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Some 800 Jews were deported from Norway, with the Auschwitz Camp as their main destination. Few of these Jews reported back with the local authorities after the war. Most of them have gone missing, and their fate is unclear. (See the entry on Jewish demography for a broader perspective.)
At the military training ground near the German town of Ohrdruf, a forced-labor camp was established in November 1944. Due to Germany’s rapid collapse at that time, the camp never had a chance of developing any proper infrastructure. Therefore, living conditions were atrocious, death rates catastrophic. As U.S. troops approached, the camp was evacuated to…
Oranienburg is a town 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 of the SS’s Concentration…
Poland had three roles within the context of the Holocaust: Crime Scene Victim Propagandist The last role is discussed in detail in the section on Poland of the entry on propaganda, so it will not be covered here. Crime Scene All the so-called extermination camps were located on what was legitimately Polish territory. They had…
Ponary is the Polish name for the Lithuanian town Paneriai, which today is a mere district of Lithuanian’s capital Vilnius. Between 1921 and 1939, the town was part of Poland, hence the name. During the two-year occupation by the Soviets from 1939 to 1941, a construction project was initiated in a forest outside of town…
Rajsko is a village some 5 miles southwest of the city of Auschwitz. Most of its population was deported/resettled in 1941/42. The Hygiene Institute of the Waffen SS established its “Sanitary and Bacteriological Testing Station Southeast” there in 1943 (“Hygienisch-bakteriologische Untersuchungsstelle Südost der Waffen-SS”). It served primarily to conduct experiments on a number of vaccines…
In May of 1939, a concentration camp for women was established near the town of Ravensbrück, some 90 km north of Berlin. It entered the stage of Holocaust historiography only after the war, when former inmates claimed during several show trials staged by the British that homicidal gas chambers had been built in that camp…
Romania never deported any Jews to German camps, but when reconquering Moldova and Transnistria from the Soviet Union in 1941 with German help, pogroms against the local Jews broke out. The Jews were suspected by the Romanians and locals that they had collaborated with the Stalinist occupants. The Romanian authorities exacerbated the situation by deporting…
Sachsenhausen is the name of a district of the city of Oranienburg, some 12 miles north of Berlin. The SS had their headquarters in Oranienburg. In July 1936, a concentration camp was erected right next to the headquarters and named after that city district. Orthodox sources state that some 600 inmates died in the camp…
According to the orthodox narrative, some 7,000 Serbian Jews are said to have been killed by German occupational forces in early 1942 in the Semlin Camp in Serbia, which is called Sajmište Camp by the Serbs. These murders are said to have been committed using a gas van that was specifically transported to that camp…
Within the context of the Holocaust, wartime Shanghai played a role as a temporary safe haven and transit stopover for some 20,000 Jews fleeing Europe and the Soviet Union in the 1930s. The reason for this is that Shanghai did not require any visas for Jews to enter and stay in the city.
The German and Slovak government agreed in early 1942 that Germany would take all of Slovakia’s Jews in return for a certain payment. During the first phase in March and April, only Jews fit for labor were deported to the labor camps of Majdanek and Auschwitz. Starting in late April 1942, everyone was deported, including…
Documented History Wartime documents concerning Sobibór are very rare, but the few that do exist do not corroborate the orthodox narrative. Chronologically the first of these few documents is a telegram sent by Hans Höfle to the SS headquarters in Berlin on 11 January 1943, which was intercepted and deciphered by the British (see the…
Introduction The Soviet Union played four roles within the context of the Holocaust: Crime Scene Victim Perpetrator Propagandist The last role is discussed in detail in the section on the Soviet Union of the entry on propaganda, so it will not be covered here. Anti-Bolshevism was one of the four main motives of National-Socialist enmity…
Just one day after the outbreak of open hostilities between Germany and Poland, the German authorities established a detention camp near the town of Stutthof in the region of the “Free City of Danzig” meant to contain anti-German Polish political activists. This region had been separated from Germany after the First World War and was…
In November 1941, the entire northern Czech town of Theresienstadt (Terezin in Czech) was turned into a ghetto for Czech and elderly German Jews, as well as privileged German Jews, among them Jewish luminaries and many decorated veterans of the First World War and their families. Later, deportees from other countries arrived there as well….
In the context of the Third Reich, the term “transit camp” refers to camps that were not designed or equipped to accommodate inmates for an extended period of time. They served merely to send them on to other locations after a brief stop-over. This stop-over may have included issuing of food and some hygienic procedures…
Ukraine had four roles within the context of the Holocaust: Perpetrator Crime Scene Victim Propaganda Podium Perpetrator The Ukrainian people suffered incredible hardships during the Bolshevist revolution and even more so under the subsequent Stalinist rule, in particular during the Holodomor. Most Ukrainians were probably keenly aware of the predominance of people with a Jewish…
Jewish ghettos are not an invention of wartime Germany, nor the deplorable conditions found in some of them during wartimes. It demonstrates calloused indifference, at best, to force people to live in close quarters with insufficient food supplies and inadequate medical care and sanitary installations, as was the case in the Warsaw Ghetto and many…
The Yad Vashem World Holocaust Remembrance Center in Jerusalem is the most important site of the orthodox Holocaust ideology, second only perhaps to Auschwitz itself. The Center runs a museum, a research center, and an online Holocaust encyclopedia. But the most ambitious project of this institution is the attempt to identify all victims of the…
Yugoslavia was dismembered during the Second World War: It consisted of German-aligned Croatia, German-occupied Serbia and areas temporarily occupied/annexed by neighboring countries. In the present context, we focus on Serbia and Croatia. (See the entry on Jewish demography for a broader perspective.) Serbia In July 1941, a major uprising occurred in Serbia, which the German…
Shortly after plans were developed to set up a large PoW camp west of Auschwitz near the village of Brzezinka (Birkenau), these 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 building…
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