In early April, Anthropic announced the release of Claude Mythos Preview, its most advanced AI model to date.
Though trained as a general-purpose large language model, Mythos quickly distinguished itself through a notable capacity for complex, multi-step cybersecurity work – autonomously parsing massive codebases, detecting critical-severity software defects and identifying vulnerabilities that have eluded human researchers for decades. Anthropic describes its cybersecurity capabilities as “substantially beyond those of any model we have previously trained,” including its prior flagship, Claude Opus.
The numbers back up that claim. When Anthropic ran the model against CyBench, a benchmark measuring autonomous vulnerability discovery and exploitation across sandboxed challenges, Mythos achieved a perfect 100% pass rate, a score Anthropic says no other AI model has achieved. On CyberGym, a separate cybersecurity evaluation site, Mythos scores 83.1% compared to 66.6% for Claude Opus 4.6. Across 17 of 18 total benchmark measures, Mythos led the field.
In practice, the model has already produced results that underscore its potential. During a preview period, Mythos found thousands of major bugs across every major operating system and browser, flaws that even the most skilled researchers had missed for years. Among the most striking findings was a vulnerability in OpenBSD that went undetected for 27 years.
“We are looking at an AI system that does not merely assist human researchers but autonomously outperforms them at scale,” said Elliott Broidy, Chairman and CEO of Broidy Capital Holdings, LLC, a seasoned entrepreneur and investor with extensive experience in national security technology and defense tech. “What Anthropic has built with Mythos is a tool that, in the right hands, could protect millions of people from attacks that would otherwise go undetected for years. The question is now whether our institutions are moving fast enough to deploy it responsibly before our adversaries find a way to use it against us.”
Given both the power and the risks that such a model entails, Anthropic decided to roll it out to a limited group of tech companies rather than the general public through a controlled defense initiative called Project Glasswing. Among the major tech companies forming the coalition are Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, Nvidia and Cisco, along with 40 other organisations that build or maintain critical infrastructure software. To support the effort, Anthropic committed $100 million in usage credits and $4 million in direct donations to open-source security organisations, enabling these partners to use Mythos exclusively for defensive security work, finding and fixing vulnerabilities before adversaries can.
Anthropic was direct about the stakes in its announcement, writing that “no one organisation can solve these cybersecurity problems alone: frontier AI developers, other software companies, security researchers, open-source maintainers, and governments across the world all have essential roles to play.”
However, the model’s very strengths are what make experts uneasy. Cybersecurity professionals have warned that if Mythos can identify and exploit vulnerabilities faster than companies can patch them, the consequences of misuse could be severe. A single AI agent scanning for flaws at this speed and scale, well beyond normal human capacity, represents what many describe as a sea change in the threat landscape.
The model has also become a flashpoint in the relationship between Anthropic and the U.S. government. The Pentagon designated Anthropic a “supply chain risk,” ordering companies working with the military to remove its software from their workflows.
The situation is evolving rapidly. White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent met with Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei last month to discuss Mythos and pathways for renewed government collaboration. The White House is now reportedly developing an executive action that would allow federal agencies to work around the supply chain risk designation and onboard Anthropic’s models, including Mythos.
This push and pull reflects a deeper shift, raising broader questions about how emerging technologies are regulated as AI systems like Mythos begin to occupy a space between commercial tools and strategic infrastructure.
“Concerns related to government use of AI technology are reasonable,” said Broidy. “But it’s imperative to consider how technologies that today seem too dangerous or non-feasible may be life-saving tomorrow.”
Broidy added that while the safe deployment of these advanced capabilities must remain a top priority, heavy-handed regulations may prevent important technologies from developing as quickly as they may be needed.
“Solving such complex cybersecurity issues is a joint effort,” said Broidy. “Economic industries, government agencies and technology companies must work together to balance AI innovation and safety.”
Jewish American Heritage Month Celebration on Capitol Hill to Honor Nobel Laureate Dr. Harvey J. Alter, Philanthropist Elliott Broidy and Rabbi David Baron
WASHINGTON, D.C. — The annual Jewish American Heritage Month (JAHM) celebration will be held on Capitol Hill on May 19 to celebrate the enduring contributions of Jewish Americans to the United States. The event brings together members of Congress, foreign ambassadors and leaders from across the civic, business and religious communities.
This year’s luncheon will honor Nobel Prize-winning physician and researcher Dr. Harvey J. Alter with the Dr. David Nassy Award, entrepreneur and philanthropist Elliott Broidy with the Visionary Award, and Rabbi David Baron of Temple of the Arts in Beverly Hills with the Creativity in the Jewish Community Award.
Dr. Alter, who spent decades at the National Institutes of Health, received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for work that eventually led to the discovery of the Hepatitis C virus, transforming blood screening and saving millions of lives worldwide. The award he will receive is named after David Nassy, the first Jewish doctor in Philadelphia who challenged prevailing medical practices during the 1793 Yellow Fever outbreak by advocating for more humane and effective treatment methods.
“At a time when antisemitism again rears its ugly head, I am proud to represent Jewish scientists in their quest to find answers to medical, technologic, and societal issues that confront and confound humanity,” said Dr. Alter.
Mr. Broidy is being recognized for his leadership in public safety, philanthropy and efforts to combat antisemitism and extremism. Following the October 7, 2023 Hamas terrorist attacks on Israel and the subsequent rise in antisemitic incidents globally, Mr. Broidy expanded his support for organizations dedicated to Holocaust remembrance, countering extremism and strengthening Jewish communal life. His philanthropic work has also included support for educational institutions, healthcare organizations and cultural initiatives in the United States and Israel.
“I am deeply moved to be recognized during Jewish American Heritage Month alongside Dr. Alter and Rabbi Baron, whose work represents the very best of Jewish American achievement and public service,” said Mr. Broidy. “This celebration is an opportunity not only to honor the contributions of Jewish Americans throughout our nation’s history, but also to reaffirm our shared responsibility to confront hatred and protect the values of tolerance, democracy and human dignity.”
Rabbi David Baron, spiritual leader of Temple of the Arts, will be receiving the Creativity in the Jewish Community Award for his contributions to Jewish cultural and religious life, Holocaust education, and public service through media, philanthropy, and international remembrance initiatives. “I am deeply honored to receive this award that celebrates the contributions of American Jews, to the spiritual, cultural and artistic growth of our nation,” said Rabbi Baron. “Our great country was founded on the biblical principles that have kept the Jewish people for millennia and form the foundation of western civilization.”
The event, organized by Project Legacy under the leadership of Ezra Friedlander, honors leaders whose lives and work reflect the enduring contributions of Jewish Americans to the fabric of this nation. The initiative traces its roots to the early 1980s, when Jewish Heritage Week was launched following discussions between Malcolm Hoenlein, Executive Vice Chairman Emeritus of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, President Ronald Reagan and author and humanitarian Elie Wiesel. It later evolved into Jewish American Heritage Month, a month-long celebration.
