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Alfred Rosenberg was born on 12 January 1893 to ethnic-German parents in Reval (today’s Tallinn), Estonia. He went on to study architecture and engineering in Moscow, eventually graduating in early 1918. Following the Russian and Bolshevist Revolutions of 1917 and 1918, he moved to Munich, Germany. In January 1919, eight months prior to Adolf Hitler,…
Eliyahu (also Ela, Elias) Rosenberg was a Polish Jew deported to the Treblinka Camp on 20 August 1942. He made a deposition in front of the Historical Commission of Warsaw, probably in 1945, which was recorded in very bad French and is barely comprehensible. It only mentions in passing that he had to drag corpses…
Rosenberg, Walter → Vrba, Rudolf /
Herman Rosenblat (1929 – 5 Feb. 2015) was a Polish Jew who was deported from the Warsaw Ghetto to a subcamp of the Buchenwald Camp, then shortly before the war’s end to the Theresienstadt Ghetto, where he was liberated. Having gotten into serious financial difficulties in the 1990s, he decided to write down his wartime…
Joshuah Rosenblum, born in 1923, was a Polish Jew who was arrested in May 1941 and sent to the Sosnowice Transit Camp, and then to Wiesau. After working with about 300 Jews on a highway construction project about 125 km from Berlin, he was transferred to Klettendorf, near Breslau, from where he fled. Arrested by…
Moritz Rosenblum was arrested in Łódź on 16 December 1940 at age 22. He was admitted to a forced-labor camp near Frankfurt on Oder, from where he was transferred to Auschwitz in December 1942. On 26 May 1945, he made a deposition, in which he claimed to have seen a homicidal gassing on his arrival…
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 1913) 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…
Maurice Rossel (1917 – 2008) was a Swiss national and physician. In 1944, he worked at the Berlin branch of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC). As such, he visited the Theresienstadt Ghetto on 23 June 1944 and Auschwitz Main Camp in September of that year. Both reports he wrote after his visits reflect…
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 (7 Jan. 1921 – 3 April 2016) 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…
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 a Hungarian Jew deported from Vienna to Auschwitz in late 1943. He spent two months in quarantine there, and was registered on 25 February 1944 (reg. no. 174438). 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…
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…
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