Ivor Markman
Dachau Death March (Todesmarsche)
Liberation of Dachau, 29 April 1945 - Death Toll: 32 000
"Sunday, just after the noon meal, the air was unusually still.
"The big field outside the compound was deserted.
"Suddenly someone began running toward the gate at the other side of the field.
"Others followed.
"The word was shouted through the mass of gray, tired prisoners.
'Americans!'
"That word repeated, yelled over the shoulders in throaty Polish, in Italian, in Russian, and Dutch and in the familiar ring of French.
"The first internee was shot down as he rushed toward the gate by the guard.
"Yet they kept running and shouting through eager lips and unbelieving eyes:
" 'Americans! Dachau Liberated' ".
The Official Report by the U.S. Seventh Army
HELL'S GATE : A replica of the wrought-iron gate and sign which greeted prisoners when they were thrown into Dachau concentration camp outside Munich, Germany. The sign is a chilling reminder of the atrocities committed during the fanatical reign of Adolf Hitler, fuhrer of Nazi Germany and reads "Arbeit Macht Frei" (Labour Makes Free). The original sign was allegedly stolen by a US army officer and replaced in 1965 when Dachau became a memorial site. In November, 2014, the replica was stolen but was found in Bergen, Norway, in December, 2016.
SEEKING LIBERATORS: Bernard Offen, a survivor of numerous concentration camps who now lives in California, was at Dachau in 1995 searching for men of the US 42 "Rainbow" Division who liberated him from captivity. He never found anyone. Here he is seen in front of the famous monument and wall erected on the parade ground to remember the victims.
DEATH CARRIAGE: US troops stare in shocked disbelievement at one of the body filled cars on the railway line leading to Dachau. The train was simply abandoned after the SS guards all ran away.
Photo: Eric Schwab/AFP/Getty Images
DEATH TRAIN: April 1945 - Corpses in the open railcars of the Dachau death train. The train consisted of 39 rail cars containing the bodies of between 2,000 and 3,000 prisoners evacuated from Buchenwald on April 7, 1945. They arrived in Dachau on April 28, 1945. As the Allied troops approached the camps, Himmler ordered the camp commanders to evacuate the prisoners. Many were marched to the Dachau camp, located in the central remains of Reich territory.
By Ivor Markman
Twenty-eight years after visiting the extermination camp at Dachau, 20 kilometres to the north of Munich, Germany, the impact and memories still echo incredibly strongly in my mind.
Although I shot many colour photographs, the images only seem appropriate when viewed in black and white.
It was wet and cold on April 29, 1995, the day the 50th anniversary was commemorated and, understandably, was terribly depressing.
1st Lt. William Cowling wrote the following in a letter to his parents the day following the liberation:
"We rode in a Jeep with a guard out ahead of the boys and we were several hundred yards ahead as we approached the Camp.
"The first thing we came to was a railroad track leading out of the Camp with a lot of open boxcars on it.
"As we crossed the track and looked back into the cars the most horrible sight I have ever seen (up to that time) met my eyes.
"The cars were loaded with dead bodies.
"Most of them were naked and all of them skin and bones.
"Honest, their legs and arms were only a couple of inches around and they had no buttocks at all.
"Many of the bodies had bullet holes in the back of their heads.
"It made us sick at our stomach and so mad we could do nothing but clinch our fists. I couldn't even talk."
With information which has become available since the release of previously classified documents, Sunday, April 29, 1945, was the day when US troops, members of the 45th Infantry Division, were so outraged and upset when they saw how the German SS guards had treated their victims they simply rounded them up and executed a number of them on the spot.
In the book Hitler's Last Day by Jonathan Mayo and Emma Craigie, it is stated that earlier that fateful day soldiers reported finding an abandoned train at a railway siding consisting of 39 railway wagons used to transport 4 800 prisoners.
The wagons were filled with dead bodies - "some with their eyes open, as if staring at the Americans."
Only 800 were still alive - the others had been left to die.
