Opinion
From the JC archive: April 13 1945
The grim toll of the death camps; a Jewish flag brings hope
April 10, 2025 12:02
3 min read
The grim toll of the death camps; a Jewish flag brings hope
April 10, 2025 12:02Death camp toll
A census taken by the Central Commission of Poland and the Central Committee of Polish Jews, details of which have been fully checked and verified, reveals, it is officially stated, that 3,200,000 Polish Jews have been slaughtered by the Germans. This figure does not include Jews deported from other countries to Poland and butchered in the death camps there. Jews deported from France to eastern Europe by the Germans, and since liberated by the victorious Red Army, have begun to trickle back. The first nine arrived in Marseilles from Odesa towards the end of last week, and were followed at the weekend by another 21. The names of the first nine repatriated Jews, who were received by Mr G Rooby, of the American Joint Distribution Committee, are: Apfelbaum, Maurice Cohen, Anna Stocklammer, Ernest Wolf and Lucien Zilberstein of Paris; Sabi Asso of Toulon; Paul Kusiner of Nice; Charles Gruszkiewicz, of Hellene, La Crossire (Vaucluse); and Hans Heinermann of Marseilles. From what they say, it seems that a mere fraction of the 120,000 Jews deported from France have survived and will be able to return. The treatment they received amounted to systematic mass extermination, which took place when the victims were unable to toil any more. Thousands of prisoners succumbed under the strain of the last nightmare days when the camps were hastily evacuated because of the approach of the Red Army, the repatriated Jews report, but some of them believe that the “losses may be less terrible than was thought”.
Evidence of Nazi butchery
Evidence of unspeakably foul German crime at the SS concentration camp at Ohrdruf, near Erfurt, where nearly 4,000 prisoners were butchered, was released this week in the form of a number of photographs taken at the camp by American soldiers. In common with most other newspapers the Jewish Chronicle felt that these pictures were too horrible to publish. A party of German citizens were compelled to make a tour of inspection of the camp by the Americans, and were shown the bodies of 31 prisoners, mostly Czech Jews, who had been shot by German guards the night before the camp was overrun because they were too weak to march off. This group of 31 corpses, lying in the forecourt or the camp is the subject of one of the pictures. Another picture shows a pile of 44 naked bodies sprinkled with lime lying in a shed. According to the survivors, of whom there were about 80 who had escaped to the woods, an average of 150 prisoners were killed daily mostly by shooting and clubbing. A German doctor admitted that many of the prisoners had been beaten to death. The German civilians, of course, claimed that they knew nothing at all of what happened in the camp.
The Jewish flag
Palestine’s blue and white national flag was formally raised last week over the Jewish Brigade headquarters in Italy, where the Brigade is attached to the Eighth Army, in a simple and quiet ceremony so moving to the soldiers participating in it that tears ran down many of their dust-caked faces. They watched the Star of David which the Nazis forced them to wear as a badge of shame being unfurled as a symbol of fighting honour. The ceremony took place in a grassy meadow, near a shell-torn baronial mansion, to the accompaniment of distant gunfire. The flag was presented to the Brigade by the Jewish Agency. Mr Moshe Shertok, Head of the Political Department of the Agency, brought it and presented it to the Commander, Brigadier E F Benjamin, while the troops stood stiffly to attention. It was unfurled by the oldest enlisted man of the Brigade. Sgt Major Sucher Spiegel, whose entire family, except one uncle living in New Jersey, USA, has been massacred by the Nazis. Mr Shertok addressed the soldiers present, who represented every unit of the Brigade. He spoke in Hebrew. He said that at last the Jews could see the flag for which they had always fought in their hearts. It represented not only their national homeland, but “the blood of five million European Jews who died without having the chance to fight, back”. Accepting the flag, Brigadier Benjamin explained that he could not fly it regularly over his headquarters for security reasons until the war was over, but he would fly it when peace came. He expressed pride at the fighting qualities already demonstrated by his troops.