Murder of Millions of Jewish people by Disease Since 1888
At the end of 1888, when the government in Vienna banned mouth-penis-wound-sucking (Metzitza b’Peh) during Jewish ritual circumcision, Jewish dealers bought thousands upon thousands of horses from farmers in Galicia[1]. Allegedly severe drought forced the farmers to give up their horses to the buyers that fall. The corpses of the horses were turned into expensive fertilizer using a special composting technique[2].
Many of the horses were very sick, “appeared to be just skin and bone”. They were slaughtered in various parts of Galicia; the hide and bones were used but the flesh was left behind. Some of the bones were ground and turned into fertilizer in the “first American steam mill for bones”[3]. Herds of pigs were driven out to feed in the areas where the meat of hundreds of horses had been left[4].
1889 saw the biggest famine in history of Galicia/Austria. Tuberculosis, typhus, diphtheria, chickenpox, and cholera broke out in east Galicia[5]. 50,000 people died of starvation every year. The average life expectancy for men fell to 27 years. After her journey through Galicia, Bertha Pappenheim described “[…] all the losses that the Jewish inhabitants of Galicia have suffered, like a grave disease that never ends”[6]. Large numbers of Jewish persons emigrated from Galicia to North and South America. “A regular frenzy of emigration has taken hold”[7]. From 1880 to 1900, 40% of all emigrants from Galicia were Jewish persons[8], although they only made up 10% of the population. However, the epidemics pursued them: “The weakest of them died on the voyage across”[9], while “Sick emigrants were sent back with increasing frequency”[10]. Even after their arrival in America, they were prone to early death: the emigrants first succumbed to American plague[11], then to Brazilian fever[12]. People died like flies[13].
The biological influence exerted over Jewish people in Galicia/Austria also affected their sex lives. Despite poverty and epidemics, the birth rate in Galicia was higher than in most other parts of Europe[14], and the growth of Galicia’s Jewish population eclipsed even that of the other groups[15]. In 1904, Pappenheim wrote that Jewish women in Galicia were “hot-blooded”. In “The Immorality of Galician Women”[16], she cited poverty as the reason why prostitution was more than averagely prevalent, but did not explain how poverty in Galicia led to prostitution. Jacob Caro: “The women of Galicia are more frivolous and immoral than all others”[17]. With regard to the disproportionately high number of whores and pimps from Galicia, Pollack wrote: “Galicia plays a particularly bleak role as the country of origin of many of the girls and also of most of their procurers”[18]. In 1889, Theodor Herzl wrote that “in recent years Jewish women from Galicia have turned to prostitution remarkably often. They travel to all parts of the world as merchandise for the most appalling trade. If we consider the former purity of Jewish family life, such a development makes the heart ache”[19]. Bertha Pappenheim wrote that “the secret prostitution spreading throughout the land like an epidemic [does not involve] women and girls who […] have been ʻinfectedʼ by modern or emancipated ideas. Instead, they are women and girls who live ultra-Orthodox lives, who scrupulously observe the Sabbath, the food laws, and all other ritual requirements, yet are absolutely unrestrained in terms of morality”[20]. Galicia’s prostitutes were exported. “In around 1891, there was a sudden rise in the number of prostitutes in the Alsterstadt (Hamburg – author’s note); most of them came from Galicia and Russia”[21]. From 1881, they emigrated via Brody, where huge barracks were built[22]. From 1888, Oswiecim (Auschwitz), the Yiddish “Oschpitziner Jerusalem” (8,000 Jewish persons and 7,000 Christians), became a place where emigrants, prostitutes, and people going temporarily to America for work gathered before their departure[23].
