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Arthur Kahn (1912 – 12 April, 1933) was a German student and activist who is considered the first Jewish Holocaust victim. Arrested in March 1933 for this anti-Nazi activism at the University of Würzburg, Kahn was deported to the recently-opened Dachau concentration camp. On 12 April, Kahn and three other Jews were marched to the the woods outside of Dachau. Kahn was the first of the four to be shot.
https://schreibdasauf.info/geschichten/wuerzburgerinnen-und-wuerzburger/arthur-kahn
Early life[edit]
Arthur was born in Gemünden am Main, Germany, the oldest of 4 children to Levi and Martha Kahn. Kahn's siblings including Lothar (b. 1924).[1]
As a student at the University of Würzburg, Kahn was active in anti-Nazi Party activism, like many Jewish students at the time.[1]
Arthur's younger brother Lothar was born in 1924.
Murder[edit]
Kahn was planning on going into cancer research and had been studying abroad at the University of Edinburgh. He returned to Wurzburg to retrieve his student records. There, a Brownshirts of the Sturmabteilung (SA) recognized Kahn and detained him.[1]
During Easter week in 1933, Kahn and three other Jews – Ernst Goldmann, Rudolf Benario and Erwin Kahn (no relation to Arthur) – arrived at the Dachau concentration camp, which had opened only a few weeks earlier on 22 March.[1]
Kahn was brought to Dachau on 12 April as part of a group of about 30 men who were suspected of Communist ties. According to witnesses, Kahn, Benario, and Goldmann were asked to step forward because they were Jews. Hilmar Wäckerle, Dachau's first commandant, ordered several guards, including one named Hans Steinbrenner, to beat them. Steinbrenner beat the three men, along with another Jew named Erwin Kahn (no related to Arthur), for hours.[2]
Later that afternoon, Steinbrenner marched the four men into the woods. Just after four o'clock in the afternoon, Arthur, Benario, and Goldmann were dead. Arthur was the first to be shot. Only 10 weeks after Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of Germany and a mere 2 weeks after the camp's opening, the four are considered to be the first Holocaust victims.[2]
Aftermath[edit]
Bernhard Kolb, the official responsible for Jewish affairs in Kahn's hometown of Gemünden am Main, falsely claimed to Kahn's parents that he had been shot while trying to escape.
A local prosecutor indicted the four men's murdered, but the Nazis would later suppress the case.[2]
Levi Kahn was forced to pay ransom to retrieve Arthur's body from Dachau for a proper Jewish burial.[1]
After Arthur's murder, Martha Kahn called Fanni back to Germany from England, where she had been working as an au pair.[1]
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/dday-veterans-brother-was_b_5440492 https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2022/05/arthur-kahn-german-jewish-holocaust-history/629762/
Dachau murders. Its headline parrots the Nazi lie: “Nazis Shoot Down Fleeing Prisoners.”
Levi pried open the coffin. He saw that his son had been shot through the forehead. Levi and his wife, Martha, and their two surviving sons didn’t leave for America until August 1939, two weeks before the war broke out. Arthur’s death was supposed to be a freak act of violence, not an omen.
Dotter had written that Arthur—the class’s lone Jew—was named valedictorian. He stands on one side of the group, with a hand on his hip. https://www.google.com/books/edition/Hitler_s_First_Victims/vgVxAwAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&bsq=%22arthur%20kahn%22
Kahn's father was one of approximately 30,000 Jews who were arrested after the Kristallnacht pogrom on 9 and 10 November 1938, and he was deported to the Buchenwald concentration camp. Following Levi's release from Buchenwald, Levi and Martha and children Lothar and Herbert his parents Lothar followed another son of a Kindertransport to London in the middle of 1939. The four subsequently immigrated to the United States on the eve of Passover in 1940.[1]
Fanni later married. In 1942, Fanni and her then-7 year old son were murdered by the Nazis in Minsk.
Lothar Kahn's service in the U.S. Army[edit]
Lothar was drafted into the U.S. Army in 1943, serving as a combat engineer in Germany and France. On 6 June, 1944, 19-year old Lothar participated in the Normandy landings with the 146th Engineer Combat Battalion, tasked with destroyed physical obstacles for following waves of infantry.
As the U.S. Army advanced through Europe at the end of the war, Lothat worked as an interpreter at a displaced persons camp in Bamberg.https://www.pritzkermilitary.org/explore/museum/permanent-current-upcoming-exhibits/allied-race-victory-air-land-and-sea-ca/lothar-kahn-survivors-buchenwald-headed-displaced-persons-camp
Even worse, Arthur's mother insisted that his sister, Fanni, an Au pair in England, return to Germany immediately. She eventually married and was later killed with her 7-year-old son in Minsk.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/dday-veterans-brother-was_b_5440492
https://www.jewishbookcouncil.org/book/hitlers-first-victims-the-quest-for-justice
References[edit]
- ^ a b c d e f g Karras, Steve. "D-Day Veteran's Brother Was Holocaust's First Jewish Victim". Huffington Post. Retrieved 25 May 2023.
- ^ a b c Kahn, Mattie. "The German model for America". Vox. Retrieved 25 May 2023.
Further reading[edit]
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/dday-veterans-brother-was_b_5440492