1.
Poison
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In biology, poisons are substances that cause disturbances in organisms, usually by chemical reaction or other activity on the molecular scale, when an organism absorbs a sufficient quantity. The fields of medicine and zoology often distinguish a poison from a toxin, toxins are poisons produced by organisms in nature, and venoms are toxins injected by a bite or sting. The difference between venom and other poisons is the delivery method, industry, agriculture, and other sectors use poisons for reasons other than their toxicity. Pesticides are one group of substances whose toxicity to various insects, in 2013,3.3 million cases of unintentional poisonings occurred. This resulted in 98,000 deaths worldwide, down from 120,000 deaths in 1990, the use of poison as an adjective dates from the 1520s. Using the word poison with plant names dates from the 18th century, the term poison ivy, for example, was first used in 1784 and the term poison oak was first used in 1743. The term poison gas was first used in 1915, paracelsus, the father of toxicology, once wrote, Everything is poison, there is poison in everything. Only the dose makes a thing not a poison, the term poison is also used in a figurative sense, His brothers presence poisoned the atmosphere at the party. The law defines poison more strictly, substances not legally required to carry the label poison can also cause a medical condition of poisoning. Some poisons are also toxins, which is any poison produced by animals, vegetables or bacterium, such as the proteins that cause tetanus. A distinction between the two terms is not always observed, even among scientists, the derivative forms toxic and poisonous are synonymous. Animal poisons delivered subcutaneously are also called venom, in normal usage, a poisonous organism is one that is harmful to consume, but a venomous organism uses venom to kill its prey or defend itself while still alive. A single organism can be poisonous and venomous, but that is rare. Human antimicrobial peptides which are toxic to viruses, fungi, bacteria, in nuclear physics, a poison is a substance that obstructs or inhibits a nuclear reaction. For an example, see nuclear poison, environmentally hazardous substances are not necessarily poisons, and vice versa. Biologically speaking, any substance, if given in large amounts, is poisonous. For instance, several kilograms worth of water would constitute a lethal dose, many substances used as medications—such as fentanyl—have an LD50 only one order of magnitude greater than the ED50. An alternative classification distinguishes between lethal substances that provide a value and those that do not
2.
The Holocaust
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The Holocaust, also referred to as the Shoah, was a genocide in which some six million European Jews were killed by Adolf Hitlers Nazi Germany, and the World War II collaborators with the Nazis. The victims included 1.5 million children, and represented about two-thirds of the nine million Jews who had resided in Europe, killings took place throughout German-occupied Europe, as well as within Nazi Germany, and across all territories controlled by its allies. Other victims of Nazi crimes included ethnic Poles and other Slavs, Soviet citizens and Soviet POWs, communists, homosexuals, Freemasons, Jehovahs Witnesses, some 42,500 detention facilities were utilized in the concentration of victims for the purpose of gross violations of human rights. Over 200,000 people are estimated to have been Holocaust perpetrators, the persecution was carried out in stages, culminating in the policy of extermination of European Jews termed the Final Solution to the Jewish Question. Following Hitlers rise to power, the German government passed laws to exclude Jews from civil society, starting in 1933 the Nazis began to establish a network of concentration camps. After the outbreak of war in 1939 both German and foreign Jews were herded into wartime ghettos, in 1941, as Germany began to conquer new territory in the East, all anti-Jewish measures radicalized. Specialized paramilitary units called Einsatzgruppen murdered around two million Jews in mass shootings actions in less than a year, by mid-1942, victims were being regularly transported by freight trains to extermination camps where, if they survived the journey, most were systematically killed in gas chambers. This continued until the end of World War II in Europe in April–May 1945, the most notable exception was the Warsaw Ghetto uprising of 1943, when thousands of poorly-armed Jewish fighters held the Waffen-SS at bay for four weeks. An estimated 20, 000–30,000 Jewish partisans actively fought against the Nazis, French Jews took part in the French Resistance, which conducted a guerilla campaign against the Nazis and Vichy French authorities. Over a hundred armed Jewish uprisings took place, the term holocaust comes from the Greek adjective holókaustos, a variant of holókautos, referring to an animal sacrifice offered to a god in which the whole animal is completely burnt. Often used substantively in apposition with the noun thysia, the term appears in a fragment of pseudo-Callisthenes, writing in Latin, Jerome Latinized the Greek word as a neuter noun holocaustum, using it to translate references to the Jewish burnt offering in his translations of Exodus and Leviticus. In his Chronicon de rebus gestis Ricardi Primi, Richard of Devizes, the English poet John Milton had used the word to denote a conflagration in his 1671 poem Samson Agonistes and the word gradually developed to mean a massacre thereon. The term was used in the 1950s by historians as a translation of the Jewish word shoah to refer specifically to the Nazi genocide of Jews, the television mini-series Holocaust is credited with introducing the term into common parlance after 1978. The biblical word shoah, meaning calamity became the standard Hebrew term for the Holocaust as early as the 1940s, especially in Europe and Israel. Shoah is preferred by some Jews for several reasons including the offensive nature of the word holocaust which they take to refer to the Greek pagan custom. The Nazis used the phrase Final Solution to the Jewish Question, all branches of Germanys bureaucracy were engaged in the logistics that led to the genocides, turning the Third Reich into what one Holocaust scholar, Michael Berenbaum, has called a genocidal state. Every arm of the countrys sophisticated bureaucracy was involved in the killing process, as prisoners entered the death camps, they were made to surrender all personal property, which was catalogued and tagged before being sent to Germany to be reused or recycled. Berenbaum writes that the Final Solution of the Jewish question was in the eyes of the perpetrators, through a concealed account, the German National Bank helped launder valuables stolen from the victims
3.
Nazi Germany
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Nazi Germany is the common English name for the period in German history from 1933 to 1945, when Germany was governed by a dictatorship under the control of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party. Under Hitlers rule, Germany was transformed into a fascist state in which the Nazi Party took totalitarian control over all aspects of life. The official name of the state was Deutsches Reich from 1933 to 1943, the period is also known under the names the Third Reich and the National Socialist Period. The Nazi regime came to an end after the Allied Powers defeated Germany in May 1945, Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany by the President of the Weimar Republic Paul von Hindenburg on 30 January 1933. The Nazi Party then began to eliminate all opposition and consolidate its power. Hindenburg died on 2 August 1934, and Hitler became dictator of Germany by merging the powers and offices of the Chancellery, a national referendum held 19 August 1934 confirmed Hitler as sole Führer of Germany. All power was centralised in Hitlers person, and his word became above all laws, the government was not a coordinated, co-operating body, but a collection of factions struggling for power and Hitlers favour. In the midst of the Great Depression, the Nazis restored economic stability and ended mass unemployment using heavy military spending, extensive public works were undertaken, including the construction of Autobahnen. The return to economic stability boosted the regimes popularity, racism, especially antisemitism, was a central feature of the regime. The Germanic peoples were considered by the Nazis to be the purest branch of the Aryan race, millions of Jews and other peoples deemed undesirable by the state were murdered in the Holocaust. Opposition to Hitlers rule was ruthlessly suppressed, members of the liberal, socialist, and communist opposition were killed, imprisoned, or exiled. The Christian churches were also oppressed, with many leaders imprisoned, education focused on racial biology, population policy, and fitness for military service. Career and educational opportunities for women were curtailed, recreation and tourism were organised via the Strength Through Joy program, and the 1936 Summer Olympics showcased the Third Reich on the international stage. Propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels made effective use of film, mass rallies, the government controlled artistic expression, promoting specific art forms and banning or discouraging others. Beginning in the late 1930s, Nazi Germany made increasingly aggressive territorial demands and it seized Austria and Czechoslovakia in 1938 and 1939. Hitler made a pact with Joseph Stalin and invaded Poland in September 1939. In alliance with Italy and smaller Axis powers, Germany conquered most of Europe by 1940, reichskommissariats took control of conquered areas, and a German administration was established in what was left of Poland. Jews and others deemed undesirable were imprisoned, murdered in Nazi concentration camps and extermination camps, following the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, the tide gradually turned against the Nazis, who suffered major military defeats in 1943
4.
Genocide
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Genocide is intentional action to destroy a people in whole or in part. The hybrid word genocide is a combination of the Greek word génos, the United Nations Genocide Convention, which was established in 1948, defines genocide as acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group. The term genocide was coined in a 1943 book responding to mass murder of populations in the 20th century, in 1943, Raphael Lemkin created the term genocide in his book Axis Rule in Occupied Europe. The book describes the implementation of Nazi policies in occupied Europe, the term described the systematic destruction of a nation or people, and the word was quickly adopted by many in the international community. The word genocide is the combination of the Greek prefix geno-, Lemkin defined genocide as follows, Generally speaking, genocide does not necessarily mean the immediate destruction of a nation, except when accomplished by mass killings of all members of a nation. The preamble to the 1948 Genocide Convention notes that instances of genocide have taken place throughout history. Lemkins lifelong interest in the murder of populations in the 20th century was initially in response to the killing of Armenians in 1915. He dedicated his life to mobilizing the international community, to together to prevent the occurrence of such events. In a 1949 interview, Lemkin said I became interested in genocide because it happened so many times and it happened to the Armenians, then after the Armenians, Hitler took action. In 1948, the UN General Assembly adopted the Convention on the Prevention, the CPPCG was adopted by the UN General Assembly on 9 December 1948 and came into effect on 12 January 1951. The USSR argued that the Conventions definition should follow the etymology of the term, and may have feared greater international scrutiny of its own Great Purge. Other nations feared that including political groups in the definition would invite international intervention in domestic politics. ”The conventions purpose and scope was later described by the United Nations Security Council as follows, In 2007 the European Court of Human Rights, noted in its judgement on Jorgic v. In the same judgement the ECHR reviewed the judgements of several international and municipal courts judgements, in the case of Onesphore Rwabukombe the German Supreme Court adhered to its previous judgement and didnt follow the narrow interpretation of the ICTY and the ICJ. The phrase in whole or in part has been subject to discussion by scholars of international humanitarian law. The International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia found in Prosecutor v. Radislav Krstic – Trial Chamber I – Judgment – IT-98-33 ICTY8 that Genocide had been committed. The aim of the Genocide Convention is to prevent the destruction of entire human groups. The Appeals Chamber goes into details of other cases and the opinions of respected commentators on the Genocide Convention to explain how they came to this conclusion. The judges continue in paragraph 12, The determination of when the part is substantial enough to meet this requirement may involve a number of considerations
5.
North Korea
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North Korea, officially the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea, is a country in East Asia, constituting the northern part of the Korean Peninsula. Pyongyang is both the capital as well as its largest city. To the north and northwest the country is bordered by China and by Russia along the Amnok, the country is bordered to the south by South Korea, with the heavily fortified Korean Demilitarized Zone separating the two. Negotiations on reunification failed, and in 1948 two separate governments were formed, the communist Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea in the north, an invasion initiated by North Korea led to the Korean War. The Korean Armistice Agreement brought about a ceasefire, and no peace treaty was ever signed. North Korea officially describes itself as a self-reliant socialist state and formally holds elections, critics regard it as a totalitarian dictatorship. Various outlets have called it Stalinist, particularly noting the elaborate cult of personality around Kim Il-sung, International organizations have assessed human rights violations in North Korea as belonging to a category of their own, with no parallel in the contemporary world. Over time, North Korea has gradually distanced itself from the world communist movement, Juche, an ideology of national self-reliance, was introduced into the constitution as a creative application of Marxism–Leninism in 1972. The means of production are owned by the state through state-run enterprises, most services such as healthcare, education, housing and food production are subsidized or state-funded. From 1994 to 1998, North Korea suffered from a famine that resulted in the deaths of between 0.24 and 3.5 million people, and the continues to struggle with food production. North Korea follows Songun, or military-first policy and it is the country with the highest number of military and paramilitary personnel, with a total of 9,495,000 active, reserve, and paramilitary personnel. Its active duty army of 1.21 million is the fourth largest in the world, after China, North Korea is an atheist state with no official religion and where public religion is discouraged. The name Korea derives from the name Goryeo, the name Goryeo itself was first used by the ancient kingdom of Goguryeo in the 5th century as a shortened form of its name. The 10th-century kingdom of Goryeo succeeded Goguryeo, and thus inherited its name, the modern spelling of Korea first appeared in the late 17th century in the travel writings of the Dutch East India Companys Hendrick Hamel. After the division of the country into North and South Korea, the two sides used different terms to refer to Korea, Chosun or Joseon in North Korea, in 1948, North Korea adopted Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea as its new legal name. After the First Sino-Japanese War and the Russo-Japanese War, Korea was occupied by Japan, Japan tried to suppress Korean traditions and culture and ran the economy primarily for its own benefit. Korean resistance groups known as Dongnipgun operated along the Sino-Korean border, some of them took part in allied action in China and parts of South East Asia. One of the leaders was the communist Kim Il-sung, who later became the leader of North Korea
6.
