Sunday, December 18, 2016

holocaust



http://www.fatherkolbe.com http://www.auschwitz.dk/bilecki.htm
The famous Steven Spielberg film Schindler's List focused attention on people like Oscar Schindler, who - at great risk to themselves and their families - helped Jews escape the Nazi genocide. These non-Jews are called Righteous Among The Nations Of The World. They are the spiritual heirs to the thirty-six Gentiles mentioned in Jewish legend whose purpose in every generation, unknown to themselves or to others, is to assist their fellow man in his hour of greatest despair.

The Holocaust survivor, the author Elie Wiesel, has dedicated his life to ensuring that none of us forget what happened to the Jews. The Nobel Prize recipient wrote:
"In those times there was darkness everywhere. In heaven and on earth, all the gates of compassion seemed to have been closed. The killer killed and the Jews died and the outside world adopted an attitude either of complicity or of indifference. Only a few had the courage to care."
The Holocaust was the systematic annihilation of six million Jews during the Nazi genocide - in 1933 nine million Jews lived in the 21 countries of Europe that would be occupied by Nazi Germany during World War 2. By 1945 two out of every three European Jews had been killed.




The number of children killed during the Holocaust is not fathomable and full statistics for the tragic fate of children who died will never be known. Estimates range as high as 1.5 million murdered children. This figure includes more than 1.2 million Jewish children, tens of thousands of Gypsy children and thousands of institutionalized handicapped children who were murdered under Nazi rule in Germany and occupied Europe.

In his book Sheltering The Jews the Holocaust historian Mordecai Paldiel later wrote:
"Never before in history had children been singled out for destruction for no other reason than having been born. Children, of course, were no match for the Nazis' mighty and sophisticated killing machine .." 


Nazi Crimes - Warning: Graphic Photos

The Wannsee Conference

Nazi Medical Experiments

Holocaust Photos

Auschwitz-Birkenau

Holocaust In Memoriam

A Letter To God

Porajmos - Sinti And Roma

Albert Goering - The Good Brother

Graphic Holocaust Photos

Dachau Holocaust Photos

Wilm Hosenfeld from The Pianist

Varian Fry, The American Schindler


Today Oscar Schindler's name is known to millions as a household word for courage in a world of brutality - the flawed hero who saved hundreds of Jews from Hitler's gas chambers. A saint walking through hell.

No one will ever know exactly what made this complex man do what no German had the courage to do. A large part of the fascination of Schindler is that not even those who admire him most can figure out his motives.

But Oscar Schindler rose to the highest level of humanity and gave his Jews a second chance at life. He earned the everlasting gratitude of his Schindler Jews. No matter why, no matter that he was an alcoholic and a shameless womanisor of the worst sort - what matters to his Jews is that he surfaced from the chaos of madness and risked everything for them.

To more than 1200 Jews Schindler was all that stood between them and death at the hands of the Nazis. But he remained true to his Jews, the workers he referred to as my children. In the shadow of Auschwitz he kept the SS out and everyone alive.

Today there are 7,000 descendants of Schindler's Jews living in US and Europe, and many in Israel. Before the Second World War, the Jewish population of Poland was 3.5 million. Today there are between 3,000 and 4,000 left.

Here you find Schindler Jews sharing memories of their unlikely savior - generations will remember him for what he did ..
Kurt Gerstein, SS Officer
Nicholas Winton

Miep Gies

The Children Of Izieu

The Forgotten Holocaust

Photos - The Holocaust children

The Children Of Bullenhuser Damm


The truth of the photographs of various crimes and atrocities included in this Holocaust project needs to be shown. The photos may be of graphic nature and disturbing - before providing access to younger learners, parents and teachers should preview the sites and guide through what they may read and see.
In November 1944 20 Jewish children, ten boys and ten girls, had been brought from Auschwitz to the concentration camp of Neuengamme, just outside Hamburg. The youngsters, aged between 5 and 12 years old, came from all over Europe and were to be human guinea-pigs in a series of medical experiments conducted by the SS doctor Kurt Heissmeyer. 

Dr. Heissmeyer removed the children's lymph glands for analysis, and he injected living tuberculosis bacteria in their veins and directly into their lungs to determine if they had any natural immunities to tuberculosis. They were carefully observed, examined and photographed as the disease progressed. The condition of all the children deteriorated very rapidly and they became extremely ill.