“Jewish American Heritage Month is an opportunity to celebrate the extraordinary impact Jewish Americans have had on every aspect of American life,” said Friedlander. “This year’s honorees reflect a deep commitment to public service, innovation, philanthropy and the fight against hatred and intolerance.”
Malcolm Hoenlein, along with Eric J. Gertler, Executive Chairman of U.S. News and World Report will chair this year’s event.
Additional speakers and program participants will be announced in connection with the event.
This essay, written by author, artist, and filmmaker Inna Rogatchi, is the second of two parts and was originally published in The Times of Israel. Part I can be found here.
Thought-provoking and unusual exhibition The Birdman of Auschwitz: Science and Faltered Conscience has been opened at House 88 in Oswenziem, Poland, in a direct proximity to Auschwitz camp. The exhibition which evokes fundamental questions that has become acutely relevant today again, is located at the house in which Rudolf Höss’ family was happily thriving during his years as the Auschwitz Commandant, and even during his absence there. Since 2025, the house has become a site-specific awareness and education point of ARCHER Project that fights antisemitism and terrorism.
The Birdman of Auschwitz exhibition at ARCHER in House 88, Oswienciem, Poland. April 2026. Photo: Michael Bojara. (C) CEP?ARCHER. With kind permission.
The Story of Moral Creeps, Their Actions & Traces
The Birdman of Auschwitz exhibition presents in documents, photos, and artifacts the story that if it would be first laid out as a script , it might not get far as the Hollywood script-gatekeepers would think that the imagination of the script writer was too wild. Once again, history itself has proved to be the most surprising author. In this case, it happened through a very able and thorough British historian Nicholas Milton on whose book The Birdman of Auschwitz ( 2025) the current exhibition at ARCHER at House 88 is based.
The visitors of the exhibition and the readers of the book will learn the story of a very well-known and highly esteemed scientist in the pre- and post- WWII Germany and Austria, Gunter Niethammer, who was the head of the Department of Ornithology at the Museum of Natural History in Vienna just on the brink on WWII.
At the same time, the man was a devoted Nazi. Like many of his scientific colleagues, Niethammer did rush to prove his loyalty to the Nazism and join the party early, to guarantee the smoothness of his career. At the same time, he actually belonged to the Nazi elite, via his family circle.
Niethammer was the nephew of an ultra-nationalist writer Hans Grimm, the one who invented and created a concept of Volk onhe Raum, A People Without Space, at the early moment of the formation of the Nazi ideology, in 1926, next year after publication of Mein Kampf.
nuFiD-vYSZviVYUb_rj3ij__anPXDTzYgA.woff2The cover of two volumes of the Nazi expansionist ideology, the novel by Hans Grimm. First edition, 1926. Credit: Creative Commons.
Not only that line, Volk onhe Raum, has become the title of Grimm’s very well-known novel, but because of that, the novel was probably the most-read book in Germany and Austria all the years from its release throughout the war, until 1945, at least. There is statistical data with this regard. Grimm’s 1345-page novelized ideology has become the backbone of the explanation of the necessity of expansionist global war. And its author has been very well-known in the top-layer of the Reich. So his nephew Gunter, who has been quite close to his writer uncle, had a very solid and far-stretching backing in his career and life in general, too.
Niethammer joined the Nazi party in 1937, when he was 25. Two years later, he joined the SS. Immediately after, he joined the Secret Field Police. He knew exactly what he was doing, why and what for. He was turned away from the Luftwaffe, mostly likely due to his age (he was over 30 at the time), and also due to the fact that he had no military background. He ended up as a guard in Auschwitz, staying there on duties at the main entrance. The most inviting point for bird-watching, naturally for the Nazis.
In a half of a year, he started to use his family and academic connections to get transferred from under that huge Arbeit Macht Frei sign over his head while on duty. At the same time, he tried hard to be useful for Rudolf Höss, who did not mind having a freshly-hunted game for his family dinners. There is an existing statistic, for example, that only during one month between September and October 1942, Niethammer provided over 100 wild ducks for Höss household for an upscale nutrition.
In demonstrating his patronage, Höss assigned Niethammer to ‘special ornithological duties’ in Auschwitz. It is thanks to the Nazis’ punctuality in maintaining their documentation that we have the documents about it. Otherwise, it would be too kitschy to believe in such sick fantasies of these humanoids.
As a proof of his usefulness and existence of those ‘special ornithological duties’, methodical Nazi Niethammer cared for publishing a scientific paper on his effort in Auschwitz. It also exists, and the copy of it is one of the stunning exhibits at House 88. There is the photo of the scientific ornithological paper from Auschwitz in 1942, with a proud SS stamp in the headline.
The copy of the Niethammer’s scientific paper published in 1942, exhibited at The Birdman of Auschwitz. (C) CEP/ARCHER. With kind permission.
The degree of perversion of those supposed-to-be humans was, in fact, far higher than it has been known publicly for decades after WWII. Importantly, it was a focused, deliberate effort by far too many people after the war to diffuse the scale of crimes against humanity committed by all those ‘white-color Nazis’, such as architects, scientists, engineers, and anyone else who did make the Shoah happen in the industrial scale or was such a willing Nazi fellow traveller. This is the shameful and screaming fact of history which has to be addressed in full detail, today and tomorrow. There is no statute of limitation for covering up the crimes against humanity.
Nicholas Milton, the author of The Birdman of Auschwitz book ( 2025) which has provided the material for the ongoing exhibition at ARCHER House 88 in Oswenciem, has shared with me one of his surprises while researching for his very thorough book: “Can you imagine that when the Red Army has liberated Auschwitz and went through the premises, including the Höss house, what did they find in his safe? The copy of that scientific publication of Niethammer, with his hand-written dedication and gratitude to Höss. The point is that Höss actually kept it in his safe, it was something important and meaningful for him”, – emphasized Nicholas.
If there would be any ornithologist who hunted delicacies for the Auschwitz commandant and his family, Höss most likely would not give a damn to whatever paper his private hunter might publish. But in the case of Niethammer, his family was well-known politically, and his uncle was literally an ideologist-at-large for the very core of the Nazi Germany’s expansionist zealotry. Höss’ guard on his special ornithological duties in Auschwitz belonged to the Reich elite. No wonder that his hand-written gratitude was regarded as something of value and perhaps something potentially useful by one of the Reich most notorious criminals.
While Niethammer was thoroughly enjoying his scientific activities in Auschwitz and elsewhere, his happy family, an exact version of Höss idyllic monsters, frau and four sons, were living all the time from 1940 through May 1945 in Vienna, in a large house of a Jewish family, whose owners were kicked off from their property unceremoniously, and later on, the owner of the villa and her mother were sent to their death in the concentration camps. The 83-year old mother of the owner, Sofia Grunspann was murdered in Treblinka in 1942. And the owner of a lovely villa Rudolfina Liatcheff has vanished without trace, somewhere in the one of the camps that the bastard whose family has seized and occupied her house, was so busy with his scientific ornithological observations. The murky irony did stop there: nowadays once forcibly seized by the Nazis Jewish villa in Vienna houses the Embassy of Libya.