Extermination camp
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This genocide of the Jewish people of Europe was the Third Reichs Final Solution to the Jewish question. It is now known as the Holocaust. In 1941, the experience gained in the killing of these hospital patients led to the creation of extermination camps for the implementation of the Final Solution. By then, the Jews were already confined to new ghettos and interned in Nazi concentration camps along with other targeted groups, including Roma, and the Soviet POWs. The Nazi Endlösung der Judenfrage, based on the killing of Europes Jews by gassing, began during Operation Reinhard. Responsibility for the logistics were to be executed by the programme administrator, notably, the order preceded the Wannsee Conference by three months, but the gassings at Kulmhof north of Łódź using gas vans began already in December, under Sturmbannführer Herbert Lange. The camp at Bełżec was operational by March 1942, with leadership brought in from Germany under the guise of Organisation Todt, Auschwitz concentration camp was fitted with brand new gassing bunkers in March 1942. Majdanek had them built in September, todeslagers were designed specifically for the systematic killing of people delivered en masse by the Holocaust trains. The executioners did not expect the prisoners to more than a few hours beyond arrival at Belzec, Sobibór. The Jewish men, women and children were delivered from the ghettos for special treatment in an atmosphere of terror by uniformed police battalions from both, Orpo and Schupo. From March 1936, all Nazi concentration camps were managed by the SS-Totenkopfverbände, who operated extermination camps from 1941 as well. An SS anatomist, Dr. Johann Kremer, after witnessing the gassing of victims at Birkenau, wrote in his diary on 2 September 1942 and they dont call Auschwitz the camp of annihilation for nothing. The distinction was evident during the Nuremberg trials, when Dieter Wisliceny was asked to name the extermination camps, then, when asked How do you classify the camps Mauthausen, Dachau, and Buchenwald. He replied, They were normal concentration camps, from the point of view of the department of Eichmann, irrespective of round-ups for extermination camps, the Nazis abducted millions of foreigners for slave labour in other types of camps, which provided perfect cover for the extermination programme. Prisoners represented about a quarter of the workforce of the Reich, with mortality rates exceeding 75 percent due to starvation, disease, exhaustion, executions. On top of that, the new death camps outside the borders of the Third Reich proper could be kept secret from the German civil populace. The killing method was based on experience gained by the SS during the secretive Aktion T4 programme of involuntary euthanasia, there were two types of death chambers operating during the Holocaust. The three killing centres of Einsatz Reinhard were constructed predominantly for the extermination of Polands Jews trapped in the Nazi ghettos
7.
Criticism of Holocaust denial
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The methodologies of Holocaust deniers has been criticized as being based on a predetermined conclusion that ignores extensive historical evidence to the contrary. The claims of deniers are grounded in flawed research, biased statements, courts of law have also rejected Holocaust denial claims and passed several laws against holocaust denial in 14 European countries. The Nizkor Project, a group opposed to Holocaust denial claims, in a letter dated 1919 Hitler mentions that an unshakable aim of a strong national government must be the removal of the Jews. In a speech on 30 January 1942, Hitler repeated his prophecy of 1939 and he war will not end as the Jews imagine it will, namely with the uprooting of the Aryans, but the result of this war will be the complete annihilation of the Jews. Now for the first time they will not bleed other people to death, but for the first time the old Jewish law of an eye for an eye, and -- world Jewry may as well know this -- the further these battles spread, the more anti-Semitism will spread. It will find nourishment in every camp and in every family when it discovers the ultimate reason for the sacrifices it has to make. And the hour will come when the most evil universal enemy of all time will be finished and this process is of vast importance, and will have unforeseeable consequences that will require time. But it can no longer be halted and it must only be guided in the right direction. Nevertheless, and in contrast to the T4 euthanasia program, no document written or signed by Hitler ordering the Holocaust has ever been found, deniers have claimed that this lack of order shows genocide was not Nazi policy. Mr Justice Gray concluded that this was a double standard, heinrich Himmler instructed his camp commandants to destroy records, crematoria, and other signs of mass extermination. As one of examples, the bodies of the 25,000 mostly Latvian Jews whom Friedrich Jeckeln. Similar operations were undertaken at Belzec, Treblinka and other death camps and we can now very openly talk about this among ourselves, and yet we will never discuss this publicly. Let us thank God that we had within us enough self-evident fortitude never to discuss it among us, every one of us was horrified, and yet every one clearly understood that we would do it next time, when the order is given and when it becomes necessary. I am now referring to the evacuation of the Jews, to the extermination of the Jewish people, historian Peter Longerich states that Hitler. avoided giving a clear written order to exterminate Jewish civilians. Wide protest was evoked when Hitlers authorisation of the T4 program became public knowledge in Germany and this made Hitler realise that such undertakings must be done secretly in order to avoid criticism. Critics also point out that if Hitler did sign such an order in the first place, many statements from the Nazis from 1941 onwards addressed the imminent extermination of the Jews. When speaking about this document under oath, David Irving is quoted as saying There is no explicit reference, David Cole has previously stated that those who consider themselves revisionists have yet to provide an adequate explanation of this document. When questioned by interrogators if orders for the extermination of Jews were delegated in writing by Himmler, Adolf Eichmann states, I never saw a written order, all I know is that Heydrich said to me, The Führer has ordered the physical extermination of the Jews
8.
Prussian blue
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Prussian blue is a dark blue pigment with the idealized chemical formula Fe 718. To better understand the situation in this complex compound the formula can also be written as Fe 43 · xH 2O. Another name for the color is Berlin blue or, in painting, Turnbulls blue is the same substance, but is made from different reagents, and its slightly different color stems from different impurities. Prussian blue was the first modern synthetic pigment and it is employed as a very fine colloidal dispersion, as the compound itself is not soluble in water. It is famously complex, owing to the presence of variable amounts of other ions, the pigment is used in paints, and it is the traditional blue in blueprints. In medicine, Prussian blue is used as an antidote for certain kinds of metal poisoning, e. g. by thallium. In particular it was used to absorb 137Cs+ from those poisoned in the Goiânia accident, the therapy exploits Prussian blues ion exchange properties and high affinity for certain soft metal cations. It is on the World Health Organizations List of Essential Medicines, Prussian blue lent its name to prussic acid, which was derived from it. In Germany, hydrogen cyanide is called Blausäure, and Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac gave cyanide its name, from the Greek word κυανός, because it is easily made, cheap, nontoxic, and intensely colored, Prussian blue has attracted many applications. It was adopted as a pigment very soon after its invention and was almost immediately used in oil, watercolor. The dominant uses are for pigments, about 12,000 tonnes of Prussian blue are produced annually for use in black, a variety of other pigments also contain the material. Engineers blue and the pigment formed on cyanotypes—giving them their common name blueprints, certain crayons were once colored with Prussian blue. It is also a popular pigment in paints, similarly, Prussian blue is the basis for laundry bluing. Prussian blues ability to incorporate monocations makes it useful as a agent for certain heavy metal poisons. Pharmaceutical-grade Prussian blue in particular is used for people who have ingested thallium or radioactive caesium, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency, an adult male can eat at least 10 g of Prussian blue per day without serious harm. The U. S. Prussian blue is a common stain used by pathologists to detect the presence of iron in biopsy specimens. The original stain formula, known historically as Perls Prussian blue after its inventor, German pathologist Max Perls, used separate solutions of potassium ferrocyanide, iron deposits in tissue then form the purple Prussian blue dye in place, and are visualized as blue or purple deposits. The formula is known as Perls Prussian blue and as Perls Prussian blue
9.
Aktion T4
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Aktion T4 was the postwar designation for a programme of involuntary euthanasia in Nazi Germany. Under the programme certain German physicians were authorized to select patients deemed incurably sick, after most critical medical examination, about half of the victims were from church-run asylums. Several reasons for the programme have been offered, including eugenics, compassion, reducing suffering, racial hygiene, cost effectiveness and pressure on the welfare budget. After the nominal end of the programme, physicians in German and Austrian facilities continued many of the practices of Aktion T4, the unofficial continuation of the policy led to additional deaths by medicine and similar means, resulting in 93,521 beds emptied by the end of 1941. The technology, personnel and techniques developed were instrumental in the implementation of Nazi genocides, the term Aktion T4 came into use after the war, before that German terminology included Euthanasie and Gnadentod. The euthanasia programme was part of the evolution of the policy of murder that culminated in the extermination of Jews of Europe during the Holocaust. In his book Mein Kampf, Hitler wrote that one day racial hygiene, the idea of sterilising those carrying hereditary defects or exhibiting what was thought to be hereditary antisocial behaviour was widely accepted. Canada, Denmark, Switzerland and the US had passed laws for the sterilisation of people before Germany. Studies conducted in the 1920s ranked Germany as a country that was unusually reluctant to introduce sterilisation legislation, the policy and research agenda of racial hygiene and eugenics were promoted by Emil Kraepelin. Sterilisation was also legalised for chronic alcoholism and other forms of social deviance and it is estimated that 360,000 people were sterilised under this law between 1933 and 1939. In 1935, Hitler told the Leader of Reich Doctors, Gerhard Wagner and he wrote that he intended to radically solve the problem of the mental asylums in such an event. Although officially started in September 1939, Aktion T4 was initiated with a case in late 1938. Hitler instructed his personal physician, Karl Brandt, to evaluate a familys petition for the killing of their blind. The child, born near Leipzig and identified as Gerhard Kretschmar eventually, was killed in July 1939, Hitler instructed Brandt to proceed in the same manner in all similar cases. Three weeks after the killing of the boy, the Reich Committee for the Scientific Registering of Hereditary and it was to prepare and proceed with the registration of sick children or newborns identified as defective. Secret killing of infants began in 1939 and increased after the war started, by 1941 more than 5,000 children had been killed. Hitler was in favour of killing those whom he judged to be unworthy of life and this issue, according to the Nazi regime, assumed new urgency in wartime. The German eugenics movement had an extreme wing even before the Nazis came to power, as early as 1920, Alfred Hoche and Karl Binding advocated killing people whose lives were unworthy of life
10.
