The last known photograph of Anne taken in May 1942, taken for a passport photo.

Her voice has come to symbolise the Holocaust, one victim among the six million who spoke for them all, a testament to all who perished with her.

Anne Frank died aged 15 in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in early March 1945, possibly the 7th.

Born on 12 June 1929, Anne and her elder sister, Margot, lived their early years in Frankfurt. But in 1933, following Hitler’s appointment as Chancellor, the Franks, as a Jewish family, became concerned for their safety as the Nazis introduced increasingly fanatical anti-Semitic legislation.

The Franks Move to Amsterdam

In late 1933 Anne’s father, Otto, was offered and accepted a business opportunity in Amsterdam. In February 1934 his wife and daughters joined him in the Netherlands. Of the half-million Jews living in Germany in 1933, about 320,000 had emigrated by 1939.

In May 1940 Hitler launched his attack against France and the Low Countries. Rotterdam was heavily bombed and, on 15 May, the Dutch, fearing further losses, surrendered.

Occupied Netherlands

Life for the Jewish population in Nazi-occupied Netherlands became increasingly intolerable and dangerous. In July 1942 Otto Frank received an order to report his eldest daughter for a work camp. The Franks, fearing for their lives, decided they had no option but to go into hiding.

On 6 July 1942 the Franks moved into their secret annexe, behind Otto’s business premises at 263 Prinsengracht, and in doing so left their flat in a state of chaos to give the impression of a family on the run. The annexe consisted of three floors, its entrance concealed by a large, wooden bookcase. They were to live in this self-imposed incarceration for over two years.

From the outside, the Franks were provided with food, provisions, news and humanity by a small group of trusted business associates of Otto’s. A week after moving in, they were joined by Hermann and Auguste van Pels and their 16-year-old son, Peter. On 16 November, they were joined by a German dentist and veteran of the First World War, Fritz Pfeffer.

Anne and Peter had a brief dalliance, which, although pleasurable, was, for such a young girl, confusing. For Anne, becoming aware of her sexuality but in such a confined and claustrophobic atmosphere and tainted with the lack of normality and the constant nag of fear, it must have been unbearably confusing and difficult. But there was always the solace and consolation of her diary.

The Diary

Anne had always shown a propensity to write and on her thirteenth birthday, a month before their flight, she received from her father an autograph book. With its thick blank pages, tartan cover and lock and key, Anne was delighted by her present and immediately began using it as a diary.

As with many a teenager, a diary is a constant companion and source of comfort, allowing the writer to express their feelings, their frustrations, their fears and hopes for the future, and their beliefs and changing attitudes. And so it was for Anne, an ordinary girl with an extraordinary talent, in extraordinary circumstances. The last entry in Anne’s diary is dated August 1, 1944:

Believe me, I’d like to listen, but it doesn’t work, because if I’m quiet and serious, everyone thinks I’m putting on a new act and I have to save myself with a joke, and then I’m not even talking about my own family, who assume I must be sick, stuff me with aspirins and sedatives, feel my neck and forehead to see if I have a temperature, ask about my bowel movements and berate me for being in a bad mood, until I just can’t keep it up anymore, because when everybody starts hovering over me, I get cross, then sad, and finally end up turning my heart inside out, the bad part on the outside and the good part on the inside, and keep trying to find a way to become what I’d like to be and what I could be if… if only there were no other people in the world.

Yours, Anne M. Frank

Three days later, on 4 August, Nazi security police, led by an Austrian called Karl Josef Silberbauer, burst into the annexe and arrested the Franks and their companions. They had been betrayed but by whom we will never know. The call was taken by Silberbauer’s commanding officer, a SS lieutenant called Julius Dettmann, who merely said the call had come from a ‘reliable source’. (Following the end of the war, Dettmann was arrested and interned as a prisoner of war. He committed suicide in July 1945). Otto Frank was giving Peter van Pels an English lesson when the Nazis entered the annexe. On seeing Anne, Silberbauer said to Otto, ‘You have a lovely daughter’. He couldn’t believe that the Franks and their friends had been in the annexe for over two years. As proof, Otto showed Silberbauer the pencil lines where he had charted Anne and Margot’s growth since 1942.

Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen

The Franks, the van Pels and Fritz Pfeffer, the German dentist, were taken to a prison in Amsterdam, then to the Westerbork transit camp, in the northeast of the country. On 3 September 1944, all eight were deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau in Poland on the last train to leave the Netherlands for the extermination camp. Immediately, on arriving at Auschwitz, Otto was separated from his wife and daughters – he never saw them again. He did, however, remain with Peter van Pels, and was reunited with Pfeffer. Pfeffer died in Auschwitz on 20 December 1944 while Peter was put on a death march out of Auschwitz in January 1945 and died in Mauthausen, Austria, aged 18, on 5 May 1945, the very day the camp was liberated. Peter’s parents both died as well, his father gassed.

In October 1944 the girls were relocated to Bergen-Belsen whilst their mother remained in Auschwitz where she was to die from starvation.

Margot and Anne, already weak, deteriorated further and when a typhus epidemic swept through the camp killing almost 20,000 inmates, the sisters were amongst the victims. The exact date of their deaths is not known but it was early March 1945, just weeks before the camp’s liberation.

Otto and his daughter’s diary

Otto (pictured), the only resident of the secret annexe to survive, returned to Amsterdam following the war knowing that his wife was dead but unsure of his daughters’ fate. He learnt, on returning home, of their deaths and received from friends Anne’s diary. This man, his life devastated by cruelty and inhumanity, sat down and read the secret diary of his deceased daughter.

He read of Anne’s desire to be published, to be recognised as a writer and decided to devote the rest of his life to Anne’s work. He was to die in 1980, aged 91.

The diary was first published in the Netherlands in 1947 and five years later in the US and the UK. The name Anne Frank rapidly became known throughout the world.

Seventy years later and her name lives on, and Anne’s diary, recognised as a timeless classic, remains essential reading for all humanity.

Rupert Colley.

Read more about the war in The Clever Teens Guide to World War Two available as an ebook and 80-page paperback from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Waterstone’s, Apple Books and other stores.

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Chicken farmer

Heinrich Himmler was born the son of a Catholic schoolteacher in Munich on 7 October 1900. After a stint in the army during the First World War, although he missed out on seeing active service, Himmler studied agriculture and held a number of jobs including that of a chicken farmer and a fertilizer salesman before joining the Nazi Party in 1921.

Hardworking and meticulous, Himmler became devoted to Hitler and the Nazi cause. He took part in the failed putsch of 1923 in which Hitler tried to seize power in Bavaria. Between 1926 and 1930, Himmler acted as the Nazi party’s propaganda leader until, in 1929, Hitler appointed him head of the SS.

In 1934, Himmler became head of the Prussian division of the Gestapo and, two years later, head of all Nazi security organs. In 1933, soon after Hitler’s coming to power, Himmler established the first concentration camp at Dachau, near Munich, and in 1934, played a vital role in the elimination of Hitler’s opponents during the ‘Night of the Long Knives‘.

A page of glory

During the war, Himmler was responsible for co-ordinating the systematic murder of Jews and other victims of the Nazi regime, extending and expanding the network of concentration and death camps, and responsible for implementing the ‘Final Solution’.

Himmler suffered from various psychosomatic illnesses and intense headaches and was shocked and sickened by what he saw when visiting the camps he administered. Yet he remained determined that the work should continue, however distasteful.

On 4 October 1943, addressing an audience of SS officers in Posen, he said, ‘Whether or not 10,000 Russian women collapse from exhaustion while digging a tank ditch interests me only in so far as the tank ditch is completed for Germany … This is a page of glory in our history, which has never been written and is never to be written…. We had the moral right, we had the duty to our people, to destroy this people which wanted to destroy us.’

On another occasion, he compared Anti-Semitism to delousing: ‘Getting rid of lice is not a question of ideology, it is a matter of cleanliness.’

In 1943, Himmler was appointed minister of the interior, and expanded the Waffen-SS, the Armed SS, to the point its strength rivaled the regular German army.

Himmler had his homosexual nephew, Hans, sent to the Dachau concentration camp where he was forced to wear a pink triangle and was eventually executed.

