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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…
In 2005, the British government released several hitherto secret files from the immediate time after World War Two. In this context, several documents came to light revealing that a division of His Majesty’s War Office operated secret interrogation centers all over the world. One of them was located in London itself and was nicknamed the…
Madagascar is a large island (almost 600,000 sq km) located off the coast of southeast Africa. Currently it is an independent nation of some 28 million people, but from 1897 through World War Two, it was a colony of France. For at least two centuries prior to the war, German critics of the Jews had…
Morgues, also called mortuaries, serve to temporarily store human corpses awaiting identification, autopsies and burial or cremation. To slow decay, they are usually chilled to temperatures close to the freezing point, and they are equipped with efficient ventilation systems to remove gases resulting from decomposition. In the context of the Holocaust, it is worthwhile knowing…
Oranienburg is a German city some 17 miles north-northwest of Berlin. It was the location of a small prison facility functioning as a concentration camp between March 1933 and summer 1934, when it was dissolved. A new camp on the town’s outskirts, called Sachsenhausen, was established in 1936. Since 1938, Oranienburg was also the seat…
Within the context of the Holocaust, the Chinese city of Shanghai played a role prior to and during the war as a temporary safe haven and transit stopover for some 20,000 Jews fleeing Europe and the Soviet Union. The reason for this is that Shanghai did not require any visas for Jews to enter and…
Shortly after the launch of a project to set up a large PoW camp west of Auschwitz near the village of Brzezinka (Birkenau), plans included a large facility containing inmate showers and disinfestation devices for inmate clothes. A map showing an early stage of the camp from late March 1942 shows an outline of this…
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