Tag Archives: Holocaust

My Weekly Reader 21 March 2026.

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            Zionism is nationalism for Jews in places where Jews aren’t allowed to assimilate.  It began in the late Nineteenth Century and drew most of its followers from the anti-Semitic states of Eastern Europe.[1]  For the most part, Eastern European Jews preferred to emigrate to Western Europe or—best of all—the United States.  After the First World War, American immigration restrictions choked down on Eastern European immigrants of all varieties.  The Depression had much the same effect on Western Europe.  Then Hitler came to power in Germany.  Suddenly, British-ruled Palestine began to look attractive.  The British government “recognized” a Jewish Agency as the spokesman for the “Yishuv,” the Jews in Palestine. 

            Then came the Second World War.  Jewish emigration from Nazi-ruled Europe slowed to the occasional droplet.  Early German victories forced Britain to play offense from its back foot.  To this end, Britain had two “intelligence” organizations with a special interest in Nazi Europe.  The Special Operations Executive (S.O.E.) fomented and supported resistance in occupied countries.  MI-9 tried to rescue the crews of downed British planes.  At first, they concentrated their work in Western Europe.  By 1944, they both had an interest in Eastern Europe. 

            While there were lots of agent candidates who knew Western Europe and its languages, equivalent people who were familiar with eastern Europe were thin on the ground.  Where to find people who could pass anonymously in Hungary, Rumania, Czechoslovakia, or Yugoslavia?   After a while, it occurred to someone that British Palestine had a bunch.  Here, the Jewish Agency had begun to learn of the Holocaust and wanted to know what might be done to help the besieged Jews.[2]  S.O.E., MI-9, and the Jewish Agency collaborated in recruiting 250 male and female volunteers; approving 150 of them for training; and sending 37 behind German lines.  They would be parachuted into Eastern Europe, where they would work with resistance movements, set up evasion lines for downed aircrew, and investigate the situation of the Jews. 

            By Spring 1944, the situation in the region had become highly unstable.  A revolt against the puppet-government of Slovakia was about to begin.  Traditional conservative nationalists struggled with fascists for control of Hungary.  The Red Army had made a dramatic advance westward in Spring and early Summer 1944.  If the Germans were pinned down by the Red Army, their allies in Hungary and Slovakia might be toppled.  Or not. 

            Most of the 37 parachuted in between March and September 1944.  Some fought with the Slovaks and some with the Yugoslav partisans, while some went to Budapest at the moment of the German coup to put the fascist Arrow Cross in power.  Twelve were captured and seven of these were executed.[3]  None of them accomplished their original missions.  Nevertheless, the effort has inspired interest.[4]  Why? 

            Perhaps because how we live our lives is more important than what we accomplish in them?  Courage and self-sacrifice are recurring themes in the world’s art, literature, and myth. 

[1] The Russian Empire, which then included most of Poland; Rumania; and the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Subsequently, Poland and Hungary became independent states. 

[2] See: Walter Laqueur, The Terrible Secret (1980) on the Yishuv’s incomprehension of the Holocaust. 

[3] Of the seven who were executed, the most famous is Hanna Szenes, a sort of Jewish Noor Inayat Khan. 

[4] Amos Ettinger, Blind Jump (1992); Judith Baumel-Schwartz, Perfect Heroes (2010); Taviva Ofer, Haviva Reick (2014); Matti Friedman, Out of the Sky (2026).   

War Movies: “Anthropoid” (2016).

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If you want a look at a true case of “state-sponsored terrorism” and at one approach to counter-terrorism, watch “Anthropoid” (dir. Sean Ellis, 2016).  It gives a compelling view of the May 1942 assassination of Reinhard Heydrich (the head of the Reich Main Security Office and also “Reich Protector of Bohemia and Moravia”[1]) and of what followed. 

In the movie, the motive for the assassination is the desire on the part of the Czech government-in-exile to inspire more resistance in the Nazi-occupied country.  The team of killers (Josef Gabcik, Jan Kubis[2]) is air-dropped at night; overcome difficulties to reach Prague; find that the Germans have wrecked the resistance movement and they must rely upon a small group of locals; eventually, they are joined by some other parachutists who had been dropped later; and they improvise an attack on Heydrich.  The German is mortally wounded; a gigantic manhunt begins; the Germans track the parachutists to a Prague church; and one hell of a gunfight ensues.  The few surviving parachutists kill themselves rather than be taken alive. 

The movie strives for realism: it was filmed in Prague and mostly on the sites where events occurred; the pervasive fear of the Germans among the Czechs is brought out, not minimized; the semi-botched assassination is clearly portrayed; and the ferocious Nazi manhunt should leave anyone squirming. 

