JF Ptak Science Books

Trying Hard Not to See the Jews: American Immigration Practices, WWII

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 1237

 This pamphlet holds an insight into a period, and also to one of he greatest stains of American foreign policy/humanitarianism of the last seventy years. And somehow this prolonged act is still a semi-secret, still I think not very widely known or acknowledged.

Your Help for Refugee Children (March 1939)  is the text for a radio broadcast by Chicago-based Dr. Charles Copeland Smith for his “The Neighborhood Guild” series.  (The document is also available from our blog bookstore.) Actually, Smith gave the broadcast over to his wife (for some reason) to make this appeal-- I guess because the subject was children, and that it would best be made by a woman.  Mrs. Smith made the case for the relaxation or extension of American immigration policy to accommodate the newly-minted refugees of Hitler’s Nazi Germany. 

The European war was just about started by the point–Czechoslovakia and Austria were already done, and Poland and the rest of the beginning of the war was just six months away.  By this point, however, the war was considered a foregone conclusion by most thinking people.  

I have to give credit to the Smiths, as they did recognize the coming threat of Nazism, and did make the appeal for a more expansive inclusive of the relatively stingy American immigration policy.  They figured that the children of refugees would be their main concern, and that accommodation should be made to accept 10,000 of them per year.  

That would be 10,000 “extra” children, I’m assuming, since the Smiths make the case that the current levels for allowable immigration was an at “inadequate” 27,000 per year.  In 1938 there were more than 300,000 applications for U.S. visa from German Jews alone, about 20,000 of which were accepted.  In 1939, a smaller number of Jews would find themselves allowed into the United States. From 1933 onwards, the case can be clearly made for the State Department, Congress and the Executive branch actively engaged in restricting immigration to the U.S. by many hundreds of thousands of European Jews.  Even after it became apparent that not only were Jews being sent to concentration camps by the millions, but they were also being exterminated , that the U.S. policy for acceptance of Jewish refugees barely changed.

It is at the Jewish question that the Smiths got things wrong in their broadcast.  Mrs. Smith made “another attempt” to make the case for the refugee issue was not “predominately a Jewish problem”, the argument being that there were so many more Catholics than Jews in places like Czechoslovakia and Austria.  She went on: “I believe that Nazism is determined to stamp out liberalism.  The movement is political, not racial, not religious.”

The undercurrent of their argument for saving (“not just”) Jewish children was based on a very selective use of out-of-context statistics, concentrating on numbers of refugees coming out of Austria and Czechoslovakia, and not, somehow, out of Germany.  I’m not sure how they could have gotten to their argument on refugee status for Europeans while ignoring the six years worth of anti-Jewish legal abominations perpetuated upon the German Jewish population.  

The “Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service” was passed in April 1933 (the first official banishment of the Jewish people as menials, second-class citizens,  banning them Jews from government jobs). The Jews had already been established by the Nazis as being the cause for the loss of WWI, the debacle at Versailles, the ruination of German culture and mortal enemy of the Aryan German. Many hundreds of laws like this would be instituted over the coming few years, establishing the legality of the supposed inferior nature of the Jewish people.  (Also in July 1933 came the underpinning legislation of some future nasty thinking, Ernst Rudin’s “Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring”, which established health courts and compulsory abortion and sterilization for a variety of physical and hereditary traits found to be unacceptable for the promulgation of a superior German race.) And this is all before the Nuremberg Laws of 1935/1936, (specifically the “Reich Citizenship Law” 1936)  which basically established the fate of the Jews, removing their citizenship and making them “subjects of the state”.Do I really need reiterate the case for the Nazi subjugation of the Jews, and their making the social and legal basis for the coming extermination policies which were codified at Wansee in 1942?  I think not–though it seems to me that for whatever reason the Smiths decided to not utilize this already well established (even by 1939) information.I think that at the very least they did not want to know.
                                    
I’d like to focus on this self-deception, the welcoming of not knowing something, of not wanting to know, of stopping: of doing nothing in the face of something needing to be done.