They were left so shocked and profoundly disturbed by what they found they shouted "Let's get those Nazi dogs! Take no prisoners! Don't take any SS alive!"
- Sam Dann.
"On that Sunday, we entered the camp.
"Angered by the sight of it, we hauled down that Nazi flag and burned it!
"Angered, yes, and even more furious, enraged, even dismayed, disoriented, and made violently ill.
"For we had just learned a most traumatic lesson.
"We found out why we were fighting this war.
"True, we were aware of the fact that we were fighting for our country, our freedom, our way of life - for justice and even to save the world.
"We believed it as an accepted truth.
"But we believed it in our heads.
"Now, suddenly, as if we had been struck by a bolt of lightning, it became a revealed truth.
"It had burned its way into our being.
"Yes, Dachau was a lesson, a most expensive lesson. "We had to pay for it with our innocence."
Dachau, April 29, 1945, the Rainbow Liberation Memoirs.
The thing which most struck me when I entered the concentration camp compound was how clean it was.
Where were the smells one so often reads about?
The walls were clean, the pathways were neat, and (thank goodness) there were no bodies lying about.
But why are there no photos at the sites where all these atrocities happened?
In the room attached to the crematorium, why was the photo (see opposite) not placed where the photographer stood?
The deathly connection needs to be there - this, after all, is where it happened. It took many years for me to realise I had been there but where was the documentation and proof?
It should have been pointed out to me and all the other visitors who come to see the evidence of the Nazis brutality, but there was nothing.
The signs also, exclude English.
This I found disappointing - after all, English and Russian were the languages of the death camp liberators.
The shame of the German people has prevented them from talking about their heinous crimes.
They still hate the Jews.
Perhaps now they are blaming the Jews for all the bad publicity the Nazis earned for Germany.
Perhaps it would have been so much more convenient for Germany if the Jews simply went away and let it be? Who knows!
Dachau is a most terribly depressing place to be but what happened there is going to remain the shame of the Gerrman nation for a long, long time.
ROOM OF DEATH: This is another sight which the shocked troops of the US Seventh Army witnessed when they liberated Dachau concentration camp on May 14, 1945. I walked past this room in 1995 but there was absolutely no recording or photograph to tell visitors what had happened there. It was only 21 years later - after I found this photograph - that I found out about these horrible incidents. The room is still there, situated right next to the crematorium, but now it is clean, empty - and sterile. Photo: Associated Press
UNFORGETTABLE STARE: An emaciated 18-year-old Russian girl looks into the camera lens during the liberation of Dachau concentration camp in 1945. Dachau was the first German concentration camp, opened in 1933. More than 200 000 people were detained between 1933 and 1945, and 31 591 deaths were recorded, mostly from disease, malnutrition and suicide. Unlike Auschwitz, Dachau was not explicitly an extermination camp, but conditions were so horrific that hundreds died every week.
Photo: Eric Schwab/AFP/Getty Images
MEMORIAL CANDLE: An elderly woman places a memorial candle at the foot of the memorial wall in Dachau concentration camp on April 29, 1995, - exactly 50 years after the camp was liberated by American troops.
I wanted to speak to this woman but she didn't speak English. I wondered: Was she a survivor?
CAMP OF DEATH: Visitors from all over the world stand at the entrance into Dachau concentration camp.
It is a terribly depressing place with a lookout tower situated on the roof. Add to this the gloomy overcast sky which I experienced and you can just imagine how I felt. It is a sight which still sends shivers of depression shooting through my body. The construction on the roof is the watchtower.
THE OVENS: A man lights a memorial candle for loved ones in front of the ovens where the bodies of thousands of victims of Nazi cruelty were cremated during the Second World War. A really sick sign on a ceramic tile is set into the top left corner of the crematorium which reads, in Dutch, "BROEDERS VAARWEL". When translated, this means "Farewell Brothers". Three of the five single ovens in the crematorium can be seen in the building called Baracke X. The cremation ovens had two sets of doors; the first set of doors opened outward.
