Herzog sheds light on victims whose bodies were set to become parts of museum of Jewish skeletons

In his Holocaust memorial day speech, President Isaac Herzog chooses to focus on a little-known, yet chilling, aspect of the Nazi project to exterminate the Jewish people.

He brings the stories of two of the 86 Jews killed at the Natzweiler-Struthof camp, on French soil, whose bodies were then sent to become exhibits in a planned “museum of skulls and skeletons of an extinct race.”

The bodies were sent to “the museum of horrors that the Nazi beast planned, at the Reichsuniversität Strasburg in France. A collection of limbs belonging to our brothers and sisters, whose bodies were cut open, chopped up, and shoved into test tubes and glass bottles to be displayed and catalogued in an orderly fashion.”

The plan, Herzog says, “reflected how, with blood-curdling cruelty, the Nazis were also thinking about the day after. The day when no living Jew would remain anywhere on earth. How would the ‘enlightened’ world, ‘cleansed’ of Jews, recall this extinct inferior race?

“This museum was supposed to provide an answer to this question. It was the finale of the Final Solution,” Herzog says.

He brings the stories of Siegbert Rosenthal and Sarah Bomberg-Birenzweig, two of the Jews whose remains were meant to be featured in the museum, highlighting the decades-long effort needed to discover the names of these unique victims.

“At first, they found numbers. Then, names. Then, the names became people. With life stories. With photographs,” he says.

“Eighty-six worlds, worlds of love, joy, and dreams, reduced to dismembered limbs,” he adds. “And they did not find perfect rest. This horrifying, depraved, sick act of murder for the purpose of public display exemplifies the depravity. The depths of the most chilling abyss in human history. Hell itself.”