fulda train station during heavy snowfall.

We discovered two new images of the same Nazi deportation, apparently taken by the same photographer, in a videotaped survivor interview in the Visual History Archive of the USC Shoah Foundation in Los Angeles.

In 1996, the Shoah Foundation interviewed Miriam Berline, née Gottlieb, the daughter of a successful Orthodox Jewish merchant in Fulda. At the end of the two-hour interview, Berline held two photographs up to the camera. They clearly show the same snowy deportation in Fulda.

Berline, born in 1925, escaped Nazi Germany in 1939. She did not remember how her family obtained the images but recalled the photographer as Otto Weissbach, a “wonderful” man who had helped Fulda’s Jewish families.

Our researchers investigated and learned his name was Arthur Weissbach, a non-Jewish neighbor of the Gottliebs. The factory he owned still exists. Descendants of Jewish families have since confirmed that he kept valuables for them and took care of elderly relatives who stayed behind.

Weissbach’s niece said he was a passionate hobby photographer. Since Weissbach kept contact with survivors after the war, he might have given the images to the Gottlieb family. Today, the family’s copies are lost, but their existence is preserved in Berline’s video interview at the USC Shoah Foundation.

The pictures show the Jews at the Fulda train station on Dec. 9, 1941 – revealing how Nazi deportations happened in plain view.

The day before, Jewish men and women from around Fulda had been summoned and spent the night at a local school gym. In the morning, they were taken to the train station and forced by police to board a train to Kassel, in central Germany, and then eastward onto Riga, in Nazi-occupied Latvia.

In total, 1,031 Jews were deported from Kassel to Riga. Only 12 from Fulda survived.
Identifying the deportation victims

It is difficult to identify the people in the photos we discover. So far, we’ve published 279 biographies in the digital atlas.

In the future, artificial intelligence may help us identify more people from the photos in our collection. But for now, this process takes exhaustive research with the help of local researchers and descendants of survivors, whose names are known from archived transport lists.

Families often struggle to recognize individuals in these images, but sometimes they have family photos that help us do so.

Take, for example, this posed family portrait of two young girls. They are Susanne and Tamara Cohn.

Relatives of the Cohn family had this photo. It, along with data from the local Nazi transport list, established that two girls photographed in one of his Breslau deportation shots were the daughters of Willy Cohn.

Cohn, a well-known German-Jewish medieval historian and high school teacher in Breslau, kept a detailed diary about the persecution of the town’s Jews from 1933 to 1941. It was unearthed and published in the 1990s.

This photo, below, may be the last picture ever taken of his children with their mother, Gertrud.

Gertrud, Susanne and Tamara Cohn, Breslau, November 1941. #LastSeen Project, CC BY-SA

New insights

The #LastSeen research project is generating new insights into the history of Nazi mass deportations, new methodologies for photo analysis and new tools for Holocaust education.

In addition to the digital atlas, which has been visited by more than 50,000 people since its launch in 2023, we have developed several award-winning educational tools, including an online game that invites students to search for clues, facts and images of Nazi deportations in an artificial attic.

In workshops for teachers and seminars with students, #LastSeen teaches the history of Nazi deportations and demonstrates how historical photo research works. In Fulda, for example, high schoolers helped us locate the exact places where the photographs were taken.

Those pictures will be published in our atlas on Holocaust Remembrance Day 2025. A public commemoration in Fulda will feature the local students’ contributions.

Depending on fundraising, we hope to extend the #LastSeen project beyond Germany. Collecting images from all 20-plus European countries annexed or occupied by the Nazis will help us better understand these crimes and advance research and education in new ways.

READ ORIGINAL STORY HERE