Villa, confiscated property of Liatcheff family, in Vienna, at Blaasstrasse, 33. (C) Creative Commons.
Entertainment, Auschwitz Style
To add to all this mounting macabre, the exhibition at House 88 tells about ornithological museum, or show-room, in the extermination camp, that has been set there by Niethammer with backing by the special order by the camp’s commandant Höss, in one of the barracks, for the entertainment of the Auschwitz officers and personnel. It is not black humor.
As it is known, Auschwitz has become the place of the worst of moral perversity, additionally to its monstrous mass extermination. The Nazis set up three orchestras there, two male ones and one female one, of which my great-aunt Alma Rose after her arrest and deportation to Auschwitz from the Drancy in July 1943 was forced to lead. They also have a cinema for the officers and personnel, as it is known. And as it transpires from the exhibition at ARCHER at House 88 and Nicholas Milton’s book, they also cared enough to set up an ornithological museum in the extermination camp. According to Milton, during his inspectional visit to Auschwitz on July 17-18, 1942, Himmler visited the museum as well. The Zone of Interest, indeed.
There is one telling episode of the kind of ornithology that Niethammer exercised in Auschwitz. Nicholas Milton has told me about it specifically, and since that, the episode pierces my mind. “Among the species of the Niethammer’s hunted and stuffed birds that are on display at the current exhibition, there is sadly not the Black redstart, which does exist and belongs to the Niethammer Auschwitz trophies at the Vienna Natural History Museum collection. It is a nice bird that looks like a robin. In Niethammer’s papers, there is a specific description regarding the Black redstart, in his own handwrite”.
The Nazi ornithologist’s observation was the following: “June 25, 1941. The nest is found in a brickyard at the camp where amongst the bricks piled up by the prisoners the female (Black redstart bird) had built a loose cup of grass lined with hair, wool and feathers’, the hair and wool once belonging to the prisoners, the wool coming from the prisoners clothes and uniforms”. This kind of ornithology. This kind of science. This kind of conscious behavior of a humanoid in the midst of the engineered genocide.
Authentic prisoner robe from Auschwitz exhibited at The Birdman of Auschwitz at ARCHER in House 88 exhibition. Photo: Michal Bojara. (C) CEP/ARCHER, with kind permission.
That humanoid, after a brief, due to the intervention of his international scientific colleagues, just three years imprisonment in Poland after the war, has lived thirty more years, flourishing in his career and being recognized at many levels, both in Germany and internationally. He was elected as President of German Ornithological Society, the Chairman of German Zoological Society, Director of museums, professor of universities. There are as many as nine bird and other species officially named after him, still today. Of course, he was such an expert on the bird’s nests made with ‘formerly human hairs’. Shame is not enough for all those people and institutions who have blurred and covered up the Niethammer’s complicity in the crimes against humanity both in Germany and anywhere else for good three decades. This is actually co-complicity from all those individuals and institutions, and it has to be understood and known this way, for the sake of normality of this and next generations.
Expanding the Painful Lessons
Probably, with this in mind, the people who are leading the Ornithology Department of the Vienna Natural History Museum nowadays, have become alerted with regard to their Niethammer collection of more than 90 species hunted by him in Auschwitz during WWII. Based on ongoing dialogue with them, Ambassador Mark Wallace has told me about them re-visiting the collection, and their plans to expand the Museum’s loan to ARCHER project with more species to be shown publicly, and also possibly in the expanded tour of this stunning exhibition.
That would be sobering and highly important.“Can you imagine, all these birds who were hunted and stuffed by that beast Niethammer personally, and which all bears his own nitty hand-written labels with the SS stamps of each of them, during past 85 years had been never shown to anyone, not for once, none of them. Now they, the material witnesses of the Nazi evil, will be shown internationally, and hopefully, will evoke people’s attention to the evil that has ruled that darkness that was the Shoah, and by seeing it as it is, and learning the story behind it, people will become more vigilant to the same-creed of evil which has been awakened so ugly today. This is one of the ways to show the wide public one of the dark faces of hate and crime, and to make people think about it, in general as well This is what we are aiming for at CEP and ARCHER Projects, fighting the hate of today by evoking the understanding and compassion by the authentic means of history for which we are looking tirelessly”.
It is quite uneasy and demanding emotionally and mentally, but an absolutely necessary thing to do today. Because tomorrow it might be too late.
From the left: historian Nicholas Milton, Ambassador Mark Wallace, director of ARCHER in House 88 Jacek Purski at the preview event of The Birdman of Auschwitz exhibition in Oswienciem, Poland. April 2026. Photo: Michal Bojara. (C) CEP/ARCHER. With kind permission.
Birdsong from Silence, Light from Darkness
In their determination to fight the evil of yesterday and today, Ambassador Wallace, his colleagues, principle co-funders of the ARCHER projects, such as Robin and Elliott Broidy, Dr. Thomas S. Kaplan and Dafne Recanati Kaplan, the CEP and ARCHER team, are going further than exhibiting artifacts. They are determined to fight the evil at its very housing. It can be done in different ways, what matters here is the principle and the intention.
In the case of the theme of birds over Auschwitz, the ARCHER team has placed four bird-houses in the garden made in part from wood from the Höss fence. As the exhibition’s curator Nicholas Milton has told me, “We plan to use the bird boxes to bring back birdsong to Auschwitz in memory of the victims.”
Nicholas also mentioned that in mid-April this year, the birds already sang at the premises, quite vividly so. It looks like the famed architect Daniel Libeskind who in early 2025 was telling his friend Ambassador Mark Wallace that the birds will sing there again, was right.
The birds that in Jewish tradition symbolizes Jewish souls and are connected to it directly, in their behavior also always feel human warmth, and the character of human activities, in a primary meaning, good or bad it is, roughly. This is a scientific fact, too.
In this first major awareness and educational, historic exhibition at ARCHER in House 88, we can see embodiment of the idea that Mark Wallace was graceful to share with me in one of our conversations: “Birdsong from silence, Light from Darkness”. Simple and clear, as moral clarity and determination to act for its sake should be, to be efficient and worthy.
This article was originally published on Technology.org.
I returned to the U.S. about two weeks ago, after spending the better part of a year in Israel covering Israel’s war with Hamas in Gaza and now the confrontation with Iran. A year is a long time to be embedded in a country at war. You see things that don’t make the evening news. You develop a sense of how a society actually operates under sustained threat — not in theory, but day to day.
One thing struck me more than anything else: artificial intelligence in Israel is not a buzzword. It’s not a pilot program or a Silicon Valley talking point. It’s infrastructure. As common and as load-bearing as the country’s electrical grid.
