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www.insideHALTON.com | OAKVILLE BEAVER | Thursday, October 29, 2015 | 6 Spotlight by David Lea Oakville Beaver Staff "Connected to your Community" Beaver reporter donates to Museum for Human Rights A Nazi-era letter discovered by the Oakville Literacy Council has found a new home in the Canadian Museum for Human Rights in Winnipeg, Manitoba. Oakville Literacy Council volunteer co-president Ken Auden found the letter as he was examining some donated books last May. The letter, which is dated Aug. 3, 1939, appears to have been an attempt by the Third Reich to offset its horri c global reputation in the days leading up to the start of the Second World War. Written in English, it bears the letterhead of the Deutscher Fichte Bund and was mailed from Hamburg, Germany (then Nazi Germany) to a British MP in Wolverhampton Bilston, England. It begins with the author thanking the MP for his past correspondence and noting he was pleased to hear the of cial had previously met Germans during travel in many different lands and enjoyed visits to Germany. The letter takes on a more sinister tone near its conclusion where it becomes increasingly anti-Semitic and speaks to the global view of Germany at the time. The letter then indicates the MP would be sent a lea et and pro-Nazi book, which he may want to read. Its closing salutation reads: "In Anglo-German Friendship very sincerely yours Th. Kessemeier." "I picked up this letter and I was reading it and I got to this one paragraph and I thought `What the heck?,'" said Auden at the time. "To come across something like this, in this day and age... I was astounded. There were a number of people in the room and I called them over to see it." York University History Professor David Lea it embodies, showing a sense of congenial sentiment between a Nazi German bureaucrat and a British politician less than a month before the beginning of the Second World War. He said it is important to preserve pieces of history like this letter because it demonstrates that a genocidal attack against a speci c group does not begin in killing elds or gas chambers. "Prejudice can often assume a form that appears less overtly destructivesuch as an off-hand remark that Jews control the media. Yet this perception of a Jewish conspiracy is one of the canards that the Nazis leveraged to spread fear and hatred of Jews within Germany, and attempt to justify their discrimination and persecution of the Jews in propaganda at home and, as this letter shows, abroad," said Maron. "It is such fear, hatred and suspicion of Jews in Nazi Germany that helped set the stage/context of the mass annihilation that would follow in the six years that followed this letter." While the letter will be permanently preserved in the museum's archives, Maron said it may also be displayed in the facility's `Examining the Holocaust' gallery, which includes an examination of Nazi use of propaganda. NEIL OLIVER Vice ­President and Group Publisher DAVID HARVEY Regional General Manager Oakville Literacy Council volunteer co-president Ken Auden displays the Nazi-era document he found inside one of the thousands of donations. Oakville Beaver reporter David Lea purchased the letter then donated it to the Canadian Museum for Human Rights, which was happy to accept the donation. | Oakville Beaver le photos Michael Kater discussed the piece of history Auden has stumbled upon. He noted that before the start of the Second World War, the Nazi propaganda machine, of which the Deutscher Fichte Bund was part, worked diligently to counter stories being told abroad by Jewish refugees who had been driven out of Germany and Austria by Nazi persecution. The Oakville Literacy Council decided to sell the letter to raise some money for its programs. It was purchased for $30 by Oakville Beaver Reporter David Lea, who in turn donated it to the museum. "This object has clear human rights relevance given the critical role that propaganda played for the Nazis in terms of both promoting the supposed superiority of Germany and the danger posed by those that they perceived to be obstacles to a strong Germany, namely Jews," said Jeremy Maron, researcher-curator, Canadian Museum of Human Rights. "The casualness of the antiSemitism in this letter is particularly striking, and speaks to just how ingrained this attitude was in Nazi Germany...You can't re ect on the mass scale of the annihilation perpetrated during the Holocaust without considering the role that such casual anti-Semitism played in the cultural context of Nazi Germany, and indeed in the context of Europe for centuries preceding the rise of the Nazis and the Holocaust." Maron also said the letter is a valuable addition to the museum because of the historical moment Volume 53 | Number 86 5046 Mainway, Unit 2, Burlington (905) 845-3824 Oakville Beaver is a member of the Ontario Press Council. The council is located at 80 Gould St., Suite 206, Toronto, Ont., M5B 2M7. Phone (416) 340-1981. 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