Seder Olam Revisited: C48c- Shoah
- Albert Benhamou
- Nov 20, 2025
- 20 min read
CHRONOLOGY OF JEWISH HISTORY
Generation 48: Hebrew years 5640-5760 (1880-2000 CE)
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Introduction
This 48th chronological generation continues with the greatest human disaster caused by World War II which saw the emergence of ideological conflicts, translating into nationalism and territorial conquests, between multiple camps: Communism, Nazism, Socialism, Fascism, and so on over time. The Jews were a distinctive target in this conflict which also saw the creation of a new sort of genocide that human kind had never experienced before: the Holocaust, also known in Hebrew as the Shoah.
Hebrew Year | CE | Event |
5696 | 1936 | Zeev Jabotinsky |
5698 | 1938 | Kristallnacht |
5699 | 1939 | The doomed journey of the St. Louis |
5702 | 1942 | The Wannsee conference |
5703 | 1943 | The Mufti of Jerusalem and the Final Solution |
5704 | 1944 | The Blood for trucks initiative |
5705 | 1944 | The assassination of Lord Moyne |
5705 | 1945 | The Holocaust of six million Jews |
5707 | 1946 | The Nuremberg Trial, and PurimFest 1946 |
Year 5696 – 1936 CE – The "evacuation plan" of Zeev Jabotinsky
Zeev Jabotinsky was born in Odessa in 1880 from an assimilated Jewish family. After the Kishinev Pogrom of 1903 (see document C48a, year 1903), he became Zionist and established a Jewish self-defence organisation to protect the Jews from the Antisemitic riots that took place in these times. His motto was : better have a gun and not need it, rather than need a gun and not have it.
In 1904 he moved to Saint-Petersburg and was the publisher of a magazine, Jewish Life. In his columns, he showed fierce criticism against assimilation, and the Bund (political movement of assimilated Jews who endorsed Socialism). During WW-I, he organised a mule corps composed of Jewish fighters to take part of the liberation of Palestine, along the British troops. He even served in one regiment of the British Army in Palestine and received an MBE decoration for his military services.
In 1920, he founded the Revisionist movement, and its youth branch, the Betar, with the aim of training Jews to self-defence. In 1930, during a trip to South-Africa, he was informed by the British authorities there that he was not allowed to return to Palestine, in application of the new White Paper (see document C48b, year 1930).
Jabotinsky returned to Europe only to witness the rise of Antisemitism. He knew too well from personal experience how fast could things turn bad for Jews and campaigned to negotiate an "evacuation plan" in 1936 for those of Poland, Hungary and Romania to be sent to Palestine. The plan was actually approved by the heads of government from all three countries but met the opposition of the British Government who had shut the doors of Palestine to Jewish immigration since the White Paper. The plan was also dismissed by Chaim Weizmann, the chairman of the Zionist Organization, probably as a wish not to openly confront the British policy with such plan. So, around 1938, Jabotinsky went to warn Jewish communities in Eastern Europe to affect their Aliyah to Palestine by themselves or, else, to face a wave of "super-pogroms". His warnings fell in deaf ears.
Jabotinsky found refuge in USA during WW-II, where he died in 1940. His ashes were later brought back to the State of Israel in 1964. His doctrine served as the basis for the Herut then Likud political parties in Israel.
Year 5698 – 1938 CE – Kristallnacht
The financial crash of 1929 created millions of unemployed persons in the world. In Germany, it was particularly severe and took the local currency (the Deutschmark) to its lowest levels with huge inflation. This situation brought the Nazi (National Socialist) party, led by Adolf Hitler, to power after the general elections of March 1933. A few months later the old president von Hindenburg died. Less than 12 months later, Hitler managed to gain full powers, in other words turned Germany in a legalised dictatorship. Hitler engaged the country in a program of reconstruction and rearmament (not authorized since the end of WW-I) which took unemployment down from 6 to 1 million between 1932 and 1936. With a policy of bullying and personal threats, Hitler progressively got rid of all political opponents by resignations or otherwise and, by 1938, gained effective control of the armed forces.