When I came home, I started calling sources to make sense of what I’d witnessed. I spoke with Elliott Broidy — entrepreneur, CEO of Broidy Capital Holdings, and founder and managing partner of LEO Technologies, LLC (LeoTech), a firm deploying AI tools for law enforcement and public safety agencies across the United States, and Chairman and CEO of agentic AI Video Intelligence company Cynapse AI. Broidy has spent years watching the intersection of AI and national security from the investment side, and he has a clear-eyed view of where Israel sits relative to the rest of the world.
“What Israel has done,” Broidy told me, “is to compress decades of technological development into a few years of operational necessity. When your survival depends on making better decisions faster than your adversaries, you don’t wait for a perfect product. You build, you test, you deploy — and you refine under pressure.”
That compression is exactly what I observed on the ground.
A Hospital That Functions Two Stories Underground
One of the more surreal moments of my time in Israel came during a visit to the Sheba Medical Center outside Tel Aviv — the largest hospital in the Middle East, with 11,000 employees, 1,700 doctors, and over 3,000 nurses. What I found was a functioning hospital operating almost entirely underground, out of reach of Iranian ballistic missiles.
Pediatrics, oncology, ophthalmology, cardiology — all of it had migrated beneath the surface. Ambulances unloaded patients on gurneys in underground bays while workmen fixed overhead cables nearby. “This place is not a field hospital. This is the hospital. It is just subterranean,” one pediatric doctor told me. She said the staff had assumed they might be working this way indefinitely.
After the 12-day Israeli-U.S. war with Iran last June, hospital leadership had studied what they’d learned and built a more distributed underground system — spread across five subterranean locations, each capable of running independently.
What made it possible was the AI-driven systems, which monitor threat levels, coordinate logistics, and help hospital command know when to move, how fast, and in what sequence. The military gave the hospital roughly a month’s notice before the latest air strikes, based on its own predictive modeling. That lead time saved lives.
Predicting Emergencies Before They Happen
Below the level of military operations, Israel has also wired its civilian emergency response system with AI in ways that feel almost sci-fi.
Members of Unit 8200, Israel’s elite signals intelligence unit, collaborated with the emergency response organization United Hatzalah to build an AI dispatch system trained on 18 years of historical emergency data. The system predicts where medical emergencies are likely to occur within the next 10 minutes, dynamically repositioning ambulances and first-response “ambucycles” ahead of actual calls. During a three-month pilot, it correctly predicted the location of the next emergency call — within a one- to two-minute response radius — roughly 85 percent of the time.
The implications are straightforward: faster response times, more lives saved. In one documented case, a volunteer was directed to a mall based on an AI prediction. Before he arrived, his app flagged a patient with chest pains 400 meters away. He reached the patient before the caller even hung up the phone.
Magen David Adom, Israel’s national emergency service, has built a similarly sophisticated system — a Computer-Assisted Design AI platform that simultaneously alerts and dispatches the nearest certified civilian responders, ambulance crews, police, and fire services the moment an emergency call comes in. It routes everyone using real-time traffic data and predictive algorithms, all without a dispatcher manually coordinating each agency.
“What Israel has built in the civilian sector is just as instructive as the military applications,” Elliott Broidy said. “The same logic applies: you reduce the time between a threat and a response, you reduce harm. Whether the threat is a cardiac arrest or a missile, the principle is identical.”
On the Battlefield: AI as Operational Doctrine
The IDF’s adoption of AI goes well beyond logistics. Deep inside a fortified command facility known as the “Fortress of Zion” — a bunker beneath IDF headquarters in Tel Aviv — military planners coordinate air, sea, and land operations from a nerve center built for high-tech warfare.
On its walls of screens: three-dimensional building diagrams, live aerial drone feeds, real-time maps of ground and air assets across the region. During combat operations over Gaza and Lebanon, roughly 300 to 400 personnel worked there around the clock, with that number swelling to the thousands during active campaigns. Intelligence analysts from Mossad, Shin Bet, the Foreign Ministry, and police all shared the same operational picture.
The IDF has used this infrastructure to target enemy assets with a precision that older command structures simply could not achieve. It has also grappled with the serious ethical questions that come with it — the distance between a commander and a target, the reduction of human lives to data points in a system, the risk of indifference that can creep in when war is conducted from a climate-controlled room. Senior IDF officers acknowledge this tension directly. It is, as one general put it, “part of the commander’s challenge.”
On the medical side, the IDF Medical Corps has been running its own AI-driven revolution. An R&D division within the corps reduced evacuation times from the Gaza battlefield to a hospital to an average of 60 minutes — well within what medics call “the golden window” for saving the critically wounded. In Lebanon, where distances were greater, the average was 107 minutes. Paramedics were pre-positioned close to front lines so they could reach wounded soldiers within two to three minutes.
The corps also developed a drone delivery system for whole blood — one of the most time-sensitive medical supplies in combat. Engineers spent years solving the physics: keeping blood at two to four degrees Celsius at altitude, designing landing systems that wouldn’t rupture bags on impact, ensuring drones flying at 200 meters wouldn’t be shot down by friendly forces who didn’t recognize them. By October 2025, a full-scale drill had worked. Operational use was expected shortly after.
AI has also entered the realm of mental health. Using EEG machines paired with machine learning, IDF mental health professionals can now map individualized “calming cues” for soldiers dealing with PTSD, identifying whether exposure to a particular song, voice, or image has a measurable neurological effect. Separately, AI tools are cutting the time clinicians spend on administrative record-keeping from an hour down to about 15 minutes per session, freeing up more face time with patients.
What the U.S. Can Learn
Elliott Broidy has thought carefully about the gap between where Israel operates and where the United States still aspires to be.
“Israel doesn’t have the luxury of bureaucratic timelines,” he said. “When you’re a country of 10 million people surrounded by adversaries on multiple fronts, every tool has to work. That’s created a culture where AI gets deployed, gets tested in the hardest conditions imaginable, and gets refined fast. The U.S. has enormous assets, but we don’t always move with that kind of urgency.”
His firm, LEO Technologies, is trying to apply that urgency in the American public safety context. Through its VerusAI platform, LeoTech brings agentic, semantic, and generative AI to law enforcement agencies — compressing what used to take investigators weeks of manual work down to seconds. The platform monitors communications for contraband coordination, gang activity, and suicide risk in correctional facilities, surfacing the intelligence that matters and filtering out the noise. It currently serves more than 224 agencies nationwide.
“The core insight is the same whether you’re in Tel Aviv or Tulsa,” Broidy said. “AI doesn’t replace human judgment — it gives humans better information, faster, enabling better decisions that can be deployed more quickly. The question is always: what does your team need to know, and how quickly can you get it to them?”
A Country That Builds Under Fire
What I keep coming back to, weeks after returning home, is the sheer normality of AI’s role in Israeli life. Emergency dispatchers rely on predictive algorithms the way American dispatchers rely on phone maps. Hospitals have AI-integrated contingency protocols baked into their operations. The military runs targeting and logistics through systems that would have seemed like science fiction a decade ago.