Operation Barbarossa
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Operation Barbarossa was the code name for Nazi Germanys invasion of the Soviet Union during World War II, which was launched on Sunday 22 June 1941. In the two leading up to the invasion, the two countries signed political and economic pacts for strategic purposes. Nevertheless, the German High Command began planning an invasion of the Soviet Union in July 1940, over the course of the operation, about four million Axis personnel invaded the western Soviet Union along a 2, 900-kilometer front, the largest invasion force in the history of warfare. In addition to troops, the Wehrmacht employed some 600,000 motor vehicles, the offensive marked an escalation of the war, both geographically and in the formation of the Allied coalition. Despite their successes, the German offensive stalled in the Battle of Moscow and was pushed back by the Soviet winter counteroffensive. The Red Army repelled the Wehrmachts strongest blows and forced the unprepared Germans into a war of attrition, the Wehrmacht would never again mount a simultaneous offensive along the entire strategic Soviet–Axis front. The failure of the operation drove Hitler to demand further operations of limited scope inside the Soviet Union, such as Case Blue. The failure of Operation Barbarossa proved a point in the fortunes of the Third Reich. Most importantly, the operation opened up the Eastern Front, in more forces were committed than in any other theater of war in world history. The German armies captured 5,000,000 Soviet prisoners of war who were not granted protections stipulated in the Geneva Conventions, a majority of them never returned alive. The Nazis deliberately starved 3.1 million of the prisoners to death as part of a Hunger Plan that aimed to reduce the population of Eastern Europe, over a million Soviet Jews were murdered by Einsatzgruppen death squads and gassing as part of the Holocaust. On 10 February 1939, Hitler told his commanders that the next war would be purely a war of Weltanschauungen. Totally a peoples war, a racial war, on 23 November, once World War II had already started, Hitler declared that racial war has broken out and this war shall determine who shall govern Europe, and with it, the world. The racial policy of Nazi Germany viewed the Soviet Union as populated by non-Aryan Untermenschen, Hitler claimed in Mein Kampf that Germanys destiny was to turn to the East as it did six hundred years ago. Accordingly, it was stated Nazi policy to kill, deport, or enslave the majority of Russian and other Slavic populations and repopulate the land with Germanic peoples, under the Generalplan Ost. Likening the Soviets to the forces of Genghis Khan, Hitler told Croatian military leader Slavko Kvaternik that the Mongolian race threatened Europe. Following the invasion, Wehrmacht officers told their soldiers to target people who were described as Jewish Bolshevik subhumans, the Mongol hordes, the Asiatic flood, German army commanders cast the Jews as the major cause behind the partisan struggle. The main guideline policy for German troops was Where theres a partisan, theres a Jew, many German troops viewed the war in Nazi terms and regarded their Soviet enemies as sub-human
11.
Exhaust gas
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Exhaust gas or flue gas is emitted as a result of the combustion of fuels such as natural gas, gasoline, petrol, biodiesel blends, diesel fuel, fuel oil, or coal. According to the type of engine, it is discharged into the atmosphere through an exhaust pipe, flue gas stack and it often disperses downwind in a pattern called an exhaust plume. A2013 study by MIT indicates that 53,000 early deaths occur per year in the United States alone because of vehicle emissions. According to another study from the university, traffic fumes alone cause the death of 5,000 people every year just in the United Kingdom. The largest part of most combustion gas is nitrogen, water vapor, and carbon dioxide, Exhaust gas temperature is important to the functioning of the catalytic converter of an internal combustion engine. It may be measured by an exhaust gas temperature gauge, EGT is also a measure of engine health in gas-turbine engines. During the first two minutes after starting the engine of a car that has not been operated for several hours, inefficient catalytic converter under cold conditions, Catalytic converters are very inefficient until up to their operating temperature. This time has much reduced by moving the converter closer to the exhaust manifold. The small converter handles the start-up emissions, which enough time for the larger main converter to heat up. Further improvements can be realised in many ways, including heating, thermal battery, chemical reaction preheating, flame heating. The requirements were phased in beginning with 2004 vehicles and all new cars, in spark-ignition engines the gases resulting from combustion of the fuel and air mix are called exhaust gases. The composition varies from petrol to diesel engines, but is around these levels, The 10% oxygen for diesel is likely if the engine was idling and it is much less if the engine is running under load. People exposed to it should wear a gas mask, in aircraft gas turbine engines, exhaust gas temperature is a primary measure of engine health. Typically the EGT is compared with an engine power indication called engine pressure ratio. For example, at full power EPR there will be a maximum permitted EGT limit, once an engine reaches a stage in its life where it reaches this EGT limit, the engine will require specific maintenance in order to rectify the problem. The amount the EGT is below the EGT limit is called EGT margin, the EGT margin of an engine will be greatest when the engine is new, or has been overhauled. For most airlines, this information is monitored remotely by the airline maintenance department by means of ACARS. In jet engines and rocket engines, exhaust from propelling nozzles which in some applications shows shock diamonds, Flue gas Flue gas emissions from fossil fuel combustion In steam engine terminology the exhaust is steam that is now so low in pressure that it can no longer do useful work
12.
Einsatzgruppen
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Einsatzgruppen were Schutzstaffel paramilitary death squads of Nazi Germany that were responsible for mass killings, primarily by shooting, during World War II. As ordered by Nazi leader Adolf Hitler, the Wehrmacht cooperated with the Einsatzgruppen, historian Raul Hilberg estimates that between 1941 and 1945 the Einsatzgruppen and related auxiliary troops killed more than two million people, including 1.3 million Jews. The total number of Jews murdered during the Holocaust is estimated at 5.5 to 6 million people, after the close of World War II,24 senior leaders of the Einsatzgruppen were prosecuted in the Einsatzgruppen Trial in 1947–48, charged with crimes against humanity and war crimes. Fourteen death sentences and two sentences were handed out. Four additional Einsatzgruppe leaders were tried and executed by other nations. The Einsatzgruppen were formed under the direction of SS-Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich and operated by the Schutzstaffel before, the Einsatzgruppen had its origins in the ad hoc Einsatzkommando formed by Heydrich to secure government buildings and documents following the Anschluss in Austria in March 1938. Originally part of the Sicherheitspolizei, two units of Einsatzgruppen were stationed in the Sudetenland in October 1938, when military action turned out not to be necessary due to the Munich Agreement, the Einsatzgruppen were assigned to confiscate government papers and police documents. They also secured government buildings, questioned senior civil servants, and arrested as many as 10,000 Czech communists, from September 1939, the Reichssicherheitshauptamt had overall command of the Einsatzgruppen. Action T4 mainly took place from 1939 to 1941, but the killings continued until the end of the war, initially the victims were shot by the Einsatzgruppen and others, but gas chambers were put into use by spring 1940. In response to Adolf Hitlers plan to invade Poland, Heydrich re-formed the Einsatzgruppen to travel in the wake of the German armies, membership at this point was drawn from the SS, the Sicherheitsdienst, and the police. Heydrich placed SS-Obergruppenführer Werner Best in command, who chose leaders for the forces and their subgroups, called Einsatzkommandos. Some had previously been members of groups such as the Freikorps. There must be no Polish leaders, where Polish leaders exist they must be killed, the Sonderfahndungsbuch Polen — lists of people to be killed — had been drawn up by the SS as early as May 1939. The Einsatzgruppen performed these murders with the support of the Volksdeutscher Selbstschutz, members of the SS, the Wehrmacht, and the Ordnungspolizei also shot civilians during the Polish campaign. Approximately 65,000 civilians were killed by the end of 1939, in addition to leaders of Polish society, they killed Jews, prostitutes, Romani people, and the mentally ill. Psychiatric patients in Poland were initially killed by shooting, but by spring 1941 gas vans were widely used, seven Einsatzgruppen of battalion strength operated in Poland. Each was subdivided into four Einsatzkommandos of company strength, many senior army officers were only too glad to leave these genocidal actions to the task forces, as the killings violated the rules of warfare as set down in the Geneva Conventions. However, Hitler had decreed that the army would have to tolerate, some army commanders complained about unauthorised shootings, looting, and rapes committed by members of the Einsatzgruppen and the Volksdeutscher Selbstschutz, to little effect
13.
Gas van
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A gas van or gas wagon was a vehicle equipped as a mobile gas chamber. The vehicle had a compartment for victims, into which exhaust fumes were transmitted while the engine was running. The victims were gassed with carbon monoxide, resulting in death by monoxide poisoning, the gas van was invented and used by the Soviet secret police NKVD in the late 1930s during the Great Purge. It was later implemented as an extermination method in Nazi Germany to kill those the regime deemed enemies of the state. But, when in Moscow Oblast there came to be three troikas having their sessions simultaneously, the executioners could not cope with the load. They hit upon a solution, to strip the victims naked, to tie them up, plug their mouths and throw them into a closed truck, during transportation the fuel gases went into the truck, and when delivered to the farthest ditch the arrestees were already dead. Note, Berg denied that he was the inventor of the gas van, during trips to Russia in 1941, Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler learned the psychological impact of shooting women and children on the Einsatzgruppen. Hence, he commissioned Arthur Nebe to explore ways of killing that were less stressful for the task forces, nebes experiments eventually led to the utilization of the gas van. This type of vehicle had already used in 1940 for the gassing of East Prussian and Pomeranian mental patients in Soldau. Another source states that the vans were first tested on Soviet prisoners in Sachsenhausen and it was a vehicle with an airtight compartment for victims, into which exhaust gas was piped in while the engine was running. As a result, the victims were gassed with carbon monoxide, resulting in death by the effects of carbon monoxide poisoning. The suffocations usually occurred as the gas van was carrying the victims to a freshly dug pit or ravine for mass burial, there were two types of gas vans in operation, used by the Einsatzgruppen in the East. The Opel-Blitz, weighing 3.5 tons, and the larger Saurerwagen, in Belgrade, the gas van was known as Dušegupka and in the occupied parts of the USSR similarly as душегубка. The use of gas vans had two disadvantages, It was slow—some victims took twenty minutes to die and it was not quiet—the drivers could hear the victims screams, which they found distracting and disturbing. By June 1942 the main producer of gas vans, Gaubschat Fahrzeugwerke GmbH, had delivered 20 gas vans in two models to Einsatzgruppen units, out of 30 ordered, not one gas van was extant at the end of the war. The existence of gas vans first came to light in 1943 during the trial of Nazi collaborators involved in the gassing of 6,700 civilians in Krasnodar, the total number of gas van gassings is unknown
14.
Jews
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The Jews, also known as the Jewish people, are an ethnoreligious group originating from the Israelites, or Hebrews, of the Ancient Near East. Jews originated as a national and religious group in the Middle East during the second millennium BCE, the Merneptah Stele appears to confirm the existence of a people of Israel, associated with the god El, somewhere in Canaan as far back as the 13th century BCE. The Israelites, as an outgrowth of the Canaanite population, consolidated their hold with the emergence of the Kingdom of Israel, some consider that these Canaanite sedentary Israelites melded with incoming nomadic groups known as Hebrews. The worldwide Jewish population reached a peak of 16.7 million prior to World War II, but approximately 6 million Jews were systematically murdered during the Holocaust. Since then the population has risen again, and as of 2015 was estimated at 14.3 million by the Berman Jewish DataBank. According to the report, about 43% of all Jews reside in Israel and these numbers include all those who self-identified as Jews in a socio-demographic study or were identified as such by a respondent in the same household. The exact world Jewish population, however, is difficult to measure, Israel is the only country where Jews form a majority of the population. The modern State of Israel was established as a Jewish state and defines itself as such in its Declaration of Independence and its Law of Return grants the right of citizenship to any Jew who requests it. The English word Jew continues Middle English Gyw, Iewe, according to the Hebrew Bible, the name of both the tribe and kingdom derive from Judah, the fourth son of Jacob. The Hebrew word for Jew, יְהוּדִי ISO 259-3 Yhudi, is pronounced, with the stress on the syllable, in Israeli Hebrew. The Ladino name is ג׳ודיו, Djudio, ג׳ודיוס, Djudios, Yiddish, ייִד Yid, ייִדן, Yidn. The etymological equivalent is in use in languages, e. g. but derivations of the word Hebrew are also in use to describe a Jew, e. g. in Italian. The German word Jude is pronounced, the corresponding adjective jüdisch is the origin of the word Yiddish, in such contexts Jewish is the only acceptable possibility. Some people, however, have become so wary of this construction that they have extended the stigma to any use of Jew as a noun, a factual reconstruction for the origin of the Jews is a difficult and complex endeavor. It requires examining at least 3,000 years of ancient human history using documents in vast quantities, as archaeological discovery relies upon researchers and scholars from diverse disciplines, the goal is to interpret all of the factual data, focusing on the most consistent theory. In this case, it is complicated by long standing politics and religious, Jacob and his family migrated to Ancient Egypt after being invited to live with Jacobs son Joseph by the Pharaoh himself. The patriarchs descendants were later enslaved until the Exodus led by Moses, traditionally dated to the 13th century BCE, Modern archaeology has largely discarded the historicity of the Patriarchs and of the Exodus story, with it being reframed as constituting the Israelites inspiring national myth narrative. The growth of Yahweh-centric belief, along with a number of practices, gradually gave rise to a distinct Israelite ethnic group
15.