As the war turned against Germany, Himmler sought peace negotiations with the Western allies in order to carry on the fight against the Soviet Union. Labelled a traitor by Hitler, he was stripped of all his responsibilities.

Sergeant Hitzinger

After Germany’s surrender, Himmler tried to escape detention, dressing up as an army sergeant under the name Heinrich Hitzinger, shaving off his moustache and sporting a patch over one eye. Caught by the British near the northern German town of Lüneburg, Heinrich Himmler committed suicide by poison before the British could bring him to trial. His final words, said as he swallowed the poison, were, ‘I am Heinrich Himmler’. He was buried in an unmarked grave. His death mask is on display at London’s Imperial War Museum.

Gudrun Burwitz

Heinrich Himmler was married in 1928 to Margarete Boden. They had one child, a girl, Gudrun, born 8 August 1929. (Pictured is Gudrun with her parents). Gudrun Burwitz, who died, aged 88, in 2018, had been a member of the Stille Hilfe (‘Silent Help’) organization since its inception in 1951, an organization that helped, and continues to help, former SS members. The ‘Princess of Nazism’, as she was once described, remained committed to aiding former National Socialists and neo-Nazis to the very end.

Rupert Colley.

Read more in The Clever Teens’ Guide to Nazi Germany, available as ebook and paperback (80 pages) on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Waterstone’s, Apple Books and other stores.

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Born 19 March 1906 in the town of Solingen in western Germany, Eichmann was brought up in a middle-class Lutheran environment. (Eichmann kept his faith right up to the late 1930s, long after it was fashionable for Nazis to denounce religion).

Following his mother’s death in 1914, Adolf Eichmann’s father, an accountant, took his two sons to live in Linz, Austria, the town that Adolf Hitler always considered his home. Eichmann’s early life was certainly ordinary, dropping out of his studies to become a mechanical engineer and drifting from one job to another before finding more permanent employment as a travelling salesman for an Austrian oil company.

The Jewish Expert

Eichmann joined the Austrian Nazi Party in April 1932 having been approached by a friend of his father’s, an SS man, who said to the younger Eichmann, ‘You belong to us’. Within seven months he had become attached to the SS itself, Hitler’s paramilitary corps, headed by Heinrich Himmler. In 1934, as an SS corporal, he worked at the newly-opened Dachau concentration camp.

Working his way up the SS ladder, Adolf Eichmann studied Jewish history and culture to better understand them and the threat they posed, becoming known for his expertise in Jewish affairs. In spring 1938, following Hitler’s annexation of Austria, he was sent to Vienna and set the task of facilitating the emigration of Jews from the Austrian capital, a task that needed his methodical organisational skills. During a ten-month period in 1938-39, having established the Central Office for Jewish Emigration, his office ‘helped’ over 100,000 Jews emigrate. Such was his success in Vienna, the following year Eichmann was dispatched to Prague to replicate the fine job he had executed in the Austrian capital. But by now it was less a case of emigration and more a case of deportation.

In 1939, Himmler invited Adolf Eichmann into the Reich Security Central Office, based in Berlin, and from 1941 to the end of the war, Eichmann headed the Department of Jewish Affairs within the Gestapo.

In 1940, Eichmann looked into the feasibility of deporting four million French and German Jews to Madagascar, a plan that failed to take off. On 20 January 1942, Eichmann attended the one-day Wannsee Conference, on the outskirts of Berlin, where high-ranking Nazis, chaired by the ruthless Reinhard Heydrich, discussed in detail the implementation of what was to become known as the ‘Final Solution’, the mass extermination of Jews both within and outside occupied Germany. Eichmann, a mere lieutenant colonel, was the lowest-ranking officer present, his duties at the conference relatively mundane. But Adolf Eichmann’s remit, post-Wannsee, was to organise the logistics and transportation of millions of Jews to the death camps of Auschwitz and others in eastern Germany and Poland. A daunting task, Eichmann was efficient and enthusiastic, charming and berating; earning the sobriquet, the ‘specialist’, such were the vast numbers he moved.

