1.
Poison
–
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
Poison
–
"Poisoning of Queen
Bona " by
Jan Matejko.
Poison
–
The GHS pictogram for poisonous substances. The
skull and crossbones has long been a standard symbol for poison.
2.
The Holocaust
–
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
The Holocaust
–
Hungarian Jews are selected by Nazis to be sent to the
gas chamber at
Auschwitz concentration camp, May/June 1944.
The Holocaust
–
Romani children in
Auschwitz, victims of medical experiments.
The Holocaust
–
In Germany,
Sturmabteilung stormtroopers urge a national boycott of all Jewish businesses on 1 April 1933. These SA stormtroopers are outside
Israel's Department Store in Berlin to deter customers. The signs read: "Germans! Defend yourselves! Don't buy from Jews." (" Deutsche! Wehrt Euch! Kauft nicht bei Juden! ") The store was later ransacked during
Kristallnacht in 1938, then handed over to a non-Jewish family.
3.
Nazi Germany
–
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
Nazi Germany
–
Hitler became Germany's head of state, with the title of
Führer und Reichskanzler, in 1934.
Nazi Germany
–
Flag
Nazi Germany
–
Joseph Goebbels,
Reich Minister of Propaganda
Nazi Germany
–
Ethnic Germans in
Saaz, Czechoslovakia, greet German soldiers with the
Nazi salute, 1938
4.
Genocide
–
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
Genocide
–
Buchenwald concentration camp was not an
extermination camp, though it was responsible for a vast number of deaths
Genocide
–
Armenian Genocide victims
Genocide
–
Nuon Chea, the Khmer Rouge's chief ideologist, before the
Cambodian Genocide Tribunal on 5 December 2011.
Genocide
–
The cemetery at the
Srebrenica-Potočari Memorial and Cemetery to Genocide Victims
5.
North Korea
–
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
North Korea
–
Jikji, the first known book printed with movable metal type in 1377. Bibliothèque Nationale de Paris
North Korea
–
Flag
North Korea
–
Gyeongbok Palace is the largest of the
Five Grand Palaces built during the
Joseon Dynasty.
North Korea
–
Three Koreans shot for pulling up rails as a protest against seizure of land without payment by the Japanese
6.
Extermination camp
–
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
Extermination camp
Extermination camp
–
The Holocaust map: Nazi extermination camps (marked with skulls in black squares) set up in
occupied Poland, 1942
Extermination camp
–
Members of the
Sonderkommando burn corpses in the fire pits at Auschwitz II-Birkenau.
Extermination camp
–
Jewish children during deportation to the
Chełmno extermination camp
7.
Criticism of Holocaust denial
–
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
Criticism of Holocaust denial
–
Report to Hitler detailing the executions of prisoners.
Criticism of Holocaust denial
–
Detail of a photograph taken at Auschwitz between February 9 and 11, 1943, showing the gas chamber at Crematorium Complex II, then under construction. Some of the apertures through which Zyklon B was inserted into the gas chamber are visible.
Criticism of Holocaust denial
–
Nazi blueprints of the Crematorium II gas chamber. A cross section view of the width of the room shows the ventilation channels that straddle the building along its longitudinal axis, marked Belüftung (aeration) and Entlüftungskanal (de-aeration channel).
8.
Prussian blue
–
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
Prussian blue
–
Prussian blue
Prussian blue
–
The Great Wave off Kanagawa by
Hokusai, a famous artwork which makes extensive use of Prussian blue
Prussian blue
–
Vincent van Gogh 's
Starry Night uses Prussian and
Cerulean blue pigments.
Prussian blue
–
Prussian blue stain
9.
Third Reich
–
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
Third Reich
–
Hitler became Germany's head of state, with the title of
Führer und Reichskanzler, in 1934.
Third Reich
–
Flag
Third Reich
–
Joseph Goebbels,
Reich Minister of Propaganda
Third Reich
–
Ethnic Germans in
Saaz, Czechoslovakia, greet German soldiers with the
Nazi salute, 1938
10.
Action T4
–
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
Action T4
–
Hitler's order for Action T4
Action T4
–
This poster (from around 1938) reads: "60,000
Reichsmark is what this person suffering from a
hereditary defect costs the People's community during his lifetime. Fellow citizen, that is your money too. Read '
[A] New People ', the monthly magazine of the
Bureau for Race Politics of the
NSDAP."
