Folks, today is Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Day, and I found two articles for you to read and one film for you to watch.
Both articles are difficult to read but if you’ve got a spine and a heart, and you know the difference between right and wrong, you’ll put your other chores aside and you will find the time to read them.
The first one is an online article about Hitler’s nurse, Erna Flegel, now 93 and living in a nursing home in northern Germany, who told Britain’s Guardian newspaper in an interview published Monday that
“In the last few days, Hitler sank into himself,” Flegel said. “He shook a great deal, walking was difficult for him, his right side was still very much weakened as a result of the attempt on his life (in July 1944).”
The second article is about Shalom Nagar, who sprung the gallows under Adolf Eichmann over 40 years ago. To this day the scene plays itself over and over in Nagar’s head in minute detail but “in spite of all the trauma, today I understand the great merit I was given. God commands us to wipe out Amalek, and ‘not to forget.’ I have fulfilled both.”
The third is a film, Memory of the Camps, which I watched last night on Frontline, on PBS.
Sixty years ago, in the spring of 1945, Allied forces liberating Europe found evidence of atrocities which have tortured the world’s conscience ever since. As the troops entered the German concentration camps, they made a systematic film record of what they saw.
Work began in the summer of 1945 on the documentary, but the film was left unfinished. FRONTLINE found it stored in a vault of London’s Imperial War Museum and, in 1985, broadcast it for the first time using the title the Imperial War Museum gave it, “Memory of the Camps.”
As the film’s history shows, it was a project that was supervised by the British Ministry of Information and the American Office of War Information. And during that summer of 1945 some of the documentary editing was done under the direction of Alfred Hitchcock.
“At the time we found the film, it was not entirely clear what role Hitchcock played in its development,” says David Fanning, executive producer of FRONTLINE. “Moreover, one reel of the original six, shot by the Russians, was missing. There was a typed script intact — undated and unsigned — but it had never been recorded.”
FRONTLINE took the film, added the script and asked the late British actor, Trevor Howard, to record it. The aim was to present the film unedited, as close as possible to what the producers intended in 1945.
“Memory of the Camps” includes scenes from Dachau, Buchenwald, Belsen and other Nazi concentration camps whose names are not as well known. Some of the horrors documented took place literally moments before the Allied troops arrived, as the Germans hurried to cover the evidence of what they had done.
Twenty years after its first broadcast on FRONTLINE, “Memory of the Camps” remains one of the most definitive and unforgettable records of the 20th century’s darkest hour.
Folks, you can watch the full program on line here. Please be prepared for graphic imagery. Toughen it up, take a deep breath, take one hour out of your life and watch this film. It is one hour of your life that six million Jews and five million non-Jews never had. So quit your whining. You’re lucky you’re sitting up, well-fed, and breathing.
While you watch this documentary, say your prayers for the dead. Question how this could have happened.
If you can’t and if you choose not to watch this film, then you’re made of nothing but shit and sinew.
The film, “Memory of the Camps”, proves that Germans could not have truthfully claimed that they did not know what was going on. There were 300 camps in Germany alone. Did you know that?
The film also documents how the Brits turned the tables on the captured German swine; for example, in the Belsan camp, the Brits made the captured Germans take each dead body out of the make-shift graves and hand carry each of the approx 50,000+ corpses to ten other graves, a ghastly task the German scum themselves had previously asked the camp prisoners to do, and now the Brits were making the German scum do it. At last, the captured Germans knew what it was like to touch dead flesh, to labor non-stop, to smell the stink of dead rotting flesh, to have it stink on their clothes, to see the skeletons and nakedness, to finally know shame. It was a victorious feeling to witness this part of the film.
I bought the DVD from PBS.org, but it will be a few months before I can watch the film again.
It’s that ghastly.