In 1915, the Russian government abducted and expelled 1.5 million Jewish persons from Russia and Belarus. When German and Austrian troops occupied the area in August 1915, they continued the expulsions and prevented the Jewish persons from returning to the areas destroyed. They also forced the local inhabitants out of the region by spreading diseases such as typhus fever, cholera, and malaria. Millions of them fell ill, some with deadly typhus fever, spread in particular by lice that carried the previously unknown bacteria Rickettsia prowazecki. There were no cases of typhus fever on the Western front, although the Germans took only a few countermeasures and the French and British none at all. On the Eastern front and in the Soviet Union, however, 30 million people contracted the disease between November 1917 and the end of 1921, and three million of them died[24]. The spread of these louse-borne bacteria did have fatal consequences for German military physicians. The „Spiegel” magazine glosses this over: “The army […] deployed medical troops to treat the local population (by force if necessary), which was said to be infested with lice. This work was hazardous: 10 of the 50 German medical officers in occupied Poland died of typhus”[25]. However, apart from the physicians, hardly any German soldiers succumbed to the disease.
The „Hilfsverein der deutschen Juden” (Aid Association of German Jewish persons), Berlin, had been building schools in Palestine for “East European Jewish persons” since 1901. During World War I, it worked with Jewish organizations in the US to take 200,000 people from German-occupied territories and resettle them in Palestine. The USA kept a military presence in the “Ober-Ost” region of Poland even after declaring war on Germany on April 2, 1917, having simply refrained from making a declaration of war on Austria. At that time, German and US organizations were working together in Austrian Galicia. Not until December 7, 1917, did the USA finally declare war on its Austrian hosts.
Many of the following quotations are taken from “The First Holocaust” by Don Heddesheimer[26], while the interpretations are partly the author’s own.
“As soon as the World War (I) started and it was obvious that a large part of the War would be fought in the zone in which six or seven million Jews lived, particularly Poland, Russia, and Galicia, many worthy people started organizations to collect funds for the sufferers in the War zones”[27]. The locations of Russia’s, Germany’s, and Austria’s military activities were therefore known for example to the Warburg bankers. Activities for Eastern Europe took place during the month when war began. The Central Committee for the Relief of Jewish persons Suffering Through the War (October 1914), the American Jewish Relief Committee (1914), and American Jewish Joint Distribution for Jewish War Sufferers (1914) were established under the supervision of the Warburgs and the President of the American Jewish Committee, Louis Marshall. On January 13, 1915, Marshall said, “In the world today there are about 13 million Jews, of whom more than 6 million are in the heart of the war zone […] who today are subject to every manner of suffering and sorrow […] We hear of pogroms in Russia, in Poland, in Galicia”, claiming it to be the blackest period of Jewish history. In September 1915, the “Ezras Torah Fund” was set up to support rabbis and zadeks in East Europe. From October 1915, the governments of Germany and other countries worked with the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS) in the USA to implement measures in East Europe. In May 1916, the New York Times wrote that 1,770,000 of the 2,450,000 Jewish persons that formerly inhabited Poland, Lithuania, and Courland were still living there, and that 700,000 of them were in desperate need of help[28]. In August 1915, the Russian government granted freedom of movement for Jewish people throughout Russia, already in 1916, one million Jewish persons were expelled. In 1916, the American Jewish Committee circulated 25,000 copies of “The Jews in the Eastern War Zone”: “[…] Hundreds of thousands were forced from their homes on a day’s notice, the more fortunate being packed and shipped as freight – the old, the sick and insane, men, women, and children, shuttled from one province to another, side-tracked for days without food or help of any kind – the less fortunate driven into the woods and swamps to die of starvation […]”[29] “[…] the Jews, already proscribed by the Russians and Poles, met with a concentrated orgy of hatred, blood lust, and vindictive opportunity that threatened to wipe them out in one vast holocaust”.[30] Until 1917, banker Jacob Schiff repeatedly demanded an end to “this holocaust”[31].
