Nazi blueprint for North American Holocaust acquired by Canada archive

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jan/25/nazi-north-american-holocaust-book-canada-national-archive

Leyland Cecco in Toronto
Fri 25 Jan 2019 02.00 EST

A book once owned by Adolf Hitler, which scholars suspect was a blueprint for a Holocaust in North America, has been acquired by Canada’s national archive.

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Published in 1944 by the German researcher and linguist Heinz Kloss, Statistics, Media, and Organizations of Jewry in the United States and Canada is a disturbingly thorough catalogue of Jewish residents in the two countries and reflects Nazi plans in the event they gained control over the continent.

“[The book] demonstrates that the Holocaust wasn’t a European event – it was an event that didn’t have the opportunity to spread out of Europe,” Michael Kent, a curator at Library and Archives Canada, told the Guardian. “It reminds us that conflicts and human tragedies that seemed far away could find their way to North America.”

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The book highlights Nazi plans for an eventual presence in North America. They made larger strides than is often realized: in 1943, the year before Kloss’s book was published, the Germans established an automated weather station in what is now the Canadian province of Newfoundland and Labrador. There are also numerous wartime stories in eastern Canada of German U-boats making headway up the St Lawrence river.
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Kent likens the library’s recent acquisition to the Black Book, a list of prominent British residents identified as potential targets, in the event of a successful Nazi invasion of the United Kingdom.

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The acquisition by the national archive comes at a time when scholars have warned of rising ignorance among Canadians about the Holocaust.

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The verdict follows a study that found more than half of Canadian adults were unaware that more than 6 million Jews were killed during the Holocaust, and as many as two-thirds of young respondents failed to demonstrate knowledge of the event.

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