Category Archives: Jews

1944: Ardeatine Massacre

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On this date in 1944, Nazi troops occupying Italy avenged a partisan attack by executing 335 Italian hostages in the Ardeatine caves outside Rome.

Part of the cave complex where the massacres took place, barred by a decorative gate.

It was six months since Germany had invaded her onetime ally, eliminating those fascists who had deposed Mussolini. Now an occupied country — an increasingly tenuous occupation as the Allied war effort bore down on Germany — Italy’s partisans multiplied.

On March 23, some of them bombed a German army column, killing 33.

The Germans ordered an immediate reprisal, although there were administrative debates over how many hostages to shoot for each casualty. Hitler initially ordered a staggering 100:1 ratio, the sort of boundary-pushing command that makes 10:1 look like the choice of moderate, reasonable mass-murderers.

A motley collection was hastily assembled to fill the quota: regular prisoners, captured partisans, men from the neighborhood and from the Jewish community rounded up randomly,* even a young Italian diplomat (the link is in Italian) being held as a political suspect. So hastily was it done, the killers miscounted the harvest — as one later explained in a deposition:

Q. It was discovered that the number of people killed was more than intended, five extra. Can you explain that to us?

A. [At the Ardeatine,] Priebke was there with the copy of the list. He got the people down [off the trucks] and canceled out their names. At a certain point, one of the prisoners was not on Priebke’s list. At the end, in fact, there were five extra men. That was when Kappler said, “What do I do with these five? They’ve seen it all.”

For much of this day, in groups of five in these manmade caves that form part of the ancient catacomb network, German soldiers went about their sanguinary business. The bodies were stacked; some of the caves dynamited — as surely many Germans realized it would not be many months before the less that was known of such crimes, the better.

But publicity is the point of reprisals, after all, and the five extra men were far from the only ones who had seen the awful business. The butchery was known from the very next morning.

Intended to alienate leftist partisans from the general populace, the massacre instead united Italians of every stripe in disgust. Even the Italian fascists were horrified; according to Richard Lamb’s War in Italy 1943-1945, Mussolini ordered all political prisoners released to safeguard them from a repeat performance.

Like many wounds of the Second World War, this infamous war crime is far from healed over.

For one thing, the Pope was notably — outrageously — silent about a crime in his own back yard and directed largely against his own flock, feeding charges of Vatican collaboration.

For another thing, there was far from a complete accounting for its authors after Italy’s liberation. An American investigative series famously caught one of the massacre’s perpetrators, onetime Gestapo officer (and little apologetic about it) Erich Priebke, living in Argentina — in 1990.

The relevant parts two and three are below (part one is here).

Part 2:

Part 3:

And finally, the affair, or more particularly the partisan bombing that precipitated the massacre, has been the subject of postwar critique and revisionism, especially given the years of terrorist tit-for-tat between far-right and far-left factions that followed the war. Just last year, an Italian court intervened in the historical dispute, ruling against a Berlusconi newspaper’s campaign to smear the resistance with responsibility for this day’s executions.

* Notorious informer Celeste di Porto, “the black panther,” reputedly helped fill up the rolls by fingering Jews. A childhood friend of hers, Lazzaro Anticoli, scribbled before his execution, “If I never see my family again, it is the fault of that sellout Celeste di Porto. Avenge me.” According to Susan Zuccotti, the informer had had Anticoli’s name added at the last minute to bump her own brother off the list; di Porto’s Italian Wikipedia page charges her with responsibility for 26 of the Ardeatine victims. She was almost lynched at one point after the war for collaborating; she spent seven years in jail.

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1944: Emanuel Ringelblum, historian of the Warsaw Ghetto

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It was not only the destroyers of the Warsaw ghetto who left their testimony.

Emanuel Ringelblum, a Polish-Jewish historian and social worker, was among the 450,000 trapped in the ghetto.*

Ringelblum organized a monumental project to document its life — the “Oyneg Shabbos”. Ringelblum’s ring cast a network throughout the ghetto, systematically collecting its written history: public proclamations, ration cards and identity papers, and most precious of all, personal diaries and memoirs of hundreds of inhabitants, testament to the gathering madness encircling Warsaw’s Jews. Ringelblum sat up nights, sifting and categorizing a stupendous trove — over 25,000 surviving sheets — that was still never equal to his vision:

“To our great regret, however, only part of the plan was carried out … We lacked the necessary tranquillity for a plan of such scope and volume.” (Source)

Shortly before the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, Ringelblum and his family were spirited out of the Jewish quarter and into the protection of friendly Poles. There, they outlived the ghetto by nearly a year.

