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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…
Oswiecim → Auschwitz /
outdoor cremations → Open-Air Incinerations /
Principles How many people can stand on a surface area of one square meter (some 10 square feet, or a square 3’3” on a side)? Assuming that there are children in the mix, a figure of ten people seems physically possible – barely. The skeptical reader is invited to lay down some masking tape on…
Dov Paisikovic (1 April 1924 – 1988) was a Jew from Hungary deported to Auschwitz, where he arrived on 31 May 1944. He claims to have been a member of the so-called Sonderkommando. Only the frenzy of the investigations leading to the Frankfurt Auschwitz show trial motivated Paisikovic to come forward with his testimony. His…
Paneriai → Ponary /
Vassily Pankov was a Ukrainian auxiliary presumably deployed as a guard at the Sobibór Camp. After the war, he was arrested for this. In his interrogation of 18 October 1950 by Soviet authorities, he was made to describe even the Buchenwald Camp as an extermination camp. According to Pankov, the gassing facility at Sobibór consisted…
Alexander Pechersky (22 Feb. 1909 – 19 Jan. 1990), a Soviet-soldier of the Red Army, ended up in German captivity in 1941. After an extended stay at a labor camp in Minsk, he ended up at the Sobibór Camp in September of 1943, where he organized a successful prisoner uprising just three weeks later, on…
Moshe Peer was a French Jew who, at the age of 9, was arrested and, together with his family and many other Jews from France, deported to Auschwitz. While his mother perished there, he and the rest of his family were transferred to the Bergen-Belsen Camp toward the end of the war, where they all…
Wilhelm Pfannenstiel (12 Feb. 1890 – 1 Nov. 1982), SS Standartenführer, was professor for hygiene at the University of Marburg. After the war, Kurt Gerstein claimed in his various statements that Pfannenstiel had accompanied him on a trip to visit the alleged extermination camps at Belzec and Treblinka. Although the destination of that trip was…
According to some sources, certain German wartime camps are said to have had facilities for the mass murder of inmates, such as homicidal gas chambers, but all historians without exception reject these claims as false, based either on false rumors, distorted hearsay, misunderstandings or outright black-propaganda lies. These camps, some of which have been completely…
In the past, the chemical phenol has been a medical and instrument disinfectant used in hospitals all over the world. It was also used by the inmate infirmary of the Auschwitz Camp for this purpose. The camp’s documentation contains several orders of phenol by employees of the infirmary (see Mattogno 2023, Part 1, pp. 140,…
Bruno Piazza was an Italian Jew deported to Auschwitz at the end of July 1944. In a 1956 brochure, he claimed that he experienced a homicidal gassing at Auschwitz carried out inside a barracks that had 20 showers on the ceiling. Then some clerk wearing a mask entered the building, sprinkled potassium-cyanide powder onto the…
Witold Pilecki (13 May 1901 – 25 May 1948) was a lieutenant in the Polish Clandestine Army in German-occupied Poland. As such, he was arrested on 19 September 1940 and interned at Auschwitz under the name Tadeusz Serafiński. Pilecki organized a Polish resistance group in that camp. He claimed to have escaped from Auschwitz on…
SS Hauptscharführer Walter Piller was the deputy commandant of the Chełmno Camp in 1944. Toward the end of the war, he was captured by the Soviets. After some time of appropriate treatment in their captivity, Piller signed a deposition. He stated in it that the extermination of Jews deported from the Lodz Ghetto started in…
Aaron Pilo was a Greek Jew who was interned at Auschwitz from January 1943 to January 1945, where he claimed to have worked inside the crematoria. In June 1945, he signed a statement, in which he claimed the following, among other things: Each of the crematoria could cremate 3,000 bodies a day. However, each muffle…
Stefan Pilunov, a Soviet citizen from the village of Prisna near the Belorussia city Mogilev, was arrested in July 1943 for partisan activity, and held in a prison until 4 October of that year. On that day, he claims to have been deployed by his German captors in the exhumation of various regional mass graves…
On 20 September 1942, the Yiddish-language periodical Oif der Vach (On Guard) published an article titled “The Jews of Warsaw Are Killed in Treblinka.” The author claimed that Jews were being killed by gas or electrocution in three camps: Belzec, Treblinka and, for the Jews from western Belorussia, another one in the vicinity of the…
Stephen Pinter was an Austrian who immigrated to America in 1906 at the age of 17. He obtained U.S. citizenship in 1924, and after the end of the Second World War, he applied with the U.S. War Department to become an investigative judge and prosecutor during the Allied war-crime trials in Germany. He got the…
pit burnings → Open-Air Incinerations /
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