The destruction of the Jewish people during World War II is a history with many bearings, a complex of actions that seem to have been both elusively unstoppable and eminently addressable.  The psychology of why this occurred is forensically comprehensible; the ultimate question, after everything is said and done, is why the extermination was allowed to continue for years on end. There is a considerable catalog of demons of non-actions and deceits that I just can’t address now in a short post like this. Though I would like to know why was it so difficult/impossible for the British government (and in particular, Anthony Eden) to allow Palestine as a safe haven for desperate Jews, engaging in torturously long non-decisions and bureaucratic inscrutability to emergency situations?  Why did Franklin Roosevelt take so long to come acknowledge the documentation of the Holocaust and then cause almost nothing to be done about it?  Why did Sumner Welles act decidedly against any real action in presenting the full case of the Holocaust to American leaders?  Why would the War Department (represented by Assistant Secretary McCloy) respond in 1944 that  Auschwitz was both beyond the reach of tactical bombers and not be of sufficient military interest to divert Air Force resources away from other areas of interest?  The knowledge of vast extermination of Jews in Europe was known by early 1943, and yet, there was little action taken to do anything to stop it.  Not only that, the issue of emigration for Jews to the United States or any other country that would have them was caustic and slow; it was in short a history of the use of the word “no”.

Henry Morgenthau (1891-1967), an old-line politician, was Secretary of the Treasury under Roosevelt and was also the only Jew in the cabinet.  It was he who in 1944 produced one of the most compelling, and damaging, documents questioning the American government’s culpability in doing nothing concerning the Holocaust, when "officials dodged their grim responsibility, procrastinated when concrete rescue schemes were placed before them, and even suppressed information about atrocities."

Its title left nothing to question:

Report to the Secretary on the Acquiescence of this Government in the Murder of the Jews (1944).

 It starts so:

“One of the greatest crimes in history, the slaughter of the Jewish people in Europe, is continuing unabated.

"This Government has for a long time maintained that its policy is to work out programs to serve those Jews of Europe who could be saved.

Evil Replaced by Evil: The Baltics, the USSR and the Nazis. An Anniversary, 25 November 1940

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1234

This rare, offset-printed publication comes from the representatives of the Free Trade Unions of the Baltic States–a part of the International Federation of trade Unions (IFTU)--and is dated December, 1943, and is a witness to the brutal regimes that illegally and maliciously subverted the countries of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania.
(The IFTU was a social democrat-like organization that existed from 1919 to 1945, and which was a largely European body after 1925 when its main American counterpart, the AFL, chose to disengage.)

[This document is available for purchase from our blog bookstore, here.  I would gladly reproduce the entire document except that given the nature of its reporduction the pages are brittle, meaning that the document could no tbe scanned unless taken apart, which I do not want to do, presently.]

The six-page pamphlet is interesting to me because it provides some details on the rape of the Baltics--the theft of their legal status as nations, the murder and deportation of those who disagreed with the ruling Soviet and then Nazi occupiers, and then, lastly, the murder of the Baltic Jews–which, in December of 1943, was not common reading material.

As a result of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, the Soviet Union moved into the Baltic states in June, 1940, after having compelled the thre nations to allow the establishment of Soviet bases on their soil.  In June of 1940 the life of the Baltics changed dramatically, when the U.S.S.R. overtly took control in the three countries. At the beginning of the Soviet brutalities, elections were stolen, military forces were moved, and murder and deportations and arrests began in earnest. In beginning to kill the soul of these countries, the Soviet union established a “Commissariat of the Interior...was a powerful apparatus for carrying out persecutions and taking reprisals”, a euphemism of the early part of the pamphlet which would be replaced by mor direct language just paragraphs later.

But 25 November 1940 marked the final destruction of the independence of these countries when their national currencies were replaced by the ruble, allowing complete control by the Soviet Union, and plunging the countries into a malicious chaos, with the citizens now faced with an almost-order of magnitude change in their buying power.

The report continues on the disappearances of workers and intellectuals, which came quite early in the Soviet occupation.  According to the document, tens of thousands of workers who were opposed to the new changes by the Commissariat of the Interior were arrested and deported to “enjoy a happy life” in prison.  More shocking details would come, highlighting the deportations, arrest and executions of thousands of people–tens of thousands who would be sent to “labor camps” in northern Russia, selected from”secretly drawn-up lists by the Communist Party”.

