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From the earliest years of the Nazi regime, German authorities persecuted homosexuals and others whose behavior did not match prescribed social norms. German police officials targeted thousands of political opponents (including Communists, Socialists, and trade unionists) and religious dissidents (such as Jehovah's Witnesses). Many of these individuals died as a result of incarceration and maltreatment.
The authorship of the following article must remain anonymous, for obvious reasons. The New Republic vouches for its authenticity, and for the fact that the conditions described are continuing to the present day. Indeed, reliable reports from Germany indicate that mistreatment of prisoners in concentration camps has become much worse since the alleged attempt at revolt at the end of June.—The Editors, 1934
MoshePeer and his siblings - who all survived - were cared for at the camp by two women, whom Peer unsuccessfully tried to find after the war. Peer was reunited with his father in Paris and the family moved to Israel. Peer's four children were born in Israel, but after serving in the Israeli army in a number of wars, Peer moved to Montreal in 1974. Even today 55 years later, Peer is still haunted by his concentration-camp experience and still finds his memories keep him awake at night.
By April 1945 the Germans were aware that the British would soon overrun the camp and were fearful that typhus would spread if the prisoners escaped. On 12 April, they approached elements of the British 11th Armoured Division to negotiate a temporary local truce and surrender the camp. The British entered Bergen-Belsen three days later. Harry Oakes and Bill Lawrie both served with the Army Film and Photographic Unit (AFPU), which was set up in 1941 to produce an official record of the British Army's role during the Second World War. Both men arrived at Bergen-Belsen to record conditions in the camp. Here they explain how British forces gained access to the camp.
From 1933 until 1938, most of the people held in concentration camps were political prisoners and people the Nazis labeled as "asocial." These included the disabled, the homeless, and the mentally ill. After Kristallnacht in 1938, the persecution of Jews became more organized. This led to the exponential increase in the number of Jews sent to concentration camps.
Then came the first American jeeps: a GI got out and opened the gate. Machine-gun fire burst from the center watchtower, the very one which since morning had been flying the white flag! The jeeps turned about and an armored tank came on. With a few bursts, it silenced the fire from the watchtower. The body of an SS man fell off the platform and came crashing loudly to the asphalt of the little square.
Evacuation of the camp began on April 21. After being deloused, inmates were transferred to Camp No. 2, which had been converted into a temporary hospital and rehabilitation camp. As each of the barracks was cleared, they were burned down to combat the spread of typhus. On May 19, evacuation was completed and two days later the ceremonial burning of the last barracks brought to an end the first stage of the relief operations. In July, 6,000 former inmates were taken by the Red Cross to Sweden for convalescence, while the rest remained in the newly-established displaced person (DP) camp to await repatriation or emigration.
Young boys of the Hitler Youth were brought to see the dead bodies on the train. Mutilated corpses of SS guards, who had been killed by the Americans after discovering the train, were lying nearby. Before the corpses in the camp were finally given a decent burial, the stench could be smelled up to a mile away, according to the American liberators. When the bodies of the typhus victims were finally taken to the cemetery on a hill called Leitenberg for burial by the citizens of Dachau, the horse-drawn wagons had to be driven slowly though the town, on the orders of the American military, so that the town's people would be forced to confront the horror of what the Nazis had done.
SS Officer Hosler, under arrest, stands in front of a truck which is loaded with corpses at Belsen concentration camp © The Final Solution moved into its last stages as Allied forces began to close in on Germany in 1944. The Project Reinhardt camps were razed. A prisoner work-gang called the Blobel Commando began digging up and burning the bodies of those killed by the Einsatzgruppen. Prisoners remaining in Auschwitz and other concentration camps were transported or force-marched to camps within Germany. Hardly fit for such an effort, thousands of prisoners on these death marches succumbed to starvation, exhaustion and cold, or were shot for not keeping up the pace.
For the role, Spielberg cast then relatively unknown Irish actor Liam Neeson, whom the director had seen in a Broadway play called Anna Christie. "Liam was the closest in my experience of what Schindler was like," Spielberg told The New York Times. "His charm, the way women love him, his strength. He actually looks a little bit like Schindler, the same height, although Schindler was a rotund man," he said. "If I had made the movie in 1964, I would have cast Gert Frobe, the late German actor. That's what he looked like."
By the end of 1934 Hitler was in absolute control of Germany, and his campaign against the Jews in full swing. The Nazis claimed the Jews corrupted pure German culture with their "foreign" and "mongrel" influence. They portrayed the Jews as evil and cowardly, and Germans as hardworking, courageous, and honest. The Jews, the Nazis claimed, who were heavily represented in finance, commerce, the press, literature, theater, and the arts, had weakened Germany's economy and culture. The massive government-supported propaganda machine created a racial anti-Semitism, which was different from the longstanding anti-Semitic tradition of the Christian churches.
Prisoners on a death march from Dachau move towards the south along the Noerdliche Muenchner Street in Gruenwald, Germany, on April 29, 1945. Many thousands of prisoners were marched forcibly from outlying prison camps to camps deeper inside Germany as Allied forces closed in. Thousands died along the way, anyone unable to keep up was executed on the spot. Pictured, fourth from the right, is Dimitry Gorky who was born on August 19, 1920 in Blagoslovskoe, Russia to a family of peasant farmers. During World War II Dmitry was imprisoned in Dachau for 22 months. The reason for his imprisonment is not known. Photo released by the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. #
While these massacres were happening, the Nazis elsewhere were laying plans for an overall 'solution to the Jewish question'. Death camp operations began in December 1941 at Semlin in Serbia and Chelmno in Poland, where people were killed by exhaust fumes in specially modified vans, which were then driven to nearby sites where the bodies were plundered and burnt. 250,000 Jews were killed this way at Chelmno and 15,000 at Semlin.
Dachau is 20 km (12 mi) northwest of Munich. It is 482 meters above sea level by the river Amper, with a boundary demarcated by lateral moraines formed during the last ice age and the Amper glacial valley. It is also close to a large marshy area called Dachauer Moos. Highest elevation of the district is the so-called "Schlossberg", the lowest point is near the neighborhood of Prittlbach, at the border to the next community of Hebertshausen. The bordering communities are Bergkirchen to the west, Schwabhausen to the northwest, Röhrmoos to the north, Hebertshausen to the northeast, and Karlsfeld to the south. To the east the greater district Dachau borders on the greater district of Munich with the community of Oberschleißheim.
According to the testimony of witnesses, from a total of 360 to 400 prisoners used in these experiments 80 to 90 died. Professor Dr Claus Schilling a well-known researcher in tropical medicine opened a malaria experimental station in the Dachau camp. He hoped to discover possible methods of immunization against malaria, and for this purpose had about 1,100 inmates infected with the disease.
During the liberation of the sub-camps surrounding Dachau, advance scouts of the U.S. Army's 522nd Field Artillery Battalion, a segregated battalion consisting of Nisei, 2nd generation Japanese-Americans, liberated the 3,000 prisoners of the "Kaufering IV Hurlach"[85] slave labor camp.[86] Perisco describes an Office of Strategic Services (OSS) team (code name LUXE) leading Army Intelligence to a "Camp IV" on 29 April. "They found the camp afire and a stack of some four hundred bodies burning ... American soldiers then went into Landsberg and rounded up all the male civilians they could find and marched them out to the camp. The former commandant was forced to lie amidst a pile of corpses. The male population of Landsberg was then ordered to walk by, and ordered to spit on the commandant as they passed. The commandant was then turned over to a group of liberated camp survivors".[87] The 522nd's personnel later discovered the survivors of a death march[88] headed generally southwards from the Dachau main camp to Eurasburg, then eastwards towards the Austrian border on 2 May, just west of the town of Waakirchen.[89][90]
The camp changed its name to Bergen-Belsen and was converted into a concentration camp in 1943. Jews with foreign passports were kept there to be exchanged for German nationals imprisoned abroad, although very few exchanges were made. About 200 Jews were allowed to immigrate to Palestine and about 1,500 Hungarian Jews were allowed to immigrate to Switzerland, both took place under the rubric of exchanges for German nationals.
