WTFhistory

Chiune Sugihara. This man saved 6000 Jews. He was a Japanese diplomat in Lithuania. When the Nazis began rounding up Jews, Sugihara risked his life to start issuing unlawful travel visas to Jews. He hand-wrote them 18 hrs a day. The day his consulate closed and he had to evacuate, witnesses claim he was STILL writing visas and throwing from the train as he pulled away. He saved 6000 lives. The world didn’t know what he’d done until Israel honored him in 1985, the year before he died.

Why can’t we have a movie about him?

He was often called “Sempo”, an alternative reading of the characters of his first name, as that was easier for Westerners to pronounce.

His wife, Yukiko, was also a part of this; she is often credited with suggesting the plan. The Sugihara family was held in a Soviet POW camp for 18 months until the end of the war; within a year of returning home, Sugihara was asked to resign - officially due to downsizing, but most likely because the government disagreed with his actions.

He didn’t simply grant visas - he granted visas against direct orders, after attempting three times to receive permission from the Japanese Foreign Ministry and being turned down each time. He did not “misread” orders; he was in direct violation of them, with the encouragement and support of his wife.

He was honoured as Righteous Among the Nations in 1985, a year before he died in Kamakura; he and his descendants have also been granted permanent Israeli citizenship. He was also posthumously awarded the Life Saving Cross of Lithuania (1993); Commander’s Cross Order of Merit of the Republic of Poland (1996); and the Commander’s Cross with Star of the Order of Polonia Restituta (2007). Though not canonized, some Eastern Orthodox Christians recognize him as a saint.

Sugihara was born in Gifu on the first day of 1900, January 1. He achieved top marks in his schooling; his father wanted him to become a physician, but Sugihara wished to pursue learning English. He deliberately failed the exam by writing only his name and then entered Waseda, where he majored in English. He joined the Foreign Ministry after graduation and worked in the Manchurian Foreign Office in Harbin (where he learned Russian and German; he also converted to the Eastern Orthodox Church during this time). He resigned his post in protest over how the Japanese government treated the local Chinese citizens. He eventually married Yukiko Kikuchi, who would suggest and encourage his acts in Lithuania; they had four sons together. Chiune Sugihara passed away July 31, 1986, at the age of 86. Until her own passing in 2008, Yukiko continued as an ambassador of his legacy.

It is estimated that the Sugiharas saved between 6,000-10,000 Lithuanian and Polish Jewish people.

A phrase that was carved on the walls of a concentration camp cell during WWII by a Jewish prisoner.  (via ieula)

I looked this up and it’s legit, though it’s not 100% certain that the person who wrote it was Jewish. The linked documentary is also a reminder of how unthinkably horrible the places like Mauthausen really were. http://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/18913/did-a-jewish-prisoner-write-this-quote-about-god-and-forgiveness

(via archaeo-geek)

Today is International Holocaust Remembrance Day.

January 27 marks the 69th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau, the largest Nazi death camp. 

In 2005, the United Nations General Assembly designated this day as International Holocaust Remembrance Day (IHRD), an annual day of commemoration to honor the victims of the Nazi era.

From 1940 to 1945, more than 1.1 million men, women and children were killed in the Auschwitz concentration camp. 90% of them were Jews. All were innocent. Today, we remember

Never Again.

Albert Einstein

The fact the Einstein was a raging misogynist kind of makes sense, given that it is widely speculated his first wife made significant contributions to his work, at least in the realm of thermodynamics, (a good breakdown of the scientific basis for that suspicion here) if not in the Theory of Relativity, but was completely unacknowledged (especially after he left her for his cousin).*

*There is some discussion about the veracity of the sources for this claim, and I am by no means asserting it as an undeniable fact, but it is a worthwhile speculation. Mileva Einstein-Maric is routinely dismissed because she did not pass her exams while in school with Einstein, but none of the historians discussing this acknowledge that she was three months pregnant with Einstein’s child, and as of yet unwed, which I imagine would have been quite stressful. Before her final year in school and before her pregnancy, she was one of the top students (and the only woman) in her and Einstein’s class, receiving the same grade as him (5.5/6) in physics.

- The Tesla Society (perhaps dubious)

-Women in Science 

Walter Isaacson’s Biography of Einstein

10 Strange Facts about Einstein

(via hyggehaven)

Dr. Seuss was not even in the general area of fucking around.

