“Now the Jews of Berlin will finally be deported. On February 28 they are to be assembled, first, in camps and then deported in groups of up to 2,000 per day.”              ~Joseph Goebbels~[1]

Saturday, February 27, 2011 marks the 68^th anniversary of one of the most extensive and brutal arrests of Jews in Berlin during the Holocaust.  

 “The scheduled arrest of all Jews on one day has proven a flash in the pan because of the shortsighted behavior of industrialists who warned the Jews in time.  We therefore failed to lay our hands on about 4,000.  They are now wandering about Berlin without homes, are not registered with the police and are naturally quite a public danger.  I ordered the police, Wehrmacht, and the Party to do everything possible to round these Jews up as quickly as practicable.”[2]

The Factory Action is depicted in the second act of The Sparks Fly Upward.

Here is what the German Resistance Memorial Center has to say about Dietrich Bonhoeffer.  http://www.gdw-berlin.de/bio/ausgabe_mit-e.php?id=22 "Dietrich Bonhoeffer (February 04, 1906 - April 09, 1945)		Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Bonhoeffer, son of the renowned psychiatrist and neurologist Karl Bonhoeffer, became a university pastor in Berlin after studying theology and receiving an advanced degree. As early as 1933 he was regarded as a resolute opponent of the National Socialists; in his essay "The Church Before the Jewish Question" he established that Christians have a duty to resist unlawful actions by the state. From 1935 to 1937, he directed a Confessional Church seminary first located in Zingst, Pommerania, and later in Finkenwalde near Stettin. He was a leading theologist of this religious opposition movement. The courses Bonhoeffer taught decisively influenced the theological development of every participant. In 1937 Reich Church Minister Hans Kerrl prohibited these seminars. In 1938 Bonhoeffer's brother-in-law Hans von Dohnanyi informed Bonhoeffer of his plans for a coup. Pressed into service in the Office for Foreign Affairs/Counter Intelligence of the Armed Forces High Command in 1940, Bonhoeffer repeatedly traveled abroad to make contact with the Allied governments. In early April 1943 he was arrested. For two years he was held without trial in Berlin's Tegel prison. It was here that he wrote his most notable theological works. In February 1945, Dietrich Bonhoeffer was brought to the Flossenbürg concentration camp where he was murdered on April 9, 1945, after being sentenced by an SS summary court-martial." **** In 2006 PBS aired a great documentary about Bonhoeffer called Bonhoeffer which can be rented or purchased.  The film's producers also have a website about him at www.bonhoeffer.com.

Here is what the German Resistance Memorial Center has to say about Hans von Dohnanyi.   http://www.gdw-berlin.de/bio/ausgabe_mit-e.php?id=330 "Hans von Dohnanyi (January 01, 1902 - April 09, 1945)		Hans von Dohnanyi
Hans von Dohnanyi studied law in Berlin, gained his doctorate in Hamburg in 1926 and passed the second final law examination in 1928. He worked in the Reich Ministry of Justice from 1929 until the spring of 1932, and then again from June 1933 on. In his position as personal adviser to Franz Gürtner and later as head of Gürtner’s ministerial office, Hans von Dohnanyi systematically gathered information on National Socialist violations of justice and crimes in the concentration camps. From the beginning of 1938 he was in contact with opponents of Hitler in the military. Dohnanyi, Ludwig Beck, Hans Oster and Erwin von Witzleben were leading figures in the preparations for a coup attempt against Hitler’s regime in September 1938. Hans von Dohnanyi was forced to resign from the Ministry in 1938 under pressure from the Party Bureau of the National Socialist Party (NSDAP). He was transferred to the Supreme Court of the Reich in Leipzig. In the fall of 1939 Oster asked for him to be transferred to the Office for Foreign Affairs/Counterintelligence in the Armed Forces High Command. The intention was to enable Dohnanyi to pursue his work on the preparations for a coup against Hitler. His job gave him access early on to information about the mass extermination of the European Jews. He passed on reports on the deportation of Jews written by his brother-in-law, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, to high-ranking military officers in order to motivate them to intervene. In the spring of 1942 he decided that at least some of the families threatened with deportation should be brought to safety. The plan was that the persons under threat should obtain permits to travel abroad to neutral countries by passing them off as spies working for Counterintelligence. The operation was called “Enterprise Seven” because it was designed in the first instance to help just seven people. On April 5, 1943 Hans von Dohnanyi was arrested in his office for alleged currency offences. Oster, who tried to shield him, was removed from his post. After the unsuccessful coup attempt of July 20, 1944, the Gestapo discovered a part of the documents on National Socialist crimes that Hans von Dohnanyi had collected before 1938. Dohnanyi became seriously ill during his long imprisonment in the Gestapo prison in Prinz-Albrecht-Straße in Berlin. Hans von Dohnanyi was sentenced by an SS court martial on account of his involvement in the preparations for the coup against Hitler and murdered in Sachsenhausen concentration camp, probably on April 9, 1945."