History Forum / General / General Topics / January 2008

[Follow-ups set]

January 30

1933

Adolf Hitler becomes Chancellor of Germany.

1939

During his Reichstag speech, Adolf Hitler declares: "Today I
will once more be a prophet: if the international Jewish
financiers in and outside Europe should succeed in plunging
the nations once more into a world war, then the result will
not be the Bolshevizing of the earth, and thus the victory
of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in
Europe!" (Goldhagen, 142, Fleming, 68)

Hitler speaks to the German Reichstag, and tells them that
another world war will result in the destruction of the
Jewish race in Europe. (3418-PS) (NCA II, 476)

1941

Adolf Hitler reminds Germans of his 1939 prophecy (see 1939,
above), and added: "They [the Jews] may also laugh about it
even today, just as they laughed earlier about my
prophecies. The coming months and years will prove that I
have been right." Just less than three months earlier, on
November 8, 1940, Hitler had referred to his "prophcy" as
something that was still off on the horizon. Yet now ... he
could say that he would begin to play it out in "the coming
months." (Goldhagen, 147-148)

1943

Zegota, the Council for Aid to the Jews, a Warsaw-based
clandestine organization of Polish citizens created in
December 1942, urges the Warsaw delegate of the Polish
government-in-exile to endeavor to remove thousands of
Jewish children from the endangered Warsaw ghetto. The
appeal goes unanswered. (USHMM, 1993. Pg. 21)

Also in January, 1943: Yiddish leaflets distributed in the
Bialystok ghetto in Poland urge the Jews to fight against
"evacuation." ...Fifteen hundred Jews are deported from the
labor camp in the Polish city of Radom to the killing center
of Treblinka....German, Polish, and Russian Jehovah's
Witnesses form secret study groups in the Neuengamme
concentration camp in Germany....The Germans establish a new
concentration camp for Dutch Jews at Vught, also known as `s
Hertogenbosch, in a former police detention center in North
Brabant....The German occupation authorities in Holland
prohibit Jews from maintaining private bank accounts....The
Milice, a 25,000 man police force, is established in Vichy
France to collaborate with the Gestapo in arresting French
resisters and rounding up Jews....The remaining Jews in the
Radom ghetto in Poland are deported to Treblinka and to a
labor camp in Skarzysko-Kamienna. (USHMM, 1993. Pg. 21-22)

1944

Seven hundred Italian Jews are deported from Milan and
Verona to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Ninety-seven men and thirty-
one women are registered for labor; 572 are sent to their
death on arrival. (USHMM, 1994. Pg. 27)

Also in January 1944: The young Italian-Jewish chemist Primo
Levi, arrested on December 13, 1943, as a member of
Giustizia e Liberta ("Justice and Liberty," Italy's major
non-Marxist anti-Fascist organization) arrives at the
Fossoli interment and transit camp....Widespread raids by
the French police in Laon, Saint-Quentin, Amiens, Reims, and
Poitiers result in the arrest of hundreds of French and
foreign Jews as well as persons with suspicious or illegal
documents....The Portuguese ship Nyassa sails from Lisbon
and Cadiz for Palestine with 170 Jewish emigrants from
Portugal and 560 Jewish emigrants from Spain and Tangier.
(USHMM, 1994. Pg. 27)

                        Work Cited

Fleming, Gerald. Hitler and the Final Solution. Berkely and Los
  Angeles: University of California Press, 1982

Goldhagen, Daniel Jonah. Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans
  and the Holocaust.  New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996

NCA II. Office of the United States Chief of Counsel for
  Prosecution of Axis Criminality. Nazi Conspiracy and
  Aggression, Volume II. Washington: United States Government Printing
  Office, 1946

USHMM (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum). Fifty
  Years Ago: Revolt Amid the Darkness: Days of Remembrance,
  April 18-25, 1993. Washington, D.C.: 1993
                             
USHMM (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum). Fifty
  Years Ago: Darkness Before Dawn: Days of Remembrance, April
  3-10, 1994. Washington, D.C.: 1994