By April 1917, 19 million US dollars had been sent from the USA via Berlin to German-occupied Poland; another $2 million followed via Holland/Berlin. By the end of the war, the “six million” Jewish persons in East Europe were not dead, but victim to “unbelievable poverty, starvation and disease”[32]. On April 21, 1920, the New York Times reported: “In Europe there are today more than 5 million Jews who are starving or on the verge of starvation, and many are in the grip of a virulent typhus epidemic” in the regions that had received 30 million US dollars in aid. “The war has left 5 million destitute and stricken Jews in Eastern Europe […] Their number is being reduced every day by a series of the most terrible epidemics that ever swept any section of the world. Typhus, cholera, and smallpox […] Dirt and malnutrition are the two great causes of the epidemic of disease […] Two out of three infants do not survive their first year of life […]an abnormal number of children are born blind […]a new eye disease … attacked thousands of children […]” [33].
Based on agreements reached by Germany and the new Soviet Union, Germany and Austria occupied Ukraine in February 1918, seizing the capital Kiev in March and parts of the Caucasus in summer that same year. Between 1917 and 1920, there were 2,000 pogroms in the region, which led to the murder of 85,000 Jewish persons. Tens of thousands fled. Carl Melchior, who later became a partner in the Warburg Bank, was an officer there.
In 1926, there were new reports of epidemics among the Jewish persons in East Europe together with an increased incidence of tuberculosis, psychiatric disorders, and suicide.
Mass Murders of Armenian, Aramaic, Greek, and Jewish People 1895-1923
The deportation of “Armenians”, Jewish and Christian persons from parts of the Ottoman Empire bordering on Russia started in 1895. At that time, “thousands of Jews were deported to Syria (Palestine – author’s note) for forced labor, and many of them perished”[34].
“At least 200,000 Armenians died in the pogroms that took place during the last decade of the 19th century.” The “Armenians” were driven south from East Turkey, particularly after 1915.
Here Zionist functionary Sarah Aaronsohn observed, “while travelling from Constantinople back to Palestine […] how thousands of Armenians were mercilessly driven south by the Turks […]”[35]. “Armenian men were mostly killed on the spot, the survivors, women and children were deported, first to Aleppo and then into the Syrian and Mesopotamian desert, where around 200,000 people fell victim to mass executions. Another 400,000 died on death marches or in camps under the open skies”[36].
On the German side, affairs in Turkey were organized by General Otto Liman von Sanders, General Willy Leopold Freiherr von der Goltz, and General Erich von Falkenhayn as general staff officers, along with 900 officers such as the Zionist and military correspondent of the „Münchener Neueste Nachrichten”, Franz Carl Endres, the Navy attaché Hans Humann, Eberhard Wolffskehl, Paul Borchardt, and the later supporters of the National Socialist regime Franz von Papen, Joachim von Ribbentrop, Martin Bormann, Max Erwin von Scheubner-Richter, and Franz Gürtner.
Lieutenant-Colonel Böttrich was in charge of the railway department at the Ottoman general headquarters and was responsible for the transportation of Armenian and Jewish people. The Baghdad Railway from Istanbul, financed by the Deutsche Bank, had been built as far as the Palestinian border by 1915 and facilitated the transport of hundreds of thousands of people to Palestine.
The deportation and murder of hundreds of thousands of “Armenians” by “Turkish” units under the command of German generals, an act that remains utterly incomprehensible even to this day, was carefully observed and described by the US American ambassador, Jewish banker Heinrich Morgenthau, who originally came from Mannheim, Germany.
The chronological and geographical links between the pogroms and expulsions of Jewish people in Russia and the deportation of “Armenians” suggest that the Jewish people who survived disease and other hardships were forced out of Russian territory and made to go to Palestine.
Eight Million People killed in 1931 – 1933 in Soviet Ukraine and in Polish Galicia by diseases/hunger (“Holodomor”)
In 1932 and 1933, Ukraine, which used to be the granary of Imperial Russia, was swept by deadly epidemics and severe crop failures. Around 8 million people died of disease and starvation. The governments of the USA, Britain, France, Poland, and particularly of Germany, which had thousands of Reichswehr soldiers stationed in the Soviet Union, hid this mass murder of Jewish and Non-Jewish inhabitants by the Soviets under a cloak of silence. In August 1933, the New York Times actually printed the following against its better knowledge: “Any report of a famine in Russia is today an exaggeration or malignant propaganda”[37].