Under Adolf Eichmann’s supervision, an estimated 1.5 million Jews were deported, affecting Jews in France, Belgium, Greece, Hungary and, once Italy had swapped sides, from northern Italy. In Hungary alone, in just an eight-week period in mid-1944, he organised the transportation of almost 440,000 Jews to the death camps. He once confessed to saying, ‘I will leap into my grave laughing with the knowledge that five million enemies of the Reich have died like animals’.

Riccardo Klement

Following Germany’s surrender in May 1945, Eichmann was arrested by US troops but within a few months managed to escape to a small village in northern Germany. There, living under the name Otto Eckmann, he stayed for four years, working as a lumberjack, before fleeing to Italy. From Europe, he fled to Argentina, aided by the Catholic Church and possibly various pro-Nazi groups, such as the notorious ODESSA organization, an organisation set up specifically to aid the escape of former SS officers. In Argentina, Eichmann took the name Riccardo Klement and again worked in various blue-collared jobs, including a stint with a water company and even as a rabbit farmer. In 1952, Eichmann’s family joined him in Argentina.

Eichmann was finally arrested by the Israeli secret service, Mossad, near Buenos Aires on 11 May 1960. On the 20^th, in direct violation of Argentine law, Mossad agents smuggled their man out of the country and back to Israel. Eichmann, in describing his abduction, stated he was ‘assaulted in Buenos Aires, tied to a bed for a week and then drugged by injections in my arms… from there I was flown out of Argentina.’

Dismissing calls that he should be tried in Germany by an international court, and that Israel should stand as only the ‘accuser, and not of judge’, Eichmann was tried in front of three Jewish judges in a Jewish state, leading to accusations that the process was little better than a kangaroo court.

‘Dark Duties’

In a trial that lasted from April to December 1961, Adolf Eichmann maintained he was not an anti-Semite and indeed was fond of Jewish literature. Throughout the trial, in which Eichmann was shielded behind bullet-proof glass, he claimed he was only obeying orders and was responsible merely for the transporting of Jews but had no hand in their liquidation. A prosecutor asked, ‘Were you an Obersturmbannführer (lieutenant colonel) or an office girl?’ On witnessing a gassing of Jews in a van, Eichmann said, ‘I was horrified. My nerves aren’t strong enough. I can’t listen to such things without their affecting me. I didn’t look inside; I couldn’t. Couldn’t! What I saw and heard was enough. The screaming and… I was much too shaken.’

Eichmann was found guilty of crimes against the Jewish people and sentenced to hang. On hearing the verdict, Eichmann made his plea, stating, ‘I did try to leave my position, to leave for the front, for honest battle. But I was held fast in those dark duties. Once again I would stress that I am guilty of having been obedient, having subordinated myself to my official duties and the obligations of war service and my oath of allegiance and my oath of office.’

‘Banality of Evil’

Appeals for clemency failed, including one from Eichmann’s wife who wrote to the Israeli president, Izhak Ben-Zvi, ‘As the wife and mother of four children, I beg your Excellency for the life of my husband’. Eichmann reportedly said he would rather ‘face capital punishment in Israel than serve a life term.’ A Canadian missionary was assigned to the condemned Nazi, his task to convert Eichmann to Christ before his execution. He failed. Eichmann, said the missionary, was ‘unrepentant’.

Nearing midnight, on 31 May 1962, Eichmann was hanged in Ramla prison. He was cremated and his remains scattered at sea, away from the waters of Israel, in neutral waters.

Eichmann’s trial formed the basis of a book, Eichmann in Jerusalem: a Report on the Banality of Evil, written by a German-born American writer, Hannah Arendt, in which she rejected the idea of all Nazi leaders as being psychopathically evil and that Adolf Eichmann was himself an ordinary, ‘banal’ man swept along by ambition and the twisted objectives of his masters.

2024 update: The man tasked with hanging Eichmann, Shalom Nagar, died 26 November 2024.

Rupert Colley.

Read more in The Clever Teens’ Guide to Nazi Germany, available as ebook and paperback (80 pages) on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Waterstone’s, Apple Books and other stores.

