The prelude to WWII, started by Hitler, took place in Munich, the cradle of Nazism and where Hitler composed his anti-Semitically vitriolic book Mein Kampf, outlining his criminal ideology and future intentions. The British conservative primie minister Neville Chamberlain signed with Hitler the Munich Agreement whereby the Sudetenland region of Czechoslovakia was ceded to Germany, followed by the German invasion of the rest of the country a year later, completing the betrayal.
It was here that one of the most notorious and sadistic Nazis, Reinhard Heydrich, chose to reside. In due course he was killed by Czechoslovak resistance fighters which led to the German reprisal of exterminating and razing the village of Lidice.
Here are some further sources:
Click here to Read: Reinhard Heydrich’s Wikipedia page.
One of the key figures of the Final Solution.
Hitler’s written order was not found, but everybody knew he made good on his threat to exterminate the Jews as punishment for the Jews having started WWII which Hitler stated in his speech to the Reichstag on Janaury 31, 1939.
Click Here to Read: Arad, Yitzhak<> (1987). Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka: The Operation Reinhard Death Camps. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press
Background reading
Click Here to Read: Daniel Johah Goldhagen’s Wikipedia page.
Click Here to Read: Goldhagen, Daniel Jonah (1996). Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust. New York: Knopf
Click Here to Read: Ian Kershaw’s Wikipedia page.
Kershaw, Ian (2008). Hitler: A Biography. New York, NY: W. W. Norton & Company.
Ckick Here to Read: William Shirer.
Click Here to Read: Shirer, William L. (1960). The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. New York: Simon & Schuster
Click Here to Read: Rudolf Vrba’s Wikipedia page.
Rudolf Vrba, co-author of the Vrba-Wetzler report.
Click Here to Read: The Vrba-Wetzler Report about the Auschwitz concentration camp on Wikipedia.
Click Here to Read: More on the Auschwitz concentration camp on Wikipedia.
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Their report did not produce the needed reaction from the Allies.
Henry Friedlander published an important book: The Origins of Nazi Genocide from Euthanasia to the Final Solution
Click Here to Read: Henry Friedlander’s Wikipedia Page
Click Here to Read: Information about the University of North Carolina Press on Wikipedia.
The Origins of Nazi Genocide: From Euthanasia To The Final Solution. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. 1995
The Nazis euthanized some 70,000-100,000 chronic mental patients in 6 asylums, one of which was Sonnenstein, where Schreber had been incarcerated. One of the criminals hanged after the trial in Nuremberg was the last Nazi director of Sonnenstein, Paul Nitsche:
Click Here to Read: The Sonnenstein Euthanaisia Centre’s Wikipedia page.
Like Vrba and Wetzler, the Pole Jan Karski submitted reports about Nazi atrocities to the Allies.
Click Here to Read: Jan Karski’s Wikipedia Page
Jan Karski addressed the UN and published a book in 1942 about the extermination of Polish Jews. The Allies did not act.
Click Here to Read: Hannah Arendt’s Wikipedia Page
Arendt created a furore with the publication in 1963 of Eichmann in Jerusalem The banality of Evil, where she alleged that Eichmann was just a common faceless functionary who obeyed orders when in fact he actively participa in the 1942 participated in the Wannsee conference where the Final Solution was organized. In the summer of 1944, when it was obvious the Nazis lost the war, Eichmann organized the deportations to Auschwitz of some 400,000 Hungarian and Czech Jews. Neither was Eichmann banal, nor, a fortiori, the crimes against humanity perpetrated by the Nazis. Arendt never retracted her terrible trivialization. She had been the mistress of
Nazi-Party-member Martin Heidegger who also refused to apologize for his country*s crimes. Arendt only spent some two weeks at the trial and thus did not observe Eichmann’s testimony to the end.
In a letter to Karl Jaspers of 17.8.1946 Arebdt wrote: *Your definition of Nazi policy as crime (*criminal guilt*) strikes me as questionable,* in spite of what had already emerged during the Nuremberg trials held
between 20 November 1945 and 1 October 1946.
The most prominent historian of the Holocaust was Raul Hilberg, in his The Destruction of European Jews, published in 1961. He would later complain bitterly that Arendt plagiarized his work.
Henry Lothane, MD
Clinical Professor of Psychiatry
Mount Sinai School of Medicine
Office address: 1435 Lexington Avenue
New York, NY 10128
Phone: (212)534-5555
www.lothane.com