But on March 7, tipped by a neighborhood teenager who would himself receive a death sentence after the war for the act, the Gestapo captured both Ringelblum’s family and that of his protectors. Around this date — just a few days after their arrest — they would be summarily shot with other fugitives in the ruins of the community he chronicled. Ringelblum reportedly spurned a rescue attempt, preferring to swallow the same draught as his wife and son.

A few years before, another writer living under another dictator scratched in his secret novel — still secret at the time of Ringelblum’s death — words that would become a signature of literary integrity in a totalitarian age:

Manuscripts don’t burn.

While Ringelblum himself fell victim at last, like most of Warsaw’s Jews, to the Holocaust, the burning — his manuscripts did not. Shortly before capture, the diligent historian had secreted them in buried coffee tins. Years after the war, many of those tins were recovered.

Their contents form the basis for Notes from the Warsaw Ghetto, one of the most moving and penetrating first-person Holocaust histories.

An interesting interview with Samuel Kassow, author of Who Will Write Our History?, is available from the New Books In History podcast.

This French-language page on an exhibition of Ringelblum’s archives covers some of its history, with a number of photographs. This site collects a number of Yiddish poems from the Ringelblum archive.

* This Time magazine article claims that Ringelblum was safe in Switzerland as of 1939, but voluntarily returned to Poland to witness and share his fellows’ fate. Noble if true, but I have been unable to find corroboration of this elsewhere.

Part of the Themed Set: The Written Word.

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1942: Avraham Stern, a strange bedfellow

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On this date in 1942, Zionist freedom-fighter — or was he a terrorist? — Avraham Stern was captured by British colonial authorities and summarily executed.

Stern, as pictured on a 1978 Israeli stamp.

Born in 1907 in a part of eastern Poland then in Russian hands, Stern immigrated to British Palestine in 1925 and became an adherent of Revisionist Zionism — a maximalist strain of the fermenting Jewish homeland movement.

Various threads and factions within the Zionist movement pursued different territorial and political goals with different strategies; Stern was among the most militant foes of anything with the whiff of collaboration with the British. When the armed underground movement Irgun opted in 1940 to suspend attacks against British targets during World War II, Stern created a splinter organization with a programme of continuing anti-British violence.

The “Stern gang,” as imperial authorities knew it, had its reasons — controversial enough that some more moderate Jewish elements were happy to help the British hunt it, but reasons with their own logic, premised on the notion that London was the fundamental enemy of Jewish national interests while Berlin, for all its anti-Semitism, was not.

Between those two lay the room for wartime collaboration with Hitler against Britain with the object of establishing a Jewish state in the Levant open to unlimited immigration from a Reich eager to be rid of its Jews. In one fell swoop, it would solve Germany’s “Jewish question,”* realize Zionist state-building aspirations, and disrupt the Nazis’ wartime enemy. Stern, who had cultivated an affinity for fascism while studying in Italy and pitched a similar bargain to Mussolini, offered a pact with the devil: “the establishment of the historic Jewish state on a national and totalitarian basis, bound by a treaty with the German Reich.”

Berlin never took up the offer. Stern himself would have only a year to live, and his tiny splinter group didn’t get very far off the ground during it, carrying out a few murders and trying to raise money through crime. A high-profile bank robbery in January of 1942 that left several Brits and Jews dead brought down an intense manhunt that caught up with Stern on this day. He was handcuffed and shot on the spot.

His organization would come into its own after his death under leadership that included future Likud Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, carrying out a campaign of assassinations in the mid-40’s as Palestine slid towards the civil war that would give birth to Israel. In that incarnation, it valorized its creator:

He was a lion, and the cravings of the foxes were foreign to him. He was an eagle who did not know how to fly low … He was not of those who live and die, like all human beings. He was a Prometheus, one who appears but once over many generations. (Source)

That valorization has been contested but nonetheless lasting. The Knesset, just days ago as of this writing, voted laurels for Stern’s hundredth birthday. There’s almost no apolitical way to write his story, and given Israel’s persistence as a flashpoint — and its own ironic inheritance of a rebellious subject population reminiscent of pre-1948 Palestinian Jews — the radicalism of his words, deeds and persona invite debate.

Books about the Stern gang in the founding of Israel

There’s a fascinating first-person apologia from a former member of the Stern gang here.

Stern also dabbled as a poet, and wrote this anthem to the struggle with his wife:

Part of the Themed Set: Unruly Britannia.

