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Poland had three roles within the context of the Holocaust: Crime Scene Victim Propagandist The last role is discussed in detail in the section on Poland of the entry on propaganda, so it will not be covered here. Crime Scene All the so-called extermination camps were located on what was legitimately Polish territory. They had…
Boris Nikolaevich Polevoy (aka Kampov; 17 March 1908 – 12 July 1981) was a Soviet journalist writing primarily for Soviet Russia’s leading newspaper Pravda. His métier was similar to Ilya Ehrenburg’s: glorifying communism and the Soviet Union, and as Pravda’s official war correspondent during the war, exaggerating and inventing atrocity tales about the enemy and…
During the German occupation of Poland between 1939 and 1944, the Polish Government-in-Exile in London managed to organize a well-functioning shadow government inside Poland working completely underground. To one degree or another, it could count on the support of almost the entire Polish population. This underground government had informants almost everywhere. Apart from active acts…
Ponary is the Polish name for the Lithuanian town Paneriai, which today is a mere district of Lithuanian’s capital Vilnius. Between 1921 and 1939, the town was part of Poland, hence the name. During the two-year occupation by the Soviets from 1939 to 1941, a construction project was initiated in a forest outside of town…
population statistics → Demography, Jewish /
Posen speeches → Himmler Speeches /
Henryk Poswolski was a Polish Jew deported from the Warsaw Ghetto to the Treblinka Camp in January 1943, where he was employed as a bricklayer and stoker. However, he was not working at the camp’s extermination sector, which was physically and optically cordoned off from the rest of the camp. (What he was stoking, then,…
Friedrich Pradel (16 April 1901 – 24 Sept. 1978), SS Sturmbannführer, was head of Subdepartment II D 3a of Germany’s Department of Homeland Security (Reichssicherheitshauptamt), which dealt with the Security Police’s motor pool. As such, he is said to have organized the procurement of trucks that, according to his specifications, were allegedly changed into homicidal…
The early era of industrialization was an era of coal and coke. Steam machines were driven by coke and coal fires, homes were heated with them, food was cooked with them, and an entire industry evolved around producing coke from coal and using the by-product – “coal gas” or “city gas” – to provide heating,…
Dina Pronicheva was a Ukrainian Jew from Kiev who claimed, in at least 12 statements made between the 1940s and 1960, that she survived the mass shooting of Jews by Germans at the ravine of Babi Yar in Kiev on 29 September 1941. According to her various testimonies, the Jews were driven to Babi Yar,…
Introduction The term originates from the Latin word propagare, to propagate, and did not initially have any nefarious connotation. It simply meant the dissemination of information, with no implication that this information may be inaccurate or untrue. The shift in the term’s meaning is a result of spreading disinformation through mass media with the intention…
Protectorate → Czechia /
Prussian blue → Iron Blue /
Lucjan Puchała was a Polish railway worker at Małkinia Station near Treblinka until June 1942, and then at the construction of the track from Treblinka Station to the sand pit near the Treblinka I Labor Camp. Necessarily from pure hearsay, he reported, among other things: There were 8 brick-and-cement gas chambers for 700 victims per…
Fritz Putzker was a Jew from Vienna who passed through several camps, among them Auschwitz and Birkenau, where he arrived on 23 February 1943. He was deployed in this camp for nine months as a foreman in the workshops of the Lenz Corporation. Probably in 1945, he wrote a report, in which we read, among…
pyres → Open-Air Incinerations /
Walter Quakernack (9 July 1907 – 11 Oct. 1946), SS Oberscharführer, was a mid-level employee at the Political Department of the Auschwitz Camp. He was mentioned by several witnesses, all of whom lack any credibility. Stanisław Jankowski constructed a fantastic tale involving Quakernack and another SS man being seduced by a Jewess doing a strip-tease…
Jakub Rabinowicz was a Treblinka inmate who managed to escape from the camp probably in early September 1942. Later that month, his testimony was recorded by the Jewish underground movement of the Warsaw Ghetto. The extant fragment of it does not contain any reference to extermination facilities or killing methods, but it does mention a…
radio intercepts → British Radio Intercepts /
Chil Rajchman (aka Henryk or Ye(c)hiel Reichman(n), 14 June 1914 – 7 May 2004) was a Polish Jew who was deported to the Treblinka Camp on 10 October 1942, from which he escaped after an inmate uprising on 2 August 1943. Still during the war, he presumably wrote down his experiences in Yiddish, which were…
Jerzy Rajgrodzki was deported to the Treblinka Camp on 12 September 1942, and escaped during the prisoner uprising on 2 August 1943. On an unspecified date, he wrote a lengthy report on his stay at the camp, which was published in 1958. He described the alleged Treblinka gas chambers, presumably operated with engine-exhaust gas, similar,…
Rajsko is a village some 5 miles southwest of the city of Auschwitz. Most of its population was deported/resettled in 1941/42. The Hygiene Institute of the Waffen SS established its “Sanitary and Bacteriological Testing Station Southeast” there in 1943 (“Hygienisch-bakteriologische Untersuchungsstelle Südost der Waffen-SS”). It served primarily to conduct experiments on a number of vaccines…
Samuel Rajzman (1904 – 1979) was a Polish accountant who was deported from the Warsaw Ghetto to the Treblinka Camp in late September 1942 – or maybe in August of that year, according to his testimony at the Nuremberg International Military Tribunal (IMT, Vol. 8, p. 325). He managed to escape from that camp on…
Sigmund Rascher (12 Feb. 1909 – 26 April 1945), a Luftwaffe Major, was a physician who conducted often-lethal freezing and low-pressure experiments on concentration-camp inmates at the Dachau Camp. In 1944, he and his wife were arrested for kidnapping babies while falsely claiming them to be Mrs. Rascher’s natural-born children. For this, both were executed…
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