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Ziama Trubakov was a Ukrainian Jew interned in the Syretsky Camp, 5 km from Kiev. On 18 August 1943, he was taken from there to Babi Yar, a place where tens of thousands of Jews are said to have been shot and buried by the Germans in mass graves in late September 1941 (see the…
Eugeniusz Turowski was a Polish Jew who was deported to the Treblinka Camp on 5 September 1942. He was interviewed by Polish judge Łukaszkiewicz on 7 October 1945. At the camp, he was assigned to the machine shops, where he helped build, repair and maintain that camp’s various machines and mechanical devices until the uprising…
Otto Uthgenannt (born 1935) was a German claiming to have been incarcerated at the Buchenwald Camp. For years he travelled throughout Germany, telling school students his stories of suffering – until a German newspaper exposed him as a notorious, previously convicted forger and fraudster. Germany’s Jewish newspaper pointed out the core problem: “[German-Jewish] Historian Julius…
Marie-Claude Vaillant-Couturier (née Vogel; 3 Nov. 1912 – 11 Dec. 1996) was a communist member of the French resistance against the German occupation during World War II. She was arrested on 9 February 1942 by the French police, and on 24 January 1943 deported to Auschwitz–Birkenau. She arrived there three days later and was initially…
Siegfried van den Bergh was an Auschwitz inmate who, right after the war, wrote his war memoirs. Regarding mass murder at Auschwitz, he made the following peculiar claims: Poison gas was emitted into the gas chamber through showerheads. However, the product allegedly used at Auschwitz, Zyklon B, contains liquid hydrogen cyanide absorbed on gypsum pellets….
Morris (Maurice) Venezia (25 Feb. 1921 – 2 Sept. 2013) was an Italian Jew deported from Greece to Auschwitz, where he arrived on 11 April 1944 together with his brother Shlomo Venezia, among others. In contrast to his brother, he never elaborated in public in great detail what he claimed to have experienced while at…
Shlomo Venezia (29 Dec. 1923 – 1 Oct. 2012) was an Italian Jew deported from Greece to Auschwitz, where he arrived on 11 April 1944 together with his brother Morris Venezia and five other notorious false witnesses: Josef Sackar, Yaakov Gabai, Shaul Chasan, Leon Cohen and Daniel Bennahmias. After three weeks of quarantine, Venezia was…
Rudolf Vrba (born as Walter Rosenberg, 11 Sept. 1924 – 27 March 2006) was a Slovakian Jew deported to the Majdanek Camp on 14 June 1942, and 16 days later, on 30 June, transferred to the Auschwitz Camp. Initially, he was employed at the inmate property warehouse of the Main Camp, sorting and registering the…
Monique de Wael (born 12 May 1937) is a Belgian Catholic who lost her parents during the Second World War. They had been arrested and deported by the German occupational forces for resistance activities, and never returned home. In 1988, de Wael immigrated to the U.S., where she wrote a book under the pen name…
Bernhard Walter was an SS man deployed at the Auschwitz Camp. During the deportation of Jews from Hungary to the Auschwitz-Birkenau Camp in the spring of 1944, he was tasked by the camp’s administration to document the arrival and processing of these deportees. Hence, on 26 May 1944, Walter and his colleague Ernst Hofmann took…
Szyja Warszawski was a Polish Jew deported to Treblinka on 23 July 1942 from Kielce. He was interviewed by a Polish investigator on 9 October 1945. Here are some of his pertinent claims: Deportees were killed in the trains in transit with chlorine (probably meaning chlorinated lime) sprinkled in the railway cars. This was also…
During World War Two, Donald Watt (10 Aug. 1918 – 29 May 2000) was an Australian soldier. In 1995, Watt published his memoirs, titled Stoker. He claimed in it that he had been incarcerated at the Auschwitz Camp, where he was allegedly assigned to the Sonderkommando serving as a cremation furnace stoker. Due to its…
Janda Weiss was a 14-year-old teenager deported from the Theresienstadt Ghetto to Auschwitz in May 1944. After the war, he made a deposition which was printed in a U.S. compendium on the Buchenwald Camp. Here are some of Weiss’s peculiar statements: On arrival, he saw “horrible tongues of flame coming out of” the crematorium chimney….