Still, the movie simplifies or omits some things.  First, it begins with Gabcik and Kubis on the ground in a Czech forest.  The movie elides the origins of “Operation Anthropoid.”  In fact, Eduard Benes, the leader of the Czech government-in-exile, feared that the West would sell out his country after the war if the Czechs didn’t show some fight.  The British and French had surrendered the Sudetenland to Hitler at Munich (September 1938) and had shrugged their shoulders when Germany occupied the rest of the country (March 1939).  Several thousand Czech soldiers had found their way to the West before the Second World War began (September 1939), but this wasn’t much of a contribution.  Internal resistance had mostly been the work of the Czech Communist Party after Germany attacked the Soviet Union (June 1941).  If the Germans lost the war, the Communists might claim a moral right to rule as the only true “resisters.”   A dramatic act might arouse non-Communist resistance, but it would surely make the government-in-exile appear to be doing something.  So, kill Heydrich now for a distant gain.    

Second, Heydrich had crushed the resistance by a combination of carrot and stick.  He had good material.  Few Czechs wanted to run risks for the sake of the Western powers that had betrayed them before.  Wages and working conditions in factories were improved at the same time that Gestapo penetration agents combatted the Communist underground. 

Third, the Germans unleashed a savage response to the attack on Heydrich.  Mass arrests; right to torture in the pursuit of some clue; massacres of villages on the mere rumor that someone had sheltered the killers.  In a society where few people actually backed resistance, this worked.  Finally, one of the parachutists betrayed someone else to save his own family; and the betrayed finally gave up the hiding place of the other parachutists. 

“The Battle of Algiers” openly confronts truths that “Anthropoid” skims over. 

[1] Also the driving force behind the implementation of the Holocaust.  On this, see: “Conspiracy” (dir. Frank Pierson, 2001), with Kenneth Branagh as Heydrich and Stanley Tucci as Adolf Eichmann. 

[2] Played by Cillian Murphy and Jamie Dornan respectively. 

Kishinev 1903.

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When our family did a study-abroad stint in Paris, I failed to get my sons into the local French public schools.  As a fallback, I enrolled my older boy in a commercial language class.[1]  He soon reported that his classmates were Portuguese plasterers and Moldavian cleaning ladies.  (He spent the rest of his time panhandling).  Now Moldavia is just a squalid and impoverished country waiting to be flossed from the gap between Ukraine and Rumania.  Better than a hundred years ago, however, it was just a squalid and impoverished territory of the rotting Russian Empire of the Tsars.  In Moldavia, there was a town called Kishinev.

Kishinev became a railroad town on the southwestern edge of the Russian Empire.  It attracted businessmen and entrepreneurs and people looking for jobs.  A dozen factories sprang up, but most people shopped in street bazaars.  By 1897, almost half (46 percent) of the city’s population were Jews.  Perhaps 50,000 people.  Familiarity did not breed fraternity.

In Spring 1903, as Easter approached, rumors circulated among the Orthodox Christians of Kishinev, that Jews had engaged in the ritual murder of Christian children so that their blood could be used for making mazo for Passover.[2]  Other rumors—somewhat better grounded in reality—also circulated that government authorities had approved three days of retribution.

Kishinev’s Jews were not without preparation for this attack.  After the assassination of Tsar Alexander II (1881), 200 attacks on Jewish communities happened.

On 19-20 April 1903, mobs of Moldavian Christians ran amok in a “pogrom” (an anti-Semitic riot).  The town’s government and police did not protect the embattled subjects of the Tsar.  The mobs left behind 49 dead Jews, a great deal of property damage, and many raped women.

The Russkie ambassador to the United States claimed that oppressed peasants had merely counter-attacked against Jewish money-lenders.  That didn’t sit too well with TR.[3]  Vladimir Korolenko, a Russian writer of no great ability, but of great courage, wrote a book about the pogrom called House Number 13.[4]  Sholem Aleichem’s play, “Tevye and His Daughters,” became the basis for the musical, then movie “A Fiddler on the Roof.”  It is set in Ukraine in 1905.  Eventually, the family decides to emigrate to the United States to escape oppression.

The pogrom was traumatic, but not only in the obvious ways.  Jews began to tear at each other over the refusal of many men to fight back.[5]  Some Israeli attitudes may find their origins in Kishinev as much as in the Holocaust.[6]

In Maus: My Father Bleeds History, Art Spiegelman has his protagonist, Vladek Spiegelman, observe of pre-war Nazi Germany that “there is a real pogrom going on there.”  Before 1945, a pogrom like Kishinev offered the only terms that Jews had for understanding extreme danger.  It wasn’t enough.