In 1934, the President of the (Jewish) British Board of Deputies reported from Poland that he had “never seen such poverty, squalor, and filth. It made one despair of civilization”[38]. In 1935, the Chairman of the Polish Committee of the American Joint Jewish Distribution Committee, Alexander Kahn, reported that one third of Polish Jewry had no income, no work, or was living in difficult conditions[39].
In October 1936, Asch Scholem reported on the health and physical condition of the Jewish persons in Poland: “Every second person was undernourished, skeletons of skin and bones, crippled, candidates for the grave”[40].
In 1937, the Jewish Chronicle described the Jewish people in Poland as “a helpless minority sunk in squalid poverty and misery such as can surely be paralleled nowhere on the face of the earth. […] one third of the Jewish population is on the brink of starvation”[41]. In 1937, an official investigation of Jewish children in Poland found that only 17% were healthy. 83% were frail, anemic, neglected, malnourished, or starving[42].
“Hunger and plagues killed tens of thousands in the ghettoes, even before the Nazis began their general destruction. Infant mortality was up to 60-70% in various places – a shocking and unparalleled phenomenon”[43]. “For the last two years (since 1936 – author’s note) the Jewish persons have suffered almost incessant physical assaults and pogroms. This outburst of anti-Semitic bestiality has no equal in Europe, not even in Nazi Germany”[44], reported The Nation, New York, in 1938.
By August 1940, according to a report (August 15, 1940) by the Jewish Agency’s representative in Geneva, Richard Lichtheim, hundreds of thousands of Jewish persons had perished and there were 1,250,000 degraded humans close to death in the Polish ghettos. Behind the walls and barbed wire fences of the concentration camps, there were unpaid forced laborers who went without clothing, malnourished Jewish persons, and children who died of hunger and cold[45]. As early as January 1942, at the Wannsee Conference convened to plan the mass extermination of the Jewish persons, Secretary of State Bühler remarked that “in German-occupied Poland […] most of the 2 ½ million Jews who came into question were unfit for labor” (cf. chapter on Auschwitz).
In 1948, Yehuda Bauer wrote: “The destruction of European Jewry during World War II has obliterated the memory of that first Holocaust of the 20th century in the wake of the first world conflict”[46].
Jewish persons abducted for Conquest of Palestine in 1948
After the end of World War II, more than 1 million people, mainly from East Europe, were sent to Germany and Austria (of all places) as “displaced persons” [47], not as “refugees”. They were forced to travel via Stettin (Szczecin), where 25,000 Jewish people from the Soviet Union had been sent in 1946,[48] Wroclaw Breslau, Poland, and Berlin for resettlement.
They were accommodated at around 1,000 locations in Germany (e.g. in Bremen, Hanover, Berlin, Frankfurt-Höchst, Stuttgart, Baden-Baden, Munich, Regensburg, and in Salzburg, Vienna and Linz), Emsland and Bavaria, including approx. 60 camps (e.g. Bergen-Belsen), and specially depopulated villages (e.g. Spahn and Neuvrees, Emsland) and towns (e.g. Haren (Maczkow), Emsland). All correspondence was forbidden to them until October 1945[49]. Between 1948 and 1957, after the establishment of the State of Israel, most of them were sent from the displaced persons’ camps to Palestine/Israel.