The number of prisoners incarcerated in Dachau between 1933 and 1945 exceeded 188,000. The number of prisoners who died in the camp and the subcamps between January 1940 and May 1945 was at least 28,000, to which must be added those who perished there between 1933 and the end of 1939. It is unlikely that the total number of victims who died in Dachau will ever be known.
By mid-1944 those Jewish communities within easy reach of the Nazi regime had been largely exterminated,[367] in proportions ranging from about 25 percent in France[368] to more than 90 percent in Poland.[369] On 5 May Himmler claimed in a speech that "the Jewish question has in general been solved in Germany and in the countries occupied by Germany".[370] As the Soviet armed forces advanced, the camps in eastern Poland were closed down, with surviving inmates shipped to camps closer to Germany.[371] Efforts were made to conceal evidence of what had happened. The gas chambers were dismantled, the crematoria dynamited, and the mass graves dug up and the corpses cremated.[372] Local commanders continued to kill Jews, and to shuttle them from camp to camp by forced "death marches".[373] Already sick after months or years of violence and starvation, some were marched to train stations and transported for days at a time without food or shelter in open freight cars, then forced to march again at the other end to the new camp. Others were marched the entire distance to the new camp. Those who lagged behind or fell were shot. Around 250,000 Jews died during these marches.[374]
Throughout the 1930s, the legal, economic, and social rights of Jews were steadily restricted.[83] On 1 April 1933, there was a boycott of Jewish businesses.[84] On 7 April 1933, the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service was passed, which excluded Jews and other "non-Aryans" from the civil service.[85] Jews were disbarred from practising law, being editors or proprietors of newspapers, joining the Journalists' Association, or owning farms.[86] In Silesia, in March 1933, a group of men entered the courthouse and beat up Jewish lawyers; Friedländer writes that, in Dresden, Jewish lawyers and judges were dragged out of courtrooms during trials.[87] Jewish students were restricted by quotas from attending schools and universities.[85] Jewish businesses were targeted for closure or "Aryanization", the forcible sale to Germans; of the approximately 50,000 Jewish-owned businesses in Germany in 1933, about 7,000 were still Jewish-owned in April 1939. Works by Jewish composers,[88] authors, and artists were excluded from publications, performances, and exhibitions.[89] Jewish doctors were dismissed or urged to resign. The Deutsches Ärzteblatt (a medical journal) reported on 6 April 1933: "Germans are to be treated by Germans only."[90]
Behind the furnace was the execution chamber, a windowless cell twenty feet square with gas nozzles every few feet across the ceiling. Outside, in addition to the huge mound of charred bone fragments, were the carefully sorted and stacked clothes of the victims - which obviously numbered in the thousands. Although I stood there looking at it, I couldn't believe it. The realness of the whole mess is just gradually dawning on me, and I doubt if it will ever on you.
As a member of the Nazi Party and the Abwehr intelligence service, Schindler was in danger of being arrested as a war criminal. Bankier, Stern, and several others prepared a statement he could present to the Americans attesting to his role in saving Jewish lives. He was also given a ring, made using gold from dental work taken out of the mouth of Schindlerjude Simon Jeret. The ring was inscribed "Whoever saves one life saves the world entire."[77] To escape being captured by the Russians, Schindler and his wife departed westward in their vehicle, a two-seater Horch, initially with several fleeing German soldiers riding on the running boards. A truck containing Schindler's mistress Marta, several Jewish workers, and a load of black market trade goods followed behind. The Horch was confiscated by Russian troops at the town of Budweis, which had already been captured by Russian troops. The Schindlers were unable to recover a diamond that Oskar had hidden under the seat.[78] They continued by train and on foot until they reached the American lines at the town of Lenora, and then travelled to Passau, where an American Jewish officer arranged for them to travel to Switzerland by train. They moved to Bavaria in Germany in the fall of 1945.[79]
Women who became pregnant shortly after the Holocaust had not always regained full strength and health. They and their babies were often in danger. There was a constant shortage of proper nutrition in the DP camp, undernourished mothers found it difficult to breastfeed, and there was not enough baby food in the DP camp. The fact that new mothers did not usually have guidance from their own mothers, grandmothers, sisters or aunts, as they would have had in previous happier times, also posed a challenge. As a result, the welfare agencies that operated in Bergen Belsen made great efforts to care for new mothers and babies. Moreover, young mothers at Bergen Belsen reached out to help one another, creating extended "families."
On April 15, 1945, British troops entered Bergen Belsen. They liberated some 60,000 prisoners, many of whom were on the verge of death. During the first weeks after liberation, close to 500 people in Bergen Belsen died every day. From liberation day until June 20, an estimated 14,000 people died from the terrible conditions that had been inflicted on them by the Nazis during the war.
As the first major camp to be liberated by the allies, the event received a lot of press coverage and the world saw the horrors of the Holocaust. Sixty-thousand prisoners were present at the time of liberation. Afterward, about 500 people died daily of starvation and typhus, reaching nearly 14,000. Mass graves were made to hold the thousands of corpses of those who perished.
Soon after he became chancellor, Hitler called for new elections in an effort to get full control of the Reichstag, the German parliament, for the Nazis. The Nazis used the government apparatus to terrorize the other parties. They arrested their leaders and banned their political meetings. Then, in the midst of the election campaign, on February 27, 1933, the Reichstag building burned. A Dutchman named Marinus van der Lubbe was arrested for the crime, and he swore he had acted alone. Although many suspected the Nazis were ultimately responsible for the act, the Nazis managed to blame the Communists, thus turning more votes their way.
In July 1938, representatives of 32 countries met in the French town of Evian to discuss the refugee and immigration problems created by the Nazis in Germany. Nothing substantial was done or decided at the Evian Conference, and it became apparent to Hitler that no one wanted the Jews and that he would not meet resistance in instituting his Jewish policies. By the autumn of 1941, Europe was in effect sealed to most legal emigration. The Jews were trapped.
Solidarity among the prisoners is strong. Although at every cross-examination the prisoners are tortured, the Nazis never succeeded in obtaining any traitorous information. Despite the fact that several attempts were made by the Commander to stir up hatred between the Christian prisoners and the Jewish minority, and although the Commander promised that any prisoner who harmed a Jew would be released, the Jews receive every encouragement, kindness and consideration from other prisoners.
Steve Paulsson is a lecturer at the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies. His doctoral thesis, 'Hiding in Warsaw: The Jews on the "Aryan side", 1940-1945', was co-winner of the 1998 Fraenkel Prize in Contemporary History, and is published by Yale University Press. He has also published articles on the flight of the Danish Jews to Sweden in 1943, and on Polish-Jewish relations. He was senior historian in the Holocaust Exhibition Project Office at the Imperial War Museum, 1998-2000.
Dachau was liberated by American troops on April 29, 1945. Among their most-gruesome discoveries were railroad cars filled with Jewish prisoners who had died en route to the camp and had been left to decompose. American and British media coverage of Dachau and other newly liberated camps—which included photographs published in magazines and newsreel footage shown in cinemas—profoundly shaped the public's understanding of the atrocities that had occurred.
