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Mariela Baeva
Mariela Baeva
Member of the European Parliament for Bulgaria
2007 - 2009
(first direct EP elections in Bulgaria);

LEED to OECD partner (Nanotech)


News of the Day

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The Global Tantrum 
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Young people in partnership with @Theirworld demanded action on the #GlobalEducationCrisis and world leaders have listened. #IFFEd will unlock billions for children globally and help deliver a world where every child has a place in school. #LetMeLearn

Theirworld, Your Walk: Thank you! – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bcwI3ZWZGc4

Nous venons de signer cette lettre ouverte pour demander aux chefs d’Etat et de gouvernement de faire de l’école gratuite pour tous les enfants un droit humain universel.


Holocaust – Part I

Atrocities of WWII and Its Legacy

Photograph:Smoke, oil on linen by Holocaust survivor Samuel Bak, 1997.Smoke, oil on linen by Holocaust survivor Samuel Bak, 1997

 

Nazi anti-Semitism and the origins of the Holocaust*

Holocaust, Hebrew Shoʾah, Yiddish and Hebrew Ḥurban (“Destruction”), the systematic state-sponsored killing of six million Jewish men, women, and children and millions of others by Nazi Germany and its collaborators during World War II. The Germans called this “the final solution to the Jewish question.” The word Holocaust is derived from the Greek holokauston, a translation of the Hebrew word ʿolah, meaning a burnt sacrifice offered whole to God. This word was chosen because in the ultimate manifestation of the Nazi killing program—the extermination camps—the bodies of the victims were consumed whole in crematoria and open fires.

Even before the Nazis came to power in Germany in 1933, they had made no secret of their anti-Semitism. It was rooted in religious anti-Semitism and enhanced by political anti-Semitism. To this the Nazis added a further dimension: racial anti-Semitism. Nazi racial ideology characterized the Jews as Untermenschen (German: “subhumans”). The Nazis portrayed Jews as a race and not a religious group.

When Hitler came to power legally on January 30, 1933, as the head of a coalition government, his first objective was to consolidate power and to eliminate political opposition. The assault against the Jews began on April 1 with a boycott of Jewish businesses. A week later the Nazis dismissed Jews from the civil service, and by the end of the month, the participation of Jews in German schools was restricted by a quota. On May 10, thousands of Nazi students, together with many professors, stormed university libraries and bookstores in 30 cities throughout Germany to remove tens of thousands of books written by non-Aryans and those opposed to Nazi ideology. The books were tossed into bonfires in an effort to cleanse German culture of “un-Germanic” writings. A century earlier, Heinrich Heine—a German poet of Jewish origin—had said, “Where one burns books, one will, in the end, burn people.”

As discrimination against Jews increased, German law required a legal definition of a Jew and an Aryan. Promulgated at the annual Nazi Party rally in Nürnberg on September 15, 1935, the Nürnberg Laws—the Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honour and the Law of the Reich Citizen—became the centerpiece of anti-Jewish legislation and a precedent for defining and categorizing Jews in all German-controlled lands.

For those Jews who felt themselves fully German and who had patriotically fought in World War I, the Nazification of German society was especially painful.

By the late 1930s there was a desperate search for countries of refuge. Those who could get visas and qualify under stringent quotas emigrated to the United States. Many went to Palestine, where the small Jewish community was willing to receive refugees. Still others sought refuge in neighbouring European countries. Most countries, however, were unwilling to receive large numbers of refugees.

On the evening of November 9, 1938, carefully orchestrated anti-Jewish violence “erupted” throughout the Reich, which since March had included Austria. Over the next 48 hours rioters burned or damaged more than 1,000 synagogues and ransacked and broke the windows of more than 7,500 businesses. The Nazis arrested some 30,000 Jewish men between the ages of 16 and 60 and sent them to concentration camps. That night was named Kristallnacht (“Crystal Night,” or “Night of Broken Glass”). In its aftermath,  Jews lost the illusion that they had a future in Germany.

*excerpts from the survey article of Dr. Michael Berenbaum, the former director of the Holocaust Research Institute at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum and author of The World Must Know and Witness to the Holocaust, among other books, is the principal author of Britannica’s extensive coverage of the Holocaust.

 

 

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