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Marie-Claude Vaillant-Couturier (née Vogel; 3 Nov. 1912 – 11 Dec. 1996) was a communist member of the French resistance against the German occupation during World War II. She was arrested on 9 February 1942 by the French police, and on 24 January 1943 deported to Auschwitz–Birkenau. She arrived there three days later and was initially…
Siegfried van den Bergh was an Auschwitz inmate who, right after the war, wrote his war memoirs. Regarding mass murder at Auschwitz, he made the following peculiar claims: Poison gas was emitted into the gas chamber through showerheads. However, the product allegedly used at Auschwitz, Zyklon B, contains liquid hydrogen cyanide absorbed on gypsum pellets….
Maria van Herwaarden was a young German woman who was incarcerated at Auschwitz and Birkenau from December 1942 to January 1945 for having had a sexual relationship with a Polish man. She testified as a witness for the defense during the Second Zündel Trial in Toronto in 1988. Already on the way to Auschwitz, she…
Edward van Roden (1892-1973) was a Pennsylvania judge who served on a special postwar committee (The Simpson Commission) to investigate possible prisoner abuse and torture by Americans against captive Germans. Among the many war crimes of World War Two was the Malmedy Massacre of 17 December 1944. During the Battle of the Bulge, some 120…
Simone Jacob, whose last name changed to Veil after marrying, was a young Jewish woman from France who was deported to Auschwitz in April 1944. When Polish historian Danuta Czech wrote the first edition of her Auschwitz Chronicle, she reported that not a single woman of the transport with which Ms. Jacob arrived at Auschwitz…
Morris (Maurice) Venezia (25 Feb. 1921 – 2 Sept. 2013) was an Italian Jew deported from Greece to Auschwitz, where he arrived on 11 April 1944 together with his brother Shlomo Venezia, among others. In contrast to his brother, he never elaborated in public in great detail what he claimed to have experienced while at…
Shlomo Venezia (29 Dec. 1923 – 1 Oct. 2012) was an Italian Jew deported from Greece to Auschwitz, where he arrived on 11 April 1944 together with his brother Morris Venezia and five other notorious false witnesses: Josef Sackar, Yaakov Gabai, Shaul Chasan, Leon Cohen and Daniel Bennahmias. After three weeks of quarantine, Venezia was…
Principles By “ventilating” an enclosed space, we refer here to replacing old, stale or contaminated air with fresh, uncontaminated air. In an ideal scenario of a cuboid space (room), fresh air would be pushed in along the entire surface area of one end of the room, and stale air would be taken out along the…
Vernichtung → Extirpation /
VHF delousing → Microwave Delousing /
Peter Voss, allegedly born on 18 December 1897 in Flensburg, Germany, is said to have been an SS Oberscharführer deployed at the Auschwitz Camp. However, there does not seem to exist any documentation about the presence or activity of a person with that name at that camp. Voss is mentioned (with spelling varieties) as a…
Rudolf Vrba (born as Walter Rosenberg, 11 Sept. 1924 – 27 March 2006) was a Slovakian Jew deported to the Majdanek Camp on 14 June 1942, and 16 days later, on 30 June, transferred to the Auschwitz Camp. Initially, he was employed at the inmate property warehouse of the Main Camp, sorting and registering the…
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…
weapons, of mass murder → Tools, of Mass Murder /
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….
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