San Marino, CA – During the final days of World War II, as American soldiers were returning from Germany with swastika-inscribed helmets, flags and other Nazi memorabilia, Gen. George Patton was packing up his own set of souvenirs.
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The legendary field commander took four pages of documents signed by Adolf Hitler that laid the legal framework for killing 6 million Jews – the so-called Nuremberg Laws.
On Wednesday, The Huntington Library, a sprawling complex of libraries, museums and botanical gardens in this leafy Los Angeles suburb, plans to hand over the documents to the government-run National Archives, thus concluding a 65-year-old odyssey.
The papers, which among other things rescinded the citizenship of German Jews and forbid them to marry non-Jews, are the only original pieces of Nuremberg trial evidence missing from the collection, said National Archives spokeswoman Susan Cooper.
Holocaust scholars have described them as priceless, saying they provide an outline of the beginnings of a movement that led to the most atrocious act of genocide in history.
It hasn’t been lost on officials at The Huntington that Patton, a notorious war trophy collector, carried the papers out of Germany illegally.
“We were aware of the fact that General Patton, who had received the documents from his staff as a gift and deposited them at The Huntington, had not paid attention in his souvenir hunting to the orders of his commander in chief,” library President Steve S. Koblik said.
The papers should have gone to the U.S. government, which was collecting evidence to use in the Nazi war crimes trials that took place in Nuremberg shortly after the war. Prosecutors had to use photocopies instead.
“Had General Patton not taken these documents, they would have been part of the collection the government was putting together in order to prepare for the Nuremberg trials,” Koblik said.
Patton, instead, deposited the papers at The Huntington in 1945. The general grew up next door to the library and his father once worked for its namesake, railroad baron Henry Huntington.
The laws, which also forbade Jews from having sex with non-Jews, flying the German flag or hiring non-Jewish women to work in their homes, remained quietly filed away in a bombproof vault until 1999 when Huntington officials announced they had them.
After lending them for several years to Los Angeles’ Skirball Cultural Center – whose mission is to promote Jewish culture and heritage – The Huntington announced this week it was handing them over.
The time had come to take them off display, Koblik said, adding the papers’ fragility doesn’t allow they be exposed to light indefinitely.
“We’ve never made them an official part of the Huntington collection,” Koblik told The Associated Press on Tuesday. He said the nonprofit institution, known for such treasures as its priceless Gutenberg Bible and early editions of the works of Shakespeare and Chaucer, has very little material on 20th century Germany.
Although the laws didn’t directly call for the execution of Jews, they laid the groundwork for that, several scholars said, by marginalizing a group of people, turning them into second-class citizens.
“It’s important to our understanding of genocide that genocide is always a process,” said Stephen Smith, executive director of the University of Southern California’s Shoah Foundation Institute, which documents evidence of the Holocaust.
“That was not an order to murder the Jews, it was an order to exclude them from participation in society,” Smith said of the Nuremberg Laws. “Once you start excluding a group for whatever reason you are on the path to the ultimate exclusion.”
“It was an order to exclude them from society”
We should learn a Mussar Haskel, never to exclude any needy Non-Yid, adult or a child, from our prayers. Nor should we exclude them from our good wishes.
When end off a speech, we shlould try not to end the sentence, “may this summer be one of good health and Parnossoh for Klal Yisroel”, because the words ‘Klal Yisroel’, Excludes other Human Beings.
We must send the right message to our children, that every Human, is a Tzelem Elokim.
Then, we will be able to beg Hashem “Never-Again”.
To #1
Well, since HKB”H does, Middoh Kneged Middoh, If we will have true love, and sincere respect, to every Human Being, then HKB”H will instill the Nations, with true respect to Yidden.
To #2
Even the assimilated Yidden in Germany, in the late 1800’s, used to degrade any Non-Yidden. As the joke used to go, ‘they are Yidden with only two things, scared of a dog and disrespects any Non-Yid’.
They were the ones to intrduce the songs, Ah Yiddishe Mama, or Ah Yiddishe Kop, or Ah Yiddishe Haartz. (or the word ‘Shegetz’).
To HKB”H, it is far worse when we disrespect a cultured and an inviting People like the Germans were in the 1800’s.
I agree with #1 ,
we’re not supposed to be an exclusive religion, we’re inclusive…everyone was welcome within the tent of Avraham, everyone was given an opportunity to accept the Torah, we give charity to the needy amongst our people, and the poor of other nations as well. The non-Jews are allowed to bring Korbanos, and it says in Nach that Cohanim will come from the nations in the future…
The idea of hatred of non-Jews is antithetical to the Torah itself! It says that everyone from Mitzrayim to Ashur will worship Hashem, this has already come to pass with the advent and spread of Islam.
It says that the nations will bless Hashem through the Jews, this came to be with the spread of Christianity.
Eventually we will all become elevated in our intellectual understanding and spiritual awareness to the point where organized religion will be a thing of the past, there won’t be Jews and non-Jews, but rather everyone will understand the nature of Hashem and our place within creation.