Action T4
–
Philipp Bouhler, Head of the T4 programme
Action T4
–
Dr.
Karl Brandt,
Hitler 's personal physician and organiser of Action T4
11.
Neuengamme concentration camp
–
The Neuengamme concentration camp, was a German concentration camp, established in 1938 by the SS near the village of Neuengamme in the Bergedorf district of Hamburg, Germany. It was operated by the SS from 1938 to 1945, over that period an estimated 106,000 prisoners were held at Neuengamme and at its subcamps. 14,000 perished in the camp,12,800 in the subcamps and 16,100 during the last weeks of the war on evacuation marches or due to bombing. The verified death toll is 42,900, after Germanys defeat in 1945, the British Army used the site until 1948 as an internment camp. In 1948, the facility was transferred to the Hamburg prison authority which tore down the camp huts, after being operated as two prisons by the Hamburg authorities from 1950 to 2004, and a period of uncertainty, the site now serves as a memorial. It is situated 15 km southeast of the centre of Hamburg, in September 1938 the SS-owned company DEST Earth & Stone Works bought the defunct brickyard in Neuengamme. On 13 December 1938 the Neuengamme concentration camp was set up, in April 1940 the SS and the city of Hamburg signed a contract for the construction of a larger brick factory, and on 4 June the Neuengamme concentration camp became an independent main camp. According to the testimony of Wilhelm Bahr, an ex-medical orderly, in April 1942, a crematorium was constructed at the camp. Prior to that all bodies were taken to Hamburg for cremation, in late 1943, most likely November, Neuengamme recorded its first female prisoners according to camp records. In the summer of 1944, Neuengamme received many prisoners from Auschwitz. All of the women were shipped out to one of its twenty-four female subcamps. In July 1944, a section for prominent prisoners from France was set up. These were political opponents and members of the French resistance who had taken up arms against German forces and they included John William, who had participated in the sabotaging and bombing of a military factory in Montluçon. William discovered his voice while cheering his fellow prisoners at Neuengamme and went on to a prominent career as a singer of popular. At the end of 1944 the total number of prisoners was around 49,000, on 15 March 1945 the transfer of Scandinavian prisoners from other camps to Neuengamme started. This was part of the White Buses program, on 27 March a Scandinavian camp was established at Neuengamme. On 8 April an air raid on a train transporting prisoners led to the Celle massacre, on 26 April 1945 about 10,000 surviving prisoners were loaded into four ships, the passenger liners Deutschland and Cap Arcona and two large steamers, SS Thielbek and Athen. The prisoners were in the holds for several days without food or water
Neuengamme concentration camp
–
Neuengamme concentration camp perimeter along the
Dove Elbe embankment
Neuengamme concentration camp
–
Aerial shot of the Neuengamme camp taken by British aviation on 16 April 1945
Neuengamme concentration camp
–
Sleeping quarters in the subcamp at
Wöbbelin.
Neuengamme concentration camp
–
Max Pauly, a commandant of the camp.
12.
Bernburg Euthanasia Centre
–
It was one of several euthanasia centres run by the Nazis under their official Euthanasia Programme, later referred to after the war as Action T4. Today there is a memorial in Bernburg commemorating the victims of the Bernburg Euthanasia Centre, the victims at the killing centre in Bernburg were categorized by their place of origin. These statistics cover only the first phase of the T4 killings that were carried out by Hitlers order of 24 August 1941, the operation of the gas tap was therefore the job of the gas doctors in the extermination centres. Despite that, during the course of the Euthanasia Programme, in the absence of the doctors or for other reasons, in correspondence with the outside world, the doctors employed false names. 40,000 are gone,60,000 must still go and this is difficult, but necessary work. Bouhler is the man to do it. The planned figure of 100,000 victims mentioned here was not achieved according to the Hartheim Statistics, Action 14f13 was used to eliminate seriously ill concentration camp inmates or those who, for other reasons, were unable to work, they were referred to as ballast. Action 14f13 also dealt with Jewish prisoners, regardless of their state of health. The programme was prepared, alongside Action T4, in the spring of 1941 when medical commissions visited the concentration camps, in a letter after the cessation of the programme had been ordered, it was announced that Bernburg should deal in the near term with concentration camp members. By the spring of 1942,1,400 women from Ravensbrück had been killed in Bernburg and these 300 victims are all named at the Neuengamme concentration camp memorial site. Their names may be seen in the lists in the House of Remembrance, before working in Bernburg SS-Obersturmführer