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Six months earlier, on 28 December 1941, two Free Czech agents, Jan Kubis and Jozef Gabčík, trained by Britain’s Special Operations Executive (the SOE), had parachuted into Czechoslovakia. Their objective, almost certain to end in their deaths, was to assassinate the ‘Deputy Reich Protector of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia’, to give Reinhard Heydrich his full title.

Assassination attempt

On 27 May 1942, the agents, on learning of Heydrich’s movements that day, went into action. As the car taking Heydrich to a meeting slowed to navigate a hairpin bend, the two men attacked. Heydrich, as was his routine, was without an armed escort. Gabčík tried to shoot Heydrich but his submachine gun jammed at the fatal moment. Instead of ordering his chauffeur to drive off, Heydrich chose to fight. He attempted to fire back but a small bomb, thrown by Kubis, exploded, injuring him. Heydrich and his driver gave chase on foot, but the two agents escaped before Heydrich, bleeding profusely, collapsed from his injuries. He was rushed to hospital. Surgeons operated and initially it seemed the stricken Nazi was recovering.

On 2 June, a week after the attack, he received a visit from his superior and mentor, Heinrich Himmler. Following Himmler’s visit, Heydrich slipped into a coma and died on 4 June. He was given a sumptuous funeral in Prague followed by a second ceremony in Berlin.

Meanwhile, Heydrich’s assassins, Kubis and Gabčík, hid in the crypt of a Prague church. Three weeks later they were betrayed and the church was surrounded by 800 members of the SS. The men held out for as long as possible before turning their guns on themselves.

Young Heydrich

Reinhard Heydrich was born in the eastern German town of Halle on 7 March 1904. His mother was an actress and his father, Richard, a music teacher and occasional opera composer inducing in his sons (Reinhard and his younger brother, Heinz) a love of the operas of Richard Wagner. Reinhard became an accomplished violinist. Heydrich’s father, a fervent German nationalist, was sometimes known as Heydrich-Süss.  Süss, having a Jewish ring to it, fuelled rumours that the family had Jewish blood. Later, Reinhard Heydrich was so haunted by the thought, that he ordered an SS investigation into his family ancestry. The report concluded, unsurprisingly, that Reinhard Heydrich’s family contained no trace of Jewish descent.

Conduct unbecoming

Too young to enlist as a soldier during the First World War, in 1919, the fifteen-year-old Heydrich joined the post-war Freikorps, a right-wing paramilitary group, an unruly rabble of demobilized soldiers. In 1922, Heydrich joined the German Navy and steadily rose through the ranks, soon becoming a first lieutenant. In 1930, he became engaged to Lina von Osten, a member of the Nazi Party. In doing so, he broke off a previous engagement to a shipyard director’s daughter, whom he may have got pregnant. The affair earned him a dismissal from the navy for ‘conduct unbecoming an officer and a gentleman’. He was granted a monthly allowance for two years by way of compensation.

Up until now, Heydrich had lampooned the Nazis, the ‘privates from Bohemia’, as he called them. But depressed by his loss of career and the uniform he so highly prized, and with Von Osten’s influence, whom he had married in December 1931, Heydrich joined the Nazi Party and became a member of its security wing, the SS. His skills soon came to the attention of SS boss, Heinrich Himmler, who, on knowing the rumours of Heydrich’s Jewish background, was able to demand complete obedience of his protégé.

Heydrich was Adolf Hitler’s archetypal Aryan – tall, blond, and athletic. He was placed in charge of the SD, the ‘Security Service’, the intelligence and surveillance side of the SS. The promotion was, for Heydrich’s wife, the ‘finest hour of my life, of our life’.

In 1934, Heydrich played a leading role in organising Hitler’s purge of the SA, a rival paramilitary organization that displayed greater loyalty to its leader, Ernst Rohm, than Hitler. The killing of Rohm and his henchmen was remembered as the Night of the Long Knives.

In 1936, Heydrich again was promoted and became responsible for the SD, the criminal police and the Gestapo.

