Anne Frank betrayal book pulled after findings discredited
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
And the program page for the presentation is here: https://spui25.nl/programma/the-betrayal-of-anne-frank-a-ref...
News sites need to get over their aversion to linking outside of their own domain.
One of my least favorite things in news today is when sites will say, “A new report from _NPR_” - and NPR is just a link to example.com/category/npr, and not the original source
SEO is genuinely one of the worst things to happen to journalism.
I grew up in a community filled with old Jews, and I knew lots of people with numbers tattooed on their arms. I wonder how the narrative around the holocaust will change once there is nobody left to speak firsthand as to what happened.
This was "the talk". A discussion of the Shoah with my older brother and me, from my parents, who were kids (in the US) during that time. They simplified it somewhat, but it was absolutely horrible regardless.
As an adult, I read about the Evian Conference[1][2]. It was an opportunity to reduce and even, possibly, stop a genocide. All the participants had to do was to open their countries to jewish refugees. Of all of the participants, only 1 did. Not because it was morally the right thing to do. But because he thought it would enrich him.
After learning of many of the rest of the atrocities, the willing/eager participation in these from eastern European countries ... I am generally unwilling to feel sympathetic in the least, towards any country/people/group that participated in this. This includes those jews who turned into collaborators. They are called kapos btw. They existed.
Tieing this all back to today. There is precisely 1 country on the planet that accepts jews from where ever they are as olim, without appealing to other authorities. They enable jews to return from the diaspora to their historical homeland. Had this country existed in 1939, it is unlikely that the Shoah would have happened.
The same forces that allowed, and actively encouraged the Shoah to bloom are play today. Jews are still global targets. Antisemitism has been blossuming.
The difference? We have somewhere to go. And we won't go out quietly into that good night.
As Golda Meir pointed out with regards to our homeland, we have a secret weapon. We have no other place to go. And history has shown that we should never, ever, under any circumstances, trust another nation to provide security.
[1] https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/the-evian-...
This is an excellent point, although I do wish most Jews would Israel would lead by example with their treatment of Palestinians, which currently is a shande
It is difficult to discuss the history, which is part of the history of anti-semetism. I think it was that anti-semitism and the Evian Conference that directly led to the British Mandate. But if attempting to understand these events, it is difficult because even attempting to talk about what these leaders and many others believed, their belief in stereotypes, draws accusations of anti-semetism. But I am going to risk it, not because it is a valid perspective, but because it happened, it was a common belief that Jewish populations put economic strain on a country by nepotistic practices and hoarding wealth, and this belief was behind the reluctance of the Evian Conference participants to accept refugees; to avoid accepting Jewish refugees, the British Mandate created Israel. The British just grabbed hold of a pre-existing dream of some Jews (Zionism) to return to the "Promised Land," and promoted it. But I think the truth behind this detail of anti-semitism is that the lazy envy the industrious and successful, and unjustly those among Jewish populations that were successful and wealthy became representative of all Jews. The fallacy here is hasty generalization, thus the sentiment was always invalid.
The British Mandate was a very weird thing because it handed victory over the current residents of the area to a conquered (effectively) alien nation. But Israel would not have been able to exist if not for the sheer amount of backbreaking labor and the terraforming of non-arable land by the original settlers (of the 20th Century, but migrations of Jewish populations to the Four Holy cities predated the British Mandate by about 4 centuries).
Contrasting the horrifying treatment of Jewish populations with the horrifying treatment of Native American populations and the horrifying treatment of African populations reveals what is distinct in anti-semitism compared to other forms of racism. It was and is all very very bad, so it is a bit of a shock that anti-Palestinian racism is also a thing and rampant. It seems for every identifiable culture there is a particular flavor of racism. Fundamentally, racism is ignorance and hatred overpowering the ability to reason.
That seems poorly worded. Assigning the 'responsibility' for her arrest to someone other than the people who made her existence illegal is very harsh indeed.
Those who shared information with the Gestapo about where Jews were hiding were knowing accomplices in genocide.
They can be responsible for that, if there is evidence to support it, without being responsible for the arrest. Holding the jewish person at the end of the long chain of actions 'responsible' for the whole situation doesn't really seem that much different from blaming the victims themselves.
But this sort of 'posthumous trial by media' is revolting in its own right, especially because the instigators are simply trying to make a buck off the back of Anne Frank (they're not the first and likely won't be the last).
Apparently the theory is that he gave up this family to save his own family, which is a horrific situation to be in. So even if we knew this is what actually happened, and we don't, it's an obvious mitigating circumstance.
The initial price was 2,50 (Dutch Guilders) at the start of the war, it went up to 40 towards the end.
Dark numbers are said (no without discussion) to be up to 40% of the jews in hiding where sold out.
https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_van_Liempt
To portray this as a 'national hobby' is beyond disgusting, a very small fraction (Van Liempt identified a band of about 50 individuals) of the Dutch population ended up collaborating with the Germans on this, the bulk did what they could under exceedingly dangerous circumstances risking their own lives and the lives of their families in order to help others.
This seems like it is less about concerns about whether the book is true, and more that people did not want the theory to be true.
I find this trend of conflating the two very problematic.
And to be honest, even if Anne Frank was betrayed by a Jewish man to save his own family, it in no way makes the Holocaust any less horrific and in no way excuses any of the guilt of the Nazis. I think it actually makes it more tragic in that people were faced with ethical and moral choices they should never have been faced with. (Having to decide between the lives of strangers and the lives of your family is a horrendous choice)
Not entirely. Here's another article:
https://nltimes.nl/2022/03/22/historians-contradict-findings...
No, historians are not there to speculate, make up stuff and then act overconfident.
Accusing someone's grandparent of a heinous crime to sell a book is a bit different, and, well, I mean, nothing's stopping you doing it, it's _legal_, but unless you can prove it (as they appear to have failed to), people aren't going to be too thrilled about it.
Like, this wasn't a sober academic paper, it was a mass-market pop-history book.
[Edit] I don't mean you, rsynnott.
My father fought for the British Army in Malaya. I'm not campaigning for the suppression of information about the crimes the brits committed there.
Among my ancestors are people who were in the cotton business, in Liverpool; the ships went from Liverpool (manufactured goods) to the Gold Coast of Africa (sell goods, pick up slaves) to American colonies (sell slaves, buy cotton), and back to Liverpool. I'm not campaigning to block that information either.
Perhaps the BBC article is just really badly written.
- Now a new report by a team of World War Two experts and historians has said its research does not stand up to scrutiny.
- The new report into the book contradicted its findings, calling its work "amateurish".
- "There is not any serious evidence for this grave accusation," the experts found.
I'm sick and tired of all these folks that effectively abuse her again and again, and in this particular case that should be doubled because not only do they hitch their wagon to her name (and fame) they also unjustly try to pinpoint the blame for her betrayal to the Germans on a particular individual in a terribly slipshod way.