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Kraus, Ota

Ota Kraus (7 Sept. 1909 – 10 July 2010) was a Czech Jew who was arrested in 1940 for distributing resistance magazines. He was interned at Auschwitz from November 1942 until October 1944, when he was transferred to Sachsenhausen Camp. In Auschwitz, he headed the inmate metalworking shop together with the Czech Jew Erich Kulka….

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Kulka, Erich

Erich Kulka (aka Schön, 18 Dec. 1911 – 13 July 1995) was a Czech Jew who was arrested due to his communist resistance activities, and spent time at the Theresienstadt Ghetto and in the camps at Dachau, Neuengamme and Auschwitz. In Auschwitz, he headed the inmate metalworking shop together with the Czech Jew Ota Kraus….

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Langbein, Hermann

Hermann Langbein (18 May 1912 – 24 Oct. 1995) was an Austrian communist who fought during the Spanish Civil War with the Stalin-supported International Brigade. Due to his opposition to the National-Socialist regime, he was incarcerated at the Dachau, Auschwitz (from 21 August 1941 until 25 August 1944) and Neuengamme Camps. At Dachau and Auschwitz,…

Liebehenschel, Arthur

Arthur Liebehenschel (25 Nov. 1901 – 24 Jan. 1948), SS Obersturmbannführer, served initially at the Lichtenburg Camp, but since 1937 at the Inspectorate of Concentration Camps, at the SS headquarters in Oranienburg. He became commandant of the Auschwitz Main Camp on 11 November 1943. Hermann Langbein described him as a relatively humane commandant who abolished…

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Marsalek, Hans

Johann Karl (aka Hans) Maršálek (19 July 1914 – 9 Dec. 2011) was an Austrian communist of Bohemian descent. He got caught in 1941 organizing acts of sabotage, for which he ended up incarcerated at the Mauthausen Camp. He was deployed there as a clerk, and used his position to organize the camp’s inmate resistance…

Mengele, Josef

Josef Mengele (16 March 1911 – 7 Feb. 1979), SS Hauptsturmführer, had two PhD titles, one in anthropology, and the other in medicine. From mid 1940 to mid 1942, he served as a medical officer behind the front line. Due to serious injuries incurred in mid 1942, he was declared unfit for military duty. After…

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Mermelstein, Mel

Melvin Mermelstein (25 Sept. 1926 – 28 Jan. 2022) was a former Auschwitz inmate who tried to take advantage of the Institute for Historical Review (IHR), located in California. This organization had had offered a reward of $50,000 to anyone who could present “provable physical evidence for the extermination of Jews in gas chambers.” Mermelstein…

Nebe, Arthur

Arthur Nebe (13 Nov. 1894 – 21 March 1945), SS Gruppenführer, became head of Germany’s Criminal Police in 1936. In 1939, one of Nebe’s subordinates, Christian Wirth, got involved in supervising the so-called euthanasia action, which is said to have consisted of killing severely mentally disabled patients with bottled carbon-monoxide gas. Hence, Nebe was probably…

Pinter, Stephen F.

Stephen Pinter was an Austrian who immigrated to America in 1906 at the age of 17. He obtained U.S. citizenship in 1924, and after the end of the Second World War, he applied with the U.S. War Department to become an investigative judge and prosecutor during the Allied war-crime trials in Germany. He got the…

Polevoy, Boris

Boris Nikolaevich Pole­voy (aka Kampov; 17 March 1908 – 12 July 1981) was a Soviet journalist writing primarily for Soviet Russia’s leading newspaper Pravda. His métier was similar to Ilya Ehrenburg’s: glorifying communism and the Soviet Union, and as Pravda’s official war correspondent during the war, exaggerating and inventing atrocity tales about the enemy and…

Quakernack, Walter

Walter Quakernack (9 July 1907 – 11 Oct. 1946), SS Ober­schar­führer, was a mid-level employee at the Politi­cal Department of the Auschwitz Camp. He was mentioned by seve­ral witnesses, all of whom lack any credibil­ity. Stanisław Jankow­ski constructed a fantastic tale involving Quakernack and another SS man being seduced by a Jewess doing a strip-tease…