#everyone thinks of dr seuss as some sweet old guy who wrote kids books and made up cute words#little do they know he was the most hardcore political motherfucker to ever draw cartoons for newspapers of all time basically#he was of german and jewish descent and got bullied a lot as a kid#then he grew up and drew cartoons for the school paper#and when he got fired for being to fucking real for the paper to handle he made up a new name and KEPT SUBMITTING THEM ANYWAY#BECAUSE HE NEVER FUCKED AROUND FOR A SECOND#DID YOU KNOW DR SEUSS DID A FEATURE LENGTH DOCUMENTARY AFTER WWII ABOUT HOW WWII WASN’T ACTUALLY OVER AND THE NAZIS WERE STILL ALL AROUND#IT WAS CREEPY AS ALL FUCK AND MORE HARDCORE THAN YOU WILL EVER KNOW#IT WON A FUCKING OSCAR OR SOME SHIT#HE DID KIDS BOOKS ON A WHIM HIS REAL TALENT WAS DISMANTLING FASCIST REGIMES WITH ADORABLE BLACK AND WHITE SKETCHES OF TURTLES#OH YEAH AND YURTLE THE TURTLE WAS ABOUT HITLER#AND THE SNEECHES WERE ABOUT SEGREGATION#SO FUCK Y’ALL AND YOUR CANDY-ASS VISION OF DR SEUSS

I think almost all of his stories have a deeper meaning and Horton Hears a who was written as an apology to the Japanese after WWII

I appreciate politics with a hint of whimsy.

He was also pro-choice and his family is still suing people who use "Horton Hears a Who" for anti-abortion propaganda.

August 19th 1980: Otto Frank dies On this day in 1980, Anne Frank’s father Otto died in Switzerland aged 91. Otto was the only member of the Frank family to survive the Holocaust. His daughter Anne had been keeping a diary during the family’s attempts to hide from the Nazis and their time hidden in a secret annex in a building in Amsterdam. At the end of the war Otto found her diary and, moved by his daughter’s repeated desire to be an author, decided to have it published. Anne Frank’s diary was published in 1947.

"I’m not smiling and neither are Soviet Jews", c. 1970s A Boston Jewish Community Council affiliated protest at the Soviet Circus at Boston Garder. Philip Bloom dressed as a clown, holding a sign that read “I’m not smiling and neither are Soviet Jews". Other members of the Soviet Jewry Committee of the Jewish Community Council of Metropolitan Boston and the Action for Soviet Jewry handed out leaflets. The leaflets welcomed the circus, but reminded it’s members, “that millions of Soviet Jews are denied the basic human right of free emigration".

That has got to be the creepiest protest I have ever seen, and I know about PETA.

Torah scroll case from Cairo, Egypt, late 19th century.

This weekend I was schmoozing at an event when some guy asked me what kind of history I study. I said “I’m currently researching the role of gender in Jewish emigration out of the Third Reich,” and he replied “oh you just threw gender in there for fun, huh?” and shot me what he clearly thought to be a charming smile.

The reality is that most of our understandings of history revolve around what men were doing. But by paying attention to the other half of humanity our understanding of history can be radically altered.

For example, with Jewish emigration out of the Third Reich it is just kind of assumed that it was a decision made by a man, and the rest of his family just followed him out of danger. But that is completely inaccurate. Women, constrained to the private social sphere to varying extents, were the first to notice the rise in social anti-Semitism in the beginning of Hitler’s rule. They were the ones to notice their friends pulling away and their social networks coming apart. They were the first to sense the danger.

German Jewish men tended to work in industries which were historically heavily Jewish, thus keeping them from directly experiencing this “social death.” These women would warn their husbands and urge them to begin the emigration process, and often their husbands would overlook or undervalue their concerns (“you’re just being hysterical” etc). After the Nuremberg Laws were passed, and after even more so after Kristallnacht, it fell to women to free their husbands from concentration camps, to run businesses, and to wade through the emigration process.

The fact that the Nazis initially focused their efforts on Jewish men meant that it fell to Jewish women to take charge of the family and plan their escape. In one case, a woman had her husband freed from a camp (to do so, she had to present emigration papers which were not easy to procure), and casually informed him that she had arranged their transport to Shanghai. Her husband—so traumatized from the camp—made no argument. Just by looking at what women were doing, our understanding of this era of Jewish history is changed.

I have read an article arguing that the Renaissance only existed for men, and that women did not undergo this cultural change. The writings of female loyalists in the American Revolutionary period add much needed nuance to our understanding of this period. The character of Jewish liberalism in the first half of the twentieth century is a direct result of the education and socialization of Jewish women. I can give you more examples, but I think you get the point.

So, you wanna understand history? Then you gotta remember the ladies (and not just the privileged ones).

ask historicity-was-already-taken a question

Holy fuck. I was raised Jewish— with female Rabbis, even!— and I did not hear about any of this. Gender studies are important. 

Why Gender History is Important (Asshole)

"so you just threw gender in there for fun" ffs i hope you poured his drink down his pants

I actually studied this in one of my classes last semester. It was beyond fascinating. 

