Category: #7 Holocaust & Homelands

The first that I thought of when reading about how Jewish Displaced persons used the land of former Nazi’s to build farming communities that could be used to train Jews for living in Palestine is how Israel is known for its military prowess, which I have always understood to be a product of Jews working … Continue reading “Unity in Europe training for the creation of Israel?”

Lessons on the horrors of the Holocaust often include statistics on the number of deaths and personal narratives of survivors and their hardships. What became of the liberated Jews directly following the Holocaust is often overlooked. Many survivors had no home to return to because approximately 5,000 Jewish communities had been destroyed during WWII. Others […]

Tension in Germany, between the Jews and the Nazi party, predated the mass extermination we now know as the holocaust. Nazi officials had been using propaganda newspapers such as the Angriff, which was headed by Joseph Goebbels, to promote the relocation of Jews out of Germany since the 1920’s (Segev, 19). These newspapers played to […]

In the early 1930s there was a political transfer of power in Germany to the Nazi party. At this time, the party was led by Adolf Hitler and he was known for his views and his agenda for the future of Germany. Part of his views, which were shared by a majority of the Nazi […]

The new founders of Israel called all able bodied men and women ages seventeen to thirty-five to fulfill their “national duty”. Thousand of young men and women from displacement camps where sent to continue the fight in Palestine and Israel. … Continue reading →

in the Aftermath of World War II there were over 10 million Displaced Persons in Germany.  These people included forced laborers, prisoners of war and Jews who had been forced into concentration camps as part of the “Final Solution”. For most of these people the decision on what to do once they were liberated was … Continue reading “Jewish Postwar Repatriation vs. Relocation”

The faces of the children photographed above read many emotions: fear, uncertainty, confusion; however, the emotion coming across the strongest, in my eyes, is opportunity. Their youth is evident not only in their size but across their faces, and with many years left to spend in countless ways. These children, unlike most, experienced unforeseen horrors […]

“How could we ever have believed that at the end of the war the surviving Jews would have no more worries, that everything would be fine! The world, we had thought, would welcome our few survivors with open arms! We, the first victims of the Nazis. They would love us! Quickly enough, we saw that … Continue reading ““Liberated but Not Free””

 On June 22, 1945 President Harry Truman sent Earl Harrison, the Dean of the University of Pennsylvania Law School, to Europe to evaluate the condition of displaced persons in Europe. Harrison assessed military and government effectiveness in providing aid to … Continue reading →

In 1933, an mutually beneficial agreement was signed between two unlikely groups:  Zionist groups in Palestine and Nazi Germany. On August 25, the Haavara agreement was made into lawful policy, allowing German Jews to liquidate their assets in Germany, move Continue reading The Zionist Escape from Nazi Germany→