Helmut Kleinicke was posthumously awarded the designation of Righteous Among the Nations at the Israeli Embassy in Berlin on January 14.
The recognition of Righteous Among the Nations is bestowed by Israel’s Holocaust memorial center Yad Vashem to those who are verified to have risked their lives to save Jews during World War II. Israeli Ambassador to Germany Jeremy Issacharoff presented Kleinicke’s Juta Scheffzek which Scheffzek accepted on her father’s behalf.
Kleinicke, a Nazi party member, was only publicly acknowledged in recent years as the savior of perhaps hundreds of Jews at the height of the Holocaust. He is just the 628th German to be given the recognition, and one of the only recipients who was also a member of the Nazi party.
According to the survivor testimony, Kleinicke, who had joined the Nazi party in 1933, took advantage of his position as a senior official in charge of construction in Chrzanow, Upper Silesia, to “claim” Jews as workers. His intervention is estimated to have rescued hundreds of Jews in this way. Eventually the Nazi leadership realized what happening and sent Kleinicke to spend time the rest of the war at a military encampment as punishment.
Read more at Times of Israel.
{Matzav.com}
….. to those who are verified to have risked their lives to save Jews during World War II. …..
How beautiful it would be, for us to teach our children, the beauty of having true love and sincere respect to people of other ethnicities. To have a Sincere (not the Kiddush Hashem type) empathy and caring for all our decent non-yiddishe neighbors.
We have sincere respect and gratitude for all decent people and even for non decent people. In fact many of our people owe life to corrupt nazi lowlives, “corrupt” being their “positive” quality.
Dear Don, I love the entire humanity but I love my people infinitely more. No apologies. We don’t owe them anything. Their hate for us is completely irrational, so no amount of hugs will turn them around. In other words, don’t be naive.
Oscar Schindler was also a member of the Nazi party who was honored by Yad V’shem.
As a history buff this is fascinating to me. It is almost unheard of that a Nazi offical saved Jews.
Some of these Righteous Among the Gentiles like Oscar Schindler initially saved Jews for the cheap labor they provided, not out of compassion. Chazal tell us Chessed Liumim chatas. Yad Vashem is desperate to find German’s to honor with the title because it makes great PR. I’d like to know the details of this “Tzadik”.
It does not matter.
This “Tzadik” is dead and harmless now. Even if it were completely fabricated, their narrative backfires, because it states clearly that anyone, even nazi officials who had sworn allegiance to the regime (in exchange for fat privileges), could save a large number of Jews if only for whatever reason – including profit – if only they wanted to. Their own narration also states clearly that even if they were caught, the consequences were relatively mild: they say he had to spend the rest of the war confined in a military encampment, that is all. You recall? They used to say the nazi murderers were forced to comply with very strict orders, that they feared for their lives and their families’….