Last year we reported on the discovery of and subsequent arrest of Nazi war criminal Laszlo Csatary in Budapest Hungary. Regrettably, the now 98 year old Csatary escaped justice when he died in Budapest last weekend while awaiting trial for his crimes.
Csatary is best known for being responsible for/participating in the deportation of an estimated 15,700 Jews while serving as a senior Hungarian police officer in the Hungarian ruled Slovakian city of Kosice.
Though the Wannsee Conference of January 20, 1942 is often remembered as the seminal planning event of the Third Reich's genocidal strategic goals; in reality it represented a part of a much larger and horrific plan for mass murder. For on June 21, 1941, Heinrich Himmler had ordered planning to begin for a massive demographic reorganization of Eastern Europe, including the territories of the western Soviet Union. Professor Konrad Meyer authored this plan; labeled Generalplan Ost. Meyer’s genocidal plan went far beyond eliminating Europe’s Jews.
If in 1919 the question arose regarding which of the Great European Powers stood destined to drive Europe’s twentieth century fortunes, few candidates would have stood out as more unlikely than the Soviet Union. Russia had not only been forced into the Treaty of Brest-Litvosk, but had been occupied by a foreign power from 1917-1921, was in the throes of a Civil War that would kill between three and five million Russian citizens, and had foreign armies again fighting on its soil far beyond the First World War’s end. Then, in 1922 Josef Stalin.
The house where Anne Frank famously hid from the Nazi's during their Second World War occupation of the Netherlands is being opened to the public for a single day in December, 2011. Though able to escape Nazi capture for two years ultimately Anne Frank and her family were found - resulting in Anne Frank's death in a concentration camp in 1945. Anne Frank was one of over one hundred thousand Jews from the Netherlands killed by Germany during WWII.
Polish authorities have ordered a new investigation into the crimes against humanity committed at the Auschwitz concentration camp during World War II. The Germans murdered an estimated 1.5 million people at Auschwitz, located near Krakow, until the Red Army libereated the camp late in January 1945.
The crimes committed at Auschwitz were central to Nazi Germany's plans to create lebensraum in Eastern Europe - to be done mostly at the expense of the Slavic and Jewish people, though hundreds of thousands of Roma and other peoples characterized as "sub-human" were also murdered.