The firm which made the ovens, Topf & Sons, was founded in 1878 in Erfurt, near the site which later became Buchenwald concentration camp.
The firm's chief engineer, Kurt Prüfer, pioneered a design which complied with the strict government regulations set forth in 1934 stating that naked flames were not to come in contact with the coffin and the cremation was to be smoke and odour free.
Following a massive outbreak of typhus in Buchenwald in 1939 (Buchenwald was established on Ettersberg hill near Weimar, Germany, in July 1937), Topf and Sons were contacted by the Nazis and told to come up with a way to dispose of the victims.
After the design proved workable, the Nazis again contracted Topf and Sons and told them to provide similar furnaces for the Belzec, Dachau and Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camps. Larger ovens were specially designed for Auschwitz-Birkenau.
Prüfer knew exactly what the incinerators were being used for as he had been to Auschwitz and Dachau on five occasions.
After the war he told his Russian interrogators:
“I have known since spring 1943 that innocent human beings were being liquidated in Auschwitz gas chambers and that their corpses were subsequently incinerated..."
In 1945, Prüfer was detained by the Americans for a few weeks and then arrested by the Soviets, interrogated, and sent to a Gulag where he stayed until his death in 1952.
Ludwig Topf, the firm's chief officer, committed suicide in 1945 while his brother, Ernst-Wolfgang Topf fled to West Germany where he was arrested and put on trial by the Americans.
He claimed not to know how the incinerators were to be used and placed all blame on his brother Ludwig and Prüfer.
ELECTRIC FENCE: The current which once surged through the wire of these electric fences surrounding Dachau concentration camp has been disconnected and you will no longer be electrocuted if you touch them. However, during the Second World War, many hapless souls threw themselves against the wires and died rather than continue living under such wretched conditions. The huts in the background are reconstructions as all the original barracks were either burnt in 1945. Those which remained were torn down in 1964, as the cost of maintaining them would have been too costly and the dilapidated wooden buildings "would have spoiled the appearance" of the present Memorial Site. Four hundred prisoners were shoved into each barrack room, which measured 10×9 metres.
JEWISH MEMORIAL: The Jewish memorial at Dachau concentration camp was designed by Frankfurt architect Hermann Zwi Guttmann and was constructed using basalt lava. It is built two metres into the ground, symbolic of the underground gas chambers into which thousands of victims were herded to their deaths by the Nazi guards who lied to them by saying they were going to be "deloused" in the showers.
The 5.5 metres sloped pavement leading into the underground prayer-room is lined with a symbolic iron fence, reminiscent of the barbed wire fence around the camp.
The location of the Jewish Memorial is close to where the original disinfection hut, used to kill lice, once stood.
The hut was converted into a dining hall after the war when the camp was used to house German refugees.
In November 1963, it was demolished to make way for the Jewish Memorial.
The area behind the monument was used to breed rabbits. Rabbit fur was used to make the headgear for German air force crews.
When Heinrich Himmler came to visit the camp, he brought his small daughter, Gudrun, to visit the rabbits.
One of the main architects of the Holocaust, Heinrich Himmler (centre) and his daughter Gudrun (later Gudrun Burwitz, who never renounced Nazi ideology and who, until her death on May 24, 2018, repeatedly justified her father's actions during the war) were photographed with Karl Wolff, Himmler's Chief of Personal Staff, right, while visiting a concentration camp, circa 1941.
Wolff was also Hitler's SS Liaison Officer until 1943. He ended World War II as the Supreme Commander of all SS forces in Italy.
In the background is the notorious Reinhard Heydrich, who was the Senior Group Leader and General of Police, chief of the Reich Main Security Office which included the Gestapo, Kripo and SD.
In January 1942, Heydrich chaired the Wannsee Conference at which plans for the Final Solution to the Jewish Question were formalised.
Four months after the conference, on May 27, 1942, he was critically wounded in an ambush on his car (right) while driving in Prague.
