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When writing about the Aktion Reinhardt Camps, orthodox historians commonly refer to the camps Belzec, Sobibór and Treblinka, which according to their narrative were pure extermination camps, but in fact served as mere transit camps for Jews deported to the East either for construction work or for resettlement. From a telegram sent by Hans Höfle,…
Google map of the region around Auschwitz, with black labels added. The Polish town of Oświęcim (German: Auschwitz) lies in a valley at the Sola River near its confluence with the Vistula River. Already during the time of the Austrian-Hungarian Monarchy, a military barracks existed southwest of the town on the left bank of the…
Documented History The first extant document of this camp, dated 30 April 1940, is a cost estimate totaling 2 million reichsmark to convert the former Polish barracks into a camp. It includes fences, walls, watchtowers, but also an inmate kitchen, a laundry, a water-supply system, an inmate bath, a delousing facility, and of course additional…
Measured by yearly visitors, the Auschwitz Museum is the largest Holocaust-related Museum in the world, with a pre-COVID peak visitor number in 2019 of 2.3 million visitors. Showcase at the Auschwitz Museum, showing a layer of long fibers deposited on an inclined plane giving the false impression of a huge pile. These fibers all have…
In April 1944, the two Auschwitz inmates Rudolf Vrba and Alfred Wetzler escaped from the camp. They managed to flee to Slovakia, where they wrote down in May 1944 what they claimed was unfolding at Auschwitz. This report was sent in various versions and languages to several Jewish personalities. At the same time, the German authorities…
Austria had three roles within the context of the Holocaust: Perpetrator Crime Scene Victim With a few postwar Holocaust trials, it also had a minor role as a propagandist, which will not be covered here. However, see the last section in the entry on Auschwitz Trials in this regard. Perpetrator If one were to consider…
Documented History After German troops had occupied Ukraine’s capital on 19 September 1941, Soviet partisans blew up several large buildings in the city center on 24 September, killing hundreds of German soldiers, mostly officers. The explosions caused a fire that eventually destroyed a square mile of Kiev’s center, making some 50,000 persons homeless. Efforts to…
Bad Nenndorf is a German spa town some 15 km west of the northwest-German city of Hannover. After the end of the war, the town was part of the British Zone of Occupation. In violation of the Hague Convention of Land Warfare, the British occupiers hunted down civilians, especially the political leadership of the defeated…
The three Baltic states Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania had four roles within the context of the Holocaust: Perpetrator Crime Scene Victim Propaganda Podium Perpetrator By the time World War Two began, the Baltic people had long-standing and deep cultural relationships with both Russia and Germany. However, while Russia had dominated, occupied and oppressed these countries…
Documents indicate that 25,437 Jews were deported from Belgium, with the Auschwitz Camp as their main destination. Few of these Jews reported back with the local authorities after the war. It is unknown how many returned without reporting back, and how many migrated elsewhere. The fate of the Jews deported from Belgium was probably very…
Documented History The Belzec Camp was initially one of a string of forced-labor camps set up along the eastern border of occupied Poland, meant to house prisoners, among them gypsies, Jews and Christian Poles, who were deployed to build roads and border fortifications. Living conditions in these camps were very bad, and mortality due to…
Documented History The Bergen-Belsen Camp started out in the 1930s as a construction worker’s camp for a nearby military training ground of the German armed forces. After World War Two broke out, the camp was repurposed and expanded as a PoW camp. In April 1943, several sections of this camp were taken over by the…
At the beginning of the Second World War, the northeastern Polish city of Białystok was briefly occupied by German forces, but then handed over to the Soviets. After the outbreak of hostilities between Germany and the Soviet Union, Białystok was occupied by Germany within a few days. In early August 1941, all 50,000 Jews of…
Documented History After the victory over Poland, German officials developed the “Generalplan Ost,” which aimed at Germanizing the territories annexed from Poland. In the summer of 1941, after the initial success in the war with the Soviet Union, Himmler expanded this plan to encompass the large conquered Soviet territories. He drafted ambitious plans for building…
In 1928, the Soviet Union created a Jewish Autonomous Oblast (JAO) in southeastern Siberia, with the newly created city Birobidzhan as its administrative center. The plan was to offer the Jews of the Soviet Union their own homeland as an alternative to Zionism, populate and develop the area, prevent Chinese and Japanese infiltrations, and exploit…
Brest, back then called Brest-Litovsk, is a Belorussian City close to the border to Poland. It belonged to Poland since 1921, but to Belorussia since 1939. After the German invasion of the Soviet Union, a ghetto for Jews was established in that city. According to German wartime documents, altogether almost 9,000 Jews from that ghetto…
Bronnaya Gora is a Belorussian town located on the railway line from Brest to Minsk, some 110 km northeast of Brest. In mid-October 1942, the Brest Ghetto was evacuated and the roughly 17,000 Jews residing in it were officially resettled elsewhere according to German wartime documents. A Soviet investigative commission report, later published in the…
No historian has ever claimed or is currently claiming that any kind of systematic extermination of inmates by any technical means occurred at the Buchenwald Camp. Therefore, this camp would not have a place in an encyclopedia on the Holocaust, if it weren’t for some witnesses having made claims to the contrary, and if the…
Although Bulgaria was Allied with wartime Germany, no Jews were deported from that country or murdered there. Since Bulgaria was known as a relatively safe haven, several thousand Jews actually sought and found refuge there. (See the entry on Jewish demography for a broader perspective.)
In the context of the Jewish Holocaust of World War II, the camps of interest are those for which claims of mass extermination have been made. Although an argument could be made that the Soviet prisoners held in PoW camps in the temporarily German-occupied Soviet Union were subject to conditions that led to millions of…
Documented History Only a few documents about the Chełmno Camp itself seem to have survived the war. The most important of them, dated 11 May 1943, refers to the earlier delivery of iron material to the Chełmno Special Unit. This delivery included a “water reservoir,” “iron boiler pipes” with a total weight of 1,600 kg,…
During the Second World War, the Sudetenland border areas of today’s Czechia were part of Germany. The rest of Czechia itself was called Protectorate Bohemia and Moravia. Some 82,000 Jews were deported from that area. Most of them stayed temporarily at the Theresienstadt Ghetto, before being moved on to other places. Initially, many of them…
Documented History The Dachau Camp enters the Holocaust stage in March 1942, when plans for a proper crematorium building were drawn up. The few documents that the conquering U.S. troops did not destroy show little unusual. However, on 9 August 1942, hence in the early stages of the planning and construction phase, Dachau camp physician…
Measured by yearly visitors, the Dachau Museum is by far Germany’s largest Holocaust-related museum, with a pre-COVID peak visitor number of just under a million tourists. The Museum’s most-prized asset, which is also the only one remotely connected to the Holocaust, is its alleged homicidal gas chamber, which is the main reason why most people…
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