* Germany itself was tarrying with “faraway Jewish homeland” plans at this time, specifically considering relocating European Jewry to Madagascar. The Final Solution would be implemented later, once these proved unavailing. Stern, for his part, also expected the Axis to win the war.

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1738: Joseph Süß Oppenheimer, “Jud Süß”

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On this date in 1738, the Jewish banker Joseph Suss Oppenheimer was hanged in a metal cage at Stuttgart — overthrown by rival courtiers after the death of his ducal patron.

Oppenheimer steered the finances of Duke Karl Alexander, amassing a fair fortune and a crop of enemies in the process.

Daggers had been drawn for Oppenheimer for years prior, but the Duke defended him steadfastly. A year before the execution, almost to the day, the noble had rebuked a petition against him:

Oppenheimer was a faithful servant of his prince and of the state, and was intent in every way upon the welfare of both, for which he deserved the thanks of all. Since instead he was persecuted by envy and ill-will to such an extent that attempts were even made to bring him into disfavor with the duke, the latter accorded him his especial protection and expressly forbade the continuation of such attacks.

But weeks later, the Duke died unexpectedly — and that ill-will immediately poured out upon his minister.

Oppenheimer copped under torture to all manner of crime, but he stood by his faith, refusing even at the brink of the gallows to convert in exchange for his life. His body remained gibbeted for six years; the Jewish community was expelled (although only briefly) following his hanging.

What with the body hanging in public for years on end, the “Jew Suss” worked its way into literary trope for the tenuous place of Jews in German society, some but by no means all of the anti-Semitic variety. Most infamous among his interlocutors was a 1940 Nazi propaganda film — a crude Goebbels project that many participants desperately tried to avoid — available in its entirety online:

Most recently — and far more sympathetically — a 1990’s German chamber opera by Detlev Glanert re-adapts the story.

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1596: Francisca Nunez de Carvajal, her children, and four other crypto-Jews of her family

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On this date in 1596, the Inquisition sent nine Jewish converts to Christianity to the stake in Mexico City for Judaizing — a cruel fate offering a window into a secret history of New World settlement.

When Spain expelled its Jews (and subsequently its Muslims), those who did not flee had to convert. Conversions at swordpoint being of suspect sincerity, the Inquisition spent much of the following centuries hunting Conversos — so-called “New Christians” — who secretly preserved their outlawed faiths.

For some crypto-Jews, the New World held an appeal akin to that which would draw later generations of northern Europe’s religious minorities.

Latin America in particular attracted considerable numbers of New Christians. The advantage of these territories was that they offered the New Christians a familiar culture and the possiblity of direct — even if infrequent — contact with the mother countries … These factors also helped permit [crypto-Jews] to practice Judaism.

The Carvajals (or Carabajals) were just such a family, settling in Monterrey under the aegis of their kinsman, Spanish governor Luis de Carvajal y Cueva.

But in 1590, the governor’s sister Francisa was tortured by the Inquisition into implicating her entire family in Judaism.

They got off with a humiliating public recantation, but evidence of a relapse a few years later resulted in Francisca being burned at the stake at an auto de fe — along with her children Isabel, Catalina, Leonor and Luis, and four of their in-laws. The 30-year-old Luis left a testimonial to his faith and his tortures.

A headstone in New Mexico, USA, suggests crypto-Jewish descent. Image used with permission.

Despite the grisly doings of this day, however, the Inquisition never could extirpate Jews from its American territory.

These hidden communities filtered into Mexico and north to the present-day United States, keeping adapted versions of Jewish traditions secretly alive.

Still, crypto-Jews produced scant potentially self-incriminating documentary evidence. Although DNA testing has latterly entered the scene, the true extent and nature of these populations has been the subject of lively scholarly controversy.

But the Carvajals and others like them, seemingly lost to the Inquisition’s depredations, are coming alive again. This day’s executions are the subject of a modern opera and a spring 2008 Texas A&M symposium.

And the wider community of crypto-Jews have their own umbrella organization and a burgeoning body of historical literature.

Books about crypto-Jews

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1491: Eight current and converted Jews at an auto de fe

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On this date in 1491, the murder of the Holy Child of La Guardia was punished with an auto de fe and the public execution of eight Jews — some practicing, some converted to Christianity (who enjoyed the mercy of strangulation before being burnt) — and three others already dead but exhumed for the occasion.

The auto de fe — literally, “act of faith” — was a public ritual of religious penance for the condemned. Though its performance did not always precede the execution of its participants, it became closely associated with the savagery of the Spanish Inquisition.

