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General Usage in German Wartime Documents The German term Sonderbehandlung (special treatment) and other related terms, such as Sonderaktion (special operation) and Sondermaßnahme (special measure) appear on numerous occasions in original German wartime documents. In a general context of the Second World War, German documents containing the term “special treatment” could have both beneficial as…
Albert Speer (19 March 1905 – 1 Sept. 1981) was Germany’s Minister of Armaments and War Production from 8 February 1942 until 30 April 1945. He was indicted during the Nuremberg International Military Tribunal for his extended use of forced laborer in the Third Reich’s various construction and armament projects that he managed. He was…
Elisa Springer (12 Feb. 1918 – 19 Sept. 2004) was an Austrian Jewess who married an Italian and moved to Italy in 1940, living under a false identity. She was betrayed in 1944, arrested and deported to Auschwitz, arriving there in early August. After three months she was transferred to the Bergen-Belsen Camp. She went…
Ursula Stern was an inmate of the Sobibór Camp. According to a deposition summarized and published by the Dutch Red Cross, Stern claimed that there was one gas chamber at this camp into which the gas was fed through showerheads. After the murder, the floors opened, and the bodies were discharged into a space below….
Oskar Strawczyński was a Polish Jew deported to the Treblinka Camp, where he claims to have arrived on 5 October 1942. He was interviewed about his experiences on 7 October 1945. His knowledge about the claimed exterminations occurring at that camp are all from hearsay: “From the accounts of Hersz Jabłkowski, who was a blacksmith…
Just one day after the outbreak of open hostilities between Germany and Poland, the German authorities established a detention camp near the town of Stutthof, some 20 miles east of the City of Danzig, meant to contain anti-German Polish political activists. This region had been separated from Germany after the First World War and was…
Attentive observers have noted items or facilities at the so-called death camps that seem entirely inappropriate, and which in fact suggest a much-more benign usage of those camps. The brothel at the Auschwitz Main Camp is one such item, and the “zoo” at Treblinka is another. Then we have the barber shop, dentist, and shoemaker…
Eugenia Szajn-Lewin (1909 – 1944) was a Jewish journalist who lived in the Warsaw Ghetto and kept a diary of important events during this time. She was killed during the Warsaw uprising in 1944. On the rumors circulating about Treblinka, she wrote in her diary in late 1942 (Szajn-Lewin, pp. 83f.): “The worst thing is…
Stefan (István) Szende (10 April 1901 – 5 May 1985) was a bilingual Austro-Hungarian Jew who started a moderate political career in Berlin as a Socialist just prior to Hitler’s ascension to power. He was eventually arrested in late 1933 for continuing a socialist party, then tried and sentenced to two years imprisonment for this…
Stanisław Szmajzner was an inmate of the Sobibór Camp. In 1966, he was interrogated by the German judiciary, when he claimed that exhaust gases were used at Sobibór only initially for mass gassing, but were later replaced with Zyklon B. He elaborated more on this in his 1968 Portuguese book titled Inferno em Sobibór. He…
Jerzy Tabeau (born Wesołowski, 18 Dec. 1918 – 11 May 2002) was a Polish medical student who joined the Polish underground army in 1939. He was arrested in March 1942 and sent to Auschwitz Main Camp, where he fell ill with pneumonia but was nursed back to health in the inmate infirmary. After that, he…
Henryk Tauber (aka Fuchsbrunner; 8 July 1917 – 3 Jan. 2000) was a Polish Jew sent to the Auschwitz Camp in November 1942. He claimed to have been assigned to the Sonderkommando and worked as a furnace stoker first at the Main Camp’s crematorium, then in Crematorium II at the Birkenau Camp. Tauber made three…
If we take witness statements at face value, then we have to conclude that an astonishingly wide array of murder weapons is said to have been used for the mass murder of victims during the Holocaust. Apart from the obvious ones, such as simple starvation and disease to let people die from neglect, and bullets…
toothbrushes → Towels /
The company J.A. Topf & Söhne (Topf & Sons) of Erfurt, Germany, was established in 1878 with a focus on brewery equipment (malting plants). Prior to World War One, Topf & Sons expanded into the field of furnace manufacture. By the 1920, Topf & Sons had successfully expanded into the field of steam boilers, but…
A common thread running through many witness testimonies about homicidal gassings in German wartime camps is the claim that the perpetrators applied a ruse: telling their victims that, for hygienic and health reasons, they would have to take a shower before being admitted to a camp or before being transferred elsewhere. To make that lie…
Josef Trajtag was an inmate of the Sobibór Camp. In a deposition of 10 October 1945, he reported from hearsay that Sobibór had one gas chamber, where an unspecified gas was used for killings. After the murder, the floors opened, and the bodies were discharged into carts below, which brought them to mass graves. His…
In the context of the Third Reich, the term “transit camp” refers to camps that were not designed or equipped to accommodate inmates for an extended period of time. They served merely to send them on to other locations after a brief stop-over. This stop-over may have included issuing of food and some hygienic procedures…
Trawniki was a forced-labor camp located half way between the Belzec and Sobibór Camp. It was established in the fall of 1941. Some 20,000 Jewish inmates are said to have passed through this camp. The camp also served as a training facility for SS men, among them Soviet PoWs, most of them Ukrainians, who volunteered…
Documented History The Treblinka Camp near the river Bug was located some 50 miles northeast of Warsaw close to what used to be the German-Soviet demarcation line after the 1939 division of Poland between Germany and the USSR. As with Belzec and Sobibór, very few documents about Treblinka have surfaced after the war, but they…
Eugeniusz Turowski was a Polish Jew who was deported to the Treblinka Camp on 5 September 1942. He was interviewed by Polish judge Łukaszkiewicz on 7 October 1945. At the camp, he was assigned to the machine shops, where he helped build, repair and maintain that camp’s various machines and mechanical devices until the uprising…
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…
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