Re****t: Eichmann intervened to save 800 Jews in Berlin in WW2
By Haaretz Service
Adolf Eichmann was among a group of top Nazi officials who
intervened
in order to save the lives of 800 Jews in the heyday of World War II, The
Sunday Times has re****ted.
The re****t relates the staggering story of 800 Jewish men and women
who were found hiding in the cellar of a converted Jewish hospital in the
center of Berlin by Russian soldiers.
Not only had these people managed to survive the darkest days in
Jewish history, but, most mysteriously - they did this in the full
knowledge
of the Nazi high command.
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Little is known about the survivors because their files were burnt
by
the Gestapo just days before the Russians arrived. However, the re****t
suggests that these were the "privileged" few - mainly spouses of
non-Jewish
Germans.
It is only thanks to Hilde Kahan, who had access to the secret files
of the survivors, that anything is known of them. In passages of her diary
quoted in the British newspaper, Kahan sheds light on who these people
were.
"In most cases these were friends of very im****tant personalities of the
Third Reich," she writes.
Others, such as Aubrey Pomerance, head of archives at the Jewish
Museum in Berlin, think this group managed to stay alive by bribing top
Nazi
officials. In an interview with The Sunday Times, Pomerance says "Bribery
of
Jews with contacts with the Nazis was definitely part of the story of the
Jewish Hospital. It is a very, very strange story and nobody knows all of
it."
The survival of the Jewish Hospital and its 800 Jewish prisoners
remains, therefore, a mystery. But there is no doubt that their murder had
been deliberately delayed by Nazi order.
Eichmann, the man who could have revealed the truth about the
hospital, was never pressed for answers on a matter considered peripheral
to
the prime charge against him at his Jerusalem trial: Enforcement of the
Final Solution.
As for the survivors, few knew anything of how the hospital became
Eichmann's tool. And many were determined that the next generation should
never learn how they themselves survived.
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