The Limited Times

Now you can see non-English news...

Olympia 1936: "I sat ten meters from Hitler"

2021-07-31T14:31:25.840Z


Gabriel Bach attended the Olympic Games in Berlin in 1936 as a boy and above all had eyes for the National Socialist dictator. His family narrowly escaped the Nazis twice later.


Read the video transcript here

His old suitcase is full of memories.

How the Jewish boy, who narrowly escaped the Nazis, later became the prosecutor in the Eichmann trial.

The suitcase accompanied Gabriel Bach when he and his family fled Germany from the Nazi terror.

With incredible luck, he managed to survive the Holocaust.

A good two years earlier, the Berlin boy was still sitting in the Olympic Stadium.

Gabriel Bach:

I was very interested in sports.

1936 was the Olympics.

I was nine years old at the time.

I went to the Olympic Stadium very often and saw sports equipment.

Interestingly, I had a seat ten meters away from Hitler, who also had his seat.

And every time I was there, very often in any case, Hitler sat ten meters away from me.

Which also depressed me a bit.

The nine-year-old was very aware of Hitler's insane hatred of Jews.

His father had taken him.

So he was able to observe how the Nazis presented themselves with gigantic effort as peaceful and cosmopolitan.

Olympia under the swastika was the perfect propaganda spectacle for Adolf Hitler.

Gabriel Bach:

In general, I observed what Hitler was doing.

In general, Hitler had waited for the result.

Every time someone won, Hitler went down and shook hands with the man who won, and congratulated them.

And then one day there was Jesse Owens, who won wonderfully.

So I looked at Hitler.

I wanted to see what he would do then.

Since, after all, Jesse Owens is or was a black man, and then I saw that Hitler had got up, but walked away quickly so as not to go down, so as not to shake hands with Jesse Owens.

The Nazis hated Jesse Owens.

But the American triumphed, becoming the most successful athlete of the games with four gold medals and the acclaimed hero of the Berlin spectators.

During the Olympics, it appeared that the Nazi dictatorship was taking a break from terror against the Jews.

Anti-Semitic signs, for example, were removed in Berlin for the time of the games.

A deception maneuver.

Because at the same time, while the world was looking at the Olympic Stadium, the construction of the Sachsenhausen concentration camp had started just 30 kilometers as the crow flies in Oranienburg.

The Bach family lived in Berlin-Charlottenburg at the time.

Father Victor, mother Erna and Gabriel's older sister Ruth.

Gabriel Bach:

We had a park on every corner, and our park was not far from where we had lived.

On Konstanzer Strasse in Berlin.

There were benches, red benches, green benches, yellow benches, but also the yellow benches.

We had to sit there, it said: "Only for Jews".

It said: "Only for Jews".

So we had to sit there too.

Since 1933, the lives of people of the Jewish faith in Germany have been systematically restricted and threatened.

Book burning, boycott of Jewish shops, professional bans, marginalization.

In 1935 the Nuremberg Race Laws came into force, they meant the complete disenfranchisement.

The situation became hopeless, also for the Bach family.

Gabriel Bach:

We always had the opinion that we don't have to leave Germany too late before something happens.

We then decided to leave Germany in 1938.

We left for Holland two weeks before the “Kristallnacht”.

By train, just in time.

During the Reichspogromnacht from November 9th to 10th, 1938, thugs organized by the NSDAP as well as units of the police and fire brigade set fire to synagogues in Germany, destroyed Jewish shops and apartments and mistreated their residents.

This was followed by mass arrests, deportations and murders.

In the past, the excesses were also belittled as »Kristallnacht«.

They were something like the direct harbinger of the Shoah.

The Bach family fled to the Netherlands, which was neutral at the time.

Gabriel Bach was eleven years old.

Everything he had was in his trunk.

At the Dutch border, the family was taken off the train by the SS and then chased back in, says Bach.

Gabriel Bach:

I had a not so light suitcase, but that somehow helped in that way.

An SS man came after us and hit me in my bum with his shoe ... He kicked me with his leg and I flew into the train with my suitcase.

So this kick, this push from the SS man.

As gruesome as it was to look at and feel it, but it somehow helped me.

In this way I flew into the train with the suitcase.

Escape from the Nazis was very difficult.

The immigration policy of the USA was just as restrictive as that of Canada, Great Britain or the British Mandate Palestine.

For many Jewish refugees it was the second humanitarian drama.

Escaping the Nazis not only meant losing one's homeland, but also systematic expropriation by the Nazi state - and was associated with a lot of bureaucracy.

Not many people received the necessary documents.

The Bach family was lucky.

Gabriel Bach:

We were in Holland for two years - from 1938 to 1940. And then something special happened to us again.

We left Holland two months before the Germans invaded and occupied Holland.

As I said, we had no idea - also a coincidence.

And then in 1940 we went to Palestine.

On May 10, 1940, the Germans invaded the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg after having postponed the attack 29 times.

With the occupation, the terror, the systematic persecution and deportation of the Jews began in the Netherlands as well.

These are pictures from the Westerbork transit camp.

From here the people were deported to the German extermination camps.

A total of 107,000 Jews were deported from the Netherlands between 1941 and 1944.

Only about 5000 survived.

The Germans murdered three quarters of Dutch Jews during World War II.

Gabriel Bach:

And then, a few months later, I heard that after we had emigrated, the Germans had invaded.

They killed all the Jewish children in our school.

And of the twelve children who were with me, not a single one survived.

So I was the only Jew who stayed alive because we had just gone to Palestine.

The nine-year-old Jewish boy, who sat behind Hitler in the Olympic Stadium, studied law after the end of the war and was appointed deputy attorney general in the Eichmann trial in 1961.

Gabriel Bach survived the Holocaust, with a lot of luck.

Fortune that six million Jews who were murdered by the National Socialists did not have.

Bach wanted justice.

Immediately before his first encounter with the notorious Holocaust organizer Eichmann, the prosecutor realized once again how close he himself had escaped the Nazi murder machine.

Gabriel Bach:

Then I heard Eichmann approach and be close to the door.

Then I had the feeling how easily it could have been the other way around.

That I would have been brought to Eichmann when I was a child, that I would have been brought to Eichmann as a child, myself and my family.

It was a very strange feeling when I heard Eichmann approaching my room.

Eichmann was sentenced to death and executed.

Gabriel Bach was later appointed as a judge at the Supreme Court of Israel.

The 94-year-old lives in Jerusalem with his wife Ruth.

Source: spiegel

All news articles on 2021-07-31

You may like

Trends 24h

News/Politics 2024-03-27T16:45:54.081Z
News/Politics 2024-03-28T06:04:53.137Z

Latest

© Communities 2019 - Privacy

The information on this site is from external sources that are not under our control.
The inclusion of any links does not necessarily imply a recommendation or endorse the views expressed within them.