The Black Album (of Polish Jewry)

[Wetzelrad]

Perry notes that Glas was not working in a vacuum. Already, in April 1940, the Anti-Nazi League published The Black Album through the Arieli Press in Tel Aviv: a small, bound album measuring 14 × 10 cm, containing ten postcards to be removed along a perforated margin that directed the public to “Send this card to everyone you know in the world and participate in the disclosure of the Nazi crimes.”

The (non-Spinal Tap, non-Metallica) Black Album is contained in the last part of the PDF here.

April 1940 is remarkably early to be churning out propaganda of this type. The Black Album seems in many respects to be the original The Black Book.

Its description of camps are noteworthy. At this early date, only the camps Dachau and Buchenwald are mentioned, but its description could be the same for any of the supposed extermination camps that came later.

In Hitler's Germany vast concentration camps have been erected where the Nazi sadists torture their unfortunate victims to an extent never before conceived by human imagination.

In these camps of suffering and death, the prisoners, principally Jewish, are submitted to most cruel corporal and spirtual humiliation, to hard labour, starvation, and severe molestation leading to aberration of the mind and death.

The last stage in the concentration camps is that of incineration of the dead body, so that the corpse may not reveal to his relatives the traces of Nazi torture.

And since Hitler has occupied Poland, that country was turned into a gigantic Concentration Camp and the population of this unfortunate State has been placed under the dreadful mastery of wild beasts ruling according to the methods of Dachau and Buchenwald.

In 1940, the order to exterminate Jews had not yet been given, so all this is at the very least questionable. I'm not sure if the prisoner population being "principally Jewish" can even be supported.

It's fairly trivial to understand how this story, already written in 1940, would be expanded to include supposed gas chambers.

Polish Jews, hunted in the streets, are compelled to do hard work at a temperature of 40 degrees C below the freezing point while they are half-naked.

Apparently there was a record set for an extreme low temperature of -41°C in Siedlce in January 1940, which is what this must be referencing. But the average temperature in January there today is -4°C, not much colder than Poland as a whole. This is the taking of really extreme outlier weather and claiming it as common.

The postcard for this atrocity uses a photograph of men, some shirtless, walking down the street carrying bricks. There is a problem with the date and location. According to GFH and Yad Vashem, this is actually a photo of the Kovno Ghetto in Lithuania, but that ghetto hadn't been established until 1941. A booklet by Reca Stone (scanned here) put the photo in the Warsaw Ghetto, as does The Stanley Kubrick Archive (cited here), however that ghetto wasn't established until November 1940. Nothing puts it in Siedlce, and nothing in it suggests cold temperature.



Moving on, postcard #7 invented an atrocity story of Jews being forced to clean pavement with their tongues. Similar stories to this later appeared in some other contexts: Zabecki and the IMT.

In Polish towns Nazis kidnap Jewish passers-by from the very street. Men are drafted by the Compulsory Labour Service, whereas women and girls are dragged into brothels which have been especially established to satisfy the lasciviousness of the Nazi murderers. The illustration shows some of the notables cleaning the street with their hands and mouths.

However, the illustration is a crude photo forgery, as can be easily shown. Two people have been added, and a Nazi swastika is drawn in.

[Wetzelrad]

Postcard #1 is another crude photo forgery. They added an enormous skull flag to Hitler's car.



Postcard #3 is another forgery. It is supposed to show Jews bringing a coffin to a grave, but according to the Getty Images description of the original image, they were actually being forced to remove weapons they had hidden in graves. This was taken "from a Nazi propaganda series 'German Sicherheitsdienst during a raid in the Warsaw Ghetto'". Other photos from this event can be viewed for example here.



Postcard #4 seems to follow the same strategy of fakery by exaggeration, but in written form.

Postcard #8 looks like another forgery. The lighting and scale are wrong for the collapsed person, at least.

Postcard #10 is about cremation. It acknowledges that ashes were sent to the family. "The widow receives the ashes of her murdered husband."

[pilgrimofdark]

Before DavidM shared that article, I'd never heard of The Black Album. Mainstream literature has all sorts of fascinating nuggets like this. Nothing comes up for "black album" on the CODOH website, so maybe it's virtually unknown?

My favorite crude forgery is "8. A horrible race."

I don't know why, but it's funnier colorized.

Spoiler

8. A horrible race.
Nazis indulge in ordering their prisoners to run in front of fast driving motor vehicles. Those who collapse from exhaustion before reaching the goal are shot dead or knocked down by the automobile.

Even funnier is that the person collapsed in the ditch is the only one wearing lighter clothing more suitable for forced jogging. He also seems to be significantly better fed, towering over the others.

I added a second version of him to show how tall he is.

Spoiler

The last postcard is also interesting.

10. Nazi victims converted into ashes.

Staple industry of death in German concentration camps.

1. Nazis plunder a Polish citizen.
2. The victim is enlisted in the labour troups of the concentration camp.
3. The victim dies of Nazi torture.
4. The widow receives the ashes of her murdered husband. Nazis burn their dead victims in order to leave no traces of the maltreatment.

No details on whether each labor camp had its own (mobile or stationary) crematorium, or if this was carried out via flamethrower or building pyres on rails. Maybe simple explosives were used.

[Wetzelrad]

I'm sure the bit about cremation was all extrapolation from Dachau and Buchenwald, which had had crematory furnaces by this date. What is written makes sense to me, and I think it aligns with Mattogno. The Nazis originally had the ashes of the dead delivered to their families, but such stories were then used in propaganda of this sort, so they became stricter in how they delivered it, and they probably moved toward local ash burials in some cases. Note that the album says nothing about having to pay for someone's ashes, which became a propaganda theme later. Also nothing is said about hiding ashes in cabbage fields or rivers.