In the hysteria of the Holy Child of La Guardia case — one of history’s better-remembered instances of “blood libel” implicating Jews in the ritual murder of Christian children — the result was foreordained.

Knitting together (inconsistent) confessions obtained under torture, the famed Inquisitor Torquemada proved a conspiracy of Jews had kidnapped and crucified a child further to the concoction of a magic potion that depended on the heart of an innocent Christian — despite a fruitless high-and-low search for some missing child who might have been the actual victim.

After this day’s gaudy public slaughter, a cult sprang up around the supposed martyr, adored in a chapel erected where one of the prisoners had once had a home — the very spot, it was said, where the Jews conspired. The Holy Child was a staple of Spanish literature down to the 20th century and is still venerated in La Guardia.

But Torquemada aimed for results well beyond Christendom’s martyrology, and the wretches at the stake would not be this day’s only victims.

John Edward Longhurst argues in The Age of Torquemada that the Inquisitor seized on the Holy Child case to orchestrate “his heart’s desire — the expulsion of all Jews from Spain.”*

Early the next year, the Spanish monarchy obliged, permanently remaking Spain:

If Ferdinand and Isabella were hesitating over expelling the Jews from Spain, the discovery of this latest Jewish plot would surely resolve all doubts. The Auto de Fe of November, 1491, exploited the affair to its fullest, emphasizing not only all the gruesome details of the Murder but the Jewish menace to Christians intended by it. The sentence against the Jew Juce Franco, read aloud to the great crowd at the Auto de Fe, identifies him as a seducer of Christians to the Law of Moses in language that clearly foreshadows the Edict of Expulsion four months later

…

We may be sure that Ferdinand and Isabella were treated to a lengthy account of this case. It also is clear, from their own observations in the Edict of Expulsion, that Torquemada impressed on them the determination of the Jews to persist in their efforts to seduce Christians to Judaism. As long as they were permitted to remain, the danger of infection would never be eliminated, no matter how harsh the measures employed against them.

* Or, their forcible conversion … which would then keep the Inquisition in business for years to come.

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1925: Sidney Reilly

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On this date in 1925, legendary British spy — and subsequent James Bond inspiration — Sidney Reilly was shot in a forest outside Moscow for his efforts to overthrow the Soviet government.

Fact blends insensibly into fiction in Reilly‘s biography; much of what is known or believed about him is conjectural or colored by his posthumous valorization, such the 1967 book Reilly: Ace of Spies written by [the son of] his onetime cloak-and-dagger collaborator Robin Bruce Lockhart — who was himself a close friend of Bond author Ian Fleming.

However, even at the word of less sensational biographers — such as Andrew Cook — Reilly lived a life almost too extraordinary for belief.

A Jewish child of tsarist Russia born in what is now the Ukraine, Reilly claimed to have escaped Odessa by faking his death and hopping a ship bound for Brazil. Like much of Reilly’s life, the story is unverifiable, but by hook or by crook — and possibly by way of a murder in France — he arrived in London in 1895, hitched himself to a wealthy woman a few months after the suspicious death of her husband (discarding the inconvenient surname Rosenblum in the process), and became entangled with British intelligence.

In the first decade of the 20th century, he apparently spied promiscuously on England’s imperial rivals Germany and Russia, though the particulars are disputed. He arrived in Port Arthur, Russia, shortly before the outbreak of the Russo-Japanese War and may have provided the Japanese fleet intelligence enabling it to navigate the mined harbor — in addition to a copious side business in war profiteering. He may also have had a hand in capturing British oil concessions in Persia and reconnoitering behind German lines during World War I.

Like his fictional heir 007, he gambled often and left a string of lovers and mistresses in his wake. His true allegiances, and the extent to which his exploits were inflated or outright fabricated, are debated to this day.

The adventures that brought both death and fame were his machinations to overthrow the Bolshevik government in the fraught early months after Lenin took power. A planned coup d’etat in September 1918 came to grief and Reilly fled Russia steps ahead of the authorities, who subsequently condemned him to death in absentia.

Notwithstanding the sentence, which had been ruthlessly visited on his less-fortunate conspirators, Reilly was lured back to the USSR in 1925 by the Soviet counterintelligence project Operation Trust. Intending to meet anti-Bolshevik agitators, he was instead arrested at the border and tortured at the infamous Lubyanka Prison, where he kept notes on cigarette papers about enemy interrogation techniques for the eventuality of an escape or release that never came.

Part of the Themed Set: Spies.

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