Plucer, Regina

Regina Plucer was a Polish Jewess who was interned at the Auschwitz Camp from August 1943 until January 1945. On 11 May 1945, hence not even four months after leaving Auschwitz, she signed an affidavit in preparation for the Bergen-Belsen show trial. She asserted in it, among other things, that she had been deployed in…

Podchlebnik, Michał

Michał Podchlebnik was a Polish Jew who, during his interrogation by Judge Bednarz on 9 June 1945, claimed to have been deported to the Chełmno Camp in late December 1941 or early January 1942, depending on which of his statements we believe, and escaped from there after just a few days. He is one of…

Podchlebnik, Salomon

Salomon Podchlebnik was an inmate of the Sobibór Camp. In a concise deposition of 6 December 1945, he claimed that inmates at Sobibór were killed with an unspecified gas in one gas chamber, resulting in half a million victims. The orthodoxy insists, however, that there were several gas chambers, and that only half as many…

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Pohl, Oswald

Oswald Pohl (30 June 1892 – 7 June 1951), SS Obergruppenführer, headed the SS offices that, in early 1942, were consolidated as the SS’s Economic and Administrative Main Office (Wirtschafts- und Verwaltungshauptamt). This office was directly subordinate to Heinrich Himmler as the Reichsführer SS. It handled all financial and administrative matters concerning the SS and…

Poland

Poland had three roles within the context of the Holocaust: Crime Scene Victim Propagandist The last role is discussed in detail in the section on Poland of the entry on propaganda, so it will not be covered here. Crime Scene All the so-called extermination camps were located on what was legitimately Polish territory. They had…

Polevoy, Boris

Boris Nikolaevich Pole­voy (aka Kampov; 17 March 1908 – 12 July 1981) was a Soviet journalist writing primarily for Soviet Russia’s leading newspaper Pravda. His métier was similar to Ilya Ehrenburg’s: glorifying communism and the Soviet Union, and as Pravda’s official war correspondent during the war, exaggerating and inventing atrocity tales about the enemy and…

Polish Underground Reports

During the German occupation of Poland between 1939 and 1944, the Polish Government-in-Exile in London managed to organize a well-functioning shadow government inside Poland working completely underground. To one degree or another, it could count on the support of almost the entire Polish population. This underground government had informants almost everywhere. Apart from active acts…

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Ponary

Ponary is the Polish name for the Lithuanian town Paneriai, which today is a mere district of Lithuanian’s capital Vilnius. Between 1921 and 1939, the town was part of Poland, hence the name. During the two-year occupation by the Soviets from 1939 to 1941, a construction project was initiated in a forest outside of town…

Poswolski, Henryk

Henryk Poswolski was a Polish Jew deported from the Warsaw Ghetto to the Treblinka Camp in January 1943, where he was employed as a bricklayer and stoker. However, he was not working at the camp’s extermination sector, which was physically and optically cordoned off from the rest of the camp. (What he was stoking, then,…

Pradel, Friedrich

Friedrich Pradel (16 April 1901 – 24 Sept. 1978), SS Sturmbannführer, was head of Subdepartment II D 3a of Germany’s Department of Homeland Security (Reichssicherheits­hauptamt), which dealt with the Security Police’s motor pool. As such, he is said to have organized the procurement of trucks that, according to his specifications, were allegedly changed into homicidal…

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Producer Gas

The early era of industrialization was an era of coal and coke. Steam machines were driven by coke and coal fires, homes were heated with them, food was cooked with them, and an entire industry evolved around producing coke from coal and using the by-product – “coal gas” or “city gas” – to provide heating,…

Pronicheva, Dina

Dina Pronicheva was a Ukrainian Jew from Kiev who claimed, in at least 12 statements made between the 1940s and 1960, that she survived the mass shooting of Jews by Germans at the ravine of Babi Yar in Kiev on 29 September 1941. According to her various testimonies, the Jews were driven to Babi Yar,…

Propaganda

Introduction The term originates from the Latin word propagare, to propagate, and did not initially have any nefarious connotation. It simply meant the dissemination of information, with no implication that this information may be inaccurate or untrue. The shift in the term’s meaning is a result of spreading disinformation through mass media with the intention…

Puchała, Lucjan

Lucjan Puchała was a Polish railway worker at Małkinia Station near Treblinka until June 1942, and then at the construction of the track from Treblinka Station to the sand pit near the Treblinka I Labor Camp. Necessarily from pure hearsay, he reported, among other things: There were 8 brick-and-cement gas chambers for 700 victims per…

Putzker, Fritz

Fritz Putzker was a Jew from Vienna who passed through several camps, among them Ausch­witz and Birkenau, where he arrived on 23 February 1943. He was deployed in this camp for nine months as a foreman in the workshops of the Lenz Corporation. Probably in 1945, he wrote a report, in which we read, among…

Quakernack, Walter

Walter Quakernack (9 July 1907 – 11 Oct. 1946), SS Ober­schar­führer, was a mid-level employee at the Politi­cal Department of the Auschwitz Camp. He was mentioned by seve­ral witnesses, all of whom lack any credibil­ity. Stanisław Jankow­ski constructed a fantastic tale involving Quakernack and another SS man being seduced by a Jewess doing a strip-tease…

Rabinowicz, Jakub

Jakub Rabinowicz was a Treblinka inmate who managed to escape from the camp probably in early September 1942. Later that month, his testimony was recorded by the Jewish underground movement of the Warsaw Ghetto. The extant fragment of it does not contain any reference to extermination facilities or killing methods, but it does mention a…

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