Romani people
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The Romani are widely known among English-speaking people by the exonym Gypsies, which some people consider pejorative due to its connotations of illegality and irregularity. Romani are dispersed, with their populations in Europe – especially Central, Eastern and Southern Europe including Turkey, Spain. Since the 19th century, some Romani have also migrated to the Americas, there are an estimated one million Roma in the United States, and 800,000 in Brazil, most of whose ancestors emigrated in the nineteenth century from eastern Europe. Brazil also includes some Romani descended from people deported by the government of Portugal during the Inquisition in the colonial era, in migrations since the late nineteenth century, Romani have also moved to other countries in South America and to Canada. In February 2016, during the International Roma Conference, the Indian Minister of External Affairs stated that the people of the Roma community were children of India. The conference ended with a recommendation to the Government of India to recognize the Roma community spread across 30 countries as a part of the Indian diaspora, the Romani language is divided into several dialects, which add up to an estimated number of speakers larger than two million. The total number of Romani people is at least twice as large, many Romani are native speakers of the language current in their country of residence, or of mixed languages combining the two, those varieties are sometimes called Para-Romani. French bohème, bohémien, from the Kingdom of Bohemia, whence they came, Rom means man or husband in the Romani, it has the variants dom and lom, related with the Sanskrit words dam-pati, dama, lom, lomaka loman, roman. Another possible origin is from Sanskrit डोम doma, Sanskrit सिनधु is a river or stream of water in general. In particular, it denotes the river Indus and the country around it, in the Romani language, Rom is a masculine noun, meaning man of the Roma ethnic group or man, husband, with the plural Roma. The feminine of Rom in the Romani language is Romni, however, in most cases, in other languages Rom is now used for people of all genders. Romani is the adjective, while Romano is the masculine adjective. Some Romanies use Rom or Roma as a name, while others do not use this term as a self-ascription for the entire ethnic group. Sometimes, rom and romani are spelled with a r, i. e. rrom. In this case rr is used to represent the phoneme /ʀ/, the rr spelling is common in certain institutions, or used in certain countries, e. g. Romania, to distinguish from the endonym/homonym for Romanians. In the English language, Rom is a noun and an adjective, while Romani is also a noun, both Rom and Romani have been in use in English since the 19th century as an alternative for Gypsy. Romani was initially spelled Rommany, then Romany, while today the Romani spelling is the most popular spelling, occasionally, the double r spelling mentioned above is also encountered in English texts. The term Roma is increasingly encountered during recent decades, as a term for the Romani people
16.
Operation Reinhard
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The operation marked the deadliest phase of the Holocaust with the introduction of extermination camps. As many as two million Jews were sent to Bełżec, Sobibór, and Treblinka, extermination camps set up specifically for Operation Reinhard, the first concentration camps in Nazi Germany were established in 1933 as soon as the National Socialist regime developed. They were used for coercion, forced labour, and imprisonment, the camp system expanded dramatically with the onset of the Second World War, in 1939. The new network of Nazi concentration camps built by SS in Germany, Austria, Poland, some of the most notorious slave labour camps included Mauthausen, Dachau, Bergen-Belsen, Gross-Rosen, Ravensbrück, and Auschwitz, among other locations. The Nazis had decided to undertake the European-wide Final Solution to the Jewish Question in January 1942 during a meeting of German leaders called by Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich. The newly drafted Operation Reinhard would be a step in the systematic liquidation of the Jews in occupied Europe. Within months, three top-secret camps were solely to efficiently kill thousands of people each day. These camps differed from the likes of Auschwitz and Majdanek, because the latter operated as forced-labour camps initially, unlike mixed extermination camps, the extermination camps of Operation Reinhard took no prisoners and victims were killed on arrival. A very few survived by successfully escaping, the SS officers responsible for the Aktion T4, including Christian Wirth, Franz Stangl, and Irmfried Eberl, were all given key roles in the implementation of the Final Solution in 1942. The origin of the name is debated by Holocaust researchers. Various German documents spell the name differently, some with t after d, yet a different spelling was used in the Höfle Telegram. Heydrich was attacked by British-trained Czechoslovak agents on 27 May 1942, the earliest memo spelling out Einsatz Reinhard was relayed two months later. However, Höss theory cannot be proven by surviving documents, Heydrich himself had spelled his first name both Reinhard and Reinhardt throughout the 1930s according to Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler. Notably, the order preceded the Wannsee Conference by three months, the new camp was operational by March 1942, with leadership brought in from Germany under the guise of Organisation Todt. Globocnik was given control over the entire programme. Each death camp was managed by between 20 and 35 officers from the Totenkopfverbände sworn to secrecy, and augmented by the Aktion T4 personnel selected by Globocnik. The extermination program was designed by them based on experience from the forced euthanasia centres. The SS called their volunteer guards Hiwis, an abbreviation of Hilfswillige, according to the testimony of SS-Oberführer Arpad Wigand during his 1981 war crimes trial in Hamburg, only 25 percent of recruited collaborators could speak German
17.
Treblinka extermination camp
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Treblinka was an extermination camp, built and operated by Nazi Germany in occupied Poland during World War II. It was located in a forest north-east of Warsaw,4 kilometres south of the Treblinka train station in what is now the Masovian Voivodeship, the camp operated between 23 July 1942 and 19 October 1943 as part of Operation Reinhard, the deadliest phase of the Final Solution. During this time, it is estimated that between 700,000 and 900,000 Jews were killed in its gas chambers, along with 2,000 Romani people, more Jews were killed at Treblinka than at any other Nazi extermination camp apart from Auschwitz. Managed by the German SS and Trawnikis, the camp consisted of two separate units, Treblinka I was a forced-labour camp whose prisoners worked in the gravel pit or irrigation area and in the forest, where they cut wood to fuel the crematoria. Between 1941 and 1944, more than half of its 20,000 inmates died from summary executions, hunger, disease, the second camp, Treblinka II, was an extermination camp, or the Vernichtungslager in German, referred to euphemistically as the SS-Sonderkommando Treblinka by the Nazis. A small number of Jewish men who were not killed immediately upon arrival became its Jewish slave-labour units called Sonderkommandos and these bodies were exhumed in 1943 and cremated on large open-air pyres along with the bodies of new victims. Gassing operations at Treblinka II ended in October 1943 following a revolt by the Sonderkommandos in early August, several SS Hiwi guards were killed and 200 prisoners escaped from the camp, almost a hundred survived the subsequent chase. The camp was dismantled ahead of the Soviet advance, a farmhouse for a watchman was built on the site and the ground ploughed over in an attempt to hide the evidence of genocide. In postwar Poland, the government bought most of the land where the camp had stood, in 1964 Treblinka was declared a national monument of Jewish martyrology in a ceremony at the site of the former gas chambers. In the same year the first German trials were held regarding war crimes committed at Treblinka by former SS members, after the end of communism in Poland in 1989, the number of visitors coming to Treblinka from abroad increased. An exhibition centre at the camp opened in 2006 and it was later expanded and made into a branch of the Siedlce Regional Museum. Following the invasion of Poland in 1939 most of the 3.5 million Polish Jews were rounded up, the system was intended to isolate the Jews from the outside world in order to facilitate their exploitation and abuse. The supply of food was inadequate, living conditions were cramped and unsanitary, malnutrition and lack of medicine led to soaring mortality rates. The initial victories of the Wehrmacht over the Soviet Union inspired plans for the German colonisation of occupied Poland, including all territory within the General Government. At the Wannsee Conference held near Berlin on 20 January 1942, new plans were outlined for the genocide of the Jews, Treblinka was one of three secret extermination camps set up for Operation Reinhard, the other two were Bełżec and Sobibór. All three were equipped with gas chambers disguised as shower rooms, for the processing of entire transports of people, the lethal agent was established following a pilot project of mobile killing conducted at Soldau and Chełmno extermination camps that began operating in 1941 and used gas vans. Chełmno was a ground for the establishment of faster methods of killing and incinerating people. It was not a part of Reinhard, which was marked by the construction of facilities for mass murder
18.
Diesel engine
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Diesel engines work by compressing only the air. This increases the air temperature inside the cylinder to such a degree that it ignites atomised diesel fuel that is injected into the combustion chamber. This contrasts with spark-ignition engines such as an engine or gas engine. In diesel engines, glow plugs may be used to aid starting in cold weather, or when the engine uses a lower compression-ratio, the original diesel engine operates on the constant pressure cycle of gradual combustion and produces no audible knock. Low-speed diesel engines can have an efficiency that exceeds 50%. Diesel engines may be designed as either two-stroke or four-stroke cycles and they were originally used as a more efficient replacement for stationary steam engines. Since the 1910s they have used in submarines and ships. Use in locomotives, trucks, heavy equipment and electricity generation plants followed later, in the 1930s, they slowly began to be used in a few automobiles. Since the 1970s, the use of engines in larger on-road and off-road vehicles in the US increased. According to the British Society of Motor Manufacturing and Traders, the EU average for diesel cars accounts for 50% of the total sold, including 70% in France and 38% in the UK. The worlds largest diesel engine is currently a Wärtsilä-Sulzer RTA96-C Common Rail marine diesel, the definition of a Diesel engine to many has become an engine that uses compression ignition. To some it may be an engine that uses heavy fuel oil, to others an engine that does not use spark ignition. However the original cycle proposed by Rudolf Diesel in 1892 was a constant temperature cycle which would require higher compression than what is needed for compression ignition. Diesels idea was to compress the air so tightly that the temperature of the air would exceed that of combustion, to make this more clear, let it be assumed that the subsequent combustion shall take place at a temperature of 700°. Then in that case the pressure must be sixty-four atmospheres, or for 800° centigrade the pressure must be ninety atmospheres. In later years Diesel realized his original cycle would not work, Diesel describes the cycle in his 1895 patent application. Notice that there is no longer a mention of compression temperatures exceeding the temperature of combustion, now all that is mentioned is the compression must be high enough for ignition. In 1806 Claude and Nicéphore Niépce developed the first known internal combustion engine, the Pyréolophore fuel system used a blast of air provided by a bellows to atomize Lycopodium
19.
Fumigation
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Fumigation is a method of pest control that completely fills an area with gaseous pesticides—or fumigants—to suffocate or poison the pests within. It is used to control pests in buildings, soil, grain, and produce and this method also affects the structure itself, affecting pests that inhabit the physical structure, such as woodborers and drywood termites. If successful, the area is now safe and pest free. This process is called tent fumigation or tenting, the sealed tent concentrates the poisonous gases and prevents them from escaping into the neighborhood. The process can take up to a week depending on the fumigant used, which is in turn dependent on the temperature, methyl bromide was among the most widely used fumigants until its production and use was restricted by the Montreal Protocol due to its role in ozone depletion. Widely used fumigants include,1, 3-dichloropropene dazomet chloropicrin DBCP formaldehyde hydrogen cyanide iodoform methyl isocyanate phosphine sulfuryl fluoride Fumigation is a hazardous operation, post operation ventilation of the area is a critical safety aspect of fumigation. It is important to distinguish between the pack or source of the fumigant gas and the environment which has been fumigated, while the fumigant pack may be safe and spent, the space will still hold the fumigant gas until it has been ventilated. ISPM15 W. G. Johnson, Fumigation Methods National Pesticide Information Center Termite Treatments - National Pesticide Information Center
20.
