This is an excerpt from the personal diary of the philosopher Samuel Hugo Bergmann from early May 1945. On this page, Bergmann describes the final moments of World War II, dealing with topics such as the death of Hitler, the surrender of Germany, and the confrontation with German prisoners of war. Bergmann recounts a letter from his son, a soldier in Europe, who was struggling with how to deal with the German prisoners. He also wonders why the reactions to Hitler’s death were subdued and suggests that people just didn’t believe in the news of his death or were unprepared for such news. He also suggests that perhaps, after all the trauma and heavy emotions, the death of Hitler, the primary culprit, is no longer so meaningful.
Like many of his contemporaries, Bergmann wrote diaries in which he documented personal matters alongside political developments and general events. He wrote his diaries in German using the stenography method, that is, a shorthand script that was common in those days for German and other languages. Writing in shorthand made it possible to write very quickly but extremely difficult to decipher. Fortunately, several people were able to read his diaries and copied the texts into regular German script at a later stage.
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Samuel Hugo Bergmann – Samuel (Shmuel) Hugo Bergmann (1883–1975) was born in Prague and immigrated to Israel in 1920. He was a prominent figure in the Zionist movement and a member of Brit Shalom, which promoted coexistence between Jews and Arabs. He became a philosophy professor at the Hebrew University and served as its first rector from 1935 to 1938. He was also the director of the National Library of Israel from 1920-1935.
Holocaust – The Holocaust, also known as the Shoah, was the genocide and persecution of European Jewry by the German Nazi regime and its collaborators in Europe and North Africa during World War II. The Holocaust was implemented in stages from Adolf Hitler and the Nazi party’s first rise to power. From 1933 anti-Jewish laws were passed in Germany which excluded the Jews from German society. The Nazis also began to create a network of concentration camps where Jews and other “undesirable elements” of society were imprisoned in inhumane conditions. With the Nazi occupation of Europe during World War II, which started in 1939, the formal persecution of Jews was implemented in all the occupied countries. Jews were sent to ghettos, made to work in forced labour, and lived in appalling conditions. In 1942 the Nazis held the Wannsee Conference where they decided on the Final Solution which detailed the extermination all the Jews of Europe. Initially, more than one million Jews were exterminated by death squads named Einsatzgruppen, who were assisted by local collaborators. As of 1942 Jews were deported from the ghettos to death camps in Poland, including Auschwitz-Birkenau, Majdanek, Chelmno, Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka, where millions were murdered in gas chambers on arrival. Jews who were not immediately murdered were sent to force labour, and many died as a result of the harsh conditions, starvation, and disease. Jewish resistance was extremely difficult, but attempts to fight the Nazis were made by Jewish partisans and fighters in uprisings such as, most famously, the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and the Sobibor Uprising. In 1944, as it became clear that the Nazis were losing the war, Nazi camp commanders began to close the camps and forced the survivors to march towards Germany. Already sick and weak from the years of violence, more than 250,000 Jews died on these death marches. The Holocaust came to an end with the defeat of the Nazis in May 1945. Six million Jews, two thirds of the Jewish population of Europe, were murdered with millions more experiencing tremendous suffering, violence, and loss. In addition to the Jews, millions of Roma (gypsies), homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, disabled people, and Soviet and Polish prisoners of war were also murdered during the Holocaust.
