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The city of Kaunas, Lithuania, has nine 19th-century fortresses surrounding the entire city. Some of them were used as NKVD prisons after the Soviet Union’s invasion of the Baltic states in 1940. During the German occupation of the area, these prisons served to detain and presumably kill Jews from the Kaunas Ghetto and deported from…
France’s role in the Holocaust was twofold. First, during the German occupation of northern France, the French government in southern France collaborated with the German authorities and agreed to have those Jews living in France deported to Auschwitz who either had no French citizenship or who had obtained it only recently. The deportation lists have…
Despite her status as perhaps the most famous Holocaust victim, the story of Anne Frank has little direct bearing on the larger Holocaust narrative. In one sense, she was just one more Jewish victim of the evil Nazis. And yet, there is so much controversy around her famous diary that it threatens to expose deeper…
Hans Frank (23 May 1900 – 16 Oct. 1946) was governor of occupied Poland (called General Government) during the war. Four of the so-called extermination camps – Belzec, Majdanek, Sobibór and Treblinka – were on the territory he governed. (The territories where Auschwitz and Chełmno were located had been annexed by the Third Reich). Therefore,…
Alfred Franke-Gricksch (30 Nov. 1906 – 18 Aug. 1952), SS Obersturmbannführer, was an SS bureaucrat. He was arrested by the Soviets in 1951 in East Berlin, and after a show trial in Moscow, he was sentenced to death and executed for his alleged propaganda, espionage and counter-revolutionary activities, but not for any involvement in mass-murder…
Background Before the investigations for the great Frankfurt Auschwitz trial started, the German government was reluctant to evaluate the contents of eastern European archives. Offers by communist countries were conceived as attempts to destabilize West Germany with propaganda, potentially falsified evidence and manipulated witnesses. This resistance, however, collapsed under the lobbying of various pressure groups…
Viktor Frankl (26 March 1905 – 2 Sept. 1997) was an Austrian Jew and Psychiatrist. In 1942, he and his family were deported to the Theresienstadt Ghetto. On 19 October 1944, he was deported to the Dachau subcamp Kaufering III, where he arrived on 25 October, after a brief layover of three days in the…
Kurt Franz (17 Jan. 1914 – 4 July 1998), SS Oberscharführer, was deployed as a guard at the Buchenwald Camp, and later as a cook at several institutions of the Third Reich’s euthanasia action. In April 1942 he was assigned as a guard at the Belzec Camp. In September 1942, he became deputy commandant of…
Ber (or Berisch) Freiberg was an inmate of the Sobibór Camp. In three depositions of 10 and 18 August 1944 and 27 July 1945, he claimed that executions at Sobibór happened in just one gas chamber. A gas, perhaps chlorine, was produced by an electric machine, from where the gas was piped into gas tanks…
Arnold Friedman was arrested during a raid in Slovakia and deported to Auschwitz in the spring of 1944, but survived his stay there. When the Auschwitz Camp was evacuated, Friedman ended up in the Flossenbürg Camp in northeastern Bavaria. Although all historians agree today that this camp had no facilities to mass murder inmates, in…
Jakob Fries was incarcerated at Auschwitz as a “professional criminal.” When he was interrogated after the war in 1959 in preparation of the Frankfurt Auschwitz Show Trial, he was still in prison, serving a 14-year prison term. At Auschwitz, Fries was foreman of all inmate labor units at the Auschwitz Main Camp. As such, his…
Karl Fritzsch Karl Fritzsch (10 July 1903 – 2 May 1945), SS Hauptsturmführer, was the head of the Protective-Custody Camp at the Auschwitz Main Camp from 14 June 1940 until 1 February 1942. Later he had that same role at the Flossenbürg Camp. According to the demonstrably false postwar confessions of former Auschwitz commandant Rudolf…
Chaim Frosch, who claims to have been deported to Auschwitz on 30 April 1942, recorded a rather brief and terse undated account of his alleged experience in that camp, probably shortly after the war, which is now archived at the Yad Vashem Center in Jerusalem. He admitted having knowledge of extermination activities mainly – in…
Führer Order → Hitler Order /
When the link between infectious diseases, bacteria and bacteria-carrying pests (like insects or rodents) was discovered during the second half of the 19th Century, it quickly became apparent that this was a pivotal event in the history of human healthcare. Some of these pests were the vectors of major epidemic diseases, such as the body…
The term ‘furnace’ is commonly used for any industrial heating device used for the high-temperature processing or burning of material objects. The term ‘oven,’ in contrast, is commonly used for food-processing and -heating devices not intended to burn the food but rather to cook or heat it. Hence, a corpse cremation device is a furnace,…
Dario Gabai (or Gabbai, 2 Sept. 1922 – 25 March 2020) was a Greek Jew deported to Auschwitz in March 1944. Possibly incentivized by his brother’s interview with Israeli historian Gideon Greif a few years earlier (see the entry on Yaakov Gabai), Dario started giving his version of events in numerous media venues, soon after…
Yaakov Gabai (or Gabbai, aka Ya’akov, Jaacov, Jacob; born in Athens in 1912) arrived at Auschwitz from Greece on 11 April 1944. In 1983, he wrote a brief text about his alleged experiences in Auschwitz, almost four decades after the witnessed events, when asked to do so by Erich Kulka. Some ten years later, he…
Gyula Gál was a Hungarian physician who was deported to Auschwitz, where he stayed until the camp was conquered by the Soviets. Not quite two months later, he wrote a report about Auschwitz, which contains the following peculiar statements, among others: The camp’s total death toll was 5 million persons, 3½ million of them Jews,…
Moshe Garbarz (born on 28 Dec. 1913) was a Polish Jew who emigrated to France in 1929. He was deported from there to the Auschwitz Camp on 17 July 1942. In 1945, he was evacuated to Buchenwald, where he was liberated by U.S. troops in April. In 1983, an autobiographic book titled Un Survivant (A…
A gas chamber is an enclosed space or room to expose items to a chemically active gas in order to achieve certain effects. There are three main types of gas chambers: Training/testing gas chambers: used by military and civilian-defense agencies to test gas-protection equipment and to train personnel in their use. Disinfestation or fumigation gas…
A gas van is a large-capacity truck or van allegedly used to murder passengers in the enclosed rear cargo hold using engine-exhaust gas. Soviet Gas Vans In the mid-1930s, Isai Davidovich Berg – a Russian Jew and head of the economic department of the NKVD for the Moscow region – had the idea of using…
A series of wartime documents from the Auschwitz Camp authorities mention terms such as ‘gastight door’ or ‘gastight window.’ Polish investigators right after the war, and subsequently many orthodox scholars, have claimed that this so-called “criminal trace” points at the existence of homicidal gas chambers at Auschwitz. However, a thorough analysis of these documents shows…
The company Gaubschat Fahrzeugwerke Ltd. was a Berlin coachwork manufacturer mainly known for producing bus coachworks. During the war, the company also built custom-made coachworks (bodies) for trucks. In April 1942, the German Department of Homeland Security (Reichssicherheitshauptamt, RSHA) approached Gaubschat with the intent to equip the cargo boxes of special vehicles ordered but not…
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