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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…
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…
Paul Rassinier (18 March 1906 – 28 July 1967) was a French high-school teacher. Born in Bermont, France, Rassinier joined the French Communist Party in 1922, at the age of only 16. In the course of time, however, Rassinier turned to pacifism and opposed the nationalization of private property advocated by the Communists, which is…
Walter Rauff (19 June 1906 – 14 May 1984), SS Standartenführer, headed Office II D of Germany’s Reich Security Main Office (Reichssicherheitshauptamt) since November 1940, which was dealing with technical matters. Subdepartment 3a of this office dealt with the Security Police’s motor pool and was headed by Friedrich Pradel. This office supposedly was in charge…
In May of 1939, a concentration camp for women was established near the town of Ravensbrück, some 90 km north of Berlin. It entered the stage of Holocaust historiography only after the war, when former inmates claimed during several show trials staged by the British that homicidal gas chambers had been built in that camp…
Mikhail Razgonayev was a Ukrainian auxiliary who served at the Sobibór Camp as a guard from beginning to end. After the war, he was arrested for this by the Soviets. During his interrogation on 20-21 September 1948, Razgonayev described the gas-chamber facility as a stone/concrete building with a corridor on one side and four gas…
Since the Geneva Convention of 1929 only covered prisoners of war, the Third-Reich authorities consistently denied the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) access to its concentration camps. This changed only toward the end of the war, when the German authorities realized that they could no longer maintain the camps due to Germany’s collapsing…
Rudolf Reder (aka Roman Robak, 4 April 1881 – 6 Oct. 1977) was a Polish Jew from Lviv who was deported to the Belzec Camp in July or August 1942 at age 61 – which should have been his death sentence. But he miraculously was selected to live and work there as a stove mechanic…
Long-term starvation results in the human body switching from processing food ingested through the gastrointestinal system to depleting internal resources (body fat and muscle protein). The body literally eats itself. This drastic metabolic change, together with the depletion of most electrolytes, leads to numerous imbalances which make it difficult for the body to process normal…
The Third Reich’s term Reichssicherheitshauptamt (RSHA) translates to Imperial National or simply Homeland Security Main Office. It was established in 1939 and merged Germany’s police forces (Gestapo and ordinary police) and the SS intelligence-gathering service Sicherheitsdienst (Security Service) into one governmental body. This office was directly subordinate to the Chief of the German Police Heinrich…
For many centuries, it was dangerous to state in public that God does not exist, that Jesus is not God’s son, that he was not born of a virgin, and that he did not rise to the heavens. Today, saying these things is trivial. However, a similar reaction to what was earned for these statements…
Jean-Paul Renard was a French priest who was deported to the Buchenwald Camp in 1942. After the war, a collection of poems by him was published titled Chaines et lumières (Chains and Lights). In an appendix to his own work, he wrote about his experience at Buchenwald, where we read: “I saw going into the…
Resettlement in Documents National-Socialist Germany wanted its Jews to leave the country. Great efforts were made both to put Jews under all kinds of social, legal and economic pressure, making life miserable for them in Germany, and to give them incentives in case they emigrated. But when the war broke out, there were less and…
Emanuel Ringelblum (21 Nov. 1900 – 10? March 1944) was a Polish Jew who was forced to live in the Warsaw Ghetto during World War II. He organized an intelligence-gathering organization in the Ghetto named “Oneg Szabat.” It gathered documents and recorded witness testimonies, among them some from individuals who claimed to have escaped from…
André Rogerie (25 Dec. 1921 – 1 May 2014) was a member of the French resistance who got arrested in July 1943 and sent to various camps. He arrived at Auschwitz on 14 April 1944 via the Majdanek Camp. He remained at the camp until its evacuation on 18 January 1945. Back home he wrote…
Adolf Rögner was an incorrigible, pathological liar with multiple convictions for swindling, forgery and perjury, both before and after the war. Because of his status as “incorrigible,” he spent time as a criminal at the Auschwitz Camp, where he was deployed as an inmate electrician. After the war, he was convicted again for similar offenses….
Romania never deported any Jews to German camps, but when reconquering Moldova and Transnistria from the Soviet Union in 1941 with German help, pogroms against the local Jews broke out. The Jews were suspected by the Romanians and locals that they had collaborated with the Stalinist occupants. The Romanian authorities exacerbated the situation by deporting…
Alfred Rosenberg was born on 12 January 1893 to ethnic-German parents in Reval (today’s Tallinn), Estonia. He went on to study architecture and engineering in Moscow, eventually earning a PhD in early 1918. Following the Russian and Bolshevist Revolutions of 1917 and 1918, he moved to Munich, Germany. In January 1919, eight months prior to…
Eliyahu (also Ela, Elias) Rosenberg was a Polish Jew deported to the Treblinka Camp on 20 August 1942. He made a deposition in front of the Historical Commission of Warsaw, probably in 1945, which was recorded in very bad French and is barely comprehensible. It only mentions in passing that he had to drag corpses…
Herman Rosenblat (1929 – 5 Feb. 2015) was a Polish Jew who was deported from the Warsaw Ghetto to a subcamp of the Buchenwald Camp, then shortly before the war’s end to the Theresienstadt Ghetto, where he was liberated. Having gotten into serious financial difficulties in the 1990s, he decided to write down his wartime…
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