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Monique de Wael (born 12 May 1937) is a Belgian Catholic who lost her parents during the Second World War. They had been arrested and deported by the German occupational forces for resistance activities, and never returned home. In 1988, de Wael immigrated to the U.S., where she wrote a book under the pen name…
Bernhard Walter was an SS man deployed at the Auschwitz Camp. During the deportation of Jews from Hungary to the Auschwitz-Birkenau Camp in the spring of 1944, he was tasked by the camp’s administration to document the arrival and processing of these deportees. Hence, on 26 May 1944, Walter and his colleague Ernst Hofmann took…
During the year 1941, it became clear to Germany’s top officials that there would be no peace in the West. Therefore, any plans to force Jews out of Europe to some overseas region, as was suggested with the so-called Madagascar Plan, became increasingly unlikely. On the other hand, Germany’s initial successes during its invasion of…
Several scholars have raised doubts about the authenticity of the so-called Wannsee Protocol. This document is alleged to have been written by Adolf Eichmann after the so-called Wannsee Conference of 20 January 1942. For a discussion of the contents of the Wannsee Conference as laid out in its protocol, see the previous entry. The point…
The War Refugee Board was an organization established by Roosevelt in January 1944. It was the result of Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau lobbying for an official government agency assisting minorities, in particular Jews, persecuted by the Third Reich. This would have been within the area of responsibility of the State Department. Morgenthau pushed…
Jewish ghettos are not an invention of wartime Germany, nor the deplorable conditions found in some of them during wartimes. It demonstrates calloused indifference, at best, to force people to live in close quarters with insufficient food supplies and inadequate medical care and sanitary installations, as was the case in the Warsaw Ghetto and many…
Szyja Warszawski was a Polish Jew deported to Treblinka on 23 July 1942 from Kielce. He was interviewed by a Polish investigator on 9 October 1945. Here are some of his pertinent claims: Deportees were killed in the trains in transit with chlorine (probably meaning chlorinated lime) sprinkled in the railway cars. This was also…
During World War Two, Donald Watt (10 Aug. 1918 – 29 May 2000) was an Australian soldier. In 1995, Watt published his memoirs, titled Stoker. He claimed in it that he had been incarcerated at the Auschwitz Camp, where he was allegedly assigned to the Sonderkommando serving as a cremation furnace stoker. Due to its…
For years, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum has posted this image on the encyclopedia section of their website, currently (March 2023) with the following explanation: “Wedding rings taken from prisoners. The rings were found near the Buchenwald concentration camp following liberation by US Army soldiers. Germany, May 1945.” Note that these objects all look…
Gottfried Weise (11 March 1921 – 1 March 2000), SS Unterscharführer, was deployed at the inmate property administration at the Auschwitz Camp from May 1944. Between 1986 and 1988, Weise was tried and sentenced for five cases of murder allegedly committed during his time at Auschwitz. The case of Gottfried Weise is the only legal…
Janda Weiss was a 14-year-old teenager deported from the Theresienstadt Ghetto to Auschwitz in May 1944. After the war, he made a deposition which was printed in a U.S. compendium on the Buchenwald Camp. Here are some of Weiss’s peculiar statements: On arrival, he saw “horrible tongues of flame coming out of” the crematorium chimney….
Michael Dov Weissmand(e)l (25 Oct. 1903 – 29 Nov. 1957) was a Slovakian Rabbi who was summoned to meet the Slovakian Jews Rudolf Vrba and Alfred Wetzler after their escape from Birkenau. Weissmandel was either hoodwinked by Vrba and Wetzler to believe their mendacious propaganda story about Auschwitz, or else he even helped create its…
Leon Weliczker (aka Leon Wells, 10 March 1925 – 19 Dec. 2009) was a Jew from Lviv who, after the German invasion of the Soviet Union, lived initially at the Lvov Ghetto, but at age 18 was transferred to the Janowska Forced-Labor Camp. After the war, he studied first in Gleiwitz (Polish: Gliwice), then in…
Charles F. Wennerstrum (11 Oct. 1889 – 1 June 1986) was a U.S. American lawyer who served on the Iowa Supreme Court from 1941 to 1958. After the Second World War, he was the presiding judge of the Nuremberg Tribunal in Case 7 against several German generals in the so-called “Hostage Case.” Although he only…
Harry Wentritt was a mechanic at the motor pool administration of Germany’s Security Police, which was Subdepartment II D 3a of Germany’s Department of Homeland Security (Reichssicherheitshauptamt). In 1966, together with his superior Friedrich Pradel, he stood trial for allegedly having made mechanical changes to a set of trucks in 1941/42, turning them into homicidal…
During the war, Kurt Werner was a member of Sonderkommando 4a, which was part of Einsatzgruppe C. On 28 May 1964, he made a deposition during West-German investigations on the alleged mass shooting of Kiev Jews at Babi Yar. He claimed to have been one of 12 men who were doing the shootings. He said…
Alfred Wetzler (10 May 1918 – 8 Feb. 1988) was a Slovakian Jew who was deported to Auschwitz on 13 April 1942, where he became a clerk in one of the Birkenau camp sections. He managed to escape from Birkenau together with Rudolf Vrba on 7 April 1944. Once they both reached Slovakia, they co-authored…
Albert Widmann (8 June 1912 – 24 Dec. 1986), SS Sturmbannführer, was a German PhD chemist who in 1940 became the head of the section of analytical chemistry at the German Institute for Criminological Technology in Berlin (Kriminaltechnisches Institut, KTI). Right at the beginning of the Third Reich’s euthanasia action, Widmann is said to have…
Jankiel Wiernik (1889 – 1972) was a Polish Jew who was deported from the Warsaw Ghetto to the Treblinka Camp on 23 August 1942. He escaped from there during the inmate uprising on 2 August 1943. On 6 June 1944, a text written by Wiernik titled A Year in Treblinka was sent by a Pole…
Elie (Eliezer) Wiesel (30 Sept. 1928 – 2 July 2016) was a Romanian-born Jew who claimed to have been deported in May 1944 to Auschwitz at age 15 with his entire family, including his 50-year-old father, from what was then Hungary. When the Auschwitz Camp was evacuated, Wiesel claimed that he and his father Shlomo…
Simon Wiesenthal (31 Dec. 1908 – 20 Sept. 2005) was a Galician Jew (today’s western Ukraine) whose wartime history is unclear, because he has made conflicting statements about it. At one point, he claimed to have been slated for a mass execution with thousands of other Jews, but at the very moment, when it was…
Saartje Wijnberg was the wife of Chaim Engel, and also an inmate of the Sobibór Camp. In three depositions of 22 June and 19 July 1946 as well as 29 August 1949, she claimed that the gas was fed into the gas chamber(s) through showerheads, and that, after the murder, the floors opened, and the…
Samuel Willenberg (16 Feb. 1923 – 19 Feb. 2016) was a Polish Jew who was deported from the Opatów Ghetto to Treblinka on 20 October 1942. According to his memoirs, he was employed there first at sorting inmate property, then for other activities, such as weaving branches into fences to hide the camp’s events from…
Christian Wirth (24 Nov. 1885 – 26 May 1944), SS Sturmbannführer, was a German police officer who was assigned to supervise euthanasia killings in German mental institutions in late 1939. In late 1941, he was assigned to head the Belzec Camp. In August 1942, he became inspector of the Aktion Reinhardt camps. After this operation…
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