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The Origins With victory over National-Socialist Germany in May of 1945, the Allied forces consolidated their gains, moved to take control of German territory, and accelerated plans to hold leading Germans legally accountable for the war. Initially, Stalin suggested rounding up the top 50,000 or even 100,000 top German war leaders and executing them without…
Already in 1944, the British government organized a Central Tracing Bureau for the registration and tracing of missing people resulting from Axis persecution. In 1955, after several reorganizations and relocations, the center ultimately was named International Tracing Service (ITS) and established with its permanent archives in the West-German town of Arolsen. It was put under…
Iron Blue is the standard name for a broad variety of pigments formed of iron and cyanide that can exhibit a variety of hues, ranging from dark blue to greenish turquoise. It is formed of a mixture of bi- and trivalent iron cations in the presence of cyanide anions. Other names frequently used are Prussian…
In the 24 July 1998 issue of the U.S. newspaper Forward, a case of a possible Holocaust forgery was reported. The “hero” in this bizarre tale was Salomón Isacovici, a Romanian Jew who settled in Ecuador at the end of the Second World War. The account of his alleged wartime fate in Europe under German…
Bruno Israel was an ethnic German police officer with a Polish background. He was assigned to the Chełmno police in July/August 1944. Due to his cooperation with the German authorities during the war, he was arrested by the Poles after the war. On 29 and 30 October 1945, he was interrogated by Polish investigative judge…
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 accessible Jews residing in Italy 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,…
The so-called Jäger Report was presumably authored in early December 1941 by Karl Jäger, then commander of Einsatzkommando 3a of Einsatzgruppe A. This unit operated mainly in Lithuania. This document was allegedly discovered by the Soviets in Lithuania after the reconquest of Lithuania by the Red Army in 1944. For inscrutable reasons, they hushed up…
Karl Jäger (20 Sept. 1888 – 22 June 1959) was an SS Standartenführer since 1940. He joined the SS in 1932, and the German Security Service (Sicherheitsdienst) in 1938. Prior to the invasion of the Soviet Union, he became commander of Einsatzkommando 3a of Einsatzgruppe A. His unit operated mainly in Lithuania. Jäger is said…
Stanisław Jankowski (23 Oct. 1911 – 20 Sept. 1987) – also known as Alter Fajnzylberg, Alter Feinsilber and Stanisław Kaskowiak – was a Polish Jew incarcerated at the Auschwitz Camp from March 1942 to January 1945. In April 1945, he testified in front of an investigator of a Polish commission, and he also testified during…
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, some 60 miles southeast of Zagreb, near the border with present-day Bosnia. 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,…
Jehovah’s Witnesses are conscientious objectors by principle. Hence, in any country that goes to war and becomes intolerant toward individuals refusing to serve in their armed forces, Jehovah’s Witnesses will get in trouble. In Canada, for example, male Jehovah’s Witnesses refusing to serve in the military were incarcerated in camps during World War II, sometimes…
Just Document → see Gaubschat Company /
Oswald Kaduk (26 Aug. 1906 – 31 May 1997), SS Unterscharführer at war’s end, was a German soldier who, after having been wounded several times, was transferred to the Auschwitz Camp in July 1941, where he served as a Rapportführer until the camp’s evacuation in January 1945. Kaduk was arrested by the Soviets in 1946,…
Anton Kaindl (14 July 1902 – 31 Aug. 1948), SS Standartenführer, was the last commandant of the Sachsenhausen Camp from 1 September 1942 until 22 April 1945. Together with 15 other defendants, he was put on a typical Stalinist show trial staged in Berlin by the Soviet occupational authorities from 23 October to 1 November…
Magdolna Kaiser (née Beretka, born 20 July 1950) is a Serbian-German imposter with a long history of falsely pretending to be the descendant of some Jewish-Hungarian nobility. In 2014, she expanded her life built on pretense by claiming that she had found documents left in a Swiss bank safe by her late grandfather. That grandfather…
Ernst Kaltenbrunner (4 Oct. 1903 – 16 Oct. 1946) was Higher SS and Police Leader in Austria from 1938 until early 1943. On 30 January 1943, after Reinhardt Heydrich had been assassinated the previous summer, Kaltenbrunner replaced him as chief of Germany’s Department for Homeland Security (Reichssicherheitshauptamt, RSHA). However, all matters concerning the SS and…
Hans Kammler (26 August 1901 – unknown), SS Obergruppenführer, was deputy chief of the SS Economic and Administrative Main Office (Wirtschafts- und Verwaltungs-Hauptamt) directly under Oswald Pohl. Kammler was in charge of Office C, overseeing all construction efforts at all the Third Reich’s camps. After the Auschwitz Camps’ newly appointed garrison physician Eduard Wirths had…
Yakov Kaper was a Ukrainian Jew interned in the Syretsky Camp, 5 km from Kiev. In 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 entry…
Avraham Karasik was a Polish Jew who testified in 1961 during the Eichmann Show Trial. He stated that, during the war, he had been incarcerated in the prison of Białystok. Together with some 40 other inmates, he was taken from there in May 1944 to various places (Białystok, Augustów, Grodno) to exhume and burn bodies…
Samij Karolinskij was a former Auschwitz inmate who claimed to have seen a homicidal gas chamber once. He was interrogated by a Soviet investigator on 22 February 1945 in Auschwitz, but there is little of essence to this deposition. Karolinskij was cutting up wood for the cremation furnaces and “the fires,” but entered a crematorium…
Jan Karski (aka Jan Kozielewski, 24 April 1914 – 13 July 2000) was an agent of the Polish government in exile, whose task was to invent and spread “black propaganda” – meaning atrocity lies – in German-occupied Poland (Laqueur 1998, p. 230). During World War Two, the Polish government in exile maintained close relations with…
David Karvat was a Czech Jew who claimed to have been a member of the Auschwitz Sonderkommando for an entire (unspecified) year. In January 1947, he deposited an account in Italy about his alleged experiences. However, his description is both short and devoid of any details. He neither describes the “gas chambers,” the crematoria, the…
Sofia Kaufmann, married name Schafranov, was a Persian Jewess of Russian origin who lived in Italy. She was arrested on 2 December 1943, and later deported to Auschwitz, where she arrived on 6 February 1944. On 18 January 1945, she was evacuated, and ultimately ended up in Mauthausen Camp. Her testimony was published in 1945….
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