A British Special Operations Executive (SOE) team of Czech and Slovak soldiers were sent by the Czechoslovak government-in-exile to assassinate him.
He died from his injuries a week later.
The Nazis took revenge by totally destroying the villages of Lidice and Lezaky and shooting all men 16 years and older.
All the women and children were sent to the extermination camps and only a few survived.
INSIDE LOOKING OUT: The view from the inside of the Synagogue looking outwards. Construction began in September 1964. The memorial was dedicated on May 7, 1967.
MENORAH: This granite shaft passes through an opening in the roof and is symbolic of the souls of the victims who passed through the crematorium chimneys. It is topped by a seven-arm Menorah representing the holy relic of Jerusalem's ancient temple.
GRANITE SARCOPHAGUS: An inscription on the sides of a sarcophagus details the contents as "the ashes of unknown concentration camp victims".
The French inscription reads "Cendres du concentrationnaire inconnu".
LUMINOUS WREATHS: People from all over the world came to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the liberation of Dachau concentration camp. The sky was grey, the rain fell, but the bright colours of the flowers glowed in remembrance of the thousands of people who died within the confines of the camps.
WREATHS: People came to Dachau concentration camp from all over the world on April 29, 1995, to mark the 50th anniversary of the liberation of the death camp by US troops.
ALONG THIS ROUTE: Thousands of Holocaust victims passed along this railway route during the trip to their murders at Dachau concentration camp. In one recorded instance the Nazis used wagons to transport 4 800 prisoners from Buchenwald concentration camp to Dachau. Only 800 survived. The rest died in the wagons. Without the assistance of the railway system, Hitler's "Final Solution" would probably not have been possible.
SAME ROUTE: A modern commuter train speeds past a memorial to Holocaust victims - along the same tracks which were used to transport innocent victims to the concentration camps. This is where the train, pulling 39 carriages full of dead Jews, was found by the liberating American Army. The Deutsche Reichsbahn was the name of the national railway system used by the Nazis and their allies for the forced deportation of Holocaust victims to the extermination, forced labour and concentration camps.
ALL THAT'S LEFT: Dachau was not just a solitary camp but was a camp system which grew to include nearly 100 sub-camps, most of which were work camps or "Arbeitskommandos," and which were located throughout southern Germany and Austria.
The cement slab on which this group of Holocaust survivors, families and friends are standing is the floor of one of the wash-houses and is all that is left of one of the surrounding camps.
All the accommodation and administrative buildings were pulled down and the land is now used to grow crops.
PRISONER ACCOMMODATION: The interior of one of the crude bungalows at one of the satellite camps showing the sordid and cramped conditions in which prisoners were forced to live. The roof is made from a series of interlocking, clay, bottle-shaped, bricks and was partially sunk into the ground in an attempt to camouflage the camp from Allied aerial reconnaissance. The door at the far end is level with the ground outside. The black vertical stripes are from the wire screen preventing entry into the structure as it is regarded as unsafe.
CAMP RUINS: A Holocaust survivor, who emigrated to Israel after the war, returned to Dachau for the 50th anniversary of the liberation of the camps. Here he contemplates the remains of a bungalow from Lager 7 concentration camp at Friedhof Landsberg where he was kept interned. Very little is left of the concentration camp, one of the Dachau satellite camps.
WOODEN SCREAM: A tortured face sculpture lies on its side in the dirt at one of the Dachau satellite camps.
It is made out of railway sleepers, symbolically representing the railway system which was utilised to transport millions of people to their deaths in the concentration camp system.
A small ceremony is being held in the background to commemorate the liberation of the death camps.
BARBED WIRE: Moshe Prusak, one of the survivors of Lager 7 at Friedhof Landsberg holds a small piece of barbed wire which once kept him interned as a prisoner.
Very little is left of the concentration camp, one of the satellite camps of Dachau.
