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Attentive observers have noted items or facilities at the so-called death camps that seem entirely inappropriate, and which in fact suggest a much-more benign usage of those camps. The brothel at the Auschwitz Main Camp is one such item, and the “zoo” at Treblinka is another. Then we have the barber shop, dentist, and shoemaker…
Eugenia Szajn-Lewin (1909 – 1944) was a Jewish journalist who lived in the Warsaw Ghetto and kept a diary of important events during this time. She was killed during the Warsaw uprising in 1944. On the rumors circulating about Treblinka, she wrote in her diary in late 1942 (Szajn-Lewin, pp. 83f.): “The worst thing is…
Stefan (István) Szende (10 April 1901 – 5 May 1985) was a bilingual Austro-Hungarian Jew who started a moderate political career in Berlin as a Socialist just prior to Hitler’s ascension to power. He was eventually arrested in late 1933 for continuing a socialist party, then tried and sentenced to two years imprisonment for this…
The so-called Szlamek Report is a text written in 1942 by Jewish underground fighters of the Warsaw Ghetto, and deposited there in the ghetto’s unofficial archive, where it was found after the war. The text describes in diary form alleged experiences made at the Chełmno Camp during a fictitious inmate’s stay there for ten days….
Stanisław Szmajzner was an inmate of the Sobibór Camp. In 1966, he was interrogated by the German judiciary, when he claimed that exhaust gases were used at Sobibór only initially for mass gassing, but were later replaced with Zyklon B. He elaborated more on this in his 1968 Portuguese book titled Inferno em Sobibór. He…
In 1947, the “eyewitness account” of Henike Szperling about his stay at the Treblinka Camp was published in a Jewish historical journal. Szperling claimed to have been deported there in September 1942. He was deployed in the part of the camp where no extermination activities occurred, working in a unit sorting clothes. On 2 August…
Jerzy Tabeau (born Wesołowski, 18 Dec. 1918 – 11 May 2002) was a Polish medical student who joined the Polish underground army in 1939. He was arrested in March 1942 and sent to Auschwitz Main Camp, where he fell ill with pneumonia but was nursed back to health in the inmate infirmary. After that, he…
Henryk Tauber (aka Fuchsbrunner; 8 July 1917 – 3 Jan. 2000) was a Polish Jew sent to the Auschwitz Camp in November 1942. He claimed to have been assigned to the Sonderkommando and worked as a furnace stoker first at the Main Camp’s crematorium, then in Crematorium II at the Birkenau Camp. Tauber made three…
Tesch & Stabenow (Testa) was a pest-control company headquartered in Hamburg, Germany, established in 1924. They used a broad variety of methods and techniques. One chemical used was Zyklon B with its active ingredient hydrogen cyanide. Bruno Tesch had been involved in the development of Zyklon B, but the DEGESCH (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Schädlingsbekämpfung, German…
Bruno Tesch (14 Aug. 1890 – 16 May 1946) was a German businessman and owner of the pest-control company Tesch & Stabenow. He was indicted and put on a show trial by the British for his company’s massive sales of Zyklon B to the SS, and especially to the Auschwitz Camp. Based on false testimonies…
In November 1941, the garrison (fortress) section of the northern Czech town of Theresienstadt (Terezin in Czech), some 12 miles southeast of the city of Aussig (Czech: Ústí nad Labem), was turned into a ghetto for Czech and elderly German Jews, as well as privileged German Jews, among them Jewish luminaries and many decorated veterans…
Heinz Thilo (8 Oct. 1911 – 13 May 1945), SS Hauptsturmführer, was a German physician who, in July 1942, was assigned as troop and camp physician to the Auschwitz Camp. After the end of the war, he committed suicide. Johann P. Kremer quoted Thilo in his diary as having called Auschwitz the “anus mundi” –…
If we take witness statements at face value, then we have to conclude that an astonishingly wide array of murder weapons is said to have been used for the mass murder of victims during the Holocaust. Apart from the obvious ones, such as simple starvation and disease to let people die from neglect, and bullets…
toothbrushes → Towels /
The company J.A. Topf & Söhne (Topf & Sons) of Erfurt, Germany, was established in 1878 with a focus on brewery equipment (malting plants). Prior to World War One, Topf & Sons expanded into the field of furnace manufacture. By the 1920, Topf & Sons had successfully expanded into the field of steam boilers, but…
Soviet Union Soviet Russia is infamous for its systematic mistreatment, torture and murder of millions of prisoners from all walks of life already prior to the war with Germany. The legal standing of prisoners certainly did not improve with the outbreak of hostilities, and reached a fever pitch toward the end of the conflict. The…
A common thread running through many witness testimonies about homicidal gassings in German wartime camps is the claim that the perpetrators applied a ruse: telling their victims that, for hygienic and health reasons, they would have to take a shower before being admitted to a camp or before being transferred elsewhere. To make that lie…
Tracing Service → International Tracing Service, Arolsen /
Josef Trajtag was an inmate of the Sobibór Camp. In a deposition of 10 October 1945, he reported from hearsay that Sobibór had one gas chamber, where an unspecified gas was used for killings. After the murder, the floors opened, and the bodies were discharged into carts below, which brought them to mass graves. His…
In the context of the Third Reich, the term “transit camp” refers to camps that were not designed or equipped to accommodate inmates for an extended period of time. They served merely to send them on to other locations after a brief stop-over. This stop-over may have included issuing of food and some hygienic procedures…
Trawniki was a forced-labor camp located half way between the Belzec and Sobibór Camp. It was established in the fall of 1941. Some 20,000 Jewish inmates are said to have passed through this camp. The camp also served as a training facility for SS men, among them Soviet PoWs, most of them Ukrainians, who volunteered…
Documented History The Treblinka Camp near the river Bug was located some 50 miles northeast of Warsaw close to what used to be the German-Soviet demarcation line after the 1939 division of Poland between Germany and the USSR. As with Belzec and Sobibór, very few documents about Treblinka have surfaced after the war, but they…
trenches → Open-Air Incinerations /
Ziama Trubakov was a Ukrainian Jew interned in the Syretsky Camp, 5 km from Kiev. On 18 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…
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