There was one woman who begged her husband for months to leave Germany. When he refused to listen to her, she refused to get into bed with him at night, instead kneeling down in front of him and begging him to listen to her, or if he wouldn’t listen to her, to at least tell her who he would listen to. He gave her the name of a close, trusted male friend. She went and found that friend, convinced him of the need to get the hell out of Europe, and then brought him home. Thankfully, her husband finally saw sense and moved their family to Palestine.

Another woman had a bit more control over her own situation (she was a lawyer). She had read Mein Kampf  when it was first published and saw the writing on the wall. She asked her husband to leave Europe, but he didn’t want to leave his (very good) job and told her that he had faith in his countrymen not to allow an evil man to have his way. She sent their children to a boarding school in England, but stayed in Germany by her husband’s side. Once it was clear that if they stayed in Germany they were going to die, he fled to France but was quickly captured and killed. His wife, however, joined the French Resistance and was active for over a year before being captured and sent to Auschwitz.

(This is probably my favorite of these stories) The third story is about a young woman who saved her fiance and his father after Kristallnacht. She was at home when the soldiers came, but her fiance was working late in his shop. Worried for him, she snuck out (in the middle of all the chaos) to make sure he was alright. She found him cowering (quite understandably) in the back of his shop and then dragged him out, hoping to escape the violence. Unfortunately, they were stopped and he, along with hundreds of other men, was taken to a concentration camp. She was eventually told that she would have to go to the camp in person to free him, and so she did. Unfortunately, the only way she could get there was on a bus that was filled with SS men; she spent the entire trip smiling and flirting with them so that they would never suspect that she wasn’t supposed to be there. When she got to the camp, she convinced whoever was in charge to release her fiance. She then took him to another camp and managed to get her father-in-law to be released. Her father-in-law was a rabbi, so she grabbed a couple or witnesses and made him perform their marriage ceremony right then and there so that it would be easier for her to get her now-husband out of the country, which she did withing a few months. This woman was so bad ass that not only was her story passed around resistance circles, even the SS men told it to each other and honoured her courage. 

The moral of these stories is that men tend to trust their governments to take care of them because they always have; women know that our governments will screw us over because they always have. 

Another interesting tidbit is that there is sufficient evidence to suggest that Kristallnacht is a term that historians came up with after the fact, and was not what the event was actually called at the time. It’s likely that the event was actually called was (I’m sorry that I can’t remember the German word for it but it translates to) night of the feathers, because that, instead of broken glass, is the image that stuck in people’s minds because the soldiers also went into people’s homes and destroyed their bedding, throwing the feathers from pillows and blankets into the air. What does it say that in our history we have taken away the focus of the event from the more domestic, traditionally feminine, realms, and placed it in the business, traditionally masculine, realms?

Badass women and interesting commentary. Though I would argue that “Night of Broken Glass" includes both the personal and the private spheres. It was called Kristallnacht by the Nazis, which led to Jewish survivors referring to it as the November Pogrom until the term “Kristallnacht" was reclaimed, as such.

None of this runs directly counter to your fascinating commentary, though.

READ THIS.

“Einstein, when he arrived in America, was shocked at how Black Americans were treated. “There is separation of colored people from white people in the United States,” he said. “That separation is not a disease of colored people. It is a disease of white people. And, I do not intend to be quiet about it.” And, he wasn’t.

Although he had a fear of speaking in public, he made all the effort he could to spread the word of equality, denouncing racism and segregation and becoming a huge proponent of civil rights even before the term became fashionable. Einstein was a member of several civil rights groups (including the Princeton chapter of the NAACP). Happy Birthday Albert Einstein!”

Source: Craig Lowery II for Last Words.

I wonder why I never learned this about Einstein in school…oh wait, I do know why.

Yeah, I mean how could you “tarnish” the legacy of one of the world’s greatest physicists by linking him to the fight for racial equality, especially since he openly calls out racism as a “disease” of the white oppressor. Of course this isn’t a bigger part of his historical narrative. 

Legitimately pissed off that I didn’t know this

Portrait of Frieda Belinfante, reportedly dressed in men’s clothing to disguise herself from Nazi informers, 1943 Frieda Belinfante was a half-Jewish lesbian member of a gay resistance group called the CKC. She participated in the planning of the destruction of the Amsterdam Population Registry in March 1943, and was also active in falsifying identity cards and arranging hiding places for Jews and others sought by the Nazis. In December 1943, Belinfante escaped to Switzerland via Belgium and France. After the war, she returned briefly to Amsterdam and then emigrated to the United States.