MEMORIAL CANDLE: An elderly holocaust survivor lights a memorial candle at the sculpture representing a screaming face at Lager 7, one of the Dachau satellite camps.
STORY OF TEARS: Holocaust survivor Uri Chanoch addresses the assembled guests during the unveiling of one of the Death March statues outside Munich in 1995.
FOREVER ENTOMBED: Special arrangements had to be made to allow this group of survivors, family and friends, to have access to the Weingut 2 (Vineyard 2) bunker in the Iglinger Forest in Bavaria. It is situated approximately 60 km west of Munich and was built by the Nazis using forced slave labour.
An unknown number of Holocaust victims lie entombed in the concrete walls.
Somehow, either they slipped or they were pushed or they simply collapsed through weakness, they fell into the wet concrete while it was being poured and were simply left there to drown, choke or suffocate to death.
During the Second World War, the Allied bombers were gaining the upper hand through the use of aerial bombing and many armaments and manufacturing factories were destroyed. Nazi leadership considered it essential to protect the aircraft plants so on May 4, 1944, a decision was taken to implement the project "Ringed Pigeon" and erect bomb-proof bunkers at Landsberg am Lech (where the Weingut 2 bunker is located), Mühldorf am Inn, the Rhine and Prague.
The bunkers were all more than 400 meters long, 86 meters wide and 26 meters high and were intended to be used for the manufacture of the Messerschmitt Me 262, Focke-Wulf 190 and the Dornier Do 335.
On June 18, 1944, the first 1,000 forced labourers arrived at Landsberg. They lived under inhumane conditions at Landsberg and Kaufering camps.
In all a total of 30,000 workers, more than half of whom were concentration camp prisoners, were involved in the construction of the bunkers.
The heavy work and inhuman conditions, such as lack of food, beatings, illness and cold, caused enormous casualties among the prisoners with the result that 15,000 forced labourers died during “Ringed Pigeon”.
INSIDE THE BUNKER: The group was escorted to the bunker interior by German officers who politely answered questions and showed the building plans. Within the bunker, there is an underground facility which was erected by concentration camp prisoners towards the end of the Second World War. There are walls within the structure and there is only one spot where you can still see the original wall. The group paused at the spot for a while and said Kaddish, the Jewish prayer one says for the souls of the departed.
AIR FORCE HOST: The high ranking German officer, who showed the group around the Second World War bunker, gave a brief introduction about the building before the group was shown around the inside.
WEINGUT ll IS HERE: A German air force officer points out the location of the Weingut ll bunker.
RISKY PHOTO: As a young boy, a shocked Benno Gantner stood on the balcony of his house and watched the Death March as it passed by. At great risk to his personal safety, he took photographs of the hapless victims while hiding behind the drawn curtains upstairs.
DARING PHOTOGRAPHER: Benno Gantner, who, as a young boy, photographed the Death March as it passed his house in Percha, just outside Munich. He would probably have been shot on the spot had the SS guards seen him. Thanks to him there now exists documentary evidence of the tragic event. Here he is standing next to a painting he did years later when recalling the incident.
Shortly after the massive Soviet summer offensive in 1944 in eastern Belarus allowed the Soviet forces to overrun the first of the main Nazi concentration camps, Lublin and Majdanek, SS chief (Reichsfuehrer SS) Heinrich Himmler ordered all prisoners in concentration camps and sub-camps to be evacuated toward the interior of the Reich.
Not wanting the world to know about the Holocaust, the SS decided to abandon the Nazi concentration camps, moving or destroying all evidence of the atrocities committed there.
The Soviets advanced at such a speed the SS were unable to complete the destruction of Majdanek and the discovery of their atrocities was immediately publicized worldwide. Footage of the camp’s liberation and surviving prisoners’ testimony served as proof of the horrors of the Nazi ideology.
The evacuations had three aims:
(1) SS leaders didn’t want live prisoners to fall into Allied hands and to tell their stories.
(2) The SS believed they needed the prisoners to maintain their armaments production.
