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Sachsenhausen

Sachsenhausen is the name of a district of the city of Oranienburg, some 19 miles north of Berlin. The SS had their headquarters in Oranienburg. In July 1936, a concentration camp was erected right next to the headquarters and named after that city district. Orthodox sources state that some 600 inmates died in the camp…

Sackar, Josef

Josef Sackar was deported from Greece to Auschwitz, where he arrived on 11 April 1944. He testified about his alleged experiences only in the 1980s when interviewed by Israeli historian Gideon Greif. His interview is therefore inevitably contaminated with elements picked up during some 40 years of exposure to a one-sided narrative. In this interview,…

Sadowska, Rajzla

Rajzla Sadowska was a Polish Jew deported to Auschwitz. During the investigations leading up to the Frankfurt Auschwitz show trial, she testified that at one point while at Auschwitz, she suffered such a serious work-related accident that she could not work anymore. She feared “selection” and then gassing, but instead she was taken to the…

Saunas

Saunas (steam baths) are a Finish invention to boost the human immune system by alternating exposure to high heat and humidity to let the sweat wash out skin impurities, with cold showers followed by dips into cold-water pools afterwards. This method spread to Germany during World War II, and from there to the entire world….

Saurer Company

For many decades, the Swiss Saurer Company was leading in the development of truck Diesel engines. They furthermore had branches in Austria and France. By the time the Second World War broke out, the Swiss and Austrian branches equipped their trucks exclusively with Diesel engines, while the French branch phased out the last gasoline-engine trucks…

Schellekes, Maurice

Maurice Schellekes wrote a brief report in Israel in 1981, almost 40 years after his claimed experiences at Auschwitz, hence inevitably contaminated with elements picked up during those decades. He even mentioned that events at Auschwitz have been described “in so many papers and books” that they need not be repeated. His motivation to write…

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Schelvis, Jules

Jules Schelvis was a Dutch Jew who was deported to the Sobibór Camp on 1 June 1943. As he stated in a deposition in Amsterdam on 21 January 1946, this camp served as a transit camp for him: After he had arrived there, he was selected to join a group of 80 deportees who, after…

Schindler’s List, movie

The 1993 movie Schindler’s List, directed by Jewish-American director Steven Spielberg, is loosely based on Thomas Keneally’s novel Schindler’s Arc. The imprint of the 1982 edition of this book states: “This book is a work of fiction. Names, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to…

Schwarz, Deszö

Deszö Schwarz was an Austrian Jew deported to Auschwitz in late 1943. He spent two months in quarantine there. After the war, he made an undated deposition at Nuremberg that received the document number NO-2310. In it, Schwarz stated that Birkenau had four identical crematoria, each with underground “gassing bunkers,” even though that was true…

Schwarzbart, Ignacy

Ignacy Schwarzbart was a member of the Polish National Council. He reworded and spread reports received by the Polish government in exile in London from the Polish underground about mass executions at the Belzec Camp using electrocution chambers, which is rejected as untrue by all historians today. Schwarzbart’s reports were subsequently spread by major Jewish…

Schwela, Siegfried

Siegfried Schwela (3 May 1905 – 10 May 1942), SS Hauptsturmführer, was a camp physician at Auschwitz from August 1941. He became the garrison physician of that camp on 21 March 1942. Under his healthcare leadership, sanitary and health conditions in the camp deteriorated to such a degree that in particular typhus became rampant not…

Sehn, Jan

In the years 1945 through 1947, Jan Sehn (22 April 1909 – 12 Dec. 1965) was a Polish investigative judge and a member of the Polish Central Commission for the Investigation of German Crimes in Poland. He took over the investigations concerning events at the former Auschwitz camp complex from the Soviets in the spring…

Seidenwurm Wrzos, Mary

Mary Seidenwurm Wrzos was a Polish Jewess who claims to have been incarcerated at the Majdanek Camp during the war. After the war, she emigrated to Sweden, where a book about her alleged experiences was published in 1945 in Stockholm titled De dödsdömda vittnar (The Doomed Bear Witness, edited by Gunhild and Einar Tegen). We…

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Selections

“Selection” is a term used by witnesses and postwar historical accounts about the alleged process whereby German wartime-camp officials picked out inmates presumably unfit for work or otherwise deemed unworthy of living. The supposed aim was to murder these inmates either in gas chambers (large batches of inmates) or by way of individual executions, prominent among…

Self-Immolating Bodies

After several cases were reported where the bodies of deceased individuals had slowly burned to a large degree, investigations into the phenomenon have revealed that, under highly unusual circumstances, large parts of a human body can indeed burn almost to ashes without any fuel. These cases are usually initiated by small fires such as candles…

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Semlin

The Semlin Camp, which the Serbs call Sajmište Camp, was located in Serbia’s capital Belgrade near the banks of the Sava River close to where it flows into the Danube River. According to the orthodox narrative, some 7,000 Serbian Jews are said to have been killed by German occupational forces in early 1942 in the…

Shanghai

Within the context of the Holocaust, the Chinese city of Shanghai played a role prior to and during the war as a temporary safe haven and transit stopover for some 20,000 Jews fleeing Europe and the Soviet Union. The reason for this is that Shanghai did not require any visas for Jews to enter and…

Sheftel, Yoram

After John Demjanjuk’s first defense lawyer, Dov Eitan, had been assassinated the day before Demjanjuk’s appeal trial before the Jerusalem Court of Appeals was to start, Demjanjuk’s second lawyer Yoram Sheftel was attacked during Eitan’s funeral: someone threw acid into his face which almost made him blind (Sheftel 1994, pp. 243-263).

Shoes of Deportees

Both the Auschwitz Museum and the Majdanek Museum have an exhibit on display showing what are said to be the shoes of former camp inmates. (See the illustrations.) The shoes of Majdanek used to be piled up in a barracks, where the Soviets photographed them in the summer of 1944. They presented these photographs as…

Show Trials

Calling a legal proceeding a “show trial” amounts to accusing the involved judiciary of not playing by the rules of a fair trial. The degree of unfairness can vary, of course. The following are some of the features that distinguish show trials from normal, fair trials. The more of them are that are present, the…

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Showers

Fake Showers Many witnesses claimed that deportees slated for homicidal gassings were told by SS men or their helpers that, in order to be admitted to the camp, they needed to have their clothes laundered and disinfested, and they themselves had to take a shower. This, it is frequently claimed, was a deception, so the…

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Shrunken Heads, Myth of

At the Buchenwald Camp shortly after its occupation by U.S. American troops in April 1945, the U.S. Armed Forces’ Psychological Warfare Division (PWD) set up a table displaying items meant to prove National-Socialist atrocities. For “educational” purposes, the local population was forced to walk by this table and hear a U.S. official in uniform explain…

Silberschein, Abraham

Abraham Silberschein was a member of the Polish parliament, a delegate of the World Jewish Congress and a member of the Committee for Assistance to the Suffering Jews in the Occupied Countries. As such, he collected witness testimonies about the alleged extermination of Jews in occupied Poland, which he published in Geneva in 1944 in…

Simpson, Gordon

Gordon Simpson (30 Oct. 1894 – 13 February 1987) was a justice of the Supreme Court of Texas from January 1945 until September 1949. Together with Edward van Roden, at that time Chief of U.S. Military Justice in Europe, Simpson was appointed in 1948 to an extraordinary commission. This commission was charged with investigating claims…

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