On April 20, 1945, the day on which Adolf Hitler was celebrating his fifty-sixth birthday and just a few days before the war ended, Heissmeyer and SS-Obersturmführer Arnold Strippel decided to kill the children in an effort to hide evidence of the experiments from the approaching Allied forces. To conceal all traces the SS transported the children to the formerBullenhuser Damm School, which had been used as a satellite camp since October 1944. They were immediately taken to the basement and ordered to undress. An SS officer later reported: "They sat down on the benches all around and were cheerful and happy that they had been for once allowed out of Neuengamme. The children were completely unsuspecting."
The children were told that they had to be vaccinated against typhoid fever before their return journey. Then they were injected with morphine. They were hanged from hooks on the wall, but the SS men found it difficult to kill the mutilated children. The first child to be strung up was so light - due to disease and malnutrition - that the rope wouldn’t strangle him. SS untersturmführer Frahm had to use all of his own weight to tighten the noose. Then he hanged the others, two at a time, from different hooks. 'Just like pictures on the wall', he would recall later. He added that none of the children had cried. At five o' clock in the morning on April 21, 1945, the Nazis had finished with their work and drank hard-earned coffee ...
One of the children was Jacqueline Morgenstern, born to Suzanne and Karl Morgenstern in 1932 in Paris, France. Here Jacqueline led a happy life, she attended school and her father and uncle owned a beauty shop in central Paris.

The family's feelings of security collapsed, however, when in 1940, Germany invaded France and the brutality of the Nazis accelerated with murder, violence and terror. In 1944 Jacqueline and her parents were sent to Auschwitz. Jacqueline and her mother went to the women's work camp, where food rations were meager. Suzanne gave Jacqueline most of her food, so she became malnourished and ill. When the Nazis found her no longer useful for forced labor, they sent her to the gas chambers.
After her mother's death, Jacqueline was sent to a special children's barrack where the children were being held for later bogus medical experiments. The majority of the children spoke only Polish but one of the boys, Georges Andre Kohn, spoke French, too, and they became close friends.

Georges Andre Kohn was 12 years old and the youngest son of Armand Kohn, a rich Jewish businessman in Paris. In 1944 Georges, his grandmother (75), mother, father, his older sisters, Rose-Marie and Antoinette, and his eighteen year-old brother, Philippe, were crowded into cattle cars with hundreds of Jews to be deported to the Buchenwald concentration camp.

Three days after the train began moving, Rose-Marie and Philippe broke the bars of the car's small window, jumped out and miraculously survived the Holocaust. When the train arrived at Buchenwald, the family was separated. When the war was over, only Armand Kohn and the two escaped had survived.
And on April 20th, 1945, when the British were less than three miles from the camp, all the children of Bullenhuser Damm were murdered ...

After the war, the SS doctor Kurt Heissmeyer returned to his home in Magdeburg, postwar East Germany, to resume medical practice, highly regarded as a lung and tuberculosis specialist. The much-admired physician was eventually tried and sentenced to life imprisonment in 1966. Arnold Strippel, the SS-Obersturmführer commanding these killings as well as many others, lived for years well in West Germany in a villa situated on the outskirts of Frankfurt despite all efforts made by relatives of the children to take him to trial.

Opened in 1980, this memorial is located in the cellar of the former school. The room where the children were murdered has been kept in its original state. In an adjoining room there is an exhibition on the fate of the victims. The documentation also provides insight into the various individual and inofficial attempts made during the 1970s and 1980s to shed light on the crime, and describes the deliberate delay of criminal proceedings against Arnold Strippel, the SS officer in charge of the murder unit.

The association 'Kinder vom Bullenhuser Damm e.V.' has planted a rose garden behind the school. Anyone who wishes may plant a rose there as a tribute to the dead. The rose garden is open at all times.

Not one of the children of Bullenhuser Damm was older than twelve. Stripped of their childhoods, they lived and died during the dark years of the Holocaust and were victims of the Nazi regime. Had they survived another two weeks, they would have been liberated by the Allied forces ..
1.5 million children were murdered during the Holocaust. This figure includes more than 1.2 million Jewish children, tens of thousands of Gypsy children and thousands of institutionalized handicapped children.
Hitler and the Nazi Genocide
The Nazi Genocide

Men Of Courage
Men Of Courage

The Holocaust is a history of enduring horror and sorrow. It seems as though there is no spark of human concern, no act of humanity, to lighten that dark history.
Yet there were acts of courage and kindness during the Holocaust - this site focus attention on five men, who risked their lives to help Jews escape the Nazi genocide:

Wilm Hosenfeld
Oskar Schindler
Raoul Wallenberg
Kurt Gerstein
Albert Goering


Today their names are known to millions as household words for courage.
Holocaust Photos
Father Kolbe, Saint Of Auschwitz

The Holocaust is a history of enduring horror and sorrow. The charred skeletons, the diabolic experiments, the death camps, the mass graves, the smoke from the chimneys ...

Auschwitz became the killing centre during WWII where the largest numbers of the Jews were murdered. One Christian man who died here became a martyr to the truth of evils of Nazism - a true hero for our time, a saint who lived what he preached, total love toward God and man ...