Zyklon B
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Zyklon B was the trade name of a cyanide-based pesticide invented in Germany in the early 1920s. It consisted of hydrogen cyanide, as well as an eye irritant. Hydrogen cyanide, a gas that interferes with cellular respiration, was first used as a pesticide in California in the 1880s. Research at Degesch of Germany led to the development of Zyklon and it was banned after a similar product was used by Germany as a chemical weapon in World War I. The new product was also named Zyklon, but it known as Zyklon B to distinguish it from the earlier version. Uses included delousing clothing and disinfesting ships, warehouses, and trains, in early 1942, Zyklon B emerged as the preferred killing tool of Nazi Germany for use in extermination camps during the Holocaust. Around a million people were killed using this method, mostly at Auschwitz, Tesch was executed in 1946 for knowingly selling the product to the SS for use on humans. Hydrogen cyanide is now used as a pesticide, but still has industrial applications. Firms in several countries continue to produce Zyklon B under alternative names, including Detia-Degesch, the successor to Degesch. Hydrogen cyanide is a gas that interferes with cellular respiration. Cyanide prevents the cell from producing adenosine triphosphate by binding to one of the involved in the electron transport chain. This protein, cytochrome c oxidase, contains several subunits and has ligands containing iron groups, the cyanide component of Zyklon B can bind at one of these iron groups, heme a3, forming a more stabilized compound through metal-to-ligand pi bonding. As a result of the formation of this new iron-cyanide complex, instead, these electrons destabilize the compound, thus, the heme group no longer accept them. Consequently, electron transport is halted, and cells can no longer produce the energy needed to synthesize ATP, in a human weighing 68 kilograms, death occurs within two minutes of inhaling 70 mg of hydrogen cyanide. Hydrogen cyanide, discovered in the late 18th century, was used in the 1880s for the fumigation of citrus trees in California and its use spread to other countries for the fumigation of silos, goods wagons, ships, and mills. Its light weight and rapid dispersal meant its application had to place under tents or in enclosed areas. Chemists at Degesch added a cautionary eye irritant to a less volatile cyanide compound which reacted with water in the presence of heat to become hydrogen cyanide, the new product was marketed as the pesticide Zyklon. As a similar formula had been used as a weapon by the Germans during World War I, Deutsche Gold- und Silber-Scheideanstalt became sole owners of Degesch in 1922
21.
Auschwitz concentration camp
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Auschwitz concentration camp was a network of German Nazi concentration camps and extermination camps built and operated by the Third Reich in Polish areas annexed by Nazi Germany during World War II. It consisted of Auschwitz I, Auschwitz II–Birkenau, Auschwitz III–Monowitz, Auschwitz I was first constructed to hold Polish political prisoners, who began to arrive in May 1940. The first extermination of prisoners took place in September 1941, from early 1942 until late 1944, transport trains delivered Jews to the camps gas chambers from all over German-occupied Europe, where they were killed with the pesticide Zyklon B. An estimated 1.3 million people were sent to the camp, around 90 percent of those killed were Jewish, approximately 1 in 6 Jews killed in the Holocaust died at the camp. Many of those not killed in the gas chambers died of starvation, forced labor, infectious diseases, individual executions, and medical experiments. In the course of the war, the camp was staffed by 7,000 members of the German Schutzstaffel, some, including camp commandant Rudolf Höss, were executed. The Allied Powers refused to believe reports of the atrocities at the camp. As Soviet troops approached Auschwitz in January 1945, most of its population was sent west on a death march, the prisoners remaining at the camp were liberated on 27 January 1945, a day now commemorated as International Holocaust Remembrance Day. In the following decades, survivors, such as Primo Levi, Viktor Frankl, and Elie Wiesel, wrote memoirs of their experiences in Auschwitz, and the camp became a dominant symbol of the Holocaust. In 1947, Poland founded the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum on the site of Auschwitz I and II, immediately after the Nazi seizure of power in Germany, acts of violence perpetrated against Jews became ubiquitous. The Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service, passed on 7 April 1933 excluded most Jews from the legal profession, similar legislation soon deprived Jewish members of other professions of the right to practise. Harassment and economic pressure were used by the regime to encourage Jews to leave the country voluntarily and their businesses were denied access to markets, forbidden to advertise in newspapers, and deprived of government contracts. German Jews were subjected to violent attacks and boycotts, in September 1935 the Nuremberg Laws were enacted. The Reich Citizenship Law stated that only those of Germanic or related blood were defined as citizens, thus Jews and other minority groups were stripped of their German citizenship. The laws were expanded on 26 November 1935 to include Romani people and this supplementary decree defined Gypsies as enemies of the race-based state, the same category as Jews. By the start of World War II in 1939, around 250,000 of Germanys 437,000 Jews had emigrated to the United States, Palestine, the United Kingdom, Nazi Germany invaded Poland in September 1939. German dictator Adolf Hitler ordered that the Polish leadership and intelligentsia be destroyed, approximately 65,000 civilians, who were viewed as being inferior to the Aryan master race, were killed by the end of 1939. In addition to leaders of Polish society, the Nazis killed Jews, prostitutes, Romani, sS-Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich, then head of the Gestapo, ordered on 21 September that Polish Jews should be rounded up and concentrated into cities with good rail links
22.
Majdanek concentration camp
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Therefore, Majdanek became the first concentration camp discovered by Allied forces. Also known to the SS as Konzentrationslager Lublin, Majdanek remains the best preserved Nazi concentration camp of the Holocaust, unlike other similar camps in Nazi-occupied Poland, Majdanek was not located in a remote rural location away from population centres, but within the boundaries of a major city. This proximity led the camp to be named Majdanek by local people in 1941 because it was adjacent to the suburb of Majdan Tatarski in Lublin. The Nazi documents initially called the site a Prisoner of War Camp of the Waffen-SS in Lublin because of the way it was operated and funded. It was renamed by RSHA in Berlin as Konzentrationslager Lublin on April 9,1943, however, the original plan drafted by Himmler was for the camp to hold at least 25,000 POWs. In early November, the plans were extended to allow for 125,000 inmates and it was further increased in March 1942 to allow for 250,000 Soviet prisoners of war. Construction began with 150 Jewish forced laborers from one of Globocniks Lublin camps, later the workforce included 2,000 Red Army POWs, who had to survive extreme conditions, including sleeping out in the open. By mid-November only 500 of them were alive, of which at least 30% were incapable of further labor. In mid-December, barracks for 20,000 were ready when an epidemic broke out. All work ceased until March 1942, when new prisoners arrived, although the camp did eventually have the capacity to hold approximately 50,000 prisoners, it did not grow significantly beyond that size. Those camps had begun operations in March, May and July respectively of that year, subsequently, Himmler issued an order that the deportation of Jews to the camps be completed by the end of 1942. The gassing was performed in plain view of other inmates, without as much as a fence around the buildings, another popular killing method was execution by the squads of Trawnikis. According to the Majdanek museum, the gas chambers began operation in September 1942, there are two identical buildings at Majdanek, where Zyklon-B was used. Executions were carried out in barrack 41 with the use of hydrogen cyanide released by the Zyklon B. The same poison gas pellets were used to disinfect prisoner clothing in barrack 42, by mid-October 1942 the camp held 9,519 registered prisoners, of which 7,468 were Jews, and another 1,884 were non-Jewish Poles. By August 1943, there were 16,206 prisoners in the main camp, minority contingents included Belarusians, Ukrainians, Russians, Germans, Austrians, Slovenes, Italians, and French and Dutch nationals. According to the data from the official Majdanek State Museum,300,000 persons were inmates of the camp at one time or another, the prisoner population at any given time was much lower. From October 1942 onwards, Majdanek also had female overseers, Majdanek did not initially have subcamps
23.
World War II
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World War II, also known as the Second World War, was a global war that lasted from 1939 to 1945, although related conflicts began earlier. It involved the vast majority of the worlds countries—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing alliances, the Allies and the Axis. It was the most widespread war in history, and directly involved more than 100 million people from over 30 countries. Marked by mass deaths of civilians, including the Holocaust and the bombing of industrial and population centres. These made World War II the deadliest conflict in human history, from late 1939 to early 1941, in a series of campaigns and treaties, Germany conquered or controlled much of continental Europe, and formed the Axis alliance with Italy and Japan. Under the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact of August 1939, Germany and the Soviet Union partitioned and annexed territories of their European neighbours, Poland, Finland, Romania and the Baltic states. In December 1941, Japan attacked the United States and European colonies in the Pacific Ocean, and quickly conquered much of the Western Pacific. The Axis advance halted in 1942 when Japan lost the critical Battle of Midway, near Hawaii, in 1944, the Western Allies invaded German-occupied France, while the Soviet Union regained all of its territorial losses and invaded Germany and its allies. During 1944 and 1945 the Japanese suffered major reverses in mainland Asia in South Central China and Burma, while the Allies crippled the Japanese Navy, thus ended the war in Asia, cementing the total victory of the Allies. World War II altered the political alignment and social structure of the world, the United Nations was established to foster international co-operation and prevent future conflicts. The victorious great powers—the United States, the Soviet Union, China, the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union and the United States emerged as rival superpowers, setting the stage for the Cold War, which lasted for the next 46 years. Meanwhile, the influence of European great powers waned, while the decolonisation of Asia, most countries whose industries had been damaged moved towards economic recovery. Political integration, especially in Europe, emerged as an effort to end pre-war enmities, the start of the war in Europe is generally held to be 1 September 1939, beginning with the German invasion of Poland, Britain and France declared war on Germany two days later. The dates for the beginning of war in the Pacific include the start of the Second Sino-Japanese War on 7 July 1937, or even the Japanese invasion of Manchuria on 19 September 1931. Others follow the British historian A. J. P. Taylor, who held that the Sino-Japanese War and war in Europe and its colonies occurred simultaneously and this article uses the conventional dating. Other starting dates sometimes used for World War II include the Italian invasion of Abyssinia on 3 October 1935. The British historian Antony Beevor views the beginning of World War II as the Battles of Khalkhin Gol fought between Japan and the forces of Mongolia and the Soviet Union from May to September 1939, the exact date of the wars end is also not universally agreed upon. It was generally accepted at the time that the war ended with the armistice of 14 August 1945, rather than the formal surrender of Japan
24.
Soviet Union
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The Soviet Union, officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was a socialist state in Eurasia that existed from 1922 to 1991. It was nominally a union of national republics, but its government. The Soviet Union had its roots in the October Revolution of 1917 and this established the Russian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic and started the Russian Civil War between the revolutionary Reds and the counter-revolutionary Whites. In 1922, the communists were victorious, forming the Soviet Union with the unification of the Russian, Transcaucasian, Ukrainian, following Lenins death in 1924, a collective leadership and a brief power struggle, Joseph Stalin came to power in the mid-1920s. Stalin suppressed all opposition to his rule, committed the state ideology to Marxism–Leninism. As a result, the country underwent a period of rapid industrialization and collectivization which laid the foundation for its victory in World War II and postwar dominance of Eastern Europe. Shortly before World War II, Stalin signed the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact agreeing to non-aggression with Nazi Germany, in June 1941, the Germans invaded the Soviet Union, opening the largest and bloodiest theater of war in history. Soviet war casualties accounted for the highest proportion of the conflict in the effort of acquiring the upper hand over Axis forces at battles such as Stalingrad. Soviet forces eventually captured Berlin in 1945, the territory overtaken by the Red Army became satellite states of the Eastern Bloc. The Cold War emerged by 1947 as the Soviet bloc confronted the Western states that united in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in 1949. Following Stalins death in 1953, a period of political and economic liberalization, known as de-Stalinization and Khrushchevs Thaw, the country developed rapidly, as millions of peasants were moved into industrialized cities. The USSR took a lead in the Space Race with Sputnik 1, the first ever satellite, and Vostok 1. In the 1970s, there was a brief détente of relations with the United States, the war drained economic resources and was matched by an escalation of American military aid to Mujahideen fighters. In the mid-1980s, the last Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, sought to reform and liberalize the economy through his policies of glasnost. The goal was to preserve the Communist Party while reversing the economic stagnation, the Cold War ended during his tenure, and in 1989 Soviet satellite countries in Eastern Europe overthrew their respective communist regimes. This led to the rise of strong nationalist and separatist movements inside the USSR as well, in August 1991, a coup détat was attempted by Communist Party hardliners. It failed, with Russian President Boris Yeltsin playing a role in facing down the coup. On 25 December 1991, Gorbachev resigned and the twelve constituent republics emerged from the dissolution of the Soviet Union as independent post-Soviet states
25.