After the liberation of Dachau, the commanding officer of the Rainbow division, Major General Harry J. Collins, made sure that the Jewish survivors were taken care of properly. Some of the Jewish survivors were given private housing in homes in the town of Dachau after their owners had been evicted. In some cases, the home owners were allowed to live in the attic of their homes, but they were forbidden to remove any of the linens, china or silverware, which had to be left for the use of the new occupants. A few of the Jewish survivors settled in Dachau permanently after the war.
The British Army immediately began to organise the relief effort. Their first priorities were to bury the dead, contain the spread of disease, restore the water supply and arrange the distribution of food that was suitable for starving prisoners in various stages of malnutrition. Additional military and civilian medical personnel were brought in to support the relief effort. The British faced serious challenges in stabilising conditions in the camp and implementing a medical response to the crisis. Nearly 14,000 prisoners would die after liberation.
Here, seven decades after the April 1945 liberation of Bergen-Belsen by British troops, LIFE.com presents a series of photographs made at the camp by the great George Rodger (later a founding Magnum member). In an issue of LIFE published a few weeks later, in which several of the pictures in this gallery first appeared, the magazine told its readers of a "barbarism that reaches the low point of human degradation."
A prisoner, Furth, who later disappeared from camp, was found lying on the concrete floor of his cell, almost beaten to death. Commander Weckerle entered: "Why don't you stand at attention when I enter?" he asked. No answer. Thinking that the prisoner had attempted to commit suicide, Weckerle continued, "This man wants to get away before we're through with him, but he has to confess first." The prisoner was taken from his cell for medical attention, simply to restore him for additional torture. An attorney named Strauss, from Munich, was arrested because at one time he had a case against the Minister of Justice. A few days later this man, who had previously enjoyed good health, was transformed into a quivering white-haired old man. They compelled him to swim in ice-cold water while they lashed him with oxtails. After four days of torture he was shot.
In June 1941 Germany attacked the Soviet Union and began the "Final Solution." Four mobile killing groups were formed called Einsatzgruppen A, B, C and D. Each group contained several commando units. The Einsatzgruppen gathered Jews town by town, marched them to huge pits dug earlier, stripped them, lined them up, and shot them with automatic weapons. The dead and dying would fall into the pits to be buried in mass graves. In the infamous Babi Yar massacre, near Kiev, 30,000-35,000 Jews were killed in two days. In addition to their operations in the Soviet Union, the Einsatzgruppen conducted mass murder in eastern Poland, Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia. It is estimated that by the end of 1942, the Einsatzgruppen had murdered more than 1.3 million Jews.
The Commander enters the room where prisoners are mending boots and reads aloud an article on the situation in the concentration camp in Dachau, taken from the Vienna Arbeiter Zeitung. The paper states the prisoners are beaten with oxtails and shot "when caught in the attempt to escape" or are found "hanging in their cells." Every prisoner knows that the report is true. The Commander asks: "Are you now convinced of the lies published by this Marxist Jewish press?" No one answers.
Schloss, a business man from Nuremberg, was killed in less than three days by blows on the testicles. The torturing was supervised by Commander Erpsmüller. The Jews were forced to scrub especially befouled toilets with their bare hands. A lawyer, Rosenfelder, was made to dab his face with the excrement. Two other prisoners were forced to clean some barbed-wire entanglements placed in the bed of a brook. They were forced to work without shoes or gloves, so that both came back to camp benumbed with cold and with their hands and feet severely lacerated.
"Suddenly we were marched into Bergen Belsen, that's where we were taken. In Bergen Belsen it was absolutely the worst of them all. It was not blocks; not organized. It was in the streets. We were just thrown in there between the electric wires, and wherever you could go - you go, and wherever you want to sleep - you sleep. No food. Only once or twice a week they were handing out some of that horrible grass soup."1
On April 26, 1945, as American forces approached, there were 67,665 registered prisoners in Dachau and its subcamps. Of these, 43,350 were categorized as political prisoners, while 22,100 were Jews, with the remainder falling into various other categories. Starting that day, the Germans forced more than 7,000 prisoners, mostly Jews, on a death march from Dachau to Tegernsee far to the south. During the death march, the Germans shot anyone who could no longer continue; many also died of hunger, cold, or exhaustion.
The passengers had landing certificates and transit visas by the Cuban Director-General of Immigration, Manuel Benitez Gonzalez. But, a week before the ship left, Cuban President Federico Laredo Bru published a decree that overturned all recent landing certificates. For them to land in Cuba, they needed written authorization from the Cuban Secretaries of State and Labor and a $500 bond. Most of the passengers were not prepared for the bureaucratic mess they were about to face in Cuba.
Like the network of concentration camps that followed, becoming the killing grounds of the Holocaust, Dachau was under the control of Heinrich Himmler, head of the elite Nazi guard, the Schutzstaffel (SS), and later chief of the German police. By July 1933, German concentration camps (Konzentrationslager in German, or KZ) held some 27,000 people in "protective custody." Huge Nazi rallies and symbolic acts such as the public burning of books by Jews, Communists, liberals and foreigners helped drive home the desired message of party strength.
In the view of Christian Gerlach, Hitler announced his decision to annihilate the Jews on or around 12 December 1941, probably on 12 December during a speech to the Gauleiters, part of the Nazi Party leadership.[259] This was one day after the German declaration of war against the United States, which followed the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour on 7 December and the United States declaration of war on Japan on 8 December.[260] According to Deborah Dwork and Robert Jan van Pelt, Hitler had trusted American Jews, whom he assumed were all-powerful, to keep their government out of the war in the interests of German Jews. When America declared war, the Jews were blamed.[261] Joseph Goebbels, the Reich Minister of Propaganda, noted of Hitler's speech: "He warned the Jews that if they were to cause another world war, it would lead to their destruction. ... Now the world war has come. The destruction of the Jews must be its necessary consequence."[260][o]
As discrimination against Jews increased, German law required a legal definition of a Jew and an Aryan. Promulgated at the annual Nazi Party rally in Nürnberg on September 15, 1935, the Nürnberg Laws—the Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honour and the Law of the Reich Citizen—became the centrepiece of anti-Jewish legislation and a precedent for defining and categorizing Jews in all German-controlled lands. Marriage and sexual relations between Jews and citizens of "German or kindred blood" were prohibited. Only "racial" Germans were entitled to civil and political rights. Jews were reduced to subjects of the state. The Nürnberg Laws formally divided Germans and Jews, yet neither the word German nor the word Jew was defined. That task was left to the bureaucracy. Two basic categories were established in November: Jews, those with at least three Jewish grandparents; and Mischlinge ("mongrels," or "mixed breeds"), people with one or two Jewish grandparents. Thus, the definition of a Jew was primarily based not on the identity an individual affirmed or the religion he or she practiced but on his or her ancestry. Categorization was the first stage of destruction.
Another 350 suffered the same fate in early 1944, this left 350 detainees in the camp, of whom 266 were in possession of immigration permits to Palestine, 34 were United States citizens and 50 had South American papers. These prisoners were not assigned to work teams and no contact was permitted between them and other groups of Bergen- Belsen prisoners.
The most famous American at Dachau was Rene Guiraud. After being given intensive specialized training, Lt. Guiraud was parachuted into Nazi-occupied France, along with a radio operator. His mission was to collect intelligence, harass German military units and occupation forces, sabotage critical war material facilities, and carry on other resistance activities. Guiraud organized 1500 guerrilla fighters and developed intelligence networks. During all this, Guiraud posed as a French citizen, wearing civilian clothing. He was captured and interrogated for two months by the Gestapo, but revealed nothing about his mission. After that, he was sent to Dachau where he participated in the camp resistance movement along with the captured British spies. Two weeks after the liberation of the camp, he "escaped" from the quarantined camp and went to Paris where he arrived in time to celebrate V-E day.