There is in particular the mention of 14 June 1941–a bitter day in the history of the first Soviet occupation, though it seems that the author of the present paper did not yet have a full appreciation of the event, yet. Here the author mentions specially “equipped” railway cattle cars brought in from Latvia and used to deport 21,000 people from Lithuania, 11,000 from Estonia and 15,000 from Latvia.  In point of fact the period of 14-17 June 1941 was when the Soviets imprisoned/deported/murdered 100,000 Balts.

After the Nazis trashed their non-aggression pact with the USSR and began their invasion (known as “Operation Barbarosa”) of the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941the Russians began to run, replaced very quickly by the advancing German armies. The author writes that “we have no exact data” on the deportation and execution in the earliest days of the Nazi occupation, but the conservative guess was that 50,000 had been deported and 10,000 executed.

And then on to the Jewish question, where this paper reports that almost all of the Baltic Jews–by December 1943–were gone.  “Gone”in being  deported to   work camps, or collected in slums, or murdered.

In the only underlining done in the printing of this pamphlet, we read that ‘All these murders are on the German conscience”, and then goes on to name the German officials responsible for the crimes. 

In December 1943, when it was becoming apparent that the Germans were being turned in Russia, and that the Russians might return, there is this final plea from the pamphlet’s author:

“Do not allow the red Army to occupy our countries.  Save our people from physical and legal annihilation.” OF course the Soviets who were replaced by the Nazis were again occupied by the Soviet Union in 1944--the Baltics would not see the Soviet Army leaves until 1995.

This was a fast summation of a complex and complicated situation I the Baltic states for these years, but I just wanted to give the flavor for the background of this December 1943 pamphlet.  There were hundreds of references to mass killings and deportations (and vast rages of murders) that appeared in the press during this time period, but there was certainly not a collected resource for them all.  This pamphlet–quite rare in itself, as I’ve found no copy in any world-wide library holdings referenced in WorldCat–is another example of disparate reporting on what would be seen just 20 months later as a monumental climax of injustices.

Modern Antique Occupations

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1233

Earlier in this blog I looked at the diminishing importances in antiquarian times--some occupations, formerly integral and important, have now become sufficient, occasionally a luxury to be afforded by folks who can pay for reigniting past importance.  This earlier example was found in William Pyne's great-ish 1845 work, Picturesque groups for the embellishment of landscape..-- it was a work of clip art for its day, really, showing, detailing, the attitudes and occupations of working people.  It was a book filled with the people who might ordinarily have gone missing from the work of the artists needing their images displayed in their brains by someone else's labor; a book filled with figures to plug-up the blank spaces, round out that unkind bits that called out for a human touch. This new example's lists (below) are interesting in this same way, though the jobs listed are less general and more "professional", or technical, than the Pyne work--fishmongers and rat-catchers are not listed here. 

The work is that of Edward Hazen who in 1837 described 68 specialized jobs in his Panorama of Professions and Trade. Unlike many other occupations from a less specialized list, nearly all of these jobs still exist, though many have been lowered to deep depths of obscurity (say, for "lithographer"), while others are changing whole-cloth but still quite popular (like my own profession as "bookseller".  A bookseller from 1837 could see that some small percentage of the booksellers he met were indeed selling books in a way he recognized--but then there's that knotty majority who even though were brothers-in-trade would seem I think to be almost entirely foreign to his antiquarian eyes.)

Of all the professions listed below, only five, I think, are almost entirely removed from the public picture--jobs held by people now but by people who would be difficult to find. The short list--type founder, turner, wheelwright and stereotyper.  As I said, there are people who practice these positions, but their services are more luxuries than necessities, now.  Whereas my earlier post on the Pyne occupations was listed as a "Domesday tour" of disappeared professions, it it remarkable to see how many of the Hazen jobs continue to survive. 

Inauguration Gowns, "Buying American", & Jackie Kennedy: the Kennedy Inauguration of 1961.

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1229

[JFK Election/Inauguration rarities may be purchased through our blog bookstore.]