In the night of 9-10 November 1938, the Nazi party executed a well-organised plan to destroy all Jewish religious life in Germany and Austria (which had been united to Nazi Germany by the Anschluss in March of that same year). On that night, they attacked and burned over 1000 synagogues as well as Jewish homes, schools, hospices, and so on. Over 30,000 Jews were also rounded up and incarcerated in concentration camps. Kristallnacht (the Night of Crystal, so-called because of the broken glass in all the synagogues) marked a turning point of Nazi Germany in their treatment towards the Jews. Hitler was ready to follow his doctrine of a superior Aryan race, as he had expressed it in his work Mein Kampf published a few years earlier, and was ready to get rid of all minorities that he saw as an inferior race.
The German Jews had been the example of assimilation in Europe because German states gave birth to the Enlightment in the 18th century. They considered themselves not Jews but "Hebrews". Prominent figures such as Mendelssohn and Jacob Frank (see document C46b, year 1749) and Moses Mendelssohn with his Haskalah (see document C47a, year 1783) promoted assimilation, and even conversion. As a result, before the end of the 19th century, a new term was added to the German dictionary: Antisemitism. Some German-speaking Jew, such as Theodor Herzl (see document C48a, year 1896), understood the failure of assimilation and gave birth to another "Jewish solution": Zionism. But it was not widely spread yet in Jewish communities of Europe until... the catastrophe of WW-II.
After the war, Pastor Martin Niemöller stated his own cowardice, and the one of the ordinary German people, as all stood silent when the Nazis started to eliminate step after step the Communists, then the Jews, then the Tziganes, and more:
First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out
— Because I was not a Socialist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out
— Because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out
— Because I was not a Trade Unionist.
Then they came for the Catholics, and I did not speak out
— Because I was a Protestant.
Then they came for me
— and there was no one left to speak for me.
(Martin Niemoller, 1892-1984)
Year 5699 – 1939 CE – The doom journey of the St. Louis
At the dawn of WW-II, when Germany openly persecuted his Jews, the nations of the free world closed their doors to them while, in Mandated Palestine, immigration levels were kept under very low figures so that Britain would not antagonise the Arabs.
One story illustrated, maybe more than any other, the trap in which the Jews, with no homeland and no shelter, were exposed to. In 1939, about 1000 German Jews were given authorisation to leave Germany on a ship called the St. Louis. The ship sailed from Hamburg in May 1939 to cross the Atlantic. The U.S. ambassador in London, Joseph Kennedy, father of "JFK", future President of USA, a known anti-Semite who once declared that as a race, they [the Jews] stink, cabled Washington to warn of the arrival of the ship and prevent their acceptance as immigrants to USA. The St. Louis first reached Cuba, so that the Jewish refugees would be able to wait for a US visa to immigrate. But Cuba had already taken some 2,500 Jewish refugees from Europe and were not prepared to accept more, so they denied their disembarking. The ship then sailed to Florida, very close to Miami, but the US authorities did not accept these refugees (in their vast country) on the reason that immigration quotas had already been reached for the year 1939. Canadian authorities were also approached to accept refugees, but they refused too. Finally, the St. Louis had no other choice but to sail back to Europe in June 1939 where she arrived a few weeks later. Finally Britain, France and Belgium admitted most of the refugees, which enabled about half of the passengers of this doomed journey to survive the Holocaust.
Year 5702 – 1942 CE – The Wannsee Conference
While the Second World War was well engaged and the Axis Powers having the upper hand, top Nazi officials and industrialists met on 20 January 1942 (Hebrew date 2 Shevat 5702) in a suburb of Berlin to discuss what should be done with the Jews of Europe, entrapped by the advance of the German army and currently incarcerated in concentration camps or enclosed in city ghettos. Their decision came to be known as the Final Solution with the mass extermination of Jewish populations by means of industrialised mass murder techniques. The head of the extermination programme was the SS Reinhard Heydrich while the German army was to provide the logistical support needed to round up the Jews, first in Poland and then across Europe, and send them to designate extermination camps located in Poland. The key officer in the execution of this extermination plan was Adolf Eichmann, who participated to this conference and drafted a list of the number of Jews in each European country, totalling 11 million people. The Final Solution murdered over half of them, six million Jews.
The extermination of Jews started before the Wannsee conference, but the methods were experimental and not suited for the mass murder of millions of people. The goal of the conference was to discuss a more expedient way to exterminate the Jews. The above list is given in two sections: A for the areas already under German control and B for the regions to become under their control over time... In part A, the biggest number of people to kill was Jews located in the GeneralGouvernement which was the part of Poland which was not annexed to Germany (typically up to the eastern border towards USSR). The census of Jews there reached over 2 million people. In part B, the largest number of Jews was in USSR, with 5 million people of which near to 3 million of them were in Ukraine. In part B, Hungary was next in size with over 700,000 Jews who avoided the mass extermination because the country had a treaty with Germany and remained independent until 1944.