Irmfried Eberl was a doctor and medical head of the Brandenburg Euthanasia Centre with the same staff. Irmfried Eberl was appointed the camps first commandant on 11 July 1942 and he was the only physician-in-chief to command an extermination camp during World War II. In the early years of the GDR, the subject of euthanasia in Bernburg was not addressed, only in the 1980s did the hospital staff begin slowly to deal with the topic. In the wake of the Wende, a memorial was opened, the director of the memorial is Ute Hoffmann. Since 1 January 2007, the memorial has been sponsored by the Memorial Foundation of Saxony-Anhalt, on 29 November 2006, the Friends of the Memorial to the Victims of Nazi Euthanasia in Bernburg was founded on the premises of the memorial. Die Landes-Heil- und Pflegeanstalt Bernburg/Anhaltische Nervenklinik in der Zeit des Nationalsozialismus, verlag Die Blaue Eule, Essen 1999, ISBN 3-89206-954-9. 4327, Frankfurt am Main 1985, ISBN 3-596-24327-0, halle und die Landesheilanstalt Altscherbitz 1933-1945. Zwangssterilisationen und Euthanasie in der Landes- Heil- und Pflegeanstalt Bernburg, ministry of the Interior for the State of Saxony-Anhalt, Magdeburg,1996
Bernburg Euthanasia Centre
–
Extermination wing
Bernburg Euthanasia Centre
–
The gas chamber, designed by
Erwin Lambert
Bernburg Euthanasia Centre
–
Irmfried Eberl, one of the doctors who administered euthanasia
Bernburg Euthanasia Centre
–
Olga Benário in 1928
13.
Exhaust gas
–
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
Exhaust gas
–
A diesel-powered truck emits an exhaust gas rich in black particulate matter when starting its engine.
Exhaust gas
–
Steam from tailpipe of cold car
Exhaust gas
–
What looks like exhaust from jet engines, is actually
contrail. (Jet flying over the
United States Air Force Academy in
Colorado Springs, Colorado).
Exhaust gas
–
Smog in
New York City as viewed from the
World Trade Center in 1988.
14.
Tank
–
A tank is an armoured fighting vehicle designed for front-line combat, with heavy firepower, strong armour, and tracks providing good battlefield maneuverability. The first tanks were designed to overcome the deadlock of trench warfare, now they are a mainstay of ground forces. Modern tanks are versatile mobile land weapon platforms, mounting a large-calibre cannon in a rotating gun turret. In both offensive and defensive roles, they are units that are capable of performing tasks which are required of armoured units on the battlefield. As a result of advances, tanks underwent tremendous shifts in capability in the years since their first appearance. Tanks in World War I were developed separately and simultaneously by Great Britain and this was a prototype of a new design that would become the British Armys Mark I tank, the first tank used in combat in September 1916 during the Battle of the Somme. The name tank was adopted by the British during the stages of their development. While the British and French built thousands of tanks in World War I, Germany was unconvinced of the tanks potential, Tanks of the interwar period evolved into the much larger and more powerful designs of World War II. Tanks in the Cold War were designed with these weapons in mind, improved engines, transmissions and suspensions allowed tanks of this period to grow larger. Aspects of gun technology changed significantly as well, with advances in shell design, during the Cold War, the main battle tank concept arose and became a key component of modern armies. Modern tanks seldom operate alone, as they are organized into combined arms units which involve the support of infantry and they are also usually supported by reconnaissance or ground-attack aircraft. The tank is the 20th century realization of an ancient concept, the internal combustion engine, armour plate, and continuous track were key innovations leading to the invention of the modern tank. Many sources imply that Leonardo da Vinci and H. G. Wells in some way foresaw or invented the tank, leonardos late 15th century drawings of what some describe as a tank show a man-powered, wheeled vehicle with cannons all around it. However the human crew would not have power to move it over larger distance. In the 15th century, Jan Žižka built armoured wagons containing cannons, the caterpillar track arose from attempts to improve the mobility of wheeled vehicles by spreading their weight, reducing ground pressure, and increasing their traction. Experiments can be traced back as far as the 17th century and it is frequently claimed that Richard Lovell Edgeworth created a caterpillar track. It is true that in 1770 he patented a machine, that should carry and lay down its own road and his own account in his autobiography is of a horse-drawn wooden carriage on eight retractable legs, capable of lifting itself over high walls. The description bears no similarity to a caterpillar track, armoured trains appeared in the mid-19th century, and various armoured steam and petrol-engined vehicles were also proposed
Tank
–
An
M4 Sherman tank in Italy in 1943 during WW II.