The pressure that produced this ecosystem — decades of conflict, constant threat recalibration, a small population that cannot absorb large losses — is not something any country would choose. But the technological culture it has built is worth studying seriously. Israel has figured out something that larger, more comfortable nations are still working through: that AI deployed under real conditions, with real stakes, matures faster and proves its worth more clearly than AI developed in peacetime labs.
As Elliott Broidy put it: “Israel is the world’s most advanced proving ground for AI in national security. What works there, works. And what works there today often becomes doctrine everywhere else tomorrow.”
Permit me to introduce myself as I am unknown in Spain, a country whose Prime Minister, Pedro Sánchez, fills me, thousands of American Jews like me, and millions of American Christians, with great dread.
I am an entrepreneur based in Florida and dedicate much of my time to philanthropic causes. Most recently, I have supported the Counter Extremism Project (CEP), a, non-profit international policy organization working to combat the growing threat posed by extremist ideologies. I helped CEP purchase the house at Auschwitz just outside the perimeter of the death camp. It was the house in which the camp’s commandant Rudolf Höss had lived with his family. Many readers here will be familiar with the house from having seen “The Zone of Interest” (2023), a film about the comfortable banality of Höss’s idyllic domestic life while he planned and oversaw the murder of a million Jews.
That house, in which a monster once lived, has now become a center for research and investigation on organizations that are behind the rise of antisemitism around the world.
For those of us who dedicate our lives to the fight against antisemitism, and to a vigorous defense of a Jewish State in Israel, the attitude of Mr. Sánchez has been greatly troubling. Ever since the murderous attack by Hamas on Israel on October 7, 2023, Sánchez has not wasted an opportunity to treat Israel a pariah. He gives loud and frequent voice to the international leftist libels that describe Israel as an “apartheid” state and characterize its war of self-defense in Gaza as a “genocide.”
Sánchez has been at the forefront of European political efforts to recognize a Palestinian state and conferred such recognition on the Palestinians on behalf of Spain without even the most minimal concession by the Palestinians of Israel’s right to exist. He inveighs against Israel and its elected prime minister at every opportunity, and has now added to his anti-Israel zealotry a loud and gaudy opposition to the American-Israeli war against Iran. We understand, of course, that his motives are cynical: What better way can there be for him to distract attention from the corruption of his Socialist government than to posture as an international progressive poster-boy against the war.
The damage that Sánchez has done to Spain’s standing in Washington is incalculable and should be of concern to all right-thinking Spaniards. President Trump has, not surprisingly, threatened to cut all trade with Spain as a result of Mr. Sánchez’s hostility. A recent article in the Wall Street Journal suggested, also, that Spain should face punitive economic consequences under the Ribicoff Amendment to the Tax Reform Act of 1976 for boycotting Israel as a matter of national government policy.
More broadly, I write this piece so that Spanish readers are informed that their government is heaping shame on Spain’s good name among many in the United States and around the world. Not only do many American Jews regard him as a misinformed, uneducated, rabid antisemite, but millions of Christians do as well. I am widely involved in communities in Florida, California, and New York, and I have lost count of the number of people, both Christian and Jewish, who have expressed pain, and even disgust, at the hostility that Sánchez has displayed toward the only Jewish State.
There are 2.3 billion Christians in the world, and they are the majority in 120 countries. There are 1.5 billion Muslims in the world in 52 Muslim countries. In 30 of those countries, over 90% of the population is Muslim. There are only 15 million Jews in the world. Israel is the only country in the world where Jews are the majority. Of the 10 million people living in Israel, approximately 7 million are Jews and 2.1 million are Arabs. There is no apartheid in Israel. Arab Israelis go to public schools with Jewish Israelis, they are members of parliament, they work together in businesses and hospitals, and they serve as justices of the Supreme court of Israel.
Sánchez’s hostility shares horrific overtones with the Spanish Inquisition, a period when hundreds of thousands of Jews were forced to convert to Catholicism, thousands were tortured to determine if they had really converted, and at least 2,000 were killed. Estimates indicate that between 40,000 and 100,000 were exiled.
It’s a period that lives in infamy and it is being recalled now in the minds of Jews and Christians alike. Whereas the previous conservative government did the right thing by creating a law in 2015, that granted dual citizenship to Jews who could link their heritage to Spain, the next progressive government and the one that followed led by Sánchez did not. Before the law expired in 2019 and was not renewed, over 4,300 Jews were granted such citizenship. Now, no care is taken to disguise the hate and animosity of the Jewish people by the Spanish government. The Spanish people must wake up to the damage that Prime Minister Sánchez is doing, and the bridges he is burning.
The arson attack in London’s Golders Green, targeting ambulances operated by a Jewish volunteer rescue organization, shatters a basic rule of civilized society. It reaches far beyond the Jewish community of the United Kingdom. It signals something much broader: the erosion of lines that once held.
Ambulances save lives. They do not carry ideology. Anyone who burns them does not protest. They declare that nothing remains off limits. And when the target is Jewish, the meaning is unmistakable.
Burning a Jewish ambulance is not protest. It is permission. Permission for the next target, the next escalation, the next line erased.
This attack fits a pattern that grows more violent, more organized, and more brazen.
In Michigan, a gunman drove a vehicle into Temple Israel in West Bloomfield, forced entry, and opened fire. The attack unfolded in the middle of the day at a synagogue with a large preschool. Children were inside. A security guard suffered injuries, and dozens of first responders required treatment after the fire and smoke. No ambiguity surrounded the motive. The target told the story.
Months earlier in Sydney, two gunmen opened fire at a Hanukkah celebration at Bondi Beach, killing 15 people gathered for a public Jewish holiday. The attack stands as the deadliest antisemitic assault in Australia’s modern history.
In recent weeks, attackers firebombed Jewish institutions across Europe, including in Belgium and the Netherlands. The same network claimed responsibility in London. This is not coincidence. It is a coordinated campaign.
The targets are not random. Synagogues, schools, community centers, and ambulances form the backbone of Jewish life. They are visible, rooted, and essential. Attackers strike them to send a message: Jews do not belong.
Washington’s clash with artificial intelligence startup Anthropic has quickly become one of the most closely watched technology disputes in the country. The Pentagon labeled the company a national security “supply chain risk,” effectively cutting it off from defense work. Anthropic responded with a lawsuit, arguing the move was retaliatory and unlawful. A federal court hearing is scheduled for later this month.
Much of the debate so far has focused on the immediate legal and ethical questions. Anthropic says the government punished it after the company refused to loosen restrictions on how its AI models can be used for surveillance and military applications. Defense officials say the military cannot rely on technology from a company unwilling to support lawful national security missions.
But the dispute also highlights a deeper divide inside the AI economy that is shaping how both government and industry approach artificial intelligence.
The debate is not only about who builds the most powerful models, but increasingly about who controls the systems and data that make those models useful in high stakes environments.
Over the past year, capable AI systems from companies such as Anthropic and OpenAI have fueled predictions that large language models will disrupt large parts of the software industry. Many investors now expect entire categories of software to be absorbed as AI systems replicate and automate core functions.