The camp physician, Dr. Katz of Nuremberg, was also a prisoner. At first he was well treated because the guards and even the Commander admired his courageous attitude, but after he had witnessed the torture inflicted upon the prisoners, it became dangerous for the Nazis to release him. It was reported later that he had hanged himself in a detention cell—a few days before his anticipated release. His presence in the cell, however, was never explained.
^ "Headquarters Seventh Army Office of the Chief of Staff APO TSS, C/O Postmaster New York, NY 2 May 1945 Memorandum to: Inspector General, Seventh Army The Coming General directs that you conduct a formal investigation of alleged mistreatment of German guards at the Concentration Camp at Dachau, Germany, by elements of the XV Corps. A. WHITE Major General, G.S.C. Chief of Staff Testimony of: Capt. Richard F. Taylor 0-408680, Military Government, Detachment I-13, G-3". Archived from the original on 3 November 2014. Retrieved 3 June 2015.
During the first three weeks the camp was under the command of the regular police fore. Then the Nazis appeared one night to take over control. Their leader made a speech to his followers, of which the following quotations are of interest: "Always remember that no human beings are here, only swine."—"Whoever does not wish to see blood may go home immediately."—"No one who does harm to a prisoner need fear reprimand."—"The more you shoot, the fewer we must feed."
Dachau is a name that will be forever associated with Nazi atrocities and the Holocaust. Opened on March 22, 1933 in a former World War I gunpowder factory, just outside the 1200-year-old Bavarian town of Dachau, the Dachau concentration camp was one of the first installations in the Third Reich's vast network of concentration camps and forced labor camps throughout Germany and the Nazi-occupied countries.
Uprisings broke out in some extermination camps. The few remaining Jews kept alive to dispose of bodies and sort possessions realised the number of transportees was reducing and they would be next. Civilian uprisings occurred across Poland as mainly young Jews, whose families had already been murdered, began to resist Nazi oppression. With reports of rebellion and mass murder in the British press, the situation in the camps could no longer be be ignored.
Here over an acre of ground lay dead and dying people. You could not see which was which. ... The living lay with their heads against the corpses and around them moved the awful, ghostly procession of emaciated, aimless people, with nothing to do and with no hope of life, unable to move out of your way, unable to look at the terrible sights around them ... Babies had been born here, tiny wizened things that could not live. ... A mother, driven mad, screamed at a British sentry to give her milk for her child, and thrust the tiny mite into his arms. ... He opened the bundle and found the baby had been dead for days. This day at Belsen was the most horrible of my life.
Due to horrific overcrowding and the spread of contagious diseases brought from what is now Poland by new arrivals who had been evacuated from the death camps, the number of recorded deaths at Dachau in the last four chaotic months of the war jumped to 13,158. After the camp was liberated by the US Seventh Army on April 29, 1945, an additional 2,226 prisoners died from disease in the month of May and 196 more died in June.
11 of Hitler's deputies were given death sentences, including Goering, the most senior surviving Nazi. However he too committed suicide the night before he was due to hang. Others received prison terms. Albert Speer, Hitler's personal architect, was released in 1966 and spent his remaining years writing about the Nazi regime, donating most of his royalties to Jewish charities. Rudolph Hess committed suicide in prison in 1987. Many Nazis evaded justice altogether and were never tried.
In the first few days after the liberation, the town's people were forced to scrounge for food and deliver it to the camp inmates. The two bakeries in Dachau had to deliver wagon loads of bread for the starving inmates. Major General Collins, with the help of Rabbi Bohnen, made sure that the former Jewish inmates of Dachau received the best rations, including kosher foods.
A training center for SS concentration camp guards, Dachau's organization and routine became the model for all Nazi concentration camps. A new crematorium area was constructed in 1942 to dispose of the increasing number of casualties of typhoid, starvation, and executions. Dachau's prisoners were used as subjects of medical experiments and hundreds of prisoners died or were permanently crippled as a result of these experiments.
Lieutenant Skodzensky was dead. Within an hour, all five hundred of his garrison troops were to be killed, some by the inmates themselves but more than three hundred of them by the American soldiers who had been literally sickened by what they saw of rotting corpses and desperate starving inmates. In one incident, an American lieutenant machine gunned 346 of the SS guards after they had surrendered and were lined up against a wall. The lieutenant, who had entered Dachau a few moments earlier, had just seen the corpses of the inmates piled up around the camp crematorium and at the railway station.
After the Nuremberg war crimes trials finished, the United States spearheaded the effort to end genocide and become a champion for the prevention of crimes against humanity. The U.S. pushed for greater international effort, helping to draft the 1948 Genocide Convention. President Harry Truman addressed Congress urging the Convention's passage. He stressed the role the United States had to play in "outlawing the world-shocking crime of genocide."
The Holocaust was the murder by Nazi Germany of six million Jews. While the Nazi persecution of the Jews began in 1933, the mass murder was committed during World War II. It took the Germans and their accomplices four and a half years to murder six million Jews. They were at their most efficient from April to November 1942 – 250 days in which they murdered some two and a half million Jews. They never showed any restraint, they slowed down only when they began to run out of Jews to kill, and they only stopped when the Allies defeated them. More...
From the evidence it became clear how this was done. After a sleepless night – for sleep in the huts was impossible – the men were driven to a hut where the dead were collected. They were instructed by what the witness called the "language of blows, which was universal." Their duty was to take strips of blankets, tie them to a corpse, and, four men to a corpse, drag it across the main road of the camp along dusty paths to the burial pit. In the midst of this work, which lasted three days without sleep, food, or water till the British arrived, one Hungarian guard at the exit from the hut containing the bodies began shooting all prisoners if they did not come out dragging a body at the double. During the last three days the Hungarian guards were almost continuously shooting at prisoners, sometimes single shots, sometimes fusillades.
There is no question that Oskar Schindler was appalled by the murder of Jewish children when the Krakow ghetto was closed but Crowe argues "evidence suggests that he had already chosen his path sometime before this tragedy" and that the murders "simply made him more determined to help as many Jews as he could." In a film, of course, it is more challenging to portray gradual determination rather than a single moment that inspires action. However, Crowe writes, "In the end, there was no one, dramatic transforming moment when Oskar Schindler decided to do everything he could to save his Jewish workers."
German soldiers question Jews after the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in 1943. In October 1940, the Germans began to concentrate Poland's population of over 3 million Jews into overcrowded ghettos. In the largest of these, the Warsaw Ghetto, thousands of Jews died due to rampant disease and starvation, even before the Nazis began their massive deportations from the ghetto to the Treblinka extermination camp. The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising -- the first urban mass rebellion against the Nazi occupation of Europe -- took place from April 19 until May 16 1943, and began after German troops and police entered the ghetto to deport its surviving inhabitants. It ended when the poorly-armed and supplied resistance was crushed by German troops. #
Miconic 10 was introduced in 1996, and was the industry first of an innovative type of control systems now known as hall call destination system. The system features keypads and LED screens instead of hall button stations whereby riders enter their desired floor before entering an elevator car. The system then directs the rider to a specific elevator car while grouping riders traveling to nearby floors together. Schindler claims this minimizes the number of stops, and decreases congestion and travel time—especially during peak traffic periods. The system was continuously further developed and new functions were amended eventually evolving in systems which guarantee highly efficient and energy saving traffic management. Especially in high rise buildings traffic management systems like Miconic 10 and Schindler ID allow building designers to maximize rentable space and transport efficiency. Moreover, access control becomes feasible.
