Lichtmann, Icek

Icek (or Itzhak) Lichtmann was an inmate of the Sobibór Camp. In a deposition of 18 December 1945, he located the (meaning one) gas chamber at a distance of 200 m away from the camp. After the murder, the floors opened, and the bodies were discharged into carts below, which brought them to mass graves….

Liebehenschel, Arthur

Arthur Liebehenschel (25 Nov. 1901 – 24 Jan. 1948), SS Obersturmbannführer, served initially at the Lichtenburg Camp, but since 1937 at the Inspectorate of Concentration Camps, at the SS headquarters in Oranienburg. He became commandant of the Auschwitz Main Camp on 11 November 1943. Hermann Langbein described him as a relatively humane commandant who abolished…

Limousin, Henri

Henri Limousin was a professor of medicine from Clermont-Ferrand (France), who was incarcerated at the Auschwitz Camp until it was conquered by the Soviets on 27 January 1945. Together with three other European professors, and coached by their Soviet captors, he signed an appeal on 4 March 1945 “To the International Public,” which contained many…

Litwinska, Sofia

Sofia Litwinska was a Polish Jewess incarcerated at Ausch­witz from mid-1942 until November 1944. She was later transferred to Bergen-Belsen. She signed an affidavit on 24 May 1945 and took the stand on 24 September 1945 during the British Bergen-Belsen Trial. Her noteworthy claims are: Together with some 300 other inmates, she was taken by “‘Tipper-type’…

Lodz Ghetto

The ghetto in the west-Polish city of Lodz was the second largest Jewish ghetto in Poland during World War Two, after the Warsaw Ghetto. It was established in February 1940. By the end of that year, it already had 160,000 inhabitants. Due to the enormous quantities of commodities of all kinds produced there, especially textiles,…

London Cage

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…

Lumberjacks

Several German wartime camps claimed to have been the site of mass murder, such as Auschwitz, Majdanek and Stutthof, had coke-fueled cremation furnaces which steadily burned the remains of inmates who had died for whatever reason. However, several other camps which supposedly were pure extermination camps, such as Belzec, Sobibór and Treblinka, had no cremation…

Luxembourg

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…

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Lviv

An extermination camp equipped with homicidal gas chambers was allegedly located in the western Ukrainian city of Lviv (Lemberg in German). On 18 May 1943, the British received a “Memorandum” from Stockholm containing the statements of two Belgian prisoners of war who had escaped from Germany on 28 April and arrived in Sweden on 5…

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Madagascar

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…

Majdanek

Documented History The decision to set up a concentration camp for 25,000 to 50,000 inmates in the southeastern suburbs of the southeast-Polish city of Lublin was made on 20 July 1941. It was meant to supply a slave-labor force for Himmler’s ambitious Generalplan Ost aiming at the colonization, development and Germanization of territories in Eastern…

Majdanek Museum

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…

Majdanek Trials

Several trials were orchestrated by both Poland and Germany with a focus on crimes alleged to have been committed at the Majdanek Camp during the war. Soviet-Polish Show Trials The first show trial in Poland was conducted by a mixed staff of Soviet and Polish officials. It was staged at Lublin from 27 November to…

Maly Trostenets

Maly Trostenets (also spelled Trostinets) was a village in the suburbs of Belorussia’s capital Minsk. Near it is located the so-called Blagovshchina Forest of roughly 2.5 square kilometers in size (one square mile). According to Russian sources of the 2000s, this forest was the execution site of choice for the local branches of the Soviet…

Mandelbaum, Henryk

Henryk Mandelbaum (15 Dec. 1922 – 17 June 2008) was a Polish Jew who was deported to Auschwitz in late April 1944. He claimed to have been assigned to the Sonderkommando in June, and supposedly worked there until January 1945. Mandelbaum was interrogated by Soviet investigators in late February 1945, then again in preparation for…

Mansfeld, Géza

Géza Mansfeld was a professor of medicine from Budapest, who was incarcerated at the Auschwitz Camp until it was conquered by the Soviets on 27 February 1945. Together with three other European professors, and coached by their Soviet captors, he signed an appeal on 4 March 1945 “To the International Public,” which contained many untrue…

Manusevich, David

David Manusevich was a Jew who, from November 1942 to May 1943, was interned in a camp at Brody some 100 km northeast of Lviv. From there, he was sent to Bełżec Camp. He somehow managed to escape, but got arrested again. He ultimately ended up in the Janowska Camp, allegedly to be executed. Instead,…

Marco, Enric

Enric Marco (12 April 1921 – 21 May 2022) once was the president of the Spanish association of former inmates of the Mauthausen Camp, Amical de Mauthausen. Marco had claimed since the late 1970s to have been incarcerated in the German camps of Mauthausen and Flossenbürg during the war. During the 60th anniversary of the…

Marcus, Kurt

A certain Kurt Marcus authored a German essay whose title translates as “Auschwitz–Birkenau. The largest Extermination Camp of the World.” It was introduced into evidence during the Warsaw show trial against Rudolf Höss. No inmate by that exact name is known, although there were two inmates whose last name was spelled with a “k,” but…

Marijampole

Marijampole is a Lithuanian city some 120 km west of Lithuania’s capital 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…

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