Some years ago I purchased a small archive of documents relating to the public appearances of Jacqueline Kennedy, wife of President John Kennedy.  The material is all pre-inaugural, almost all 1960, and  loaded with interesting unpublished nuggets.  One such bit is this telegram sent by the Kennedy camp to Mrs. Kennedy's first (?) social/press secretary (who did not follow the Kennedys to the white House), Gladys Uhl, the content of which was to be reorganized and matured by Mrs. Uhl  for public distribution.  The subject here was Mrs. Kennedy's coming fashion sense, in general, and of her inaugural gown, in particular.

And what is interesting here is that "when Jacqueline Kennedy moves into the White House she will wear only American clothes and she is looking forward to it".  A fine sentiment; a bolder one too for today if Mrs. Obama decides to follow suit.  It will be much more difficult though for that to happen in 2009 than it would have been in 1961:  this is an age when even some of the most classic "\American" brands of clothing have been moved offshore, made for the USA in China (or Indonesia, or Pakistan, or Vietnam, or wherever the work can be delivered cheaper.  Mrs. Obama has said something about wearing simple clothing, as from a store (chain) like J. Crew--it would be nicer if she were to decide to go with another New York-based clothing store whose goods weren't made in China, though.  I could cozy up to that.  I could also cozy up to the "American Owned" supermarket that I bounce into every other day if that had more American-made products.  I can understand off season veggies and such, but does good-old Motts Apple Juice really need to be made from apple concentrate imported from China (for crying out loud?)?  I remember on 9/13/01 that the Giant Foods supermarket in my neighborhood in Cleveland Park, D.C., started selling American flags--all made in China.  This was just so entirely wrong that a protest was waged, the flags were removed, and then replaced days later with flags made in the USA.  But it is difficult to find American-made clothing in stores--even a so-called "iconic" Appalachian "general store" and landmark in Asheville, a store that wraps itself in folkiness and homespun regional taste, has, I would say, less than 5% American-made goods. 

 

But I digress. I really just wanted to talk about Jackie Kennedy and her inaugural gown and her interest in 'buying American".  In another piece from this modest archive, Jackie sends back her response to Mrs. Uhl's questions, and one in particular about color.  Seems as though Lyndon Johnson's wife, Lady Bird, was going to go shopping at Nieman Marcus for her inaugural gown and wanted to know what color Mrs. Kennedy was going to wear so that she could avoid buying that same color.  Jackie responds at the bottom:  "My Inaug gown will be White--so I'm sure that anything Mrs. Johnson picks will go with it".  

There are other interesting items in this collection that I'll get to soon--several of which are Mrs. Kennedy's copies of some scripts for television commercials for her husbands campaign.  They're actually pretty interesting, and a nice insight into the packing of the President in 1960. 

 

 

 

A Map of the Kingdom of Corsets, 1939

JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Post

This finely produced, 75-page pamphlet lists all you need to know about marketing and maintaining a corset department in 1939--all except how to actually get back to 1939 to utilize this font of knowledge.  It was published with great seriousness for a serious business by the School of Retailing at New York University, a serious object for serious people.   Among the many things I’ve never thought of before thinking with this pamphlet were corset maps--and one of these happens to appear in this publication,  a map of an idealized corset department, which to me looks to be large, sanitized and medicinal, an oddly institutionalized presentation of an intimate something, something more of artistry and chance and possibility than an orthotic. 

I should think that I would like to make a Kingdom Map for his image, some day.  It looks to me ready to accept the responsibilities of landforms or ideas or statistics or changes or comparisons in place of its plain nature of counters and countertops and display cases, empty boxes waiting for something a little more invigorating to depict.  Or maybe not, maybe the chance of display of transformations is enough to suit its peculiar, perhaps singular, needs.

Or maybe on the Corset Map  instead of  substituting land and sea for corsets and boxes, one could substitute the noises of a quiet house at night, or the sound of heavy boots in a brittle-dry snow in the deep cold.  Or maybe a map of the discovery of children's laughter, or inconvenient pauses in conversations through the history of human speaking...or a map of lost ways.

Maybe the Corset Map could be used for a template for the things we will forget and the things we've forgotten, in which case the boxes need not be filled in, giving us a new version of the Bellman's Map from Mr. Dodgson, a new subcategory of maps--the blank map.  Or it could be the outlines for a map of the places that you meant to say something, but didn't.  Perhaps it could be used to outline where and how many times that people tell/told you that they'll miss you if you step away, making hollow boxes of simple loneliness because we can't be there all of the time.

