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This Is Your Life: Holocaust Survivor Hanna Bloch Kohner Interview Part 1 (1953)

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Uploaded by on Oct 24, 2010

May 27, 1953 http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0595465986?ie=UTF8&tag=doc06-20&link... Watch the full program: http://thefilmarchived.blogspot.com/2010/10/this-is-your-life-holocaust-survi...

The Nazi persecution of the Jews culminated in the Holocaust, in which approximately 6 million European Jews were deported and murdered during World War II. On May 19, 1943, Germany was declared judenrein (clean of Jews; also judenfrei: free of Jews). It is believed that between 170,000 and 200,000 German Jews had been killed.

American historian Bryan Mark Rigg argues that approximately 150,000 German Jews had served in the German Wehrmacht, including decorated veterans and high-ranking officers, even generals and admirals. A great many of these men did not even consider themselves Jewish and had embraced the military as a way of life, eager as devoted patriots to serve a revived German nation. In turn, they had been embraced by the Wehrmacht, which prior to Hitler had given little thought to the race of these men but which was now forced to look deeply into the ancestry of its soldiers.

90% of the 214,000 Jews still left in Germany in 1939 were killed during the war. A few thousand Jews were actually still living in Berlin when the Soviet army took over the city in 1945. Most German Jews who survived the war in exile decided to remain abroad; however, a small number returned to Germany. Additionally, approximately 15,000 German Jews survived the concentration camps or survived by going into hiding. These German Jews were joined by approximately 200,000 displaced persons (DPs), eastern European Jewish Holocaust survivors. They came to Allied-occupied western Germany after finding no homes left for them in eastern Europe (especially in Poland) or after having been liberated on German soil. The overwhelming majority of the DPs wished to emigrate to Palestine and lived in Allied- and U.N.-administered refugee camps, remaining isolated from German society. After Israeli independence in 1948, most left Germany; however, 10,000 to 15,000 remained. Despite hesitations and a long history of antagonism between German Jews (Yekkes) and East European Jews (Ostjuden), the two disparate groups united to form the basis of a new Jewish community. In 1950 they founded their unitary representative organization, the Central Council of Jews in Germany.

Westerbork concentration camp (Dutch: Kamp Westerbork, German: Durchgangslager Westerbork) was a World War II Nazi refugee, detention and transit camp in Hooghalen, ten kilometres north of Westerbork, in the northeastern Netherlands. Its function during the Second World War was to assemble Roma and Dutch Jews for transport to other Nazi concentration camps.

On 15 December 1938, the Dutch government, as a gesture to Germany, closed its border to refugees. From then on, any refugees would not have any rights. In 1939, the Dutch government erected a refugee camp, Centraal Vluchtelingenkamp Westerbork, financed, ironically, partly by Dutch Jewry, in order to absorb fleeing Jews from Nazi Germany. The Jewish refugees were housed after they had tried in vain to escape Nazi terror in their homeland. During World War II, the Nazis took over the camp and turned it into a deportation camp. From this camp, 101,000 Dutch Jews and about 5,000 German Jews were deported to their deaths in Poland. In addition, there were about 400 Gypsies in the camp and, at the very end of the War, some 400 women from the resistance movement.

The Dutch government investigated much later the events connected with the massive and effective deportation of Dutch Jewry. The purpose was also to check how deep had been the collaboration by the Dutch Christian population. The Jewish historian Jacques Presser was appointed to carry out research, and he discovered disturbing facts about the many Dutch people who collaborated with the Nazis. As a result, Presser also published a novel "The night of the Girondins", which was set in Westerbork camp itself. The hero is a Jewish prisoner, who is appointed an officer and has the problematic role of helping the Nazis transporting his "brothers" to their obvious deaths in Poland.

Between July 1942 and September 1944, almost every Tuesday a cargo train left for the concentration camps Auschwitz-Birkenau (65 train-loads containing 60,330 people most of whom were gassed on arrival), Sobibór (19 train-loads of 34,313 people, all of whom were killed on arrival), Bergen-Belsen and Theresienstadt (9 train-loads of 4,894 people some 2,000 of whom survived the war). In the period from 1942 to 1945, a total of 107,000 people passed through the camp on a total of 93 outgoing trains. Only 5,200 of them survived, most of them in Theresienstadt or Bergen-Belsen, or were liberated at Westerbork.

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  • So sad that a few fools have to regard the holocaust event as a hoax. I would have thought their kind would be dead by now. Thank you for posting this video.

  • @HolohoaxISFake I can't believe this. How can people still argue that the Shoah didn't happen? Haven't enough survivors spoken up by now? Do you really think all of them made this up? They saw gas chambers and crematoria on a daily basis, they lost beloved ones in the concentration camps.

    Maybe you should visit Auschwitz, Buchenwald or Majdanek and then try to argue like that again. It's sad how so many people still close their eyes to reality. How angry must someone be to ignore historic facts?

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  • big oats make great porridge

  • @JewsMockGodWithLies

    You contemptable LIAR! Your lies will never be believed because there is too much evidence to the contrary..much of which was compiled by the NAzis themselves! The jews honor God and your are

    the one who mocks him. Anytime that you want to come forth out of your hiding place in obscurity and debate me on the Truth of The Holocaust I will be ready, willing and able to do so! Well? What do you say, coward? I await you! George Frei, BA, MA in History, German-American Catholic

  • i am not jewish,and this was very moving to me,i cannot understand you halfwits who go on to a sight like this just to post your negative bile,get a life or get off the hash and look at someything you might actually enjoy or would that confuse your half a dozen brain cells.j

  • @ChixRChattel WTF is your prblem go to hell

  • @ShikagoMale People emotionally disassociate from some traumatic events in order to function. If she broke down (this many years later) every time she heard or thought about it, she would not be able to function.

  • This woman's testimony BEGS for a truth analysis... This just does not FEEL right. Where's the emotion? I mean- she supposedly was living in a concentration camp, for God's sakes.

  • ha ha notice at 11:22 the friend forgets her 'lines' then remembers and tries to interject them..its all staged...then the very lezzy-erotic description of how 10 girls had to share 2 bunks and wore thin little dresses...yeah thats my kind of lezzy concentration camp porn

  • what a sick phoney tv shows

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