Also that November, Schindler was introduced to Itzhak Stern, an accountant for Schindler's fellow Abwehr agent Josef "Sepp" Aue, who had taken over Stern's formerly Jewish-owned place of employment as a Treuhander (trustee).[21] Property belonging to Polish Jews, including their possessions, places of business, and homes were seized by the Germans beginning immediately after the invasion, and Jewish citizens were stripped of their civil rights.[22] Schindler showed Stern the balance sheet of a company he was thinking of acquiring, an enamelware factory called Rekord Ltd[a] owned by a consortium of Jewish businessmen that had filed for bankruptcy earlier that year.[23] Stern advised him that rather than running the company as a trusteeship under the auspices of the Haupttreuhandstelle Ost (Main Trustee Office for the East), he should buy or lease the business, as that would give him more freedom from the dictates of the Nazis, including the freedom to hire more Jews.[24]
Shortly after Hitler came to power, the Reichstag building, seat of the German parliament, burnt down. Communists were blamed for setting the fire and Hindenburg declared a state of emergency, passing the Reichstag Fire Decree that suspended basic rights like trial by jury. The German Communist Party was suspended and over 4,000 members were detained without trial. The next month, Hitler's cabinet passed the Enabling Act which allowed him to enact laws without the consent of the parliament for four years, effectively transforming the German government into a de facto Nazi dictatorship.
As we approached the cells of the SS guards, the [British] sergeant's language become ferocious. "We had had an interrogation this morning," the captain said. 'I'm afraid they are not a pretty sight.' ... The sergeant unbolted the first door and ... strode into the cell, jabbing a metal spike in front of him. "Get up," he shouted. "Get up. Get up, you dirty bastards." There were half a dozen men lying or half lying on the floor. One or two were able to pull themselves erect at once. The man nearest me, his shirt and face spattered with blood, made two attempts before he got on to his knees and then gradually on to his feet. He stood with his arms stretched out in front of him, trembling violently.
The opening of the camp, with a capacity for 5,000 prisoners was announced by Heinrich Himmler, Reichsfuhrer SS at a press conference held on 20 March 1933. The first group of so-called protective-custody, consisting mainly of Communists and Social Democrats was brought to the camp on 22 March 1933. They were guarded by Bavarian state police until the camp was taken over by the SS on 11 April 1933.
Between the two barracks in the photo above can be seen three flags including a British flag. There were several captured British SOE men at Dachau when it was liberated. On the right is Barrack 27, where Belgian political prisoners were housed in Room 4. Catholic priests also lived in Barrack 27, but they had already been released a few days before the Americans arrived. Among the priests who survived Dachau was Father Marcel Pasiecznik, who was arrested in 1944 as a member of the underground Polish Army which fought as partisans.
When Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, it gained control of about 2 million Jews in the occupied territory. The rest of Poland was occupied by the Soviet Union, which had control of the rest of Poland's pre-war population of 3.3–3.5 million Jews.[141] German plans for Poland included expelling gentile Poles from large areas, confining Jews, and settling Germans on the emptied lands.[142] The Germans initiated a policy of sending Jews from all territories they had recently annexed (Austria, Czechoslovakia, and western Poland) to the central section of Poland, which they called the General Government. There, the Jews were concentrated in ghettos in major cities,[143] chosen for their railway lines to facilitate later deportation.[144] Food supplies were restricted, public hygiene was difficult, and the inhabitants were often subjected to forced labor.[145] In the work camps and ghettos, at least half a million Jews died of starvation, disease, and poor living conditions.[146] Jeremy Black writes that the ghettos were not intended, in 1939, as a step towards the extermination of the Jews. Instead, they were viewed as part of a policy of creating a territorial reservation to contain them.[147][l]
It is estimated that approximately 3,000 Jews died on the Plantages. When the camp officials felt that these internees were too ill and too weak to work, they would march them into a lake (since drained) , regardless of the time of year. They were forced to stay in the water until dead. Those who remained conscious were placed in wheelbarrows, brought back to camp, where they died a few hours later.
Last week the jubilance of impending victory was sobered by the grim facts of the atrocities which the Allied troops were uncovering all over Germany. For 12 years since the Nazis seized power, American have heard charges of German brutality. Made skeptical by World War I "atrocity propaganda," many people refused to put much faith in stories about the inhuman Nazi treatment of prisoners.


Once a year, the rich decide that "the undeserving poor" need help after all.
Americans give over $300 billion per year to charities, and the weeks between Thanksgiving and Christmas are the peak donation window. Salvation Army bell-ringers hit the sidewalks, vacant strip mall storefronts transform into Toys for Tots depots, and local newspapers feature stories about poor children gratefully receiving new shoes.
All this occasion-specific giving betrays a paradox at the heart of our political culture. Once a year people with cash to spare demonstrate a collective awareness of the severity and immorality of economic inequality. Animating the seasonal generosity is a notion at odds with prevailing ideology: namely, that something is wrong with the way our society distributes wealth. The phenomenon of Christmas giving is a large-scale admission that many are unable to attain modest comforts even though they deserve them.
Millions of people who donate to charity are otherwise stubbornly invested in capitalist meritocracy, and tend to associate wealth with ingenuity, dedication, and moral hygiene. Although the majority of Americans who make more than $50,000 per year — apparently the rough cutoff for having enough discretionary income to donate — believe that poor people have it easy, they also donate en masse each year, in recognition that poor people have it hard. Republicans are more likely to donate to charity than Democrats, but they're also less likely to believe that people are poor for reasons beyond their control. Nearly half of all Christians — who are more likely to give to charity than the non-religious — say that poverty results from a lack of effort.
It's perplexing to say the least. But many who give the most during the holiday season are guilty of more than inconsistency — the wealthiest among them actively engineer the conditions that generate poverty, and they relentlessly thwart attempts to alleviate economic hardship on an institutional scale. An extreme example is the Koch brothers, whose philanthropic network provides community holiday meals to poor people, while simultaneously organizing powerful friends around a brutally austere political program.
This December the wealthy of all political persuasions will attend tasteful winter charity galas in formal attire. Their table fees will go to assisting some immiserated population, often poor children. But the moment the tinsel comes down, they'll resume a litany of practices that are actively harmful to poor children — they'll employ those children's parents at the lowest possible wage, develop cities in ways that displace those who weren't born into affluence, and support political candidates who cut benefits programs that poor families need to survive.
If seasonal benefactors really want to alleviate suffering, they need to replace moral explanations with structural ones, and charity with policy. Even when they wax maudlin, they're correct: it is unacceptable for poor children to have holes in their shoes in the dead of winter. But the way to fix that is not through donation drives and galas, endowments and philanthropic pageantry. It's through anti-austerity social policy, decommodification of goods and services, and systematic wealth redistribution, for starters.
Ameliorating economic inequality through a steeply progressive tax system, tight regulation of corporations, and robust universal social programs won't feel as compassionate or intimate to anybody in the moment. No one's eyes will well with tears of gratitude, and there will be no admiring applause. Instead the relief will occur continuously, diffusely and cumulatively, on a mass scale. It will feel impersonal, and individual gratification will be deferred. And let's not beat around the bush: it will hurt the finances of the wealthy, while improving the finances of the dispossessed. That weakening of the class hierarchy will be the point.
Investing in the public over the private sector will diminish hardship more successfully than intermittent displays of magnanimity. It won't simply feel good, and it won't simply look good; in fact, to some people it may not feel or look good at all. But when it comes to solving the kinds of problems that tug on people's heartstrings during holiday charity season, it will do something far better — it will actually help people who are in need.