Or maybe the corset map is just a corset map.

[This item is available for purchase, here.] The other surprise is how expensive these undergarments were.  For example, the Lily of France and Mme. Irene Corset Company (NYC) sold a girdle “for the heavy figure” (liberally sprinkling the word “heavy” throughout the description of the product like, well, sprinkles) for $132. The $132 corset is equal to about $2000 in today’s currency, or roughly a 15:1 increase. There were girdles and etc. in all price ranges, but the (1939) $30-$60 range seems to have been the most common; even still, the $30/low-medium quality item is about $430 in today's dollars, and the cheapest of them all at 5 bucks goes in today’s economy at 75 dollars or so.  I’m not familiar with the value of undies today, but this sure sounds like a whole hell of a lot of money. 

$132 for underwear in 1939 was a tremendous amount of money for the average person—even for the upper-middle class, it was a bunch, considering that you could buy a decent new car for $700.  It would also be equal to a half year’s worth of an average house rent ($28/month) and 1320 gallons of gasoline. 

 

It sounds like it was very expensive to keep the up with the idea of an ideal figure, which of course was partially create by this same sort of company, creating both need and demand for its product. 

1939 Price Comparisons:

Wages per year, average:  $1,730.00
Minimum wage: 30 cents/hour
Milk, by the gallon: 35 cents
Postage stamp, 1st class: 3 cents
Dow Jones: 131
Gas, average price of a gallon:  10 cents
Bread, by the loaf:  8 cents
Hamburger Meat, by the pound: 14 cents
Automobile, new, average:  $700.00
House, new, average: $3,800.00
House rent, average: $28.00/month

 

Empty Memory: Telephone Number 20080 (Warsaw), Nazi Occupied Poland and the Holocaust, 1941

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 296

 I've felt that a great history lesson for school kids would be to make them keep a diary for some other kid from some other time, introduce them to the minutiae of life from another time and perhaps another place.  With some guidance they could make interesting entries in their diary for, say, 15 June 1897, writing about chores, the daily schedule, what they studied in school, how they were dressed, how they got food on the table and kept the house clean, how they would spend 25 cents, what they would see from some given vantage point, and on and on.  This could take place in their very own home town; it could be multi-generational, requiring them to talk to the scary white hairs, or it could reach far back into history and be of an entirely different place altogether.  After they were assigned a particular place in time and space, you could give the kid subtle hints, like this one (below), asking them what they thought it might mean by dialing the phone number 200 80 in Warsaw in 1941.  And what did that pair of lightning bolts mean, anyway?  I think that once they were made to figure it out for themselves, as though they might've been there, and then could record their feelings and observations in a diary might actually bring history to life (especially once they had their "holy crap" (and probably worse) moment at what these numbers implied). 

This is one of the ideas that came home again uncovering this odd booklet, which is a Nazi diary for those stationed in the Generalgouvernment (Tascehnjahrbuch 1941 fuer den Deutschen im Generalgouvernement) ,  for the year 1941. The General Government (or more fully the Generalgouvernement für die besetzten polnischen Gebiete) was one administrative section of occupied Poland, the country being divided in 1939 after the German invasion of 3 September 1939, with the western section being retained by the Germans and the Eastern given over to occupation by the Soviets via the Non-Aggression pact between the USSR and Germany.   

This looks like an every day diary for the period, except for the Nazi (or NSDAP) regalia and German imprint of Generalgouvernment in Krakau.  And, all of the annotated highpoints of the year for the most overly voracious parts of German militarism as well as for the hotpoints of Nazi history.  Hitler, (above) Goering, Goebbels and other leaders' birthdays are highlighted, not to mention seminal points in the development of the Nazi party and party-adoptees (Richard Wagner has a number of entries for suggested celebrations). 

There are also helpful directories in the back pointing to any number of cafes located in a growing number of "Adolf Hilter Platz's" throughout Poland (including three in Radom), as well as fares for the use of the railway and postal system. 