Dachau concentration camp
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Dachau concentration camp was the first of the Nazi concentration camps opened in Germany, intended to hold political prisoners. It is located on the grounds of a munitions factory northeast of the medieval town of Dachau, about 16 km northwest of Munich in the state of Bavaria. The Dachau camp system grew to include nearly 100 sub-camps, which were work camps or Arbeitskommandos. The camps were liberated by U. S. forces on 29 April 1945, There were 32,000 documented deaths at the camp, and thousands that are undocumented. Approximately 10,000 of the 30,000 prisoners were sick at the time of liberation, in the postwar years the Dachau facility served to hold SS soldiers awaiting trial. After 1948, it held ethnic Germans who had expelled from eastern Europe and were awaiting resettlement. It was finally closed in 1960, There are several religious memorials within the Memorial Site, which is open to the public. After the takeover of Bavaria on 9 March 1933, Heinrich Himmler, then Chief of Police in Munich, began to speak with the administration of an unused gunpowder and he toured the site to see if it could be used for quartering protective-custody prisoners. The Concentration Camp at Dachau was opened 22 March 1933, with the arrival of about 200 prisoners from Stadelheim Prison in Munich and it became the first regular concentration camp established by the coalition government of the National Socialist German Workers Party and the German National Peoples Party. Jehovah’s Witnesses, homosexuals, and emigrants were sent to Dachau after the 1935 passage of the Nuremberg Laws which institutionalized racial discrimination, in early 1937, the SS, using prisoner labor, initiated construction of a large complex capable of holding 6,000 prisoners. The construction was completed in mid-August 1938. More political opponents, and over 11,000 German and Austrian Jews were sent to the camp after the annexation of Austria and the Sudetenland in 1938. Sinti and Roma in the hundreds were sent to the camp in 1939, the prisoners of Dachau concentration camp originally were to serve as forced labor for a munition factory, and to expand the camp. It was used as a center for SS guards and was a model for other concentration camps. The camp was about 300 m ×600 m in rectangular shape, the prisoners entrance was secured by an iron gate with the motto “Arbeit macht frei”. This reflected Nazi propaganda, which trivialized concentration camps as labor and re-education camps, as of 1938, the procedure for new arrivals occurred at the Schubraum, where prisoners were to hand over their clothing and possessions. One former Luxembourgian prisoner, Albert Theis, reflected about the room, everything had to be handed over, money, rings, watches. The camp included a building that contained offices for the Gestapo trial commissioner, SS authorities
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Sachsenhausen concentration camp
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Sachsenhausen or Sachsenhausen-Oranienburg was a Nazi concentration camp in Oranienburg, Germany, used primarily for political prisoners from 1936 to the end of the Third Reich in May 1945. After World War II, when Oranienburg was in the Soviet Occupation Zone, the camp ground with the remaining buildings is now open to the public as a museum. The camp was established in 1936, executions took place at Sachsenhausen, especially of Soviet prisoners of war. During the earlier stages of the existence the executions were done in a trench. A large task force of prisoners was used from the camp to work in nearby brickworks to meet Albert Speers vision of rebuilding Berlin, Sachsenhausen was originally not intended as an extermination camp—instead, the systematic murder was conducted in camps to the east. In 1942 large numbers of Jewish inmates were relocated to Auschwitz, however the construction of a gas chamber and ovens by camp-commandant Anton Kaindl in March 1943 facilitated the means to kill larger numbers of prisoners. The Main gate or Guard Tower A, with its 8mm Maxim machine gun, on the front entrance gates to Sachsenhausen is the infamous slogan Arbeit Macht Frei. About 200,000 people passed through Sachsenhausen between 1936 and 1945, anchoring the base of the triangular shaped thousand-acre site was the large Appellplatz, where tens of thousands of prisoners would line up for morning and evening roll call. Creating a semi circular configuration, were the barracks of custody zone I which fanned out from the base of the Appellplatz, Sachsenhausen was intended to set a standard for other concentration camps, both in its design and the treatment of prisoners. The camp perimeter is, approximately, a triangle with a semi circular roll call area centered on the main entrance gate in the boundary running northeast to southwest. Barrack huts lay beyond the roll call area, radiating from the gate, the layout was intended to allow the machine gun post in the entrance gate to dominate the camp but in practice it was necessary to add additional watchtowers to the perimeter. The standard barrack layout was to have a central washing area and a room with toilet bowls. There was an infirmary inside the angle of the perimeter. There was also a kitchen and a camp laundry. The camps capacity became inadequate and the camp was extended in 1938 by a new rectangular area northeast of the entrance gate, there was an additional area outside the main camp perimeter to the north, this was built in 1941 for special prisoners that the regime wished to isolate. The camp was secure and there were few successful escapes, the perimeter consisted of a 3-metre-high stone wall on the outside. Within that there was a space that was patrolled by guards and dogs, it was bordered on the inside by an electric fence. Any prisoner venturing onto the strip would be shot by the guards without warning
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Lithuania
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Lithuania, officially the Republic of Lithuania, is a country in Northern Europe. One of the three Baltic states, it is situated along the shore of the Baltic Sea, to the east of Sweden. It is bordered by Latvia to the north, Belarus to the east and south, Poland to the south, Lithuania has an estimated population of 2.9 million people as of 2015, and its capital and largest city is Vilnius. The official language, Lithuanian, along with Latvian, is one of two living languages in the Baltic branch of the Indo-European language family. For centuries, the shores of the Baltic Sea were inhabited by various Baltic tribes. In the 1230s, the Lithuanian lands were united by Mindaugas, the King of Lithuania, and the first unified Lithuanian state, with the Lublin Union of 1569, Lithuania and Poland formed a voluntary two-state union, the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. The Commonwealth lasted more than two centuries, until neighboring countries systematically dismantled it from 1772–95, with the Russian Empire annexing most of Lithuanias territory. As World War I neared its end, Lithuanias Act of Independence was signed on 16 February 1918, in the midst of the Second World War, Lithuania was first occupied by the Soviet Union and then by Nazi Germany. As World War II neared its end and the Germans retreated, Lithuania is a member of the European Union, the Council of Europe, a full member of the Eurozone, Schengen Agreement and NATO. It is also a member of the Nordic Investment Bank, the United Nations Human Development Index lists Lithuania as a very high human development country. Lithuania has been among the fastest growing economies in the European Union and is ranked 21st in the world in the Ease of Doing Business Index, the first people settled in the territory of Lithuania after the last glacial period in the 10th millennium BC. Over a millennium, the Indo-Europeans, who arrived in the 3rd – 2nd millennium BC, mixed with the local population, the first written mention of Lithuania is found in a medieval German manuscript, the Annals of Quedlinburg, in an entry dated 9 March 1009. Initially inhabited by fragmented Baltic tribes, in the 1230s the Lithuanian lands were united by Mindaugas, after his assassination in 1263, pagan Lithuania was a target of the Christian crusades of the Teutonic Knights and the Livonian Order. Despite the devastating century-long struggle with the Orders, the Grand Duchy of Lithuania expanded rapidly, by the end of the 14th century, Lithuania was one of the largest countries in Europe and included present-day Belarus, Ukraine, and parts of Poland and Russia. The geopolitical situation between the west and the east determined the multicultural and multi-confessional character of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, the ruling elite practised religious tolerance and Chancery Slavonic language was used as an auxiliary language to the Latin for official documents. In 1385, the Grand Duke Jogaila accepted Polands offer to become its king, Jogaila embarked on gradual Christianization of Lithuania and established a personal union between Poland and Lithuania. It implied that Lithuania, the fiercely independent land, was one of the last pagan areas of Europe to adopt Christianity, after two civil wars, Vytautas the Great became the Grand Duke of Lithuania in 1392. During his reign, Lithuania reached the peak of its expansion, centralization of the state began
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Aleksotas
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Aleksotas is an elderate in the southern section of the city of Kaunas, Lithuania, bordering the left bank of the Neman River. Its population in 2006 was 21,694, the borough borders Vilijampolė and Centras in the north, Šančiai and Panemunė in the east, Garliava in the south as well as Akademija in the west. There is evidence that during pre-Christian times a pagan shrine was located here, the suburb was founded in 1408, when Vytautas the Great granted the woods that stood here to the city of Kaunas. Until the 16th century it was called Svirbigala, derived from the rivulet Svirbė, the name Aleksotas was used from the 16th century on, and is thought to be derived from the word aleksotai since many Neman River transport operations were located there. The village became part of the Kingdom of Poland in 1815, during November Uprising the insurgent forces used Aleksota hill as artillery post to attack Kaunas, and eventually took the city. 1864, it part of the Russian Empire. However, it retained its old laws and persisted in using the Gregorian calendar, a popular joke at the time had it that the Aleksotas bridge was the longest in the world, because it took twelve days to cross. It was a centre of Marijampolė Uyezd, in 1918, independent Lithuania was re-established and Aleksotas became an integral part of it. The suburb grew rapidly in the 1920s, after Kaunas became the capital of Lithuania. In 1931 it officially became a part of the City of Kaunas, from 1920 to 1940 many houses, shops, sawmills, and flour mills were built in Aleksotas. The Physics and Chemistry Institute of Vytautas Magnus University was located here before being destroyed during World War II, the area suffered much damage during World War II. Kaunas Botanical Garden is located in the elderate, the M. K. Čiurlionis Bridge and Vytautas the Great Bridge link the district to the centre and the old town. City of Kaunas - Elderate of Aleksotas Website of Kaunas city Kaunas travel guide from Wikivoyage Aleksota in the Geographical Dictionary of the Kingdom of Poland
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Kaunas Fortress
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Kaunas Fortress is the remains of a fortress complex in Kaunas, Lithuania. It was constructed and renovated between 1882 and 1915 to protect the Russian Empires western borders, and was designated a fortress in 1887. During World War I, the complex was the largest defensive structure in the entire state, the fortress was battle-tested in 1915 when Germany attacked the Russian Empire, and withstood eleven days of assault before capture. After World War I, the military importance declined as advances in weaponry rendered it increasingly obsolete. It was used by civil institutions and as a garrison. During World War II, parts of the complex were used by the Nazi Germany for detention, interrogation. About 50,000 people were executed there, including more than 30,000 victims of the Holocaust, some sections have since been restored, the Ninth Fort houses a museum and memorial devoted to the victims of wartime mass executions. The complex is the most complete remaining example of a Russian Empire fortress, the city of Kaunas is located at the confluence of two rivers, the Neman and Neris, which link Lithuanias interior and its capital, Vilnius, to the Baltic Sea. Since Lithuania was heavily wooded and its lands were often impassable, its interior was most approachable along its rivers when frozen and during the short dry harvest season in late summer. In response to this vulnerability, defensive structures, including a castle in Kaunas, were in place at various points on the Nemunas River by the 14th century. The city was first mentioned in sources in 1361, it received Magdeburg rights, regulating its autonomy and establishing trade protocols. An outpost of the Hanseatic League was created there in 1441, by the end of the 16th century Kaunas had become a major regional trade center, but plagues, fires, and wars adversely affected the country and city during the 17th and 18th centuries. Following the partitions of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth at the end of the 18th century, two major 19th century projects contributed to the citys revival. Russias western borders needed support, and fortresses existed or were being built in Latvia, Ukraine, the concept of building a fortress in Lithuania was discussed without result in 1796, but became a critical concern after the French invasion of Russia in 1812 led by Napoleon. The Grande Armée managed to cross the Nemunas near Kaunas on its drive towards Moscow without major difficulties, an increasingly unified Germany troubled the Empire during the second half of the century. A fortress in Kaunas would present an obstacle to attacks from the west, preventing further incursions towards Riga, in order to control the region, attackers would need to first neutralize Kaunas. Facing this possibility and evaluating the natural advantages of the city, after several delays, on July 7,1879 Tsar Alexander II issued an edict ordering its construction. The first design was overseen by Generals Nikolay Obruchev, Konstantin Zverev, as originally planned, the fortress encompassed a huge site, consisting of seven forts and nine defensive batteries arranged in concentric loops
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Occupation of the Baltic states
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On 22 June 1941 Nazi Germany attacked the USSR and within weeks occupied the Baltic territories. In July 1941, the Baltic territory was incorporated into the Reichskommissariat Ostland of the Third Reich, the Soviet annexation occupation of the Baltic states lasted until August 1991, when the Baltic states regained independence. In its reassessment of Soviet history that began during perestroika in 1989, however, Russia agreed to Europes demand to assist persons deported from the occupied Baltic states upon joining the Council of Europe. De facto independence was restored to the Baltic states in 1991 during the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Russia started to withdraw its troops from the Baltics in August 1993. The full withdrawal of troops deployed by Moscow was completed in August 1994, Russia officially ended its military presence in the Baltics in August 1998 by decommissioning the Skrunda-1 radar station in Latvia. The dismantled installations were repatriated to Russia and the returned to Latvian control. Early in the morning of August 24,1939, the Soviet Union and Germany signed a ten-year non-aggression pact, the pact contained a secret protocol by which the states of Northern and Eastern Europe were divided into German and Soviet spheres of influence. In the north, Finland, Estonia and Latvia were assigned to the Soviet sphere, Poland was to be partitioned in the event of its political rearrangement—the areas east of the Narev, Vistula and San Rivers going to the Soviet Union while Germany would occupy the west. According to this protocol, Lithuania would regain its historical capital Vilnius. Following the end of Soviet invasion of Poland on 6 October, the Soviets pressured Finland, the Soviets questioned the neutrality of Estonia after the escape of an interned Polish submarine on 18 September. A week later on 24 September, the Estonian foreign minister was given an ultimatum in Moscow, the Soviets demanded the conclusion of a treaty of mutual assistance to establish military bases in Estonia. The Estonians had no choice but to accept naval, air, the corresponding agreement was signed on 28 September 1939. Latvia followed on 5 October 1939 and Lithuania shortly thereafter, on 10 October 1939, in September and October 1939, the Soviet government compelled the Baltic states to conclude mutual assistance pacts which gave it the right to establish Soviet military bases. In May 1940, the Soviets turned to the idea of military intervention. Their model was the Finnish Democratic Republic, a puppet regime set up by the Soviets on the first day of the Winter War, the Soviets organised a press campaign against the allegedly pro-Allied sympathies of the Baltic governments. In May 1940, the Germans invaded France, which was overrun, in late May and early June 1940, the Baltic states were accused of military collaboration against the Soviet Union by holding meetings the previous winter. On 15 June 1940, the Lithuanian government had no choice but to agree to the Soviet ultimatum, president Antanas Smetona proposed armed resistance to the Soviets but the government refused, proposing their own candidate to lead the regime. However, the Soviets refused this offer and sent Vladimir Dekanozov to take charge of affairs while the Red Army occupied the state, on 16 June 1940, Latvia and Estonia also received ultimata
31.
