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Maryla Rosenthal was a German Jewess who was deported to Auschwitz, where she was deployed as a secretary in the typing pool of the Political Department, hence the camp’s Gestapo. She was one of the first witnesses interviewed in the course of the investigations against Wilhelm Boger, which ultimately expanded and became the infamous Frankfurt…
Arnošt Rosin (born in 2013) was deported to Auschwitz from Slovakia on 17 April 1942. He escaped from the camp on 27 May 1944 together with Czesław Mordowicz. They both wrote a report together, which was added to the so-called War Refugee Board Report, whose main component is a lengthy report authored by Alfred Wetzler…
Rumbula is a small railway station southeast of the capital of Latvia, Riga. A forest nearby is said to have been the location of the mass execution of mainly Latvian Jews from the Riga Ghetto by Einsatzgruppen and associated units (see that entry). Depending on the sources, somewhere between 4,000 to 38,000 Jews were executed…
Sachsenhausen is the name of a district of the city of Oranienburg, some 19 miles north of Berlin. The SS had their headquarters in Oranienburg. In July 1936, a concentration camp was erected right next to the headquarters and named after that city district. Orthodox sources state that some 600 inmates died in the camp…
Josef Sackar was deported from Greece to Auschwitz, where he arrived on 11 April 1944. He testified about his alleged experiences only in the 1980s when interviewed by Israeli historian Gideon Greif. His interview is therefore inevitably contaminated with elements picked up during some 40 years of exposure to a one-sided narrative. In this interview,…
Rajzla Sadowska was a Polish Jew deported to Auschwitz. During the investigations leading up to the Frankfurt Auschwitz show trial, she testified that at one point while at Auschwitz, she suffered such a serious work-related accident that she could not work anymore. She feared “selection” and then gassing, but instead she was taken to the…
Sajmište → Semlin /
Saunas (steam baths) are a Finish invention to boost the human immune system by alternating exposure to high heat and humidity to let the sweat wash out skin impurities, with cold showers followed by dips into cold-water pools afterwards. This method spread to Germany during World War II, and from there to the entire world….
For many decades, the Swiss Saurer Company was leading in the development of truck Diesel engines. They furthermore had branches in Austria and France. By the time the Second World War broke out, the Swiss and Austrian branches equipped their trucks exclusively with Diesel engines, while the French branch phased out the last gasoline-engine trucks…
Maurice Schellekes wrote a brief report in Israel in 1981, almost 40 years after his claimed experiences at Auschwitz, hence inevitably contaminated with elements picked up during those decades. He even mentioned that events at Auschwitz have been described “in so many papers and books” that they need not be repeated. His motivation to write…
Jules Schelvis was a Dutch Jew who was deported to the Sobibór Camp on 1 June 1943. As he stated in a deposition in Amsterdam on 21 January 1946, this camp served as a transit camp for him: After he had arrived there, he was selected to join a group of 80 deportees who, after…
The 1993 movie Schindler’s List, directed by Jewish-American director Steven Spielberg, is loosely based on Thomas Keneally’s novel Schindler’s Arc. The imprint of the 1982 edition of this book states: “This book is a work of fiction. Names, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to…
Deszö Schwarz was an Austrian Jew deported to Auschwitz in late 1943. He spent two months in quarantine there. After the war, he made an undated deposition at Nuremberg that received the document number NO-2310. In it, Schwarz stated that Birkenau had four identical crematoria, each with underground “gassing bunkers,” even though that was true…
Ignacy Schwarzbart was a member of the Polish National Council. He reworded and spread reports received by the Polish government in exile in London from the Polish underground about mass executions at the Belzec Camp using electrocution chambers, which is rejected as untrue by all historians today. Schwarzbart’s reports were subsequently spread by major Jewish…
Siegfried Schwela (3 May 1905 – 10 May 1942), SS Hauptsturmführer, was a camp physician at Auschwitz from August 1941. He became the garrison physician of that camp on 21 March 1942. Under his healthcare leadership, sanitary and health conditions in the camp deteriorated to such a degree that in particular typhus became rampant not…
In the years 1945 through 1947, Jan Sehn (22 April 1909 – 12 Dec. 1965) was a Polish investigative judge and a member of the Polish Central Commission for the Investigation of German Crimes in Poland. He took over the investigations concerning events at the former Auschwitz camp complex from the Soviets in the spring…
Mary Seidenwurm Wrzos was a Polish Jewess who claims to have been incarcerated at the Majdanek Camp during the war. After the war, she emigrated to Sweden, where a book about her alleged experiences was published in 1945 in Stockholm titled De dödsdömda vittnar (The Doomed Bear Witness, edited by Gunhild and Einar Tegen). We…
“Selection” is a term used by witnesses and postwar historical accounts about the alleged process whereby German wartime-camp officials picked out inmates presumably unfit for work or otherwise deemed unworthy of living. The supposed aim was to murder these inmates either in gas chambers (large batches of inmates) or by way of individual executions, prominent among…
After several cases were reported where the bodies of deceased individuals had slowly burned to a large degree, investigations into the phenomenon have revealed that, under highly unusual circumstances, large parts of a human body can indeed burn almost to ashes without any fuel. These cases are usually initiated by small fires such as candles…
The Semlin Camp, which the Serbs call Sajmište Camp, was located in Serbia’s capital Belgrade near the banks of the Sava River close to where it flows into the Danube River. According to the orthodox narrative, some 7,000 Serbian Jews are said to have been killed by German occupational forces in early 1942 in the…
Serbia → Yugoslavia /
Within the context of the Holocaust, the Chinese city of Shanghai played a role prior to and during the war as a temporary safe haven and transit stopover for some 20,000 Jews fleeing Europe and the Soviet Union. The reason for this is that Shanghai did not require any visas for Jews to enter and…
After John Demjanjuk’s first defense lawyer, Dov Eitan, had been assassinated the day before Demjanjuk’s appeal trial before the Jerusalem Court of Appeals was to start, Demjanjuk’s second lawyer Yoram Sheftel was attacked during Eitan’s funeral: someone threw acid into his face which almost made him blind (Sheftel 1994, pp. 243-263).
Both the Auschwitz Museum and the Majdanek Museum have an exhibit on display showing what are said to be the shoes of former camp inmates. (See the illustrations.) The shoes of Majdanek used to be piled up in a barracks, where the Soviets photographed them in the summer of 1944. They presented these photographs as…
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