In part A, there was the case of Estonia (Estland in German) which was marked as judenfrei, meaning "free of Jews". This meant that all the Jews of Estonia had already been massacred before this conference took place. This fact is corroborated by another document issued by Heindrich at the end of January 1942 for the number of Jews in the Baltic countries who had already been executed (typically by firing squads, a method known as the Shoah by bullets). The Heindrich document shows that Estonia's 963 Jews had already been executed, and the territory was declared judenfrei.
Before the Wansee conference, there were also massacres of Jews perpetrated by local populations when the German army advanced. The local authorities collapsed and the Jews became targets of the mob. This has been the case, for example, in the village of Jedwabne in Poland on 10 July 1941 where 340 Polish Jews of all ages had been burned alive in a barn by their Polish neighbours led by the town mayor and the local police. For long time, the massacre was blamed on the Nazis, but an investigation demonstrated that the massacre was perpetrated by the Polish civilians. A book was published on this massacre (Jan Tomasz Gross, "Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland", 2001) and watch a Polish movie called Aftermath.
On the military front, the year 1942 also marked the first major defeat of the German army: in July 1942, they were stopped in Al-Alamein (first battle) and in November 1942 they were definitely forced to retreat (second battle of Al-Alamein). So, the same year that Nazi Germany decided for the Final Solution was the year that witnessed their demise.
Year 5703 – 1943 CE – The Mufti of Jerusalem and the Final Solution
During the Nuremberg trial of the Nazi officials after the war (see below), a certain number of documents shed light on the involvement of the Mufti of Jerusalem concerning the Final Solution. Amin al-Husseini, who came from a prominent Jerusalemite family, was nominated Mufti of Jerusalem in 1921 by the British authorities although he had served in the Ottoman army during WW-I. In Palestine, he proved to be a fierce adversary to Zionism and to any agreement with the Jews over the Holy Land. He also caused the Arab riots against the Jewish population of Mandated Palestine (see document C48b, year 1929).
The Mufti was determined to ensure that no Jew would escape Europe as he anticipated that, otherwise, they would immigrate to Palestine. Already in 1933, when Hitler expressed the wish to expel Jews from Germany and would have probably agreed to have them transferred to Palestine, the Mufti convinced the Nazi officials not to pursue such idea. Before the war broke out in September 1939, he already openly sided with the Axis Powers and caused Arab revolts against the British in the region and Palestine between 1936 and 1939. In 1937, he had to flee Palestine to avoid arrest. While in exile, he collaborated with Nazi Germany and settled in Berlin from 1941 for more than a year. There he organised an Arab regiment to fight along the Waffen-SS. Before the German defeat at Al-Alamein, which shattered his plan for the Middle-East, he had negotiated with Hitler about an independent Arab state that would supplant the British Mandate and create a German ally in the Middle East.
He was also in close contact with Eichmann (the designated architect of the extermination of the Jews) making sure that, with the help of the Nazi extermination programme, no Jew would escape from Europe. During his trial in Jerusalem in 1961, Eichmann however denied that the Mufti had anything to do with the Final Solution, or knowledge of the concentration camps, in contradiction with other Nazi officials' testimonials made during the Nuremberg Trial of 1947 such as the one from Dieter von Wisliczeny, who was working for Eichmann, who declared:
The Grand Mufti has repeatdly suggested to the Nazi authorities - including Hitler, von Ribbentrop, and Himmler - the extermination of European Jewry. He considered this a comfortable solution to the Palestine problem.
Eichmann hated Jews so it seems that, during his trial of 1961 in Israel, he wanted to protect Arab interests against his former victims by not exposing the influence of the Mufti. In 1961, it was not his only lie.
Further during the war, the Bulgarian government wanted to allow the emigration of some 4000 Jewish children who had been separated from their parents when they were sent to the death camps. The Mufti wrote personally in June 1943 to the Prime Minister of Bulgaria to not permit their immigration, by fear they would end up in Mandated Palestine. Consequently, the children were also sent to the camps where they met their brutal death.
A year later, when Germany was obviously losing the war, and some of their military fronts suffered great loses, the Mufti wrote to Himmler and von Ribbentrop not to be too lenient towards the Jews.
