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The Jews living in Denmark were left unmolested by the German occupation forces until October 1943. Plans to deport them were leaked around that time, resulting in a large-scale rescue operation by Danish civilians, helping almost all Jews to escape to Sweden, where they were welcome. Some 500 Jews were arrested and deported to the…
Starting on 6 September 1943, Jews from the Theresienstadt Ghetto in what is today Czechia were deported in large numbers to the Auschwitz-Birkenau Camp and lodged there in the so-called Family Camp. More such transports arrived in December 1943 and May, September and October 1944. On 10 and 11 July 1944, some 7,000 Jews quartered…
Stephen Pinter, the U.S. chief investigator preparing the prosecution against former staff members of the Flossenbürg Camp after the war, came to the conclusion that no homicidal gas chamber ever existed at that camp. Today, all historians agree with that conclusion. That didn’t stop former inmates from making gas-chamber claims, though, as it was fashionable…
The city of Kaunas, Lithuania, has nine 19th-century fortresses surrounding the entire city. Some of them were used as NKVD prisons after the Soviet Union’s invasion of the Baltic states in 1940. During the German occupation of the area, these prisons served to detain and presumably kill Jews from the Kaunas Ghetto and deported from…
France’s role in the Holocaust was twofold. First, during the German occupation of northern France, the French government in southern France collaborated with the German authorities and agreed to have those Jews living in France deported to Auschwitz who either had no French citizenship or who had obtained it only recently. The deportation lists have…
Germany had four roles within the context of the Holocaust: Perpetrator Crime Scene Victim Propagandist The last role is discussed in detail in the section on Germany of the entry on propaganda, so it will not be covered here. Perpetrator If we consider Austria as not being a part of Germany, then the main perpetrator…
At least since the time of Raul Hilberg’s initial work in the early 1960s, orthodoxy has partitioned the claimed 6 million Jewish fatalities into three major categories: camps, shootings and ghettos. Under the headings “German controlled ghettos” and “Theresienstadt,” Hilberg allots “over 700,000” Jewish deaths – on his way to a total figure of 5.1…
In early March 1943, the Bulgarian authorities arrested and handed over to the Germans some 4,000 Greek Jews from the Bulgarian zone of occupation. These Jews are said to have been deported to the Treblinka Camp. In the spring and summer of 1943, some 40,000 Jews from Greece were deported by German forces to Auschwitz….
When the Mauthausen Camp became overcrowded in 1939, subcamps were established to house inmates near to their worksites. Eventually, three such camps near the creek Gusen were established, named Gusen I through III. Of particular interest for Holocaust historiography is the cremation furnace established at the Gusen I Camp, which was almost identical to the…
Hartheim Castle near Linz, Austria, was one of National-Socialist Germany’s euthanasia centers. It entered the Holocaust stage with two affidavits containing claims attributed to Franz Ziereis, the former commandant of the Mauthausen Camp. Both affidavits are written by former Mauthausen inmates, one of them by Hans Maršálek. Both contain the claim that Ziereis allegedly confessed…
Between 1938 and early 1941, Hungary took control of considerable swaths of territory of its various weak or disintegrating neighboring countries, but lost them all again after the war. With these new territories also came many additional Jews. While Hungary proper had some 400,000 Jews, that number swelled to 725,000 with the new territories, plus…
After the Italian surrender to the Allies in September 1943 and Germany’s partial occupation of northern and central Italy, German forces tried arresting and deporting all Jews to labor camps. However, due to advanced warnings and lack of cooperation by the local Italian authorities, not quite 7,000 Jews could be apprehended, plus 1,800 in the…
In mid-October 1941, a camp was set up at Janowska Road in Lviv to house transports of Austrian and Czech Jews deported for resettlement to the east. It was to serve as a transit as well as forced-labor camp, and started operating in November of that year. Its relevance for the Holocaust starts in the…
The Jasenovac Camp in wartime Croatia was established in August 1941 near a village of the same name. It was operated by the Croatian wartime regime. It consisted of five separate camps, two of which were short-lived, but the other three – Ciglana, Kozara and Stara Gradiska – operated until April 1945. The purpose of…
Kerch is a port city in the east of the Crimea Peninsula. Soviet media reported that German formations had committed a massacre outside of this city, near the village of Bagerovo. Photos of dozens of dead civilians littering the landscape were published alongside small pits with a few dead bodies, yet still it was claimed…
The Klooga Labor Camp was a satellite camp of the Vaivara Camp in northern Estonia. It was set up in the summer of 1943, and at its peak housed up to 3,000 Jewish men and women, mainly from the Vilnius and Kaunas Ghettos. Toward the end of the German rule in this area, most inmates…
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…
Documents indicate that 512 Jews were deported from Luxembourg, 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 Luxembourg was probably very…
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…
If a museum were to put on display how its own storyline has changed over the decades, the Majdanek Museum would be the most interesting Holocaust-related museum in the world. One massive reduction of the camp’s total death-toll figure chased the previous one, and gas-chamber claim after gas-chamber claim ended up in the dustbins of…
Marijampole is a Lithuanian city some 120 km west of Vilnius. According to a German document from 1 September 1941, 5,090 persons were killed there by German Einsatzgruppen units. In the summer of 1996, Marijampole’s city administration decided to erect a Holocaust Memorial on top of the presumed mass graves, whose locations were not exactly…
The orthodox Holocaust narrative contains a plethora of claims about mass graves of Jewish victims which are said to have been emptied out later, when the order was allegedly issued to erase the traces of these mass crimes, by exhuming the corpses and burning them using large open-air incinerations. (See the entry for Aktion 1005.)…
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…
Between the summer of 1942 and September 1944, some 105,000 Jews were deported from the Netherlands, mainly to Auschwitz and Sobibór, but some also to Theresienstadt, with the ultimate destination again being Auschwitz. The first set of transports between July 1942 and February 1943 went to Auschwitz. Their fate there was probably similar to that…
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