Those pressures are most visible in software as a service. Many SaaS (Software as a Service) products automate standardized workflows such as customer support, marketing analytics or document processing. These are precisely the kinds of tasks where general AI models can replicate existing tools with relative ease.
“A lot of the commentary assumes every new AI breakthrough wipes out entire sectors of software,” said investor and entrepreneur Elliott Broidy, who has been studying how artificial intelligence is being deployed in national security and investigative technology. “That tends to be true in horizontal markets where software is basically a bundle of interchangeable features. In specialized sectors, the advantage comes from domain expertise and proprietary data.”
In fields like intelligence analysis, financial crime investigations and regulatory compliance, AI systems operate inside operational platforms built on years of industry training data, investigative methods and analytical workflows. In those environments the AI model is only one component of a larger system.
“If you are operating in a complex investigative or national security environment you are not just plugging in a chatbot,” Broidy said. “You are integrating AI into a full investigative framework with proprietary datasets, analyst workflows and regulatory constraints. That is something generic models cannot replicate overnight.”
The distinction is already shaping how government agencies approach AI integration in sensitive systems. Defense agencies and intelligence organizations rely on software platforms that combine large proprietary datasets with specialized analytical tools refined through years of operational use. In those environments the AI model is only one component of a larger architecture.
Because these platforms are built around proprietary data pipelines and investigative workflows, they can integrate whichever AI model proves most effective. The infrastructure and domain expertise remain the core strategic asset.
“The model is important, but it is only one layer of the stack,” Broidy said. “In many cases the real moat is the data infrastructure and the domain expertise that surrounds it.”
The Pentagon’s decision to designate Anthropic a supply chain risk sheds light on another reality. Washington is increasingly willing to use regulatory authority and procurement power to shape how AI companies operate.
The designation applied to Anthropic is typically used against foreign companies that pose national security threats. Applying it to a domestic AI developer represents a striking escalation and forces government contractors to reconsider whether they can rely on the company’s technology.
The move also reflects growing tension between AI developers and government agencies.
Some AI companies have sought to place limits on how their systems can be used, particularly when it comes to surveillance or autonomous weapons. Government officials argue that decisions about national security capabilities ultimately belong to elected governments, not private technology companies.
At the same time, federal agencies are becoming increasingly dependent on the private sector for advanced AI capabilities. This dynamic is reshaping the relationship between Washington and Silicon Valley.
As artificial intelligence becomes embedded in sectors such as investigations, compliance and national security, companies that control specialized data and operational platforms are emerging as critical players in the technology ecosystem. In these environments, organizations prioritize reliability and institutional trust over novelty.
AI is integrated into long-standing workflows and regulatory frameworks, making the model itself only one layer of a much larger system. In that sense, the struggle between Anthropic and the Pentagon is not just about one company or one contract, but reflective of a broader contest over who ultimately controls how powerful AI systems are deployed.
Anthropic has launched Claude Code Security, an AI-powered vulnerability scanner built into Claude Code on the web, now available in a limited research preview for Enterprise and Team customers.
The tool is designed to flag subtle logic flaws that are difficult to detect through manual inspection. Its launch triggered an immediate and sharp sell-off across the cybersecurity sector.
The announcement marks a turning point in how security teams find and fix software flaws. Until now, identifying hidden vulnerabilities meant relying on experienced researchers to comb through thousands of lines of code. That method is no longer the only option and, in many cases, it is no longer the most efficient one. Security tools like Claude Code Security are beginning to upend these traditional systems.
Elliott Broidy, who leads Broidy Capital Holdings and invests in AI-driven capabilities for public safety and defense, believes that Claude Code Security represents a fundamental shift in how we achieve accurate vulnerability detection. “Instead of waiting for a breach to expose a weakness, security teams can now get ahead of threats before they are ever exploited,” he said.
Anthropic’s February 20 blog post, “Making frontier cybersecurity capabilities available to defenders,” highlighted this evolution: “Security teams face a common challenge: too many software vulnerabilities and not enough people to address them. Existing analysis tools help, but only to a point, as they usually look for known patterns. Finding the subtle, context-dependent vulnerabilities that attackers often exploit requires skilled human researchers, who are dealing with ever-expanding backlogs. AI is beginning to change that calculus.”
Broidy also sees both sides of the equation clearly. “AI gives human researchers a force multiplier they’ve never had before, which is a game-changer for national security and the private sector alike,” Broidy said. “However, the same capabilities that can find a vulnerability in seconds can be weaponised to exploit one just as fast. Tools like Claude Code Security enable defenders to move at the speed of the threat for the first time.”
Unlike conventional scanners that flag known patterns, Claude Code Security uses reasoning to understand how software components interact with one another. Any vulnerability it identifies undergoes a multi-stage verification and reexamination process before reaching a human reviewer. Validated findings are then assigned a confidence rating to help security teams inspect and approve necessary fixes.
“Claude Code Security is meant to simulate the real process a human security researcher would follow when evaluating code,” said Broidy. “It can read the company’s software, flag potential issues and draft fixes. Ultimately, though, humans should make the final decisions.”
Markets responded swiftly following the announcement. According to Bloomberg, Crowdstrike Holdings fell 8%, while Cloudflare Inc. dropped 8.1%. Zscaler declined 5.5%, SailPoint tumbled 9.4% and Okta Inc. fell 9.2%. The broader selloff dragged down the Global X Cybersecurity ETF by 4.9%, leaving it at its lowest close since November 2023.
The selloff reflects a broader investor concern: that AI platforms capable of detecting and remediating vulnerabilities at machine speed could compress demand for legacy suites.
“The message from markets was hard to miss,” Broidy said. “Investors are now asking an important question. As AI companies like Anthropic and OpenAI continue rolling out tools that can write and scan software code, the pressure on traditional security vendors will only grow.”
Investor concerns have been brewing. The tool builds on over a year of internal research and testing. Claude Opus 4.6, released earlier this month, helped the team find hundreds of previously undetected vulnerabilities. It also stirred up panic and triggered broad selloff across enterprise software stocks as investors fear the sustainability of traditional enterprise software companies.
As an AI code vulnerability scanner, Claude Code Security is a signal of where the industry is heading. The models are only becoming more advanced as the race to give defenders the edge in an increasingly sophisticated threat landscape accelerates.
“There’s no question that AI is becoming the backbone of how we protect critical infrastructure,” Broidy said. “We should be excited to integrate these capabilities while remaining hyperaware of the continued risks it poses.”
How the Auschwitz Research Center on Hate, Extremism and Radicalization (ARCHER) is combining artificial intelligence, digital forensics, and philanthropy to identify, expose, and disrupt extremist networks before they spread.
In recent years, the fight against extremism and hate has become more urgent than ever. With rising antisemitism, violent extremism, and radical ideologies, the old methods of combating hate are insufficient in today’s hyper-connected world. As an entrepreneur I focus on investing in businesses that advance public safety and national security. I’ve come to realize that to effectively fight the forces of hate and irrationalism, we must innovate and combine cutting-edge technology with philanthropy.