After the war, the Mufti was caught and put under house arrest in France. There he convinced the French authorities that he would be able to help the damaged position of France in the Middle East through his personal intermediation. As a result, his conditions of detention were eased. Britain asked for his extradition, as a war criminal, but France considered him as a political prisoner. Serbia also asked for his extradition to stand trial in their country for his personal responsibility in the massacre of Serb (Christian) civilians when he supported Muslim Bosnia. Owing to the pressure of international dismay at the French position to provide shelter to this war crimes culprit, the Mufti was sent to an Arab country of his choice. He then discreetly left France for Cairo and later thanked the French government for their behaviour towards him, even proposing his intermediation in their problematic situation in North Africa. The Grand Mufti pursued a life in exile. He died in Beirut in 1974. The State of Israel refused to grant his wish to be buried in Jerusalem.
Year 5704 – 1944 CE – The Blood for trucks initiative
Nazi Germany was fighting multiple fronts after 1943 and was progressively losing ground. The Allied conference in Tehran at the end of 1943 made it clear that they will seek a full surrender with no condition from their enemies. From the first months of 1944, a negotiation was engaged, through Adolf Eichmann, for letting the huge number of Jews from Hungary go free out of Europe in exchange for thousands of trucks to be provided to Germany to help their armies on the Eastern front. The rate was 1000 Jews for each truck. With this negotiation, the Nazis hoped to slow down the Allied advance in the western front, eventually break the alliance between the West and Stalin, so that it would provide them with a relief to focus on fighting back the Red Army on the eastern front.
At that time, most of European Jewry was already exterminated but Hungary had been preserved from the Nazi regime due to political considerations. Yet, the situation changed and a new regime in Hungary meant that all the Jews of that country would be sent to the death camps in Poland. Joel Brand, the Jewish negotiator from Hungary, was allowed to travel to Cairo to raise what was needed to rescue up to one million Jews for 1000 trucks. But he was arrested, and during his interrogation the British Resident in the city, Lord Moyne, would have told him: What can I do with a million Jews? Although the authenticity of this remark is debatable, the fact remains that the British Government refused to proceed with this initiative. The Allies convinced themselves that this opening from the Nazis was a bluff and an attempt to weaken their alliance with Stalin. In fact, Eichmann was already sending the Hungarian Jews to the death camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau in springtime 1944, without waiting the return of Joel Brand and the answer from the Allies.
Year 5705 – 1944 CE – The assassination of Lord Moyne
A few months later, in November 1944, the Lehi, a Jewish secret group founded by Abraham "Yair" Stern, a Polish Jew who immigrated to Palestine in 1925, carried out the assassination of Lord Moyne in Cairo. The Lehi had the policy to not negotiate with the British Mandate authorities and to rather obtain their departure from Palestine by all means. Over 20 years had passed since the start of the British Mandate, and Britain had closed the doors to Jewish immigration which was contradictory to the spirit of the Mandate and to the Balfour Declaration of establishing a homeland for world Jewry, away from persecutions. The British authorities qualified the Lehi as terrorists and called them the Stern Gang.
Abraham Stern, unlike all other Jewish groups in Mandated Palestine who agreed to a stop of their militant activities against Britain during the duration of the war, sought in 1941 to cooperate with Nazi Germany against Britain if they would let the European Jews emigrate to Palestine. The British authorities in Palestine were actively searching for Stern and found him in February 1942 in an apartment in Jaffa where he lived under the name of Abraham Hermoni, and shot him dead in cold blood after he had been arrested and hand-cuffed. This version is the one known to Israelis who used the testimonial of the woman who was in the flat at the time of the arrestation. Otherwise the British Police who shot Stern stated that he dashed for a window in an attempt to escape and that they also feared he had grenades on him to blow himself up rather than being captured. The British authorities issued a verdict of justifiable homicide to clear the British Police. But Stern's followers swore to seek revenge, and this may explain their action against Lord Moyne, especially in the context of British refusal to allow Hungarian Jews to emigrate to Palestine and avoid sure death.