(3) Some SS leaders, including Himmler, believed they could use Jewish concentration camp prisoners as hostages to bargain for a separate peace with the west and thereby guaranteeing the Nazi regime’s survival.
As winter approached the Allies reached the German borders and achieved full control of German skies.
The SS increasingly evacuated concentration camp prisoners on forced marches.
By January 1945, the Third Reich stood on the verge of defeat.
After the failure of the surprise German Ardennes offensive in December 1944, Anglo-American forces in the west invaded Germany.
As evacuations depended increasingly on forced marches and travel by open rail car the number of prisoners who died of exhaustion and exposure along the routes increased dramatically.
This encouraged an understandable perception among the prisoners that the Germans intended to kill all of them during the march.
The SS guards had strict orders to kill prisoners who could no longer walk or travel and they brutally mistreated the prisoners.
During these forced marches, they shot hundreds of prisoners who could not keep pace or who collapsed through exhaustion and starvation.
Until almost the last day of the war, the German SS guards continued to force-march the prisoners to various camps in Germany.
BENNO'S PHOTO: A view of the concentration camp prisoners' death march as they passed through Wolfratshausen. Secretly taken from Benno Gantner's window in April 1945.
NO HELP: Few civilians gave aid to the prisoners on the death marches.
OTHER SHOTS: Another of Benno Gantner's secret photos of the Death March.
BONE QUARRY: This is all that is left of the Friedhof satellite concentration camp. The camp was demolished and callously turned into a rock quarry. When human bones were dug up, legal action was taken against the company doing the digging. It took a court order to stop the contractor from doing further work on the site.
ONLY SIGN: This is the only sign indicating where Friedhof concentration camp used to be. Friedhof was one of many Dachau satellite camps. There is a parking lot and a dirt road leading to the site where thousands of prisoners were housed. Prisoners were brought here from Auschwitz, Danzig-Stutthof, Vaihingen/Enz, Dachau, Buchenwald and Bisingen. As the US troops approached the area the prisoners left in the camp were forced to partake in what became known as the "Todesmarsch" (Death March).
DUMPING PROHIBITED: A Holocaust survivor stands beside a sign at Friedhof concentration camp which reads "Unloading of debris and garbage is prohibited! X Riebel, Earthworks."
PEOPLE WITHOUT FACES: Sculptor Professor Hubert von Pilgrim and one of the castings of "Mense Ohne Gesichter," (People without Faces). Von Pilgrim won a national competition to design a monument to commemorate the infamous Death March (Todesmarschs). Twenty-two castings of the statue were made and placed at various places marking the route the concentration camp victims were forced to take in the middle of the 1945 winter. The text, roughly translated, reads "Here, in the last days of the war, in April 1945, passed the suffering prisoners from the Dachau concentration camp."
CLOSE UP: A frontal view of Professor von Pilgrim's sculpture, "Mense Ohne Gesichter," (People without Faces). The survivors, families and friends placed flowers on the sculptures.
WHITE ROSE HEROINE: The sole surviving member of the White Rose resistance movement in 1995, Dr Marie-Luise Schultze-Jahn, (previously Marie-Luise Jahn) at the unveiling of one of the 22 casts of the sculptures commemorating the 1945 Death March.
In 1943 she was arrested by the Gestapo because of her activities and sentenced to death for treason.
Fortunately she had a brilliant lawyer who managed to get her sentence commuted to 12 years imprisonment.
She was released by Allied troops in 1945.
In 1940 Dr Marie-Luise Schulze-Jahn was studying chemistry at the University of Munich in 1940 when she became a close friend of Hans Conrad Leipeltand, a member of the White Rose resistance group.
White Rose conducted an intellectual, anonymous, leaflet, non-violent and graffiti campaign during the war calling for active opposition to the Nazi regime.
After Hans and Sophie Scholl and Christoph Probst were imprisoned (and then executed) she continued to publish the Scholl leaflets and collected money to aid the widow of Kurt Huber.