Enemies of the Reich

Heydrich helped coordinate Kristallnacht, an organised series of attacks on Jews and Jewish property during the night of 8-9 November 1938. A leading proponent of forcing Jews to emigrate, Heydrich, along with Adolf Eichmann, looked into the feasibility of deporting four million Jews to Madagascar but the plan failed, and from it came the conclusion that extermination was easier than mass deportation.

On the eve of war, in 1939, Heydrich was appointed head of the Reich Main Security Office. Its aim was to fight all “enemies of the Reich” within Germany and occupied Germany. Together with Eichmann, Heydrich established the first Jewish ghettos within occupied Poland.

The Wannsee Conference

In 1941, Hermann Goering set Heydrich the task of finding a ‘total solution of the Jewish question’ in German-occupied territories. One of Heydrich’s earlier solutions was the establishment of roving killing units, the Einsatzgruppen, which followed up the German armies’ advances into Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, rounding up and murdering Jews. But the killing of Jews by bullet was a time-consuming task and often detrimental to the mental health of those carrying out the mass executions. A more efficient means of murder was needed. On 20 January 1942, Heydrich chaired the one-day Wannsee Conference in Berlin during which senior Nazis discussed and planned the ‘Final Solution to the Jewish question’.

The Butcher of Prague

In September 1941, Heydrich was appointed the Reich governor of Bohemia and Moravia, part of modern-day Czech Republic, where he promised to ‘Germanize the Czech vermin’. He soon earned the sobriquet, the ‘Butcher of Prague’. It was in Prague that Reinhard Heydrich met his death.

Himmler spoke at Heydrich’s funeral: ‘Whatever actions he took he carried them out as a National Socialist and an SS man, from the very bottom of his heart and through his blood, he carried out, felt, and understood Adolf Hitler’s world vision’.

Following Heydrich’s assassination, the Gestapo retaliated by executing hundreds of Czechs and wiping out the entire villages of Lidice, about thirteen miles north of Prague, and Ležáky. The villages were razed to the ground and the 173 male inhabitants of Lidice were murdered. The 198 women were sent to concentration camps where most were gassed. Thousands of Czech people were also deported to extermination camps as a direct consequence of Heydrich’s death. The Bishop of Prague was also executed, held responsible for allowing the assailants to hide in one of his churches.

Lina von Osten, Heydrich’s wife, survived the war and in 1976, published a memoir, Life with a War Criminal. Despite its title, Von Osten, who had remarried, defended her first husband’s name right up to her death in 1985.

Rupert Colley.

Read more in The Clever Teens’ Guide to Nazi Germany, available as ebook and paperback (80 pages) on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Waterstone’s, Apple Books and other stores.

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‘Final Solution of the Jewish Question’

Reinhard Heydrich‘s objective, as tasked by Hermann Göring (and therefore, presumably, Adolf Hitler), was to secure the support of these various agencies for the implementation of the ‘Final Solution of the Jewish Question’, the systematic annihilation of the European Jew.

Goring’s letter to Heydrich, dated July 1941, states, ‘I hereby command you to make all necessary organizational, functional, and material preparations for a complete solution of the Jewish Question in the German sphere of influence in Europe.’ 

The mass murder of Jews was already taking place. The initial method of shooting Jews on the edges of pits was considered too time-consuming and detrimental to the mental health of the murder squads. The squads, often recruited from the local populations in conquered areas, willingly collaborated in the killings but eventually found the task gruelling. Seeking alternative methods, the Germans began experimenting with gas, using carbon monoxide in mobile units, but although better this was still considered too slow and inefficient. Eventually, after experiments on Soviet prisoners of war in Auschwitz during September 1941, Zyklon B gas was discovered as a rapid and efficient means of murder.

The Wannsee Conference, as it became known, discussed escalating the killing to a new, industrial level. Heydrich estimated that 11 million Jews still resided in Europe and needed to be “combed from West to East.” He produced a list of nations and their respective number of Jews, not only in countries already under Nazi occupation but also neutral nations and those not yet occupied. For example, Britain, according to Heydrich’s figures, contained 330,000 Jews; Sweden 8,000; Spain 6,000; Switzerland 18,000; and Ireland 4,000, plus 200 Jews in Albania.