Mind-altering substances
Descriptions of the behavior, appearance, and movements of the people who lived in the displaced persons’ camps between 1945 and 1948[50] suggest that they were treated with mind-altering substances. The level of crime and the comparatively high birth rate were remarkable[51]. The Jewish inmates of the camps were described by Jewish social workers and Jewish American camp officials as depressed, dull, resigned, unable to live any kind of normal life, uncivilized, blind to the most basic requirements of hygiene, profligate towards the other sex, and disinclined to work or pursue any kind of activity[52]. Hypersexuality was observed among the Jewish people in the approx. 60 displaced persons’ camps in Germany[53]. Jewish displaced persons in occupied Germany produced a record number of children; in fact, they had the highest birth rate of any Jewish community in the world[54], while Non-Jewish women were suffering from infertility.
In his memoirs, writer Elias Canetti recalled the effects of the mind-altering substances used to resettle Jewish persons in Palestine: “As early as 1927, he reported on his stay in Bulgaria and his astonishment, apparently shared by many people, about the rapturous state to which certain Jewish preachers elevated a considerable number of Jews in order to motivate them to emigrate to Palestine. He asked himself why these people did such a thing, when they were esteemed and regarded as fellow citizens at home (in Bulgaria), and could practice their professions and earn a good income.”
[1] Pollack M. Kaiser von Amerika. Vienna 2010:182-5
[2] Pollack M. Kaiser von Amerika. Vienna 2010:185
[3] Pollack M. Kaiser von Amerika. Vienna 2010:182
[4] Pollack M. Kaiser von Amerika. Vienna 2010:183
[5] Pollack M. Kaiser von Amerika. Vienna 2010:70
[6] Pappenheim B, Rabinowitsch S. Zur Lage der jüdischen Bevölkerung in Galizien. Frankfurt/M, 1904
[7] Pollack M. Kaiser von Amerika. Vienna 2010:218
[8] Pollack M. Kaiser von Amerika. Vienna 2010:80
[9] Pollack M. Kaiser von Amerika. Vienna 2010:222
[10] Pollack M. Kaiser von Amerika. Vienna 2010:93
[11] Pollack M. Kaiser von Amerika. Vienna 2010:214
[12] Pollack M. Kaiser von Amerika. Vienna 2010:214
[13] Pollack M. Kaiser von Amerika. Vienna 2010:216
[14] Pollack M. Kaiser von Amerika. Vienna 2010:75
[15] Pollack M. Kaiser von Amerika. Vienna 2010:79
[16] Frankfurt, 1901, in Heubach 1992
[17] Jacob Caro, cited in Pollack M. Kaiser von Amerika. Vienna 2010:58
[18] Pollack M. Kaiser von Amerika. Vienna 2010:51
[19] Die Welt, Vienna, June 24, 1898
[20] Pappenheim, Rabinowitsch 1904:17
[21] Pollack M. Kaiser von Amerika. Vienna 2010:245
[22] Pollack M. Kaiser von Amerika. Vienna 2010:82, 84
[23] Pollack M. Kaiser von Amerika. Vienna 2010:
[24] Zinsser H. Lice and History. London, Routledge 1935.
[25] Spiegel 10/2004:132
[26] Heddesheimer D. The First Holocaust. Chicago 2003
[27] Warburg FM. A Biographical Sketch. The American Jewish Committee. New York, 1938:38
[28] 700,000 Jews in Need on the East War Front. New York Times, May 22,1916:11
[29] Cited in Heddesheimer:95/96
[30] Schachner N. The Price of Liberty. A History of the American Jewish Committee. The American Jewish Committee, New York, 1948:60,287, cited in Heddesheimer:32/33
[31] Cohen NW. Jacob H. Schiff. Brandeis University Press, 1999:191, cited in Heddesheimer
[32] Warburg F. Tells Sad Plight of Jews. New York Times Nov 12, 1919:7
[33] Five Million Face Famine in Poland. New York Times, Dec 3, 1919:24
[34]Gilbert M. Das jüdische Jahrhundert. Munich: C. Bertelsmann Verlag, 2001:85/86
[35] Gilbert M. Das jüdische Jahrhundert. Munich: C. Bertelsmann Verlag, 2001:87
[36] Spiegel 16/2005:134
[37] In 1932, New York Times correspondent Walter Duranty received the Pulitzer Prize for his deliberate misinformation about the mass murders. The New York Times still had him in its gallery of Pulitzer Prize winners in 2003, 70 years after the murder it supported (D’Inka W. Der Fall Duranty. Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung Oct 27, 2003:38).