We also see the following telephone number:  23075.  That's for the Literarische Kaffee Stefansgasse I, Krakau. This is the location that the Reichsminister and administrator Hans Frank (about whom we'll read inb a moment) decided to hold a chess tournament in 1941, to satisfy his own need for chess while freshly in the pursuit of the murder of millions of people.

‘Frank was extremely interested in chess. He not only possessed an extensive library of chess literature but was also a good player, and he even “received” the Ukrainian chess master Bogoljubow at the castle. On 3 November 1940 he organized a chess congress in Cracow. Six months later he announced the setting-up of a chess school under Bogoljubow and the chess master Dr Alexander Alexandrovich Alekhine, and he visited a chess tournament in October 1942 at the “Literary Café” in Cracow."--Hans Frank (subtitle: Hitlers Kronjurist und Generalgouverneur) by Dieter Schenk (Frankfurt am Main, 2006) "and quotes a reference to chess on page 177 (given below in our translation)..."[Source: Chesshistory.com., here.]

For the record, the Generalgouvernement was proclaimed in October 1939 just after the invasion of Poland and included most of what was left of Poland, which was gone again, barely 20 years after it returned to the map following WW1.  In March 1941 Hitler made a decision to "turn this region into a purely German area within 15-20 years". He also explained that "Where 12 million Poles now live, is to be populated by 4 to 5 million Germans. The Generalgouvernement must become as German as Rhineland".  Following the Wannsee conference of 20 January 1942, the Secretary of State of the Generalgouvernment, Dr. Josef Buhler (Warsaw # 222 05, a listed number in this book) began implementation if the Final Solution in Poland; by the time the Soviets entered and took control in late  1944, more than 4 million people—most of them Jewish—had been killed. 

[Photograph of a Jewish policeman, from the Jost collection.¹]

The man in charge of it all here in Poland, Hans Frank, has his photographic portrait as the frontispiece, and his number is listed, too. He was an horrendous butcher who was tried and convicted and executed for his crimes against humanity (at Nuremberg on 16 October 1946, aged 46--the decision of the court read, in part, that Frank was "...a willing and knowing participant in both the use of terrorism in Poland, as in the economic exploitation of Poland in a way that led to the starvation of a large number of people, also in the deportation of more than one million Poles as slave laborers to Germany and in execution of a program that had the murder of at least three million Jews. ").  In a speech December 16, 1941, Hans Frank said:"We cannot shoot these 3.5 million Jews [in Poland], we cannot poison them, but we will take measures that will somehow lead to successful destruction; and this in connection with large-scale procedures which are to be discussed in the Reich, the Government-General must become as free of Jews as the Reich .....We must destroy the Jews wherever we find them and wherever it is at all possible, in order to maintain the whole structure of the Reich..." Frank did his share of annihilation of Polish Jews and Polish citizens--almost as much as any other Nazi official, government or military leader--over the six years (1939-1945) that he ruled over this territory.

[Another image from the Jost collection.]

Josef Buhler, by the way, was tried after the war by the Supreme National Tribunal of Poland for crimes against humanity, condemned to death on July 10, 1948, and executed in Kraków.

This is really a fetid little booklet, its empty pages waiting for some sort of horror, all of which was actually taking place in real life, escaping  their record.

Distribution of food in General Government as of December, 1941

Nationality	Daily calorie intake
Germans	2310
Foreigners	1790
Ukrainians	930
Poles	654
Jews	184

I wonder where all of those conversations went, exactly, after they were ended.  Did they sink into the copper wire like auditory signals (very very slightly trapped) in clay pots?  I think not of course. But all of those phone numbers in this book to all of the special police and propaganda police and racial police and SS and on and on, all of those calls and conversations about this horrific undertaking, just seem to me as though they should've gone somewhere, caught in the myth of the machine, somewhere in the electromagnetic world, like a primitive internet.

I really can't stand what those simple phone numbers meant.

Footnotes:

1.  The Generalgouvernement was the central part of three general districts of the divided Poland, and it proved to be the terminal for millions of people deemed as undesirable or threatening.  It was particuarly impossible for Jews, the Generalgouvernement proving to be the place where they were collected in ghettos and housed under mniserable and starvation conditions until they began to be shipped out to concentration camps in early 1942.  By 1944 all of the ghettos had been liquidated, and with them, their inhabitants.  The Soviets did finally liberate the Generalgouvernement (from the Nazis) under delayed conditions in the winter of 1945, initiating Pogroms against the Jews by summertime.