“Eliminated through natural reduction”

The more able-bodied Jews, said Heydrich (pictured), would be used for labour “whereby a large number will doubtlessly be eliminated through natural reduction.” Those that survived the labour, the toughest, would, if liberated, be the “core of a new Jewish revival,” therefore they had to be “dealt with appropriately.” The minutes of the meeting, written up by Adolf Eichmann, were littered with such euphemisms but, according to Eichmann at his trial in 1962, once the official meeting had finished, they spoke openly of executions and liquidation.

No one at the meeting objected or questioned the proposals, and Heydrich hadn’t expected any but nonetheless was pleased with the level of enthusiasm. The rest of the meeting discussed definitions of ‘Jewishness’ – to what extent persons of mixed blood could be defined as Jewish; and whether children born of mixed marriages (German and Jew) were Jewish or not. And veterans of the First World War, it was decided, would be sent to ghettos specifically for the aged.

Satisfied, Heydrich drew the meeting to a close. The men retired to comfortable chairs to smoke, drink brandy and gossip whilst admiring the view over the lake. The meeting, barely an hour and a half long, was over.

Postscript

Hitler had admired Reinhard Heydrich, the ‘man with the iron heart’ as he called him and, in September 1941, appointed him in charge of Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia. Heydrich’s ruthlessness in dealing with the Jews within his ‘protectorate’ won him the sobriquet ‘the Butcher of Prague’. On 27 May 1942, only four months after the Wannsee Conference, Heydrich was the victim of an ambush set up by four Czech resistance fighters. A week later he died of his injuries and was given a state funeral in Berlin. (See here for a brief biography of Heydrich). The reprisals in Czechoslovakia were, predictably, savage.

Following the war, Adolf Eichmann escaped to Argentina where he was eventually hunted down. His trial provided fresh details on the workings within the Nazi hierarchy. Aged 56, he was executed on 31 May 1962.

Click here for the full set of minutes from the Wannsee Conference.

Rupert Colley.

Read more in The Clever Teens’ Guide to Nazi Germany, available as ebook and paperback (80 pages) on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Waterstone’s, Apple Books and other stores. 

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The object of the Jews Out board game is to force the Jews beyond the medieval walls and out of the city. The first player to rid the city of six Jews wins the game.

The game comes with a dice, a 50×60 cm board, and a number of figurines. The board has thirteen circles representing various Jewish-owned shops and businesses. Each player adopts one of six red figurines with a pointy hat and a belt around its waist, representing the German police force, and the idea is to land on the Jewish business and eject the Jew. The Jew is represented on 32 hat-shaped counters, the same shape as the hats Jews were compelled to wear during the Middle Ages. Each Jew is depicted with a vile, contorted face.

The rules explain that the Jews Out board game is an ‘extraordinarily amusing and up-to-date family game’. On the board are written three bits of text: Display skill in the dice game, so that you collect many Jews! / When you succeed in driving out 6 Jews, you will be winner beyond all question! And at the bottom right, a ‘typical’ Jewish family on the move accompanied by the text, Off to Palestine!

As well as the copy at the Wiener Library, the only other copy of the game known to have survived intact is on display at New York’s Museum of Jewish Heritage.

Trivial

This vile little game was produced by a Dresden-based company called Günther & Co. in 1936 and was not sanctioned by the Nazi party, it was purely a commercial venture, hoping to capitalize on the anti-Semitic hysteria sweeping through Germany at the time. The game never received official Nazi approval. Indeed, Heinrich Himmler’s SS thoroughly disapproved of the game, criticizing it for trivializing their work: ‘We do not slave ourselves away with the solution of the Jewish question, to relieve able manufacturers of toys of their worries about a great big seller or to help children with an amusing little game.’

The Wiener Library

Named after its founder, Alfred Wiener, the Wiener Library is, to use their words, “one of the world’s leading and most extensive archives on the Holocaust and Nazi era. Formed in 1933, the Library’s unique collection of over one million items includes published and unpublished works, press cuttings, photographs and eyewitness testimony.”

Read more in The Clever Teens’ Guide to Nazi Germany, available as ebook and paperback (80 pages) on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Waterstone’s, Apple Books and other stores.

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