text:
using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;
using System.Text;

namespace ProjectTo.Tests.Mapping
{
    class Continent
    {
        public int Id { get; set; }
        public string Name { get; set; }
    }
}

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaGithub


Poor Learn Rich (穷小子日记): Trump Presidency.. What next?
穷小子 must admit this, was expecting a close fight, but didn't expect and don't wish Trump to win the campaign.
After today, guess that everyone should have know by now that any thing can happened in this world. First half of the year is Brexit, and second half is Trump. On a side note, 穷小子 vote goes to Brexit.
穷小子's guess would be America will grow stronger as promised. Mr Trump has pledged to tear up or renegotiate international trade agreements. He is going to bring the jobs back to America. The new agreements may bias towards the Americans.
In short term, we may see funds and monies will flow back to the Americans. In a longer term, we may see a stronger USD again. Strong USD means that Gold price will increase as well.
On the other hand, with a stronger America, it may seems the rest of the world will grow weaker. Not literally the rest grew weaker, but the difference will be there.
Earlier this month, analyst are expecting a 76% probability of a rate hike by year-end, but now, it may have dropped to 20% or lower. Investors have tended to favor Trump's Democratic rival Hillary Clinton as a status quo candidate who would be considered a safe pair of hands at home and on the world stage. Uncertainties doesn't favor the Fed's decision for a rate hike now.
Perhaps his victory is because of "Make America Great Again!!" Those are his words which 穷小子 had heard pretty much during his rally. The victory seems good for American but may be bad for rest of the world. The Americans have made their choice, let's respect and trust their decisions. The Americans know what is the best for them.
Hopefully can use this opportunity to buy some undervalue stocks. With the recent price drop, REITs may appears to be a safer ground if there isn't rate hike next month.


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text:
It was the world's greatest man-made explosion before Hiroshima.
In Richmond Prison, at the end of Gottingen Street, Halifax, the warden's young son was drawn to a window by a spectacular display of fireworks. Too sick to go to school that day he had gone to work with his dad. Suddenly he was blinded by a brilliant flash of light and then stunned by an unearthly roar. He was one of the first eyewitnesses to Canada's greatest disaster, the Halifax Explosion. He ran in terror, screaming for his father.
In the pre-dawn darkness of Thursday, December 6, 1917, the French munitions ship Mont Blanc lay at anchor near the mouth of Halifax Harbour. It seemed a small, nondescript vessel, but it carried a deadly cargo, a witch's brew of picric acid (used to make artillery shells), TNT, guncotton, benzol (a high octane fuel) and live ammunition. The ship was prevented from entering the narrows the night before by the closing of the submarine net, the same net that prevented the Imo, a Norwegian relief ship bound for Belgium, from leaving. That morning, the two ships' captains were anxious to get going. The Imo was 18 hours behind schedule and the Mont Blanc was a sitting duck in the open harbour.
Twice the captain of the Imo avoided other vessels by passing on their starboard side, which was not standard procedure and brought the ship ever closer to the Dartmouth shore. There the pilot of the Mont Blanc was astonished to see the Imo advancing. The two ships exchanged a bewildering array of contradictory horn and whistle blasts. The last seconds before the collision dissolved in indecision and then panic.
In a final, fatal maneuver both captains bellowed out orders to put their engines full speed astern. The Mont Blanc lurched sideways. The Imo's bow swung about and its stern struck the Mont Blanc. The grinding of ragged metal sprayed sparks and ignited the benzol. The Mont Blanc's crew dove into the lifeboats and rowed for dear life, shouting warnings that no-one could understand.
For the next 20 minutes the fiery spectacle of the Mont Blanc drew a crowd of wide-eyed onlookers as it drifted ominously across the harbour towards Pier Six. In the rail yards at Richmond Station, a telegraph operator tapped out a last telegraph message: "Munitions ship on fire in the harbour. Heading for Pier Six. Good Bye." Seconds later the Mont Blanc detonated. It was the world's greatest man-made explosion before Hiroshima. The mind numbing roar of the blast was heard as far away as Sable Island and Cape Breton.
A fireball as hot as the surface of the Sun rolled over the docks, vapourizing those within its range, as if they had never existed. The metal of the Mont Blanc shattered into millions of shards moving at a velocity greater than any bullet. A sailor, J.C. Meyers, who was only 30 metres away from the blast, heard someone call "Look out!" It was the last thing that he remembered until he found himself lying on the ground at Fort Needham, over a kilometer away, wearing nothing but his boots.
Behind the fireball came a blast of air a thousand times more powerful than any hurricane, compressing the air into a steel fist, tossing railway cars like toys, smashing houses like matchsticks and crushing anyone in its path. Behind the wall of air came a deadly shower of shrapnel. In the harbour, the Imo was stripped of its superstructure and beached on the far shore. Within two seconds of the explosion the entire neighborhood of Richmond was obliterated, leaving at least 1000 people dead.
In less time than it takes to draw a deep breath almost every building in Halifax and Dartmouth had been damaged. Early rescue efforts were chaotic. The city had no power and no way to tell the world. As the word of the disaster spread, medical aid, food, clothing, building materials and skilled labourers poured in from throughout the Maritimes, central Canada, New England and the world.
The official tally of the dead is 1963, but almost certainly more died. At least 9000 more were injured and 25,000 left homeless. The confusion in the city lasted months as those who had lost loved ones spent countless hours searching and asking questions that could never be answered. There was no measure for the grief. In one family alone, that of James and Elizabeth Jackson, 46 were killed and 19 injured.
Wartime suspicion led many to thing that the explosion must be an act of sabotage. The Halifax Herald blamed it on "that arch criminal, the Kaiser of Germany." An early enquiry inexplicably put the whole blame on the captain and pilot of the Mont Blanc. The Supreme Court of Canada portioned the responsibility, with two judges blaming the Imo, two the Mont Blanc, and the fifth deciding each had acted imprudently.
First published in the National Post and CanWest newspaper chain, now featured on The Canadian Encyclopedia.
Tags: Disaster, Halifax Explosion, Largest Explosion

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


Today the UK Green Building Council and WWF have published a report they jointly commissioned from us here at Parity Projects, investigating the costs and benefits of the forthcoming minimum standards for privately rented homes. Amidst concerns from some that the regulations would place an undue burden on landlords, the analysis shows that in fact the average cost of bringing F- & G-rated properties up to the expected minimum standard (an EPC rating of E) is a modest £1,421. But the low cost is just part of the story. Private rented homes account for significant proportion of the UK's fuel poor households, and the report demonstrates that, on average, the improvements required will save occupants more than £400 per year on their energy bills. That's a "pay-back" of less than four years.
While those savings would usually be made by the tenant, there are significant benefits for landlords too. DECC's own research suggests that E- and F-rated dwellings sell for approximately 6% more than their poorer-performing (G-rated) counterparts. For the average UK house, this means an uplift of £15,000 – a ten-fold return on the average initial investment. Of course landlords of the poorest households are also likely to see a reduced risk of rent arrears as costly fuel bills diminish following these improvements.
With such short pay-backs on the measures identified, it is possible that many of these will meet the "golden rule" and qualify for Green Deal finance, meaning that there could actually be zero up-front costs to the property owner. In many cases, it will also be possible to subsidise the works with an ECO grant or Green Deal cash-back, or to offset the costs against tax through the Landlords Energy Saving Allowance scheme.
Given the potential for these regulations to play a role in re-invigorating the retrofit market after the last year's trials and tribulations, creating jobs and growth along the way, it seems they could represent a pretty good deal for everyone concerned: tenants, landlords, the Government and UK-plc. We look forward seeing the long-awaited consultation on the detail of the policy, and to doing more of what we do best – helping landlords to understand how to meet the requirements as cost-effectively as possible.