Pyongyang
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Pyongyang is the capital and largest city of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. The city was split from the South Pyongan province in 1946 and it is administered as a directly governed city on the same level as provincial governments, as opposed to a special city as Seoul is in South Korea. Pyongyang literally means Flat Land in Korean, one of Pyongyangs many historic names is Ryugyong, or capital of willows, as willow trees have always been numerous throughout the citys history, this served as an inspiration for many poems. Even today, the city has numerous trees, with many buildings. The most notable of these is the impressive Ryugyong Hotel, started in 1987, the citys other historic names include Kisong, Hwangsong, Rakrang, Sŏgyong, Sodo, Hogyong, Changan, and Heijō. During the early 20th century, Pyongyang came to be known among missionaries as being the Jerusalem of the East, due to its status as a stronghold of Christianity. In 1955, archaeologists excavated evidence of occupation in a large ancient village in the Pyongyang area, called Kŭmtan-ni. North Koreans associate Pyongyang with Asadal, or Wanggomsŏng, the first second millennium BC capital of the Gojoseon kingdom according to Korean history books, notably Samguk Yusa. Many South Korean historians deny this claim because other Chinese history books such as the Guanzi, Shanhaijing, Shiji, the connection between the two therefore may have been asserted by North Korea for the use of propaganda. Nevertheless, Pyongyang became a city under Gojoseon. Pyongyang was founded in 1122 BC on the site of the Tangun Dynastys capital and it is likely that the area of Pyongyang belonged to Wiman Joseon, the shortest-lasting part of Gojoseon if both Dangun and Gija Joseon were real, which fell in the Gojoseon–Han War in 108 BC. Emperor Wu of the Han dynasty ordered four commanderies be set up, with Lelang Commandery in the center, several archaeological findings from the later, Eastern Han period in the Pyongyang area seems to suggest that Han forces later launched brief incursions around these parts. The area around the city was called Nanglang during the early Three Kingdoms period, as the capital of Nanglang kingdom, Pyongyang remained an important commercial and cultural outpost after Lelang Commandery was destroyed by an expanding Goguryeo in 313. Goguryeo moved its capital there in 427, according to Christopher Beckwith, Pyongyang is the Sino-Korean reading of the name they gave it in their language, Piarna, or level land. In 668, Pyongyang became the capital of the Protectorate General to Pacify the East established by the Tang dynasty of China, however, by 676, it was taken by Silla, but left on the border between Silla and Balhae. This lasted until the time of the Goryeo dynasty, when the city was revived as Sŏgyŏng although it was never actually a capital of the kingdom and it was the provincial capital of the Pyeongan Province during the Joseon dynasty. During the Japanese invasions of Korea, Pyongyang was captured by the Japanese until the Japanese were defeated in the Siege of Pyongyang, later in the 17th century, it became temporarily occupied during Second Manchu invasion of Korea until peace arrangements were made between Korea and the Manchus. While the invasions made Koreans suspicious of foreigners, the influence of Christianity began to grow after the country opened itself up to foreigners in the 16th century
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NKVD
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The Peoples Commissariat for Internal Affairs, abbreviated NKVD, was a joint law enforcement agency of the whole Soviet Union that directly executed the will of the All-Union Communist Party. It was closely associated with the Soviet secret police, which at times was part of the agency, the NKVD was headed by Soviet secret police officials. The NKVD contained the regular, public police force of the USSR, including police, firefighting, border guards. It is best known for the activities of the Gulag and the Main Directorate for State Security and it was also tasked with protection of Soviet borders and espionage, influencing foreign governments and enforcing Stalinist policy within communist movements in other countries. After the Russian February Revolution of 1917, the Provisional Government dissolved the Tsars police, realizing that it was left with no capable security force, the Council of Peoples Commissars of the RSFSR created a secret political police, the Cheka, led by Felix Dzerzhinsky. It gained the right to undertake quick non-judicial trials and executions, the Cheka was reorganized in 1922 as the State Political Directorate, or GPU, of the NKVD of the RSFSR. In 1922, the USSR was formed with the RSFSR as its largest member, the GPU became the OGPU, under the Council of Peoples Commissars of the USSR. The NKVD of the RSFSR retained control of the militsiya, as a result, the NKVD also became responsible for all detention facilities as well as for the regular police. Since its creation in 1934, the NKVD of the USSR underwent many organizational changes, on February 3,1941, the Special Sections of the NKVD responsible for military counterintelligence became part of the Army and Navy. The GUGB was separated from the NKVD and renamed the Peoples Commissariat for State Security, after the German invasion, the NKVD and NKGB were reunited on July 20,1941. The CI sections were returned to the NKVD in January 1942, in April 1943, the CI sections were again transferred to the Peoples Commissariats of Defense and the Navy, becoming SMERSH, at the same time, the NKVD was again separated from the NKGB. In 1946, all Soviet Commissariats were renamed ministries, accordingly, the NKVD of the USSR was renamed as the Ministry of Internal Affairs, while the NKGB was renamed as the Ministry of State Security. In 1953, after the arrest of Lavrenty Beria, the MGB was merged back into the MVD, the police and security services were finally split in 1954 to become, The USSR Ministry of Internal Affairs, responsible for the criminal militia and correctional facilities. The USSR Committee for State Security, responsible for the police, intelligence, counter-intelligence, personal protection. In implementing Soviet internal policy towards perceived enemies of the Soviet state, untold multitudes of people were sent to GULAG camps, formally, most of these people were convicted by NKVD troikas – special courts martial. Evidential standards were low, a tip-off by an anonymous informer was considered sufficient grounds for arrest. Use of physical means of persuasion was sanctioned by a decree of the state. Hundreds of mass graves resulting from operations were later discovered throughout the country
33.
Furman v. Georgia
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Following Furman, to reinstate the death penalty, States had to at least remove arbitrary and discriminatory effects, to possibly satisfy the Eighth Amendment to the United States Constitution. The decision ruled on the requirement for a degree of consistency in the application of the death penalty. This case led to a de facto moratorium on capital punishment throughout the United States, the Supreme Court consolidated Jackson v. Georgia and Branch v. Texas with the Furman decision, and thus also invalidated the death penalty for rape. The Aikens case was dismissed as moot since all death sentences in California were reduced to life imprisonment, in the Furman v. Georgia case, the resident awoke in the middle of the night to find William Henry Furman committing burglary in his house. At trial, in an unsworn statement allowed under Georgia criminal procedure, Furman said that trying to escape, he tripped. This contradicted his statement to police that he had turned. Furman was tried for murder and was guilty based largely on his own statement. Although he was sentenced to death, the punishment was never carried out, Jackson v. Georgia, like Furman, was also a death penalty case confirmed by the Supreme Court of Georgia. Unlike Furman, however, the man in Jackson had not killed. Branch v. Texas was brought to the Supreme Court of the United States on appeal on certiorari to the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, like Jackson, Branch was convicted of rape. In a 5-4 decision, the Courts one-paragraph per curiam opinion held that the imposition of the penalty in these cases constituted cruel and unusual punishment. However, the majority could not agree as to a rationale, there was no opinion of the court or plurality as none of the five justices constituting the majority joined in the opinion of any other. Because these opinions were the narrowest, finding only that the penalty as currently applied was cruel and unusual. Stewart wrote, These death sentences are cruel and unusual in the way that being struck by lightning is cruel. My concurring Brothers have demonstrated that, if any basis can be discerned for the selection of these few to be sentenced to death, it is the constitutionally impermissible basis of race. See McLaughlin v. Florida,379 U. S.184 But racial discrimination has not been proved, chief Justice Burger and Justices Harry Blackmun, Lewis F. Powell, and William H. Rehnquist, each appointed by President Richard Nixon, dissented. They argued that a punishment provided in 40 state statutes and by the government could not be ruled contrary to the so-called evolving standard of decency. The Furman decision caused all death sentences pending at the time to be reduced to life imprisonment, the next day, columnist Barry Schweid wrote that it was unlikely that the death penalty could exist anymore in the United States
34.