[1] I took the younger boy on extended walks around Paris.  We found Jim Morrison’s grave in Pere Lachaise.  We saw the steam-powered tractor developed by the French revolutionary armies to pull cannon.  We ate a ton of crepes with melted sugar.  He later won the French prize at St. Andrew’s School.

[2] Steve Zipperstein, Pogrom: Kishinev and the Tilt of History (2018).

[3] See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fz-CVvxVHpw

[4] Let us now praise famous men.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Korolenko

[5] Chaim Bialik, “The City of Slaughter.”  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hayim_Nahman_Bialik#Move_to_Germany

[6] I’m not trying to be snarky here, but see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rpnmfbLiRng

“Conspiracy” (2001, dir. Frank Pierson).

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There are a bunch of movies about the Holocaust, but not a lot of good movies about the Holocaust.  Here’s one.

In the House of Lies. Ernst Marlier (1875-?) made a lot of money running a shipping company, then went into making and selling worthless patent medicines. The money rolled in. In 1914 he had a luxurious house built in the ritzy Wannsee area of Berlin. However, he was a fraud and he had a violent temper. By 1921 various forms of the law caught up with him as lawsuits, criminal charges, and a divorce ruined him. He sold the house to Friedrich Minoux. Minoux (1877-1945) had made a fortune in coal, oil, and electric power. After the First World War Minoux wanted to overthrow the Weimar Republic and had some contact with the Nazis. His money and contacts made Minoux and his wife stars in Nazi high-society after 1933. In 1941 he was convicted of having defrauded his own companies of an immense amount of money. Ruined and in prison, he sold the house at the Wannsee to the SS for use as a conference center.

On 22 June 1941, Germany attacked the Soviet Union. On 31 July 1941, Hermann Goering, second highest figure in the Nazi government, ordered Reinhard Heydrich to prepare a “final solution to the Jewish Problem in Europe.” Heydrich’s initial plan called for deporting Europe’s Jews to Eastern Europe, where they would slowly die of over-work, starvation, and disease. Moving all these people would involve massive organizational problems. On 29 November 1941 Heydrich invited the representatives of the key government departments to a meeting to sort out these issues. The meeting was scheduled for 9 December 1941. On 5 December 1941 the Red Army counter-attacked before Moscow; on 7 December 1941 Japan attacked the United States; on 8 December 1941 Heydrich postponed the meeting. Eventually, Heydrich re-scheduled the meeting for 20 January 1942.

Fifteen men attended the conference: Heydrich, three of his most terrifying myrmidons (“Gestapo” Muller, Rudolf Lange, Karl Schongarth), his trusty assistant Adolf Eichmann (who recorded the minutes), and representatives of the Interior Ministry (police), the Justice Ministry (the lawyers), the Ministry for Occupied Eastern Territories (Russia), the General Government (Poland), the Foreign Ministry (all the Jews not yet under SS control), the Four Year Plan for the economy (Goering’s stand-in + slave labor), the Nazi Party (stand-in for the rising figure of Martin Borman), the SS Race and Resettlement Office, and the Reich Chancellery (the office that coordinated the bureaucracy).

The meeting wasn’t about “what” to do. That had already been decided. The meeting was about “who is in charge.” Heydrich wanted to make it clear to everyone that he was in command and would brook no opposition. There are three things to look for in the proceedings of the conference. First, there is the veiled or Aesopian language. Nobody comes right out and says they plan to gas millions of people. No one who attended had any trouble figuring out what Heydrich meant. Second, the meeting got bogged down in petty details. That’s what committee meetings are like. Try not to be on committees. Third, focus on the push-back from Wilhelm Stuckart of the Interior Ministry, and Friedrich Kritzinger of the Reich Chancellery.

What them befell? The Czechs killed Heydrich in 1942; the Americans killed Roland Friesler, the Russians killed Lange and Muller, Alfred Meyer killed himself, and the Nazis killed Martin Luther, all in 1945. The Poles hanged Schongarth in 1946 and Josef Buhler in 1948. Friedrich Kritzinger testified at Nuremberg, then died in 1947. Wilhelm Stuckart died in 1951. The Israelis hanged Adolf Eichmann in 1962. The other four–Erich Neumann, Otto Hofman, Georg Leibrandt, and Gerhard Klopfer—did a little time in prison, then died in the 1980s.

Only the imprisoned Martin Luther didn’t have time to destroy his copy of the minutes.  It’s how we know what happened at the meeting.