The album was written in Hebrew but included English and French translations. The text is not identical between translations. The Hebrew text is more explicit about "Israel", "Jews", "rabbis", and uses pronouns like "our" and "us". Chiefly, there are three pages that were not translated so are only in Hebrew. Here they are, machine translated:

Spoiler

The Anti-Nazi League
Tel Aviv, P.O. Box 1815

Its goals:

Propaganda and information activities in Israel and abroad, against the Nazi regime. The spirit of Nazism and racial hatred.

In accordance with the popular nature of the accommodation, membership fees were set at one gerah per month.

The League sees its main role in training the masses to become anti-Nazi propagandists and to cooperate in the war for truth and justice, against lies and hatred, which are the foundations of the Nazi regime.

The league was approved by the Israeli government.

Her password:

Remember what Hitler did to you!

Wipe out the memory of Hitler from under the sky.----

You will not forget!

---

Wipe out the memory of Hitler from under the sky.

In contrast to Hitler's brutal war of extermination, the Jewish people stand in a worrying state of restraint and passivity, a state that betrays all the natural laws of the instinct for survival. We place our heads under the axe of the Nazi murderer and accept the death sentence that Hitler has pronounced upon us, without any protest or resistance.

And do not say in your heart that we are incapable of fighting the Nazi giant. Every creature is given the power to defend itself against the enemy that attacks it, and we too have the power and weapons to defend ourselves and fight the vile and terrible Nazi enemy.

The weapon at our disposal is the same weapon that the great powers are now using, and that our most dangerous enemy is also using, to undermine our existence everywhere in the world. This is the weapon of propaganda.

It is precisely we, who are scattered among all the nations and speak their own languages, who are more capable than any other people of using the weapon of propaganda. We have the ability to influence the peoples of the world, to awaken their consciences and to rallied them against the common enemy, whose name is Hitler.

We have the power to denounce the vile acts committed by the enemy, and to shout angrily until the nations awaken and recognize the real danger that awaits them, then all nations will rise up against the common enemy.

To our great regret, we have not known this power of ours and have not used it until now. Therefore, the Anti-Nazi League took it upon itself to awaken our people from their state of apathy and inactivity, to teach them to recognize their powers and to know how to use the weapon of propaganda.

The cry of our tortured brothers and sisters in Poland. The wails of the dying babies in their mothers' arms, comes to us and demands from us with all force to act against the vile enemy and avenge the spilled blood. Let us not say despair, let us not stand idly by, for we know that there is no place on earth for our people and for the Nazis alike. And if, God forbid, Hitler wins - our people will live, flourish and multiply.

We are lost. And if Hitler is destroyed, we will rise up as one man against the Nazi monster as long as he repels us, in this war, which is God's war against Amalek.

The war of light against darkness. And the war of truth against lies.

---

Remember what Hitler did to you.

(1) Hitler is a persecutor of the Jews, surpassing in his fanatical hatred, cruelty, and thirst for Jewish blood all the haters of Israel of all generations.

(2) Himmler brought destruction and devastation, annihilation and doom upon millions of our brothers in Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Poland.

(3) Hitler placed our brothers in the above-mentioned countries outside all law and order. He robbed them of their property, removed them from all possibilities of existence, turned our brothers into slaves and our sisters into handmaids, and handed them over as prey to the teeth of the Nazi beasts.

(4) Hitler established concentration camps in Germany and the occupied countries, where tens of thousands of his fellow Jews were tortured by Nazi sadists in a brutal manner until their souls expired.

(5) After the systematic extermination of the Jews in Central Europe, Himmler raised the axe on the 2 million Jews living on Polish soil, and subjected them to slander and ridicule, to the sword and to strangulation.

(6) Hitler brought upon our brothers in Poland all the harsh and cruel decrees written in the book, the Jewish cities in Poland were turned into cemeteries, their homes into houses of mourning, in Niram they were taxed and their daughters were brought to brothels. The Jews of Poland were denied the right to live outside the ghetto, they have no right to buy food, they have no right to go out into the street. They do not have the primitive right that every animal in the world has - to live.

(7) Hitler established a special Jewish zone in the city of Lublin, Poland. In this death zone, several hundred thousand Jews were concentrated, living there in piles of snow, dying of hunger and cold. In these horrific conditions, which are impossible to even describe, Jews were dying there in droves every hour.

(8) Hitler is not satisfied with suffocating all the Jews in Central and Eastern Europe, but is determined to destroy and lose the Jewish people in all the diaspora of the region.

(9) Hitler spreads the poison of hatred against our people throughout the world, and through the enormous and poisonous Nazi propaganda. He teaches the nations of the world how to persecute our brothers too, rob them of their wealth, and humiliate them to the point of dust.

(10) Hitler is the only one responsible for our tragic situation throughout the world. He is the angel of death who sheds Jewish blood like water, and who threatens us, our children, and our future.

In these pages the author invokes the story of Amalek, they claim to have the approval of "the Israeli government", and they state openly their peoples' special capability for propaganda and influence. The themes that appear here and the fact of their exclusion from the English translation gives us a small window into Jewish ethnocentrism.

The author was careful around numbers, but I think they slipped up with Lublin. It claims "several hundred thousand" Jews were put into the Lublin ghetto, but Wikipedia only gives 34,000 for this location.