If you're a private landlord and would like help identifying the most cost-effective way of bringing properties in your portfolio up to the 2018 standard, please contact us, or vist our "Services for Private Landlords" page.


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Faulkner scores 18 to lift W. Carolina over Mercer 79-71
CULLOWHEE, N.C. (AP)Mason Faulkner scored 18 points, making 6 of 8 free throws in the final 34 seconds, and Western Carolina ran its winning streak to five with a 79-71 win over Mercer on Saturday.
Matt Halvorsen added 16 points for the Catamounts (12-3, 4-0 Southern Conference), including a big 3-pointer with 1:02 to play that made it a 73-65 game. Carlos Dotson added 12 points, making a layup and a jumper after the Bears had cut the lead to four with less than four minutes to play.
Djordje Dimitrijevic scored a career-high 34 points for the Bears (6-11, 0-4), making 10 of 19 field goals and 12 of 14 free throws. Maciej Bender added 13 rebounds and three blocks.
Ethan Stair was held to six points, 11 below his average.
More NCAA Basketball Stories
Edler-Davis scores 22, CSU Bakersfield beats Hawaii 83-72
HONOLULU (AP)Justin Edler-Davis had 22 points and seven rebounds to help CSU Bakersfield beat Hawaii 83-72 on Saturday night for the Roadrunners' fifth win in a row.
Edler-Davis made 7 of 11 from the field, 2 of 4 from 3-point range, and 6 of 6 from the free-throw line. Taze Moore added 16 points and Shaun Williams and Shawn Stith scored 11 apiece for Bakersfield (9-4, 5-1 Big West).
While Louisville looks to rebound from its first Atlantic Coast Conference defeat, Florida State is trying to extend a modest winning stretch of its own.
The No. 16 Cardinals try to avoid losing back-to-back games for the first time this season while aiming to keep the visiting Seminoles from a third consecutive victory in this ACC matchup on Monday night.
CS Northridge tops CS Fullerton 86-85
FULLERTON, Calif. (AP)Brendan Harrick and Darius Brown II scored 25 points apiece as Cal State Northridge narrowly defeated Cal State Fullerton 86-85 on Saturday night.
The 25 points were a career high for Harrick, who hit 7 of 10 3-pointers. Brown also had 13 assists and six rebounds.


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Lohse Named As CoSIDA 2019 Hall Of Fame Inductee
Greenwood, Ind. - The College Sports Information Directors of America (CoSIDA) released the names of the 2019 Hall of Fame Class on Tuesday afternoon in advance of its 62nd annual convention this June. The awards are presented to CoSIDA members and those outside the membership for outstanding contributions to the organization or to their member organizations.
Highlighting the 2019 honorees are six new Hall of Fame inductees:
Jeff Bernstein – New York University (NYU), Assistant Athletic Director for Sports Information
Dave Lohse – University of North Carolina, Associate Athletic Communications Director
John Paquette – Big East Conference, Senior Associate Commissioner, Sports Media Relations
Maxey Parrish – Baylor University (retired), Former Director of Internet Operations and Sports Information
David Plati – University of Colorado, Associate Athletic Director/Sports Information Director
Mark Stillwell – Missouri State University (retired), Former Assistant Director of Athletics/Sports Information Director
CoSIDA is comprised of more than 3,000 intercollegiate athletic communications and media relations professionals from colleges, universities and athletic conferences at all divisions of competition in the United States and Canada.
All CoSIDA Special Awards will be presented during the 2019 CoSIDA Convention in June at the Orlando World Center Marriott in Orlando, Florida.
The CoSIDA Convention takes place June 9-12 and is held in conjunction with National Association of Collegiate Directors of Athletics (NACDA) and Affiliates Convention Week. This is the seventh year the CoSIDA Convention will be held in conjunction with the NACDA & Affiliates Convention.
"Congratulations to all of our talented, dedicated and passionate award winners," said Rob Knox, 2018-19 CoSIDA President and the Associate Director of Athletic Media Relations at Towson University. "This is an outstanding group of award winners. We're elated to recognize them during our convention in June and celebrate their accomplishments as they have been mentors, leaders and innovators throughout their distinguished careers. All of our CoSIDA member award winners have made a significant impact in our industry. Through their consistent contributions, they have brought dignity to our profession while simultaneously elevating CoSIDA. We congratulate those award winners outside our profession who will be recognized for their contributions to college athletics and for their commitment to the ideals and mission of CoSIDA."
Each of the six Hall of Fame inductees will join their predecessors on the CoSIDA Hall of Fame plaques that are on permanent display at the NCAA Hall of Champions in Indianapolis, Indiana.
In addition to the Hall of Fame, other Special Awards recognize emerging leaders, community service, lifetime achievement and 25-Year service honors. They will be announced throughout the week.
Dave Lohse – North Carolina, Associate Director of Athletic Communications
A leader for diversity and inclusion with a rich background in publicizing NCAA national champions.
The anchor of the athletic communications office at UNC, Lohse has worked at UNC since 1979 when he began his career in the Tar Hell sports information office. Over this time, Lohse has worked directly with teams that have won 19 NCAA Division I National Championships: 15 titles in women's soccer and four NCAA championships in men's lacrosse. He also assisted with the Tar Heel men's basketball national championship teams in1982 and 1993.
Lohse has worked on the staff of two Olympic Games - in 1988 at Seoul, Korea as U.S. Olympic committee press officer for diving and yachting, and in 1996 in Atlanta as media director for the Aquatics Venue (located at Georgia Tech).
Lohse has numerous present and past accomplishments. He received a 2016 CoSIDA Achievement Award, given to an associate or assistant director of athletic communications for outstanding service. He also was a founding member of the CoSIDA Diversity and Inclusion Committee. In 2014, Lohse received the Ernie Williamson Award from the UNC Department of Athletics, a honor given for service to UNC student-athletes and staff over the years. He has also won more than 50 CoSIDA publication awards.
Lohse earned his Bachelor of Arts degree from Purdue University in 1977 with distinction, majoring in political science and being elected Phi Beta Kappa.


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Home Humanities Encyclopedias almanacs transcripts and maps Lenin, Vladimir Il'ich (1870–1924)
Lenin, Vladimir Il'ich (1870–1924)
COPYRIGHT 2006 Thomson Gale
LENIN, VLADIMIR IL'ICH
Lenin was a Marxist revolutionary, Russian Communist political leader, and major contributor to the philosophy of dialectical materialism. Although his mentor Georgii Valentinovich Plekhanov is considered the father of Russian Marxism, Lenin's distinctive version of the doctrine (later dubbed Marxism-Leninism ) was considered authoritative by the Soviet Communist leadership and had an immense impact on Russia and the world through most of the twentieth century.
Lenin was born Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov into the family of a well-to-do school official in Simbirsk, Russia. He enrolled in the University of Kazan in 1887, the same year his elder brother Alexander was executed for involvement in a plot to kill Tsar Alexander III. Lenin was soon expelled from the university for taking part in student disturbances, but he gained admission to the University of St. Petersburg as an external student and in 1892 graduated with a degree in law. His activity in Marxist and other radical circles, beginning in 1888 in Kazan and Samara and continuing in St. Petersburg from 1893, led to his imprisonment in 1895, followed by banishment to eastern Siberia in 1897. Allowed to leave Siberia in 1900, he promptly fled to western Europe. For most of the next seventeen years he worked in various locations outside Russia, writing and conspiring with fellow Russian Marxists to promote the overthrow of the tsarist regime in their homeland.