[38] Bauer Y. My Brothers Keeper. Philadelphia 1974; citing American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, Archive, Cabinet 44, file no. 6
[39] WAC Box 323(c), Kahn on Poland May 22, 1935. Rabbi Schorr of Warsaw. Jewish Chronicle Jan 8, 1935 in Bauer Y. My Brother’s Keeper. Philadelphia 1974:187, 322
[40] Scholem A. The Mourner at the Marriage Fete. October 1936. In WAC, Box 366 (c), cited in Bauer Y. My Brother’s Keeper. Philadelphia 1974:189, 323
[41] Jewish Chronicle, Jan 8, 1937, cited in Bauer Y. 1974
[42] 45-Centos, Report October 1937
[43] Shonfeld M. The Holocaust Victims Accuse. New York 1977:44
[44] Zukerman W. Jews and the Fate of Poland. The Nation Apr 2, 1938
[45] Gilbert M, 1981:28
[46] Bauer Y. My Brothers Keeper. Philadelphia 1974:9
[47] Cf. Wikipedia, Displaced Persons Camp. Cf. Internet Displaced Persons (DP) Camps Table of Contents.
[48] Königseder A, Wetzel J. Lebensmut im Wartesaal. Frankfurt 1994:57
[49] Albrich:151
[50] Mann B. Hygiene problems in displaced persons camps in Germany. Public Health, V59, 2009:35-36; Minkowski E. L’anaesthesie affective. Ann medico-psychologiques 104 (1946):80; Strauss H. Besonderheiten der nichtpsychotischen seelischen Störungen bei Opfern der nationalsozialistischen Verfolgung. Nervenarzt 28, 1957:344ff.
[51] Eckert G. Hilfs- und Rehabilitierungsmaßnahmen der Westalliierten für Displaced Persons. Braunschweig, 1995:273; Klebanow D. Munich 1946 cited in Venzlaff U. Psychische Dauerschäden bei Opfern der NS-Verfolgung. In Friedrich H, ed. Dienstbare Medizin, Göttingen 1989:102.
[52] Alex Grobman. Rekindling the Flame. American Jewish Chaplains and the Survivors of European Jewry, 1944 – 1948, Detroit 1993, p.57 || Leonard Dinnerstein. America and the Survivors of the Holocaust, New York, 1982 || Jacob Rader Marcus, Abraham J. Peck (ed.). Among the Survivors of the Holocaust 1945. The Landsberg DP Camp Letters of Major Irving Heymont (=Monographs of the American Jewish Archives. Vol. 10, Cincinnati 1982, p. 5) cited in Grossmann A. Trauma, Memory, and Motherhood: Germans and Jewish Displaced Persons in Post-Nazi Germany, 1945 – 1949. Arch f Sozialgesch. 1998:229
[53] Zorach Warhaftig. Uprooted. Jewish Refugees and Displaced Persons After Liberation (From War to Peace [Nr.5], Institute of Jewish Affairs of the American Jewish Congress and World Jewish Congress) New York 1946:54, cited in Grossmann A. 1998, 38:231-2.
[54] Abraham J. Peck. Jewish Survivors of the Holocaust in Germany. Tel Aviv Jahrbuch für deutsche Geschichte 19, 1990:38. Michael Brenner. Nach dem Holocaust. Munich 1995:36 || Margarete L. Myers, Jewish Displaced Persons Reconstructing Individual and Community, Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 42, 1997:306-308, cited in Grossmann A, 1998:228 || “More than one thousand Jews had Bergen-Belsen entered in their passports as their place of birth” (Lucius R. Beton schwebt über den Gräbern. Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung Oct 29, 2007).