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Arthur Nebe (13 Nov. 1894 – 21 March 1945), SS Gruppenführer, became head of Germany’s Criminal Police in 1936. In 1939, one of Nebe’s subordinates, Christian Wirth, got involved in supervising the so-called euthanasia action, which is said to have consisted of killing severely mentally disabled patients with bottled carbon-monoxide gas. Hence, Nebe was probably…
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…
The Neuengamme Concentration Camp was established in 1938 near a village of the same name some 13 miles southeast of Hamburg. Its relevance for Holocaust historiography lies in claims about a few select homicidal gassings in that camp. There is no wartime source for this. No documents confirm any witness claim in this regard, and…
As soon as Germany had defeated Poland in late September 1939, Reinhardt Heydrich, head of Germany’s Department of Homeland Security (Reichssicherheitshauptamt, RSHA), issued directives on how to handle the “Jewish question” in the occupied territories. One of these directives was the so-called Nisko Plan, which foresaw the creation of a Jewish reservation in southeastern Poland…
The Dora-Mittelbau Camp, located a few miles northwest of the city of Nordhausen, was the nucleus of a network of forced-labor camps in and around the Harz Mountains in Thuringia, Central Germany. It served primarily to provide a slave-labor force to factories of Germany’s defense industries. Among them featured most prominently the underground production facilities…
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.)
Dawid Nowodowski was one of the first witnesses to testify about the Treblinka Camp. He was deported there on 18 August 1942, but managed to escape after just a few days. On 28 August 1942, hence before any propaganda or alleged witness accounts about this camp started spreading, he wrote a “Report of the stay…
During the International Military Tribunal (IMT) in Nuremberg, the Allied victors tried what they perceived as the 24 major German war criminals. However, already during the preparation of this tribunal, the victorious powers agreed that many more suspected war criminals needed to be prosecuted. But since it had proven very difficult to get all four…
Miklos Nyiszli (17 June 1901 – 5 May 1956) was deported from what was Hungary to Auschwitz in the context of the wholesale deportation of Jews from what was Hungary back then. He arrived at Auschwitz on 29 May 1944. He spent two weeks at the Monowitz Camp, but due to the fact that he…
Josef Oberhauser (21 Jan. 1915 – 22 Nov. 1979) was an SS Untersturmführer at war’s end. From 1939 until August 1941, he was responsible at various locations for cremating the bodies of persons who had been killed during the so-called Euthanasia Program. From November 1941 until August 1942, Oberhauser served as the head of the…
The Pole Narcyz Tadeusz Obrycki was deported to Auschwitz on 13 May 1943. In December 1946, he signed an affidavit about his time there. In it, he described the structure of Crematoria II and III rather accurately. But there are some peculiarities of his testimony, for which he relied exclusively on camp rumors: The victims…
Isaac Egon Ochshorn was an Jewish inmate in a long row of German camps: Buchenwald, Dachau, Gross-Rosen, Auschwitz-Birkenau, Warsaw. He signed a deposition about his alleged experiences, which was filed by the United Nations War Crimes Commission in September 1945. He documented in it the most-preposterous nonsense, such as: In Buchenwald, 20,000 Polish Jews were…
After the Second World War, as the Cold War was gearing up, both the U.S. and the Soviet Union competed to secure the spoils of war in occupied Germany. For instance, with “Operation Paperclip,” the U.S. transferred many German rocket scientists to the U.S., first as privileged prisoners, but later as voluntary immigrants willing to…
Otto Ohlendorf (4 Feb. 1907 – 7 June 1951), SS Gruppenführer, was head of Office III (SD-Inland, Internal Security Service) of the Reich Security Main Office (Reichssicherheitshauptamt). Just prior to the war against the Soviet Union, he was appointed head of Einsatzgruppe D, a position he held for a year. This group operated in the…
At a military training ground near the German town of Ohrdruf, some 16 miles southwest of Thuringia’s capital Erfurt, 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…
David Olère was deported to Auschwitz in March 1943 and was employed there by the SS to paint portraits for them. He claimed that he lived in the attic of Crematorium III. Although he prepared some rather accurate architectural drawings of this building, they also include invisible features, such as the smoke ducts. He could…
Fundamentals Funeral fires on ceremonial pyres were common in Europe until the Christian Church banned this practice. In other parts of the world, where the Christian Church had little or no influence, the ritual burning of a deceased person remained quite common, most prominently in India. But even in Europe, burning dead bodies was practiced…
The orthodoxy insists that on 3 and 4 November 1943, all remaining Jews in the Trawniki and Poniatowa forced-labor camps, as well as in the Majdanek Concentration Camp, were murdered. Some 42,000 to 43,000 persons are said to have been shot and buried in mass graves on these two days, 17,000 to 18,000 of them…
Operation Reinhardt → Aktion Reinhardt /
Oranienburg is a German city some 17 miles 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…
order, to exterminate Jews → Hitler Order /
OSI → Office of Special Investigations /
Leonid Ostrovsky was a Ukrainian Jew interned in the Syretsky Camp, 5 km from Kiev. On 16 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…
The Ostrowski Company operated a factory at the Polish city of Koło, some 7 km northwest of the Chełmno Camp. After the war, a damaged moving truck of the German truck manufacturer Magirus, once operated by the moving company “Otto Koehn Spedition,” was discovered on the Ostrowski factory grounds which several witnesses claimed to have…
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