From the time of the formation of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party in 1898, Lenin worked tirelessly to gain control of the group and mold it into a militant Marxist revolutionary force. His ideas and aggressive political tactics brought him into bitter conflict with other leading Russian Marxists, including Plekhanov, but eventually his Bolshevik faction of the party became dominant (the Russian term bol'shevik means a member of the majority) and in continuing intraparty struggles he consolidated his position as both a theoretician and a leader. After the February Revolution of 1917 he was able, with the help of German military authorities, to travel to Petrograd, where in the October Revolution he led the Bolsheviks in seizing control of the Russian government. In power for six stormy years, marked by attempted assassination, civil war, famine, and the formation of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, Lenin suffered a series of strokes beginning in 1922 and died in January 1924.
Philosophical Writings
Lenin's philosophical activity extended from his student days to the Bolshevik revolution, and throughout this period its character was determined by his dogmatic materialism and his devotion to the theory and practice of Marxist social reconstruction as he understood it. His writings are strongly polemical in style, exemplifying the Leninist concept of partiinost (partisanship, party spirit) in philosophy.
Lenin first studied the writings of Karl Marx and his colleague Friedrich Engels systematically in 1888 and 1889. One of his earliest works, What the "Friends of the People" Are and How They Fight the Social-Democrats (1894)—directed against the Russian Populists, such as Nikolai Mikhailovsky—shows Lenin's general acceptance of dialectical materialism, the materialist conception of history, and the characteristic concepts of Marxist socialism. The distinctively Leninist element already evident is the strong emphasis on action, on the need to combine theory with revolutionary practice. Lenin asserted that the objective, necessary character of the laws of social change in no way destroys the role of active individuals in history. Thus, unlike those Marxists who feared that Russia was not sufficiently developed for a socialist revolution, Lenin stressed the need for expeditiously organizing the revolution, focusing on the proletariat (not the peasantry) as the leading revolutionary class. This activist approach was carried further in subsequent writings, chiefly What Is to Be Done? (1902)—the first work in which he used the pseudonym Lenin )—and One Step Forward, Two Steps Back (1904). In both of these works Lenin elaborated the need for a clandestine, militant, centralized, highly disciplined party to unify and direct the proletariat.
Lenin's book Materialism and Empirio-Criticism (1909)—the principal philosophical work published during his lifetime—is directed against a group of Russian writers, including Alexander Bogdanov and Anatoly Lunacharsky, who attempted to supplement Marxism with the phenomenalistic positivism of Richard Avenarius and Ernst Mach. Characterizing their position as a form of subjective idealism (and thus as inimical to Marxism), Lenin defended dialectical materialism on the chief points at issue, particularly the status and character of matter and the nature of knowledge. Opposing the view that matter is a construct of sensations, Lenin argued that it is ontologically primary, existing independently of consciousness. Likewise, space and time are not subjective modes of ordering experience but objective forms of the existence of matter. Opposing the view that discoveries of modern science cast doubt on the objectivity of matter, Lenin distinguished between scientific conceptions of matter, which are provisional and relative because no constituent of a material thing can be regarded as indivisible or irreducible, and the philosophical conception, according to which matter is simply the objective reality known to our senses. The only property of matter to which philosophical materialism is committed, according to Lenin, is the property of existing objectively. In epistemology, Lenin opposed the so-called hieroglyph theory of Plekhanov, according to which sensations are signs of an external reality that they do not necessarily resemble, and developed a strictly realist position, the copy theory, according to which sensations depict or mirror the real world. On this basis Lenin defended the possibility of objective truth, emphasizing practical experience as its test.
Dialectics, which Lenin had long considered the heart of Marxism, is treated most fully in Philosophical Notebooks (1933), a posthumous compilation of notebook entries and fragments dating chiefly from 1914 to 1916, including his extracts from, and comments on, a number of works by other thinkers, above all Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's Science of Logic. Lenin showed a high regard for the Hegelian dialectic, which he found thoroughly compatible with materialism, and he asserted that dialectics, logic, and the theory of knowledge are identical. In his conception of dialectics Lenin departed from Engels in laying the greatest stress not on the transition from quantity to quality but on the struggle of opposing (contradictory) forces or tendencies within every natural object and process; Lenin saw this struggle as the internal basis of all change, and thus as the core of dialectics.
Lenin's last major works are concerned mainly with economic and political aspects of the revolutionary transition from capitalism to communism. In Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (1917) he argued that capitalism had reached its final, monopolistic phase and was ripe for overthrow, but that, because of the uneven development of capitalism in different countries, socialism would not triumph in all or most countries simultaneously, as Marx had expected. In State and Revolution (1918), directed against the supposed opportunism of Marxist rivals such as Plekhanov and Karl Kautsky, Lenin elaborated on the Marxist thesis that the state is an instrument of class domination. He laid special stress on a number of points not fully developed by Marx or Engels: One was the need for shattering the bourgeois state machinery and establishing a proletarian state or dictatorship of the proletariat, and another was the distinction between the lower phase of communism, in which people are rewarded in proportion to the work they perform and the state is still needed to repress remnants of the former exploiting classes, and the higher phase, in which rewards are proportional to peoples' needs and the state will wither away because all class antagonisms have been eliminated.
Throughout the twentieth-century Communist world (including China), Lenin was regarded as a philosophical luminary of the first magnitude. In the Soviet philosophical pantheon, he was considered the greatest thinker in history after Marx. Formal education in philosophy in Russia under Communist rule was structured on the premise that Lenin's pronouncements were beyond criticism; his writings were published in vast editions in all major and many minor languages, making him the most widely published philosophical thinker of the twentieth century. In one sense he was also the most influential: Although his conceptual contributions to the development of philosophy as an intellectual discipline were negligible, his ideas provided the impetus and the rationale for policies that materially and often tragically affected the lives of millions of people.
The attack on Stalinism begun by Nikita Khrushchev in 1956 did not immediately disturb the cult of Lenin, whose principles Joseph Stalin was said to have betrayed, not implemented. With the introduction of perestroika in the mid-1980s under Mikhail Gorbachev, however, significant responsibility for the flaws and evils of the Soviet system was traced back to Lenin himself; in particular, his theory of imperialism and his fixation on class antagonisms to the neglect of common human interests and moral values were criticized at the highest levels. When the Soviet Union collapsed at the end of 1991, the Communist Party lost political power and Lenin's philosophical authority all but evaporated in Russia and the former Soviet bloc. Thereafter, educational curricula in Russia and Eastern Europe were reworked to eliminate the vestiges of Marxism-Leninism, and the publication of Lenin's writings ceased.
See also Communism; Dialectical Materialism; Engels, Friedrich; Marxist Philosophy; Russian Philosophy.
Harding, Neil. Lenin's Political Thought. 2 vols. New York: St. Martin's, 1977–1981.
Kolakowski, Leszek. Main Currents of Marxism: Its Rise, Growth, and Dissolution. Vol. 2: The Golden Age. Translated by P. S. Falla. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978.
Lenin, Vladimir Ilich. Collected Works. 45 vols. Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1960–1970.
Reference Index to V. I. Lenin, Collected Works. 2 vols. Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1978–1980.
Scanlan, James P. Marxism in the USSR: A Critical Survey of Current Soviet Thought. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985.
Service, Robert. Lenin: A Biography. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000.
Service, Robert. Lenin: A Political Life. 3 vols. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985–1995.
Wetter, Gustav A. Dialectical Materialism: A Historical and Systematic Survey of Philosophy in the Soviet Union. Translated by Peter Heath. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1958.
Wolfe, Bertram D. Three Who Made a Revolution: A Biographical History. 4th rev. ed. New York: Dell, 1964.
James P. Scanlan (1967, 2005)
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