Notes:

The Wannsee conference (I will not use a capital “C) was a meeting of leading  Nazi officials and treacle who formed the decision to implement the Final Solution t the “Jewish problem” in Germany— it was the real beginning of the Holocaust.

The men who made this determination to begin with the wholesale destruction of human beings included:

SS-Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich (Chief of the RSHA and Reichsprotektor of Bohemia-Moravia), presiding
Dr Josef Bühler (Government of the General Government)
Dr Roland Freisler (Reich Ministry of Justice)
SS-Gruppenführer Otto Hofmann (Race and Resettlement Main Office, RuSHA)
SA-Oberführer Dr Gerhard Klopfer (NSDAP Chancellery)
Ministerialdirektor Friedrich Wilhelm Kritzinger (Reich Chancellery)
SS-Sturmbannführer Dr Rudolf Lange (Commander of the SD for Latvia)
Reichsamtleiter Dr Georg Leibbrandt (Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories)
Martin Luther (Foreign Office)
Gauleiter Dr Alfred Meyer (Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories)
SS-Gruppenführer Heinrich Müller (Chief of Amt IV (Gestapo), Reich Security Main Office (RSHA))
Erich Neumann (Director, Office of the Four Year Plan)
SS-Oberführer Dr Karl Eberhard Schöngarth (SD, assigned to the General Government)
Dr Wilhelm Stuckart (Reich Ministry for the Interior)
SS-Obersturmbannführer Adolf Eichmann (Head of Referat IV B4 of the Gestapo), minutes secretary

1. “German soldier Heinz Jost strolled through the Warsaw Ghetto taking illegal pictures. Almost 50 years later, they resurface in a disturbing exhibition.”

“An enfeebled urchin lies clutching the sidewalk like a breast. Three people pass by behind it; only one of them, a malnourished woman, looks down at the child. In a second or two, they will be gone and the child will be alone again, even more helpless, if that is possible. Did such dying children (there were thousands of them in the Warsaw Ghetto in 1941) know that something was horribly wrong with the world? Or did they think that squalid suffering is all that this disappointing life has to offer? wrote children, Mary Berg wrote in her diary of the ghetto, "no longer have a human appearance and are more like monkeys than children. They no longer beg for bread, but for death." Terribly, the child on the sidewalk cocks its eye at the camera, unable to ward off the final cruelty of being photographed by a German soldier.

“Eerie approximation: Heinz Jost, a small-town hotelkeeper serving in the German Army, had the day off on Sept. 19, 1941. It was also his birthday. For reasons lost to history, Jost decided to spend the day inside the walls of the Warsaw Ghetto. He carried a camera and, contrary to regulations, took 129 photographs of the ghetto and its doomed inhabitants. The pictures lay unseen in a dresser drawer for four decades before Jost rediscovered them. He gave them to the German magazine Stern, which donated them in 1987 to the Yad Vashem Archives in Jerusalem.

“What Jost found in this neighborhood consecrated to death was an eerie approximation of normal daily life that only gradually (especially as the exhibition is arranged) reveals its ghastliness. At first, street life seems no more deprived than that in lower Manhattan earlier in the century. And the jackbooted soldiers relaxing in a touring car appear more arrogant than evil. But surely they must have known, as Chaim Kaplan recorded in his Warsaw diary, that "Anywhere a tree has been planted, or a bench has been placed, Jewish children are forbidden to derive enjoyment." Elsewhere, peddlers hawk bread, grubby vegetables and coal by the individual lump, one woman sells Star of David armbands in varieties from printed paper to embroidered linen. "These armbands are very much in demand in the ghetto because the Germans arevery `sensitive' on this score, and when they notice a Jew wearing a crumpled or dirty armband, they beat him at once," Mary Berg observed. After these images, the pictures of gaunt bodies on morbid rickshaws, the merciless common graves and the catatonic attendants are but numbing epilogue.

