The Holocaust

Jews Against the Occupation rejects Israel’s weaponisation of Jewish suffering to justify its oppression of the Palestinian people saying the message of The Holocaust must be that “Never Again” means anyone.

Suzanne Weiss, a Jewish Holocaust survivor, socialist activist and author, condemned Israel for turning Gaza into a “death camp”.

Maus and Berlin covers

Andrew Chuter reviews two classic graphic novels: Maus, which tells the story of Vladek Spiegelman, a Jewish survivor of the Holocaust; and Berlin, set during the German Weimar Republic prior to World War II.

Waiting for Anya film

Barry Healy reviews a recent film about how French villagers saved Jewish children from the Holocaust during World War II.

Mira Hamermesh was only 15 when she defied her Jewish parents in Nazi-Occupied Poland and fled for her life. That she survived is a wonder, and her dramatic account is engrossing and terrifying, writes Barry Healy.

Luke Cooper reports on his visit to Hungary, a European Union member state where democratic freedoms are no longer taken for granted.

If the assassination-plotters and coup-conspirators in the German military had succeeded in their many attempts from 1938 to 1944 to remove Hitler and overthrow the Nazi regime, then entirely different options to years of mass military deaths, civilian slaughter and horrendous concentration camps would have come into play.

Denial
Directed by Mick Jackson
Starring Rachel Weisz, Tom Wilkinson & Timothy Spall
In Cinemas now

In 1996 the vile “historian” David Irving sued US historian Deborah Lipstadt for libel. She had labelled Irving anti-Semitic because of his persistent claims that the Nazi Holocaust had not occurred.

Irving sued Lipstadt in London because under Britain’s libel laws, the burden of proof would be on her. In other words, Lipstadt would have to prove the Holocaust actually did occur.

Benjamin Netanyahu

Benjamin Netanyahu has publicly asserted that Adolf Hitler had no intention of exterminating Europe's Jews until a Palestinian persuaded him to do it. The Israeli prime minister's attempt to whitewash Hitler and lay the blame for the Holocaust at the door of Palestinians signals a major escalation of his incitement against and demonisation of the people living under his country's military and settler-colonial rule.

In 1939, as Europe stood on the verge of all-out war, Nazi Germany, true to their promise, had issued and implemented 400 different decrees for the regulation of the public and private lives of Jews. Their properties were confiscated, and their businesses and synagogues were burned down. These laws effectively purged Jews from schools, academia, business and public life, and declared them “undesirables”. Many Jews were forced to seek asylum in other Western countries.