Rascher, Sigmund

Sigmund Rascher (12 Feb. 1909 – 26 April 1945), a Luftwaffe Major, was a physician who conducted often-lethal freezing and low-pressure experiments on concentration-camp inmates at the Dachau Camp. In 1944, he and his wife were arrested for kidnapping babies while falsely claiming them to be Mrs. Rascher’s natural-born children. For this, both were executed…

Ringelblum, Emanuel

Emanuel Ringelblum (21 Nov. 1900 – 10? March 1944) was a Polish Jew who was forced to live in the Warsaw Ghetto during World War II. He organized an intelligence-gathering organization in the Ghetto named “Oneg Szabat.” It gathered documents and recorded witness testimonies, among them some from individuals who claimed to have escaped from…

Rosenberg, Alfred

Alfred Rosenberg was born on 12 January 1893 to ethnic-German parents in Reval (today’s Tallinn), Estonia. He went on to study architecture and engineering in Moscow, eventually graduating in early 1918. Following the Russian and Bolshevist Revolutions of 1917 and 1918, he moved to Munich, Germany. In January 1919, eight months prior to Adolf Hitler,…

Schwela, Siegfried

Siegfried Schwela (3 May 1905 – 10 May 1942), SS Hauptsturmführer, was a camp physician at Auschwitz from August 1941. He became the garrison physician of that camp on 21 March 1942. Under his healthcare leadership, sanitary and health conditions in the camp deteriorated to such a degree that in particular typhus became rampant not…

Sehn, Jan

In the years 1945 through 1947, Jan Sehn (22 April 1909 – 12 Dec. 1965) was a Polish investigative judge and a member of the Polish Central Commission for the Investigation of German Crimes in Poland. He took over the investigations concerning events at the former Auschwitz camp complex from the Soviets in the spring…

Sheftel, Yoram

After John Demjanjuk’s first defense lawyer, Dov Eitan, had been assassinated the day before Demjanjuk’s appeal trial before the Jerusalem Court of Appeals was to start, Demjanjuk’s second lawyer Yoram Sheftel was attacked during Eitan’s funeral: someone threw acid into his face which almost made him blind (Sheftel 1994, pp. 243-263).

Silberschein, Abraham

Abraham Silberschein was a member of the Polish parliament, a delegate of the World Jewish Congress and a member of the Committee for Assistance to the Suffering Jews in the Occupied Countries. As such, he collected witness testimonies about the alleged extermination of Jews in occupied Poland, which he published in Geneva in 1944 in…

Simpson, Gordon

Gordon Simpson (30 Oct. 1894 – 13 February 1987) was a justice of the Supreme Court of Texas from January 1945 until September 1949. Together with Edward van Roden, at that time a Pennsylvania judge, Simpson was appointed in 1948 to an extraordinary commission. This commission was charged with investigating claims that German inmates in…

Spanner, Rudolf

Rudolf Spanner was a professor of human anatomy at the university of Danzig until 1946. Primitive soap cakes confiscated at his institute were submitted during the Nuremberg International Military Tribunal by the Soviets as proof that the Germans turned the bodies of murdered camp inmates into soap. It turned out that these pieces of soap…

Speer, Albert

Albert Speer (19 March 1905 – 1 Sept. 1981) was Germany’s Minister of Armaments and War Production from 8 February 1942 until 30 April 1945. He was indicted during the Nuremberg International Military Tribunal for his extended use of forced laborer in the Third Reich’s various construction and armament projects that he managed. He was…

Stahlecker, Walter

At the beginning of Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union, Walter Stahlecker (10 Oct. 1900 – 23 March 1942), SS Brigadeführer, was the head of Einsatzgruppe A operating in the Baltics and northern Russia. He is the author of two extended reports on the activities of his Einsatzgruppe, the so-called Stahlecker Reports. Stahlecker died as…

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