The Changing Face of Extremism
Historically, extremism was something seen in isolated pockets of society: radical groups operating underground, often in the shadows. Today, however, the rise of social media, encrypted messaging apps, and global connectivity have brought extremist ideologies to the forefront. Radical, violent extremism, including virulent antisemitism which incites the susceptible and misinformed to violence, are no longer confined to hidden extremist groups; they thrive online, in the dark corners of the internet, and increasingly in public view.
ARCHER at House 88: A New Approach to Fighting Extremism
That is precisely why I decided to support the creation of the Auschwitz Research Center on Hate, Extremism and Radicalization (ARCHER) at House 88, an initiative of the Counter Extremism Project (CEP), a non-profit, non-partisan organization that was founded in 2014 by Ambassador Mark Wallace, Senator Joseph Lieberman, and former Homeland Security Advisor Frances Townsend.
With my help, alongside philanthropist Dr. Thomas Kaplan, CEP purchased the former home of Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss at 88 Legionów Street (“88” was code for Heil Hitler because H is the eighth letter of the alphabet) in Oswięcim, Poland. The house, adjacent to the concentration camp, has been transformed into ARCHER, which represents a paradigm shift in how we combat antisemitism.
What sets ARCHER apart from other organizations fighting antisemitism is its relentless focus on action. ARCHER doesn’t just create programs that describe the horrors of the past or organize remembrance events, as important as those are, or research how many violent extremist or antisemitic incidents occur around the world. ARCHER develops AI-driven software tools to track violent extremist content on the internet, expose extremist networks, and disrupt the funding of terrorist and extremist organizations. The leadership and staff consist of former government intelligence officials, subject matter experts, and researchers who write important reports about existing an developing threats, and advise governments, multi-government commissions, and tech companies about how to counter these threats.
CEP and ARCHER use real-time data to identify hate before it spreads and strategically mobilize resources to stop it. In the fight against extremism, technology has proven to be both a weapon for hate and a tool for combating it. We expose extremist networks in reports, webinars, podcasts, social media, and traditional media to ensure that hate speech is no longer tolerated and allowed to proliferate under the guise of free expression. We are expert at finding all extremist content on the internet thanks to our partnership with the father of digital forensics, Dr. Hany Farid of the University of California at Berkeley. In 2016, Dr. Farid adapted his PhotoDNA software—designed to find missing and exploited children content on the internet—to create “eGlyph technology,” which enables social media platforms and governments to track where a particular piece of violent, inciting, extremist video, audio, or image has been uploaded and by whom. ARCHER is currently updating this software to enable platforms and governments to use general natural language queries to find all newly uploaded or downloaded extremist content, rather than searching for each identified piece individually.
Getting harmful and inciting extremist content off the internet, tracking terrorism finance globally, and teaching governments how to find and eliminate such material are all part of the arsenal ARCHER will use to counter the proliferation of extremist ideologies. Social media platforms like X, Instagram, and TikTok play an enormous role in the radicalization process, so it’s imperative that we hold tech companies accountable for the content being spread through their platforms. To help achieve that mission, CEP helped craft the language for the United Kingdom’s Online Safety Act 2023, which requires platforms to take down violent extremist content or face severe fines. The law also requires platforms to use the type of technology that CEP developed to find such content.
Philanthropy in the Fight Against Hate
Philanthropy has always played a critical role in shaping our societies. As someone who has been privileged to support initiatives that promote public safety, security, and education, I’ve come to believe that fighting extremism requires not just government or military intervention, but active philanthropic engagement.
That belief is reflected in my work with The Fund to End Antisemitism, Extremism and Hate, which I co-chair with Dr. Kaplan. The Fund was created to support ARCHER at House 88 and ensure that the initiative has the resources necessary to develop its research, technology, and global partnerships over the long term. Initiatives of ARCHER’s scale require sustained investment, and philanthropy can play a unique role in helping ensure that organizations working to counter extremism have the independence and resources they need to act decisively.
That same sense of responsibility also guided my decision to acquire the original architectural whiteprint for the crematoria at Auschwitz-Birkenau. The document is a chilling reminder of how bureaucratic systems and meticulous technical expertise were mobilized in service of genocide. I acquired the document for $1.5 million to honor the memory of the 1.5 million Jewish children who were murdered during the Holocaust, many of them in crematoria like the one depicted in the whiteprint. That money will support the creation of a global early-childhood curriculum that teaches altruism and empathy—precisely the traits necessary to inoculate young children against extremism and hate.
I want the document to be studied and used as a powerful educational tool. It is irrefutable evidence of the Nazis’ genocidal intent and the thought and purposefulness that went into their attempt to wipe Jews from the face of the earth. My plan is to exhibit it at institutions dedicated to Holocaust commemoration and combating antisemitism before donating it permanently to such an institution.
Through education, action, and thoughtful philanthropy, we can make a profound difference in the world.
A Call to Action
We cannot do this work alone. These are global, whole-of-society problems and they require global, whole-of-society solutions. Each of us must take responsibility. As business leaders, philanthropists, and citizens, we have a duty to combat hate wherever it resides—whether it’s in our own communities, on the internet, or in the policies of other nations.
As we move forward in this battle, I’m reminded of a cry that has been seared into my consciousness from a young age: “Never Again.” The phrase was popularized by Elie Wiesel, the author of so many important works that described the horrors of the Holocaust and the genesis of the hate that led to it. But in his 1986 Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech he added, “Sometimes we must interfere.” Hate doesn’t disappear of its own accord. We must fight to ensure that it cannot find fertile ground in which to grow.
In Conclusion
The future of global security and peace depends on our ability to work together—to harness the power of technology, philanthropy, and international cooperation to fight against the forces that threaten our shared values of tolerance, freedom, and human dignity. Only by working together can we arrive at a safer, more just world, one free from hate and the horrors that flow from it.
Elliott Broidy is an entrepreneur who has used his extensive experience and talent to found, invest, and in some cases, manage as CEO, more than 160 companies over his four-decade career. Since 2014, he has focused on technology businesses (including, more recently, AI) in the defense intelligence, homeland security, public safety, and law enforcement sectors.
At the end of 2025, an eye-catching headline appeared in several major news outlets: Robin and Elliott Broidy had paid $ 1.5 million for an original architectural drawing of the Auschwitz-Birkenau crematoria.
The fact behind the news was both significant and unusual. Private individuals rarely spend such a substantial amount on a single artifact, particularly one of such grave nature. In my 35 years working in this field, I can recall very few comparable acts. I wanted to understand the decision behind it in more detail.
It is known that only two original versions of this document exist: the one recently acquired by Robin and Elliott Broidy for philanthropic and Holocaust-education purposes, and another that was seized by the Soviet Army when it liberated Auschwitz in January 1945. The latter has been sealed in a Russian state military archive ever since, aside from a brief de-classification period in the mid-1990s when researchers were allowed limited access. It has not been available for review since.