Capital punishment in the United States
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Capital punishment is a legal penalty in the United States, currently used by 31 states and the federal government. Its existence can be traced to the beginning of the American colonies, there were no executions in the entire country between 1967 and 1977. In 1972, the U. S. Supreme Court struck down capital punishment statutes in Furman v. Georgia, subsequently, a majority of states passed new death penalty statutes, and the court affirmed the legality of capital punishment in the 1976 case Gregg v. Georgia. Since then, more than 1,400 offenders have been executed, the Espy file, compiled by M. Watt Espy and John Ortiz Smykla, lists 15,269 people executed in the United States and its predecessor colonies between 1608 and 1991. From 1930 to 2002, there were 4,661 executions in the U. S. about two-thirds of them in the first 20 years, additionally, the United States Army executed 135 soldiers between 1916 and 1955. The Bill of Rights in 1789 included the Eighth Amendment which prohibited cruel, the Fourteenth Amendment adopted in 1868 also requires a due process of law for deprivation of life by any state. Three states abolished the death penalty for murder during the 19th century, Michigan in 1846, Wisconsin in 1853 and Maine in 1887. Other states which abolished the death penalty for murder before Gregg v. Georgia include, Minnesota in 1911, Vermont in 1964, Iowa and West Virginia in 1965, hawaii abolished the death penalty in 1948 and Alaska in 1957, both before their statehood. Puerto Rico repealed it in 1929 and the District of Columbia in 1981, Arizona and Oregon abolished the death penalty by popular vote in 1916 and 1964 respectively, but both reinstated it, again by popular vote, some years later, Arizona in 1918 and Oregon in 1978. Puerto Rico and Michigan are the only two U. S. jurisdictions to have explicitly prohibited capital punishment in their constitutions, in 1952 and 1964, respectively. Until then save for a few mavericks, no one gave any credence to the possibility of ending the death penalty by judicial interpretation of law according to abolitionist Hugo Bedau. The possibility of challenging the constitutionality of the penalty became progressively more realistic after the Supreme Court of the United States decided Trop v. But in the 1932 case Powell v. Wainwright, in Furman v. Georgia, the U. S. Supreme Court considered a group of consolidated cases. The last pre-Furman execution was that of Luis Monge on June 2,1967, the Supreme Court has never ruled the death penalty to be per se unconstitutional. The five justices in the majority did not produce a common opinion or rationale for their decision, however, Stewart and William O. Douglas worried explicitly about racial discrimination in enforcement of the death penalty. Thurgood Marshall and William J. Brennan Jr. expressed the opinion that the penalty was proscribed absolutely by the Eighth Amendment as cruel. The Furman decision caused all death sentences pending at the time to be reduced to life imprisonment, the next day, columnist Barry Schweid wrote that it was unlikely that the death penalty could exist anymore in the United States. But instead of abandoning capital punishment,37 states enacted new death penalty statutes that attempted to address the concerns of White, some states responded by enacting mandatory death penalty statutes which prescribed a sentence of death for anyone convicted of certain forms of murder
35.
Gee Jon
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Gee Jon was a Chinese national who was the first person in the United States to be executed by lethal gas. A member of the Hip Sing Tong criminal society from San Francisco, California, an unsuccessful attempt to pump poison gas directly into his cell at Nevada State Prison led to the development of the gas chamber. Gee Jon was born of Cantonese descent in China around 1895 and he immigrated to the United States between 1907 and 1908 and spent most of his life at San Franciscos Chinatown in California. Gee became a member of the Hip Sing Tong society, which dealt in narcotics, in 1922, territorial disputes with the rival Bing Kong Tong society led to the outbreak of hostilities. Tom Quong Kee was a 74-year-old laundry proprietor who was a member of the Bing Kong Tong in Mina, hughie Sing, his American-educated apprentice of two years, pointed Kee out as a target for Gee. During the night of August 27,1921, Gee knocked on the door of Kees residence while armed with a Colt.38 revolver, Gee fatally shot Kee, who answered the door in his pajamas. Unlike many other Tong killings, Gee and Sing were apprehended, Gee and Sing were defended by attorneys James M. Frame and Fiore Raffetto. Gee and Sing were both convicted and sentenced to death in the District Court of Mineral County, Nevada, sings sentence was commuted to life imprisonment because he was only nineteen years old and Gee had committed the shooting itself. A bill authorizing the use of gas had passed the Nevada State Legislature in 1921. Frame argued that Gees sentence constituted cruel and unusual punishment, the Supreme Court of Nevada instead complimented the state legislators for inflicting the death penalty in the most humane manner known to modern science. Raffetto unsuccessfully filed a writ of certiorari with the U. S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco, Gee was incarcerated in Nevada State Prison at Carson City. The California Cyanide Company of Los Angeles, California, was the distributor of liquid cyanide in the western United States. The poison was used to eradicate pests from citrus groves in California, warden Denver S. Dickerson sent his assistant Tom Pickett to Los Angeles to personally pick up 20 pounds of lethal gas, which was contained in a mobile fumigating unit that cost $700. Four guards who did not want to participate in the process had resigned, the officials first attempted to pump poison gas directly into Gees cell while he was sleeping, but without success because the gas leaked from the cell. A makeshift gas chamber was set up at the shop of the prison. At least one cat was used to test the effectiveness of the chamber. Gee was to be strapped onto a chair in the chamber, which was eleven feet long, ten feet wide, a small window next to the wooden chair allowed witnesses to look inside. Attendees included news reporters, public officials, and representatives of the U. S. Army
36.
Nevada State Prison
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Nevada State Prison is a penitentiary located in Carson City. The prison was in operation since its establishment in 1862 and was managed by the Nevada Department of Corrections. It was one of the oldest prisons still operating in the United States- The high security facility housed 219 inmates in September 2011 and it was designed to hold 841 inmates and employs a staff of 211. In the early 20th century, the became the sole designated facility for executions by the state of Nevada. It carried out the first death sentence by gas chamber in the United States with the execution of Gee Jon on February 8,1924, the state of Nevada chose to close the facility for budgetary reasons. The prison closed its doors on May 18,2012, with all inmates transferred or released on early out, even though the prison has closed, it is still designated as the site of executions for the State of Nevada. The prison was established in 1862 by the Nevada Territorial Legislature at the site of the Warm Springs Hotel, the legislature had been leasing the hotel from Abraham Curry and using the prison quarry to provide stone material for the Nevada State Capitol. In 1864, the territorial legislature acquired the hotel along with 20 acres of land from Curry, in October of that year, Nevada became a state and the newly written constitution established that the Lieutenant Governor of Nevada also functioned as the ex-officio warden of the prison. The Governor, Secretary of State, and Attorney General comprise the board of prison commissioners, in 1867, a fire destroyed the original building. In 1870, a portion of the prison burned down and was rebuilt with inmate labor. On September 17,1871, lieutenant governor and warden Frank Denver was seriously injured in a break that involved 27 inmates. In 1872, Denver refused to concede the prison to Pressly C, hyman, who had been appointed the new warden under legislation that repealed that responsibility from the lieutenant governor. Governor Lewis R. Bradley sent troops in March 1873 to force Denver to surrender, with the legalization of gaming in Nevada, the prison allowed inmates to gamble in the Bull Pen, a casino that was set up in 1932 and closed in 1967. The prison was expanded in 1964 by the Northern Nevada Correctional Center, the Nevada State Prison operated as a maximum security facility until 1989, when Ely State Prison was opened to fulfill that function. Prisoners facing capital punishment are held at Ely State Prison and are to be sent to Nevada State Prisons execution chamber to be killed and this prison became the state-designated facility for all hangings in 1903. On May 14,1913, Andriza Mircovich became the first, after warden George W. Cowing was unable to find five men to form a firing squad, a shooting machine was built to carry out Mircovichs execution. When the device arrived at the prison, Cowing no longer wanted to have any part of the execution, former governor Denver S. Dickerson, who had worked to reform the state prison system, was appointed the new warden. In 1921, a bill authorizing the use of gas had passed the Nevada State Legislature
37.
Miran Edgar Thompson
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Miran Edgar Thompson was an inmate of Alcatraz whose participation in an attempted escape on May 2,1946, led to his execution in the gas chamber of San Quentin. At the time of the Battle of Alcatraz, Thompson was serving life plus 99 years for kidnapping and he also pulled armed robberies in New Mexico, Colorado, Kansas and Oklahoma. He had notoriously bad luck when getting caught, but extremely good luck at escaping from jail and he had been arrested eight times and held in small jails, and had escaped every time. Thompson had a record of eight escapes from custody by the time he was transferred to Alcatraz in October 1945, Detective Savage was shot and killed while transporting Thompson and Elber Day to jail. Savage had arrested the two when he found them burglarizing a store and he searched the two suspects before transporting, but missed a handgun hidden in Thompsons pants. During the transport, Thompson produced the gun and shot Savage, as Thompson fled, he kidnapped three other people before being apprehended. Thompson was convicted of kidnapping charges and sent to Alcatraz Prison. On May 2,1946, Thompson, with five other inmates, participated in the attempt to escape Alcatraz by seizing the prisons gun gallery. Although initially successful, the failed to open the yard door. Thompson survived the fighting, which left two officers dead and thirteen wounded, and three convicts dead. Thompson was tried for his part in the violence, specifically accused of inciting Joe Cretzer to open fire on nine hostage guards in an effort to eliminate witnesses. Thompson was found guilty along with inmate Sam Shockley, and they were executed in the gas chamber of San Quentin on December 3,1948
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Sam Shockley
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Richard Samuel Sam Shockley, Jr. was an inmate at Alcatraz prison who participated in the Battle of Alcatraz in 1946. Shockley was the son of Richard Dick Shockley and Anna Bearden and he was born in Arkansas City, Arkansas. Shockley was arrested for robbery and kidnapping in Oklahoma and sentenced to life imprisonment in May 1938. Examined by prison psychiatrists, Shockley was found to have a character, he was found to have a low IQ of 54. In May 1941 he attempted escape from one of the islands workshops along with Joe Cretzer, Arnold Kyle, during the escape attempt the men held a number of guards hostage, but gave up when they failed to cut through the tool-proof bars. On May 2,1946, after inmates Bernard Coy, Joseph Cretzer, Coy was aware of the red light that lit up in the gun gallery but they were unaware of a similar light that was in the armory. If the guard in the gun gallery didnt alert the guards in the armory then it was an alert that there was a problem. The escape attempt failed due to the jamming of the yard door. This was the bloodiest escape attempt witnessed on the island, two prison guards, Bill Miller and Harold Stites, and three inmates, Coy, Cretzer and Hubbard, were all shot dead. Shockley, along with Miran Thompson and Clarence Carnes, was found guilty at his subsequent trial, nineteen-year-old Carnes escaped the death penalty after some corrections officers who had been taken hostage testified that he had refrained from following instructions to kill them. Although Shockley pleaded insanity, he and Thompson both received death sentences and they were executed in the San Quentin gas chamber on December 3,1948
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San Quentin State Prison
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San Quentin State Prison is a California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation state prison for men, located north of San Francisco in the unincorporated town of San Quentin in Marin County. Opened in July 1852, it is the oldest prison in California, the states only death row for male inmates, the largest in the United States, is located at the prison. It has a gas chamber, but since 1996, executions at the prison have been carried out by lethal injection. The prison has been featured on film, video, and television, is the subject of books, has hosted concerts. The correctional complex sits on Point San Quentin, which comprises 432 acres on the side of San Francisco Bay. The prison complex itself occupies 275 acres, valued in a 2001 study at between $129 million and $664 million, the prison complex has its own ZIP code for mail sent to inmates,94974, the ZIP code of the adjacent community of Point San Quentin Village is 94964. It is bordered by San Francisco Bay to the south and west and by Interstate 580 to the north and east, near the northern terminus of the Richmond-San Rafael Bridge. As of October 30,2013 the prison had a capacity of 3,082 but a total institution population of 4,223. It has Level I housing, Level II housing, a Reception Center which provides short term housing to process, classify and evaluate incoming inmates, as of Fiscal Year 2006/2007, the prison had 1,718 staff and an annual budget of $210 million. It is one of the largest prisons in the United States with a population of 4,223 inmates as of October 30,2013, by December 2016, the population had declined to 3,774 inmates. Men condemned to death in California must be held at San Quentin, as of December 2015, San Quentin held almost 700 male inmates in its Condemned Unit, or death row. As of 2001, San Quentins death row was described as the largest in the Western Hemisphere, as of 2005, the states of Florida and Texas had fewer death row inmates in 2008 than San Quentin. Most of the death row inmates reside in the East Block. The fourth floor of the North Block was the prisons first death row facility, the adjustment center received solid doors, preventing gunning-down or attacking persons with bodily waste. As of 2016 it housed 81 death row inmates and four non-death row inmates, a dedicated psychiatric facility serves the prisoners. A converted shower bay in the East Block hosts religious services, many prison programs available for most inmates are unavailable for death row inmates. Although $395 million was allocated in the 2008–2009 state budget for new death row facilities at San Quentin, in December 2008 two legislators introduced bills to eliminate the funding. The state had planned to build a new death row facility, in 2015 Brown asked the Legislature for funds for a new death row as the current death row facilities were becoming filled