Leon Weliczker (aka Leon Wells, 10 March 1925 – 19 Dec. 2009) was a Jew from Lviv who, after the German invasion of the Soviet Union, lived initially at the Lvov Ghetto, but at age 18 was transferred to the Janowska Forced-Labor Camp. After the war, he studied first in Gleiwitz (Polish: Gliwice), then in…
Harry Wentritt was a mechanic at the motor pool administration of Germany’s Security Police, which was Subdepartment II D 3a of Germany’s Department of Homeland Security (Reichssicherheitshauptamt). In 1966, together with his superior Friedrich Pradel, he stood trial for allegedly having made mechanical changes to a set of trucks in 1941/42, turning them into homicidal…
During the war, Kurt Werner was a member of Sonderkommando 4a, which was part of Einsatzgruppe C. On 28 May 1964, he made a deposition during West-German investigations on the alleged mass shooting of Kiev Jews at Babi Yar. He claimed to have been one of 12 men who were doing the shootings. He said…
Alfred Wetzler (10 May 1918 – 8 Feb. 1988) was a Slovakian Jew who was deported to Auschwitz on 13 April 1942, where he became a clerk in one of the Birkenau camp sections. He managed to escape from Birkenau together with Rudolf Vrba on 7 April 1944. Once they both reached Slovakia, they co-authored…
Albert Widmann (8 June 1912 – 24 Dec. 1986), SS Sturmbannführer, was a German PhD chemist who in 1940 became the head of the section of analytical chemistry at the German Institute for Criminological Technology in Berlin (Kriminaltechnisches Institut, KTI). Right at the beginning of the Third Reich’s euthanasia action, Widmann is said to have…
Jankiel Wiernik (1889 – 1972) was a Polish Jew who was deported from the Warsaw Ghetto to the Treblinka Camp on 23 August 1942. He escaped from there during the inmate uprising on 2 August 1943. On 6 June 1944, a text written by Wiernik titled A Year in Treblinka was sent by a Pole…
Elie (Eliezer) Wiesel (30 Sept. 1928 – 2 July 2016) was a Romanian-born Jew who claimed to have been deported in May 1944 to Auschwitz at age 15 with his entire family, including his 50-year-old father, from what was then Hungary. When the Auschwitz Camp was evacuated, Wiesel claimed that he and his father Shlomo…
Simon Wiesenthal (31 Dec. 1908 – 20 Sept. 2005) was a Galician Jew (today’s western Ukraine) whose wartime history is unclear, because he has made conflicting statements about it. At one point, he claimed to have been slated for a mass execution with thousands of other Jews, but at the very moment, when it was…
Saartje Wijnberg was the wife of Chaim Engel, and also an inmate of the Sobibór Camp. In three depositions of 22 June and 19 July 1946 as well as 29 August 1949, she claimed that the gas was fed into the gas chamber(s) through showerheads, and that, after the murder, the floors opened, and the…
Samuel Willenberg (16 Feb. 1923 – 19 Feb. 2016) was a Polish Jew who was deported from the Opatów Ghetto to Treblinka on 20 October 1942. According to his memoirs, he was employed there first at sorting inmate property, then for other activities, such as weaving branches into fences to hide the camp’s events from…
Eduard Wirths (4 Sept. 1909 – 20 Sept. 1945), SS Obersturmbannführer, served as a German army physician in Norway and in the Soviet Union. After suffering a heart attack in early 1942, he was posted to the Dachau Camp for special training, then served briefly as garrison physician at the Neuengamme Camp starting in July…
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