Jewish twins kept alive to be used in Josef Mengele’s medical experiments. These children from Auschwitz were liberated by the Red Army in January 1945 Josef Rudolf Mengele (16 March 1911 – 7 February 1979) was a German SS officer and a physician in the Nazi concentration camp Auschwitz. He earned doctorates in anthropology from Munich University and in medicine from Frankfurt University. He initially gained notoriety for being one of the SS physicians who supervised the selection of arriving transports of prisoners, determining who was to be killed and who was to become a forced laborer, but is far more infamous for performing human experiments on camp inmates, including children, for which Mengele was called the “Angel of Death”.

In 1940, he was placed in the reserve medical corps, after which he served with the 5th SS Panzergrenadier Division Wiking in the Eastern Front. In 1942, he was wounded at the Soviet front and was pronounced medically unfit for combat. He was then promoted to the rank of SS-Hauptsturmführer (Captain) for saving the lives of three German soldiers. He survived the war and, after a period of living incognito in Germany, he fled to South America, where he evaded capture for the rest of his life, despite being hunted as a Nazi war criminal.

Passover for the Jewish American Civil War Soldier

The largest Jewish community until the 1830’s in the United States was in Charleston, South Carolina, with other large populations in New York and Philadelphia in the north. During the Civil War the total American Jewish population was about 150,000. Approximately 3,000 Jewish men fought on the Confederate side and 7,000 fought on the Union side with Jews playing leadership roles on both sides.

Jewish soldiers in the Union Army were just as committed to Judaism as those who fought for the Confederacy and both the Northern and Southern Jewish soldiers understood that Passover was the observance of their ancestors historic escape from the bonds of slavery

A Confederate soldier named Isaac Levy, 46th Virginia Infantry described his passover in the portion of an 1864 letter to his sister Leonora

Dear Leonora

… . [My brother] Zeke [Capt. Ezekiel J. Levy of the 46th VA] … purchased [Matzot] sufficient to last us for the week… . We are observing the festival in a truly Orthodox style. On the first day we had a fine vegetable soup. It was made of a bunch of vegetables which Zeke brought from Charleston containing new onions, parsley, carrots turnips and a young cauliflower also a pound and a half of fresh [kosher] beef, the latter article sells for four dollars per pound in Charleston. Zeke did not bring us any meat from home. He brought some of his own, smoked meat, which he is sharing with us. He says that he supposes that Pa forgot to deliver it to him.

Love to all, Your affectionate Brother Isaac J. Levy

Isaac J. Levy, age 21, was killed in the trenches of Petersburg, VA on 21August 1864.

Credit: the April 2012 Edition of the Jewish Magazine. Photo Credit from Documentary  http://www.CIVILWARJEWS.com.

March 29, 1951: Ethel and Julius Rosenberg are convicted of conspiracy to commit espionage.

In August of 1949, the Soviet Union conducted its first successful nuclear weapons test when it detonated RDS-1, or First Lightning (Joe-1 to the United States) in Kazakhstan; when President Truman notified the American public of this new and shocking (and shockingly, suspiciously fast, in the eyes of the West) development in September of 1949, the nations were thrust into a nuclear arms race. In 1950, a German physicist named Klaus Fuchs was arrested by British authorities, who revealed him to be an atomic spy for the Soviets, having supposedly supplied for the Soviet program atomic research from the United States. Fuchs, in turn, identified Swiss-born chemist Harry Gold as his courier, and Gold’s confessions led authorities to David Greenglass, the brother of Ethel Rosenberg, Army machinist for the Manhattan Project, and Soviet spy. 

The Rosenbergs, Ethel and Julius, joined the American Communist Party in 1942. In June of 1950, Julius was arrested after being named by Greenglass as a spy, and Ethel was arrested shortly after in August; their trial began on March 6, 1951, and throughout their testimonies neither would speak on anything that might incriminate other members of the Communist Party. Both were convicted of espionage and sentenced to death under the Espionage Act of 1917; Irving Kaufman, the judge who imposed their sentences, famously remarked:

Many Americans undoubtedly agreed with Kaufman’s condemnations, yet still the Rosenbergs had their supporters, among them Jean-Paul Sartre, who criticized Americans’ hysteria, accusing them of being “afraid of the shadow of [their] own bomb”; Pablo Picasso, who called the Rosenbergs’ impending execution a “crime against humanity”; and many others, including Frida Kahlo, Albert Einstein, and Bertolt Brecht. Even the Pope implored President Eisenhower to commute the couple’s death sentence, to no avail - on June 19, 1953, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg became the first and only American civilians to be executed for espionage during the Cold War. It remains unclear how much the Rosenberg’s treason actually advanced Soviet atomic research, or whether Ethel was actually guilty of any treason (her participation and guilt were vehemently denied by their two surviving children). 

How did a simple Jell-O box helped convict Ethel and Julius Rosenberg? http://slate.me/XpA1yi