Importantly, the amount the Broidys paid for the whiteprint was chosen to honor the one and a half million Jewish children murdered during the Holocaust. This dedication tells you everything about the significance of their acquisition.
The above photograph of murdered Jewish children hangs in the centre of my husband, artist Michael Rogatchi’s studio, and always will. The children are at his side as he works, and he spends most of his time there. They are always with him.
So we understand the power of Elliott and Robin Broidy’s gesture completely.
White-print of mass murder
Before me lies a typical product of a European architectural bureau or engineering office from the 1940s: clean, sophisticated, precise, confidently drawn lines, all executed by hand, lending the document an unsettling authenticity.
You look casually at the document, yellowed with age. It appears to be a precise drawing of an ordinary house. Then your eyes reach the two vertical lines at its centre, and your heart stops: a chimney, disproportionally large.
No wonder the Nazis tried to destroy all material evidence of their unspeakable crimes. Yet according to first-hand accounts I studied in the Simon Wiesenthal Archive, Soviet troops approaching Auschwitz in January 1945 were guided by the stench of burning bodies. The crematoria were operating until the very end.
Once you recover your breath, you notice the German bureaucratic stamps surrounding the carefully drawn structure with its heartrending vertical lines. The images become much more than an architectural plan.
As it is known, the first large-scale Zyklon B gassing experiment occurred on September 3, 1941, when 600 Soviet prisoners of war and 250 sick Polish prisoners were murdered in the basement of Block 11 at Auschwitz. Following the gassing, it became evident that the existing crematorium at the Auschwitz site could not adequately dispose of the bodies. Within seven weeks, SS architects from Berlin arrived in Auschwitz to address this ‘problem’.
Architect Walter Dejaco and others spent two days – October 22 and 23 – with Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss and others to determine the necessary scale of the new crematoria. The white-print in question is dated October 24, 1941. It is also known that the plans were later amended and expanded and presented at the Wannsee Conference on January 20th, 1942, as proof that their plan to eliminate all the Jews of Europe – the “Final Solution” – was feasible.
The aged white-print produced 85 years ago is clear evidence of the careful planning that made the worst crimes in human history possible.
Today, sadly and alarmingly, the historic evidence of the crimes against humanity is seen with an additional gravity in a new context of the unleashed hatred that intensified after October 7th, 2023.
We are now living in a time when irrational hatred of Jews is being normalized and spreading rapidly. Within days of the October 7, 2023 massacre – the worst mass-murder of Jews since the Holocaust – virulent antisemitic lies were spread across traditional and social media by the antisemitic zealots and those who are orchestrating the new “normality”.
Within one year of the attacks, antisemitic incidents reached their highest level since the end of the Second World War.
One recent disturbing example: at the 2026 Winter Olympics, the International Olympic Committee ordered, produced, and sold merchandise featuring imagery from the 1936 Berlin Olympics, which were a triumph of Nazi propaganda. This is a profound insult to the victims of Nazism and their families. Yet today it is a new normal, or rather an old one returning, because we have seen it before.
Personal dimension
I have been to Auschwitz many times, to work, observe, film, and think. It is a difficult place to be, as is any Nazi camp. Without being there, one cannot grasp the meaning of Nazism. The horrors of what happened there are beyond rationality. They can only be understood through raw feeling after having seen such a place firsthand.
It is for that reason that I worked with colleagues at the European Parliament to propose mandatory school visits to Auschwitz and the other extermination Nazi camps. The proposal failed, officially due to parental objections, although perhaps some countries were simply unwilling or uninterested.
I work in Auschwitz, I think about the camp orchestras. Three large ensembles: two male orchestras and one female orchestra. The latter was led for a time by my great-aunt Alma Rosé. So, Auschwitz is personal to me.
Prisoners recalled that the orchestras were forced to play, among the other grim compulsions, during selections, when SS men decided at a moment’s notice who would live and who would die. Who could forget such a thing?
Professionals such as doctors and architects planned and implemented the extermination of millions of people. Many architects were never held accountable for their crimes, or were acquitted at their trials, despite knowingly designing facilities whose purpose was mass murder.
An Acquitted Holocaust perpetrator
The white-print’s author was Walter Dejaco, an Austrian architect with no notable career before the Second World War. An enthusiastic Nazi, he joined the SS in 1933, when it was still illegal in Austria, five years before the Anschluss.
This unremarkable man – so many of them were unremarkable, including Rudolf Höss – thrived for the first time in his life during Nazi rule, and he proceeded with his tasks happily. He even joked on his architectural plans, writing ‘Auschwitz’ as ‘Au / Schwitz’ , a pun suggesting sweat. Such ‘humor’ tells you a great deal about the atmosphere in which the Auschwitz-Birkenau crematoria were planned.
My dear friend Simon Wiesenthal told me about Dejaco many years ago. Together with Auschwitz prisoner and writer Hermann Langbein, Wiesenthal tracked Dejaco for years. Dejaco had been held by the Red Army as a prisoner of war from 1945 in the camp in the USSR until 1949 or 1950, when he was inexplicably released.
So, one of just four architects who had planned and constructed the Auschwitz-Birkenau crematoria returned home and resumed his profession. He built parish buildings and was thanked and rewarded by local clergy.
After persistent efforts by Wiesenthal and Langbein, the investigation started in 1962. It took ten years before it reached the courtroom. Dejaco and two of his assistants were finally brought to trial in 1972.
It was a fiasco. One assistant’s case was dropped, and Dejaco and Fritz Ertl were acquitted on the grounds that they had acted under “duress”.
Dejaco died peacefully in his bed in 1978.
One detail from the trial still haunts me. The trial was public, but nobody attended it.
“The hall was empty”, Simon Wiesenthal told me. “ Just empty. You understand?”
I did. And I did not. I still do not.
“We did it for ourselves” – a couple ensures remembrance
But the acquisition of the crematoria whiteprints was a personal decision for the Broidys.
“We wanted to find a way to use the money spent on this terrible, but historically important, document for something good”, Elliott Broidy told me. “In conversations with Rabbi David Baron of the Temple of Arts in Beverly Hills, we decided to dedicate the sum, honoring the one and a half million Jewish children murdered by the Nazis, to fund the Temple’s creation of a global curriculum that would teach empathy and altruism to children under five, inoculating them against the scourge of extremism”.
Michael Rogatchi (C). Faces of the Holocaust. 1991-1992.
I hope this new curriculum, teaching altruism, understanding, tolerance and humanity, will flourish. This is one of those rare stories showing that even the darkest history can, through human will, be transformed into something constructive.
Evil can, and must, be answered and overcome by good, even generations later. It can prompt us to rethink, revisit, and reckon with the most painful lessons of history and to draw from them, against all odds, understanding and moral clarity.
It is never too late, so long as the memory of every soul lost in the Holocaust remains alive.
