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1941: Mass Murder
 pg. 219 
 
This first German propaganda photograph portrays "happy" Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto--celebrating at a cocktail club.
Photo: Yad Vashem / United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Photo Archive
This second German propaganda photograph portrays "happy" Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto--performing a play. The Germans created such scenes to persuade Jews that they could expect good treatment as long as they cooperated with the Reich government and went willingly to the ghettos. Once collected into ghettos, the Jews were even more at the "harsh mercy" of the German murderers and their local collaborators.
Photo: YIVO Institute for Jewish Research / United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Photo Archive
Martin Bormann

As the Führer's trusted private secretary, Martin Bormann had unmatched direct access to Hitler. This made him one of the most powerful and feared figures in the Third Reich.

Bormann gradually wormed his way into the Nazi elite. In 1941 Hitler appointed him to direct the newly created Party Chancellery. In this post he wielded enormous power, screening all communications and contacts with the Führer. Working anonymously behind the scenes, the short, stocky Bormann, dubbed the "Brown Eminence" in Nazi Party circles, manipulated the vague boundaries of his authority. A virtual "secret ruler" of Germany, he strengthened the policy-making role of the Party, launched vicious attacks on Christianity, and issued hundreds of memorandums dealing with Jews and Slavs. "The Slavs are to work for us," he proclaimed. "In so far as we do not need them, they may die."

Bormann stayed with Hitler to the end, and was apparently killed in May 1945 while trying to escape from Berlin.
Photo: Life Picture Service / United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Photo Archive

 February 6, 1941: German General Erwin Rommel is named to command the Afrika Korps in North Africa.
 February 15, 1941: Germans begin deportations of 1000 Viennese Jewish men per week to a ghetto at Kielce, Poland, as well as a camp at Lublin, Poland.
 February 19, 1941: German police who enter an Amsterdam, Holland, ice cream parlor are sprayed with ammonia by a protective device installed by the German-Jewish owners; See February 22-23, 1941.
 February 22-23, 1941: SS troops raid the Jewish Quarter in Amsterdam, Holland, in reprisal for the ammonia incident of February 19. About 400 Jews are arrested, beaten, and deported to the concentration camp at Buchenwald, Germany, where some are tortured to death. Some will be transferred to the concentration camp at Mauthausen, Austria, where most will be tortured and subsequently executed in the camp's stone quarry; See March 3, 1941.
 
1941: Mass Murder
 pg. 219 
The Holocaust Chronicle
© 2009 Publications International, Ltd.