“There are those who say that to measure any other barbarism against the Holocaust is to trivialize the unequaled tragedy that befell the Jews. Looking at these pictures, however, it is hard not to be struck by resemblances that suggest that the horror of the Holocaust has not been obliterated, but simply broken up, crushed into powder and raked into the soil of contemporary life. Even in our very rich country, the number of tattered beggars, slumped in despair on city streets, grows steadily greater. The bearded, skull-like heads of the Warsaw Ghetto's interned are remindful of AIDS victims in the last stages of the plague. And it is almost impossible not to realize that we have seen, and still see, pictures of bodies of innocents lying dead under perversely meaningless advertising signs, at the feet of blase soldiers who think they're just doing their jobs.”

And another, shorter review:

Heinrich Jöst's Photographs. In the Ghetto of Warsaw: Heinrich Jost's Photographs, edited by Gunther Scharberg,  published by  Scalo, distributed  by D.A.P. 2001.

“Among the many books released on the Holocaust, the complete set of Jöst's photographs of the Warsaw Ghetto is a valuable resource for scholars. Jöst, a hotel owner and sergeant in the Wehrmacht, took photographs of the Warsaw Ghetto in late 1941, which he shared with the journalist Schwarberg in 1982. Originally exhibited at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, these photographs are now available, along with Jöst's recollections, to a wide audience (Jöst died in 1983). Although the graphic nature of the pictures is disturbing they show, for instance, starving children dying in the streets they provide a record of the Warsaw Ghetto separate from official Nazi propaganda and as such are extremely valuable. Recommended for all libraries.”
--By Frederic Krome, Jacob Rader Marcus Ctr. of the American Jewish Archives, Cincinnati.

Human Power—Raw Images of the Middle Passage, the American Stain of Slavery. Wadstrom and the Slave Ship "Brookes".

JF Ptak Science Books   Post #84

Having just finished a short post on human-powered machines (Georg Bockler in the mid 17th century) and with Juneteenth fast approaching, I thought about another sort of human power—slaves.  I wanted to make a short post on the conditions in which Africans were taken (sold and stolen) from their home continent to North America (and later just to the United States). 

Slavery as an institution in the U.S. existed from 1619-1865, failing, ultimately, with the ratification of the 13th Amendment (the first proposed in 60 years) to the Constitution by the end of 1865. (The African slave trade—though not slavery itself—was outlawed in 1807, by a law passed jointly in the United States of America and the United Kingdom, with the  US law taking  effect on January 1, 1808.)  The amendment was ratified relatively quickly by the legislatures of the  necessary three-quarters (27) of the original 36 states in 1865—Mississippi, the last of the original states to ratify the amendment, did so in 1995, 135 years following its initial rejection. Though almost all of the states had ratified the amendment in January and February, it took until December 4th and 6th—months after the crushing failure of the Confederacy—for North Carolina and Georgia to vote for it.  (The remaining 9 states voted for the amendment as follows:  Oregon California and Florida in 1865; Iowa and New Jersey (which had initially rejected the matter in 1865) in 1866;   Texas in 1870; Delaware, the First State, in 1901; Kentucky in 1976; and Mississippi, somehow, in 1995

.

The Emancipation Proclamation was issued September 22, 1862, with a three-month long pillow until it took effect on  January 1, 1863 .  Juneteenth refers to the freeing of the slaves in Texas (at Galveston) with the reading of General Order No. 3, on 19th June 1865.  Texas was the last refuge of Southern Slavery, and it all ended on that day. 

The famous image above (of the British slave ship Brooke)  is taken from An Essay on Colonization, particularly applied to the Western Coast of Africa….by Carl Bernhard Wadstrom, printed in London in 1794.  Wadstrom (1746-1799) was devoted abolitionist and Swedenbourgian who planned, advocated and practiced (via his relationship with the Nordenskold brothers and the Philanthhropic Society a working agricultural colony on the West coast of Africa) the end of slavery and the return of removed slaves to Africa.

The images pretty much speak for themselves. Though it should be pointed out that this engraving depicts about 480 slaves packed into the modified hold of the Brooke; in reality the Brooke carried between 500 and 650 slaves to America (meaning the conditions were even more crowded than depicted here), losing on average about 125 people to the insufferable and depraved conditions (dysentery, heat, malnutrition, lack of water, scurvy and so on).