Bradenton center to host seminar to explain the devastating results of Wannsee Conference of the Nazi regime

MANATEE -- A group of Germany's social and educated elite met Jan. 20, 1942, in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee to decide what they called "the Final Solution to the Jewish question."

"Fifty million people, including 6 million Jews, perished because 12 men gathered in a palace in Germany," said Beverly Newman, the founder and a director of the Al Katz Center for Holocaust Survivors and Jewish Learning.

Newman will present the multi-media program, "How Wannsee Changed the World," at 11 a.m., Jan. 18 at the Al Katz Center's new headquarters in the Cortez West Professional Plaza, 5910 Cortez Road.

The program costs $7 for adults and $3 for students, and

includes handout materials and a table of healthy kosher foods after it ends.

There also will be an open house of the new offices at 1:30 p.m.

The center, which provides educational programs and advocates for Holocaust survivors and the elderly, moved from Sarasota to the Cortez Road location Jan. 1.

The program will explain how the decisions of the 12 Nazi Party and state officials affected the whole world.

The Wannsee Conference Protocols outlined the policies the Third Reich would use to exterminate the Jewish population of Europe.

"It's important for people to understand that education in of itself does not prevent genocide," Newman said. "It has to be an education with a moral compass."

She said there are 100,000 survivors in the United States still suffering the consequences of the Holocaust.

"Twenty-five to 50 percent live in poverty, according to research," Newman said.

Newman, who with her husband, Lawrence Newman, started the Al Katz Center two years ago in honor of her father, a victim of the Holocaust who survived.

Father on a mission

"My father always told us when he saw Rudolf Lange (the commander of the Riga, Latvia, slave-labor camp) shoot four boys in the neck," Beverly Newman said, "he was going to live to tell the story of the brutality of the Nazis.

"It was the turning point of his life," she said.

Katz made it his mission to relate his experiences in the labor camps.

He was rescued May 1, 1945, by the U.S. Army 101st Airborne Division during a death march from Riga to Dachau, an extermination concentration camp.

For about eight years before his death in 2010, Katz often spoke to students in Manatee County schools.

Newman said she has hundreds of letters from those students expressing how her father's talks affected them.

For more information about the program or the Al Katz Center, call 941-313-9239.

This story was originally published January 10, 2015 at 12:00 AM with the headline "Bradenton center to host seminar to explain the devastating results of Wannsee Conference of the Nazi regime ."