The Lehi leader who ordered the assassination of Lord Moyne was Isaac Shamir, who later became Prime Minister of Israel in the 1980's. He justified his decision to an Israeli newspaper in 1983 by declaring that Lord Moyne committed the following "crimes": (1) in early 1942, he had urged the Turkish government to refuse passage to a ship, the Sturma, full of Jewish refugees from Romania, and convinced them to send the ship back in the Black Sea (this meant a sure death because a Soviet submarine sunk the ship within a few hours killing all 780 civilian refugees except one who survived), (2) his refusal to even consider the possibility to save one million (Jewish) lives with the Blood for trucks initiative of 1944.
Year 5705 – 1945 CE – The Holocaust of six million Jews
The Holocaust, Shoah in Hebrew, was the state-orchestrated extermination of the Jewish populations in Europe by Nazi Germany. The main mass murder camps in Poland were :
Auschwitz I and Auschwitz-Birkenau, where about 1,100,000 people were killed
Treblinka, near Warsaw, about 850,000
Belzec, about 600,000
Chelmo, near Lodz, about 200,000
Sobibor, about 200,000
Majdanek, near Lublin, about 130,000
Other death camps were built in other regions such as Germany, Belarus, Croatia, etc.
The West had received information from leaks, rumours, and even reports about the murdering of Jews in great scale. But the information was believed to be mere propaganda, despite the declared intents from Nazi leaders to get rid of the Jews, and the evidence of state-sponsored mistreatment of Jews many years prior to the war. The West ignored the war-time reports. In 1942, Jan Karski, a Polish resistant, managed to reach London and the US and personally informed Roosevelt of the extent of the massacres. In December 1942, an address was officially made by the Polish Government in exile to the United Nations, and they published a report where it was stated:
The outbreak of war between Germany and Soviet Russia and the occupation of the Eastern areas of Poland by German troops considerably increased the number of Jews in Germany's power. At the same time the mass murders of Jews reached such dimensions that, at first, people refused to give credence to the reports reaching Warsaw from the Eastern provinces. The reports, however, were confirmed again and again by reliable witnesses. (Republic of Poland, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, "The Mass Extermination of Jews in German-Occupied Poland", 10 December 1942, by Edward Raczynski)
But the testimonials and the reports were not believed, or the Western leaders chose not to believe them. Instead, they chose to focus their efforts on the war and did not attempt to carpet bomb rail tracks to prevent the trains from reaching their fateful destinations. About six million Jews were murdered in the Holocaust, of which one million children. This is not the place to discuss the Holocaust and scores of books and documents have been brought to public knowledge. The Museum of Yad Vashem in Israel is a repository of such information for those who would like to research the subject further.
Jewish tradition often make parallels between catastrophes that fall upon the Jews and the Scriptures. Concerning the Holocaust, Hitler has been equalled to Haman of the Book of Esther, as explained below. It is even said that Jacob the Patriarch had foreseen the Shoah as commentaries on the chapter Vayishlach (Genesis 32:4-33) can explain. To enter Canaan, Jacob had to pay a dear price to avoid extermination at the hand of Esau, his brother, and his 400 henchmen. Some of the parallels (list is not exhaustive) are as follows (also see the following site in French on this topics, MyLeava):
Esau is written עשו in Hebrew which has numerical value of 377 (=376 for the letters + 1 for the whole word), same as Adolf Hitler which is written אדולף היטלר
Esau, who is also called Edom (ancestor to the Germans and to the Western civilization), is said to have settled in the land of Seir, which is written שעיר and can be decomposed as ש and עיר meaning "300 cities"; at the time of Bismarck, Germany was a nation composed of 300 states
Talmud Megillah 6b mentions that Jacob was anxious of Esau's intents, but that this anxiety referred to what the descendance of Esau will do to Jacob's descendance; so he made a prayer to God not to allow his evil brother, associated to "Germamia of Edom" (which has been equated to Germania), to destroy the world; the amora Talmudist Rabbi Hama bar Hanina went further to explain that Germamia of Edom is a country with "300 crowned heads" (this was stated, of course, many centuries before "Germamia" even existed); this is really about Germany
Esau marched accompanied with 400 henchmen; the number 400 represents the forces of evil that can be nullified and reset, like the 400 years of exile mentioned by God to Abraham, the 400 silver shekels that Abraham paid for the Cave of Machpelah to keep evil away, the 400 soldiers of Amalek who fought the Israelites in the desert, and so on (for Jewish symbolism of the numbers, click here).