Maximilian Kolbe
 was a Polish priest who died as prisoner 16670 in Auschwitz, on August 14, 1941. When a prisoner escaped from the camp, the Nazis selected 10 others to be killed by starvation in reprisal for the escape.

One of the 10 selected to die, Franciszek Gajowniczek, began to cry: "My wife! My children! I will never see them again!" At this Father Kolbe stepped forward and asked to die in his place - his request was granted.

As the ten condemned men were led off to the death Block of Building 13, Father Kolbe supported a fellow prisoner who could hardly walk. No one would emerge alive - Father Kolbe was the last to die ..

This is his story.

- Louis Bülow
Stroop - The Warsaw Ghetto
Canaris, The Decent Nazi

Henriette von Schirach

Albert Goering - A Story Of Courage

The Unsung Heroines



The Holocaust - the systematic annihilation of six million Jews - is a history of enduring horror and sorrow. The charred skeletons, the diabolic experiments, the death camps, the mass graves, the smoke from the chimneys ..

In 1933 nine million Jews lived in the 21 countries of Europe that would be occupied by Germany during the war. By 1945 two out of every three European Jews had been killed by the Nazis.


The Holocaust survivor, the author Elie Wiesel, has dedicated his life to ensuring that none of us forget what happened to the Jews. The Nobel Prize recipient wrote:
"In those times there was darkness everywhere. In heaven and on earth, all the gates of compassion seemed to have been closed. The killer killed and the Jews died and the outside world adopted an attitude either of complicity or of indifference. Only a few had the courage to care."
These women were inspiring evidence of human nobility:

Countess Maria von Maltzan -  throughout the war she provided a safe haven for more than 60 Jews, arranging for them to escape to safety.
Irena Sendler - an unfamiliar name to most people, but this remarkable woman defied the Nazis and saved 2,500 Jewish children by smuggling them out of the Warsaw Ghetto.
Jane Haining - in Auschwitz the missionary refused to reject her children and showed herself to be a saint. She was murdered in the gas chambers.
Miep Gies - during the Nazi occupation of Holland the Austrian-born Dutch woman risked her life daily to hide Anne Frank and her family from the Nazis.
Emilie Schindler - not only a strong woman working alongside her husband Oscar Schindler but a heroine in her own right. She worked indefatigably to save the Schindler-Jews.

Yes, there were acts of courage and human decency during the Holocaust - stories to bear witness to goodness, love and compassion. To serve as eulogy to the millions with a yellow star who lived and died during the dark years of the Nazi genocide.
The Last Letters
Photos - Medical Experiments - Warning!

Nazi Genocide and Mass Murder

New domain: www.shoah.dk

Gates To Hell

Berthold Beitz

Courage and Survival

The Auschwitz Children

The Shoah Bookstore
Holocaust Children
Anne FrankThe Story of Rivka



Julian Bilecki and 'his' Jews











































Dr. Josef Mengele, nicknamed The Angel Of Death, and the other Nazi doctors at the death campstortured men, women and children and did medical experiments of unspeakable horror during the Holocaust. Victims were put into pressure chambers, tested with drugs, castrated, frozen to death.Children were exposed to experimental surgeries performed without anesthesia, transfusions of blood from one to another, isolation endurance, reaction to various stimuli. The doctors made injections with lethal germs, sex change operations, removal of organs and limbs.

At Auschwitz Josef Mengele did a number of medical experiments, using twins. These twins as young as five years of age were usually murdered after the experiment was over and their bodies dissected.

Mengele injected chemicals into the eyes of the children in an attempt to change their eye color. 
He carried out twin-to-twin transfusions, stitched twins together, castrated or sterilized twins. Many twins had limbs and organs removed in macabre surgical procedures, performed without using an anesthetic.
Only a few of the children survived Auschwitz. They later recalled how they were visited by a smiling Uncle Mengele who brought them candy and clothes. Then he had them delivered to his medical laboratory either in trucks painted with the Red Cross emblem or in his own personal car.

Josef Mengele was the chief provider for the gas chambers at Auschwitz - and did well! When it was reported that one block was infected with lice, Mengele solved the problem by gassing all the 750 women assigned to it.

The memory of this slightly built man, scarcely a hair out of place, his dark green tunic neatly pressed, his face well scrubbed, his Death's Head SS cap tilted rakishly to one side, remains vivid for those who survived his scrutiny when they arrived at the Auschwitz railhead. Polished boots slightly apart, his thumb resting on his pistol belt, he surveyed his prey with those dead gimlet eyes. Death to the left, life to the right.
Josef Mengele and the other camp doctors - masterminds of the horrors of Nazi genocide - were found to be psychologically normal. They were men of fine standing, cultured, husbands who morning and night kissed their wives, fathers who tucked their children into bed ...