Sunday was the ninth day of the Jewish month of Av, Tisha b’Av, the saddest day in the Jewish calendar.
On this date in ancient history the First and Second Temples in Jerusalem were destroyed; the first Crusade began in 1096; the Jews were expelled from England in 1290. This is the date when SS commander Heinrich Himmler formally received approval from the Nazi Party for “The Final Solution.” And this is also the date when the Nazis began the mass deportation of Jews from the Warsaw Ghetto to be murdered in Treblinka.
This past week at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Dallas, Texas, Trump supporters gave a standing ovation to the avowed anti-Semitic prime minister of Hungary, Viktor Orban, as he preached white Christian nationalism to the crowd.
Below, for readers of WHT, is the chronology of the Holocaust:
• January 30, 1933 — Adolf Hitler is appointed Chancellor of Germany.
• April 1933 — Nationwide boycott of Jewish-owned businesses in Germany is carried out under Nazi leadership. Law excludes “non-Aryans” From government employment; Jewish civil servants, including university professors and school-teachers, are fired.
• October 1934 – November 1935 — Waves of arrests of homosexuals occur throughout Germany, continuing into November. Jehovah’s Witnesses are banned from all civil service jobs and later arrested. Citizenship and racial laws are announced at the Nazi party rally in Nuremberg.
• March 15, 1938 — Austria is annexed by Germany.
• Winter 1938 — Nazis burn synagogues and loot Jewish homes and businesses in a nationwide pogrom called “Kristallnacht” (“Night of Broken Glass”). Nearly 50,000 German and Austrian men and women are jailed. All Jewish children are expelled from public schools. Segregated Jewish schools are created. Sept. 1, 1939 — Germany invades Poland; World War II begins.
• February 22 – 25, 1941 — First arrest of Amsterdam Jews. “Hostages” are sent to “work camps,” then Buchenwald, then Matthausen.
• 1942 — Nazi extermination camps in occupied Poland at Auschwitz-Birkenau, Treblinka, Sobibor, Belzec, and Majdanek-Lublin begin mass murder of Jews in gas chambers.
• June 1942 — Jews in France and Holland are required to wear identifying stars.
• April 19 – May 16, 1943 — Jews in the Warsaw ghetto resist with arms the Germans’ attempt to deport them to the Nazi extermination camps.
• March – July, 1944 — Germany occupies Hungary. Over 450,000 Hungarian Jews are deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau, where most of them are gassed.
• January 1945 — Nazis evacuate Auschwitz and begin prisoners’ “death marches” toward Germany. Soviet troops enter Auschwitz.
• April – May 1945 — U.S. troops liberate survivors at Buchenwald, Dachau, and Mauthausen concentration camps.
• May 7, 1945 — Germany surrenders, and the war ends in Europe.
Are we watching all this begin again?
Barry Blum, MD, is a resident of Kailua-Kona.