In an attempt to please the evil Esau, Jacob sent to him a succession of animals from his cattle as a tribute, to be used as an holocaust for redemption... This tribute was composed of five groups of animals (goats, ewes/rams, camels, cows/bulls, donkeys), for a total of 580 animals or more (the exact count is not given but 580 is a minimal number); this corresponds to the five years of mass extermination of the Jews (because according to the Holocaust resource of Yad Vashem, the mass extermination of the Jews started with the invasion of Russia in June 1941, and it ended with the end of WW-II in May 1945, thus five years of active extermination), and if we multiply 580 by the largest Biblical number (=the "myriad" equalling 10,000), it gives 580 x 10,000 = 5,800,000 as a minimum, which corresponds to the number of Jews who perished in the Holocaust.
Year 5707 – 1946 CE – The Nuremberg Trial and PurimFest 1946
The war officially ended in Europe on 8 May 1945. During their progress towards Berlin, the Allied armies discovered the horror of the extermination camps across the continent. Some prominent Nazis were caught, and many other executioners escaped. The Allies decided to bring the Nazi leaders to trial: it was to be the first time that the "crime against humanity" would be punished. The Nuremberg Trial has been a key event for multiple reasons:
it detailed the machine set by the Nazis to cause the mass murder of millions of (Jewish) civilians, the Holocaust; no other country or civilisation or people had ever reached the degree of barbarity that a civilised nation such as Germany had shown,
the condemnation of the Nazi officials has been paralleled by Jewish scholars to the events of Queen Esther and the festival of Purim about 2500 years earlier (see document C28, year 479 BCE),
the trial brought the extent of the Holocaust to the world knowledge which paved the way two years later for the historical vote at the U.N. General Assembly in favour of the establishment of a Jewish State, alongside an Arab state, in Mandate Palestine.
About the first point, there is little to add to the mass of documents having proved and detailed the Holocaust.
Concerning the second point, there have been many details about the parallel with Purim:
on 10 November 1938, the day after Kristallnacht, the Nazi propagandist Julius Streicher declared that just as the Jew butchered 75,000 Persians in one night, the same fate would have befallen the German people had the Jews succeeded in inciting a war against Germany; the Jews would have instituted a new Purim festival in Germany (Randall L. Bytwerk, Landmark Speeches Of National Socialism. Texas A&M University Press, 2008, p. 91); the same Streicher, who was condemned to death in Nuremberg Trial, shouted on his way up to the gallows PurimFest 1946 (meaning the Festival of Purim 1946); this Jewish festival had been a sort of obsession in the mind of this Nazi propagandist who made a point to formally execute 10 Jews every year at Purim as a revenge for the 10 sons of Haman who were hanged 2500 years before,
10 sons of Haman were put to death by hanging, and so were 10 Nazis; all were hanged, instead of using a normal firing squad, including Goering who committed suicide a few hours before his hanging,
in time of Purim events, the Jews rejoiced the following day after the hanging of Haman and his sons; similarly, as one day could be one year, the U.N. voted for the establishment of a Jewish State in Mandate Palestine (29 November 1947), so one year had passed after the Nuremberg executions (16 October 1946),
in the text of the Megillat Esther, in the list of the 10 sons of Haman, 4 letters are written differently: one letter vaw (ו) is greater than the rest, and three letters (ת ש ג) are smaller. This has been interpreted as the indication of a date: the bigger ו is the 6th millennium, while the three smaller letters form the number 707, in other words this shows the 707th year of the 6th millennium, which is precisely the Hebrew year of the hanging of the 10 Nazis, inscribed in the hanging of the 10 sons of Haman; there are several other references in the Scriptures that link the events of Purim with the rise and fall of the Nazi regime, so the reader can read about this topic with some personal research,
the extraordinary coincidence unveiled in 1995, when the secrecy of a bank account in Switzerland was lifted 50 years after its opening, because nobody came to claim it nor made any transaction with it in that period; this was a Nazi bank account owned by a so-called "Max Amann"; it transpired that this account was opened in 1945, sometime before the end of the war, and the huge sum of 800 million Deutsche Marks was deposited in it, and never claimed since; there was no doubt that this account belonged to the Nazi leader who simply used the name of Max Amann, his superior officer during WW-I; the real Max Amann could not have been the owner of this account because he died in poverty in 1957; so the coincidence with Purim is that Hitler named himself Amann, pronounced like the Haman of Purim !
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Albert Benhamou
Private Tour Guide in Israel
Cheshvan 5786 - November 2025
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