Huber was a university professor and resistance member who assisted in the drawing up of the White Rose's pamphlets. He was arrested by the Gestapo and after a sham show trial, during which Chief Justice Roland "Raving Roland" Freisler embarrassed Huber in a demeaning verbal attack, he was sentenced to death for mutiny and beheaded by guillotine.
In October 1943 Jahn was also arrested by the Gestapo, charged with treason and sentenced to death at her trial in 1944 - but thanks to her attorney, the sentence was changed by the Volksgerichtshof (People's Court) to 12 years' imprisonment.
After her liberation she studied medicine at the University of Tübingen and worked as a physician in Bad Tölz.
In 1987 she was a founding member of the White Rose Foundation and a member of the executive board until 2002.
She died on June 22, 2010, in Bad Tölz.
HOLY MEN: Ministers from various church groups and a rabbi sit together during the unveiling of one of the sculptures.
NEVER ENDING JOURNEY: The victims of the Death March appear to be frozen in time in this statue as they mark the route taken in 1945.
PRIVATE BENEFACTOR: Survivors Bernard Offen, David Levin and Solly Ganor with Otto-Ernst Holthaus, (right) a wealthy German businessman who paid for this route marker at Mahnmal.
TRANSPORT WAGON MEMORIAL: This memorial in Seeheim to the 6 000 000 Jews killed by the Nazis is called "Transport of People," and is made up out of the remains of an actual cattle wagon used to transport Holocaust victims. It was constructed by sculptor Jorg Kicherers (with glasses, in the left front of the sculpture).
As I left Germany I was left with a deep inner ache which I cannot really describe.
It was a sort of mental anguish accompanied by a feeling of intense regret.
What, I asked myself, caused all these people to turn on the Jews and to commit such horrible acts.
I never knew at the time of my visit to Germany in 1995 and it was only a few years ago that I found a partial list of approximately 100 members of my extended family who were machine-gunned to death by the Nazis in their tiny shtetl in Lithuania where my father was born.
If my family had not emigrated I would probably not be around today.
(Since writing this piece I subsequently discovered a list of names on the Yad Vashem site which lists the number of Markmans killed by the Nazis. There are 18 pages containing the name "Markman" and each page contains 50 names. Do the maths and you will see that comes to 900 people. I am still reeling from the shock.)
So why is there so much resentment towards the Jewish nation?
Is this man's basic barbaric instinct - to kill?
Does man think that by killing others his problems will go away and the way to Utopia will lie ahead?
The Jewish religion is one of love and caring for your fellow man - anyone who has taken the time to study Judaism will know that.
The Jews have given so much to the world yet instead of thanks they receive hatred and death threats.
Why are the Jews accused of drinking the blood of young Christian virgins during the Passover meal?
Do these accusers not realise that the Kosher food laws strictly forbid the consumption of blood?
Was the Holocaust a lesson for the Jews to not trust other people?
Why are we told "Thou shalt not kill!" and yet G-d allowed all this killing - and still it continues?
Was this a way of telling the Jews to stick together or was this G-d's way of returning His Nation to the Promised Land?
When one realises the entire country of Israel could fit into an area the size of the Kruger National Park, it becomes clear just how small and vulnerable the country is and of that area, half of it is desert.
Yet the Jews have made it bloom, producing all sorts of irrigation aids which are now used throughout the world and producing enough food to be able to export to the rest of the world.
Israel goes to the aid of foreign nations whenever it can - it even gives aid to enemy soldiers - yet without asking for or receiving thanks.
Yet, in spite of all the good, the number of United Nations resolutions voted against it is beyond logic.
From a small nation of refugees, Israel has grown into a powerful nation and it continues to be a beacon of hope for mankind.
It took the Holocaust to reunite the Jewish nation - will it take another Holocaust for the rest of the world to wake up?
For example, click on these links to see how Israel has helped the world:
http://uk.businessinsider.com/the-coolest-tech-startups-in-israel-2016-11/#17-cortica-5