Tank
–
German Tiger II tanks of
Schwere Heeres Panzer Abteilung 503 (s.H.Pz.Abt. 503) 'Feldherrnhalle' posing in formation for a German newsreel
Tank
–
Model of Leonardo's proposed vehicle.
Tank
–
British World War I Mark V* tank
15.
Death camps
–
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
Death camps
Death camps
–
The Holocaust map: Nazi extermination camps (marked with skulls in black squares) set up in
occupied Poland, 1942
Death camps
–
Members of the
Sonderkommando burn corpses in the fire pits at Auschwitz II-Birkenau.
Death camps
–
Jewish children during deportation to the
Chełmno extermination camp
16.
Nazi concentration camps
–
Nazi Germany maintained concentration camps throughout the territories it controlled before and during the Second World War. Used to hold and torture political opponents and union organizers, the camps initially held around 45,000 prisoners, Heinrich Himmlers SS took full control of the police and concentration camps throughout Germany in 1934–35. Himmler expanded the role of the camps to holding so-called racially undesirable elements of German society, such as Jews, criminals, homosexuals, and Romani. The number of people in camps, which had fallen to 7,500, grew again to 21,000 by the start of World War II and peaked at 715,000 in January 1945. The concentration camps were administered since 1934 by Concentration Camps Inspectorate which in 1942 was merged into SS-Wirtschafts-Verwaltungshauptamt and were guarded by SS-Totenkopfverbände, use of the word concentration came from the idea of using documents confining to one place a group of people who are in some way undesirable. The term itself originated in the camps set up in Cuba by General Valeriano Weyler in 1897. Concentration camps had in the past been used by the U. S. against Native Americans, between 1904 and 1908, the Schutztruppe of the Imperial German Army operated concentration camps in German South-West Africa as part of their genocide of the Herero and Namaqua peoples. The Shark Island Concentration Camp in Lüderitz was the biggest and the one with the harshest conditions, when the Nazis came to power in Germany, they quickly moved to suppress all real or potential opposition. The general public was intimidated through arbitrary psychological terror of the special courts, especially during the first years of their existence these courts had a strong deterrent effect against any form of political protest. The first camp in Germany, Dachau, was founded in March 1933, the press announcement said that the first concentration camp is to be opened in Dachau with an accommodation for 5,000 people. Dachau was the first regular concentration camp established by the German coalition government of National Socialist Workers Party, Heinrich Himmler, then Chief of Police of Munich, officially described the camp as the first concentration camp for political prisoners. On 26 June 1933, Himmler appointed Theodor Eicke commandant of Dachau, in addition, the remaining SA-run camps were taken over by the SS. Dachau served as a prototype and model for the other Nazi concentration camps, almost every community in Germany had members taken there. The newspapers continuously reported of the removal of the enemies of the Reich to concentration camps making the population more aware of their presence. There were jingles warning as early as 1935, Dear God, make me dumb, between 1933 and the fall of Nazi Germany in 1945, more than 3. Many of these Germans had served in government, the military, or in civil positions, as a result of the Holocaust, the term concentration camp carries many of the connotations of extermination camp and is sometimes used synonymously. Regardless of the circumstances of the camp, which can vary a great deal. During the war, new Nazi concentration camps for undesirables spread throughout the continent, Camps were being created near the centers of dense populations, often focusing on areas with large communities of Jews, Polish intelligentsia, Communists or Romani
Nazi concentration camps
–
The Dachau camp was created for holding political opponents. In time for Christmas 1933 roughly 600 of the inmates were released as part of a pardoning action. The picture above depicts a speech by camp commander
Theodor Eicke to prisoners about to be released.
Nazi concentration camps
–
U.S. Army soldiers show the German civilians of
Weimar the corpses found in
Buchenwald Concentration Camp
Nazi concentration camps
–
Inspection by the Nazi party and
Himmler at the Dachau Protective Custody Camp on 8 May 1936.
Nazi concentration camps
–
Jewish prisoners are issued food on a building site at
Salaspils concentration camp, Latvia, in 1941.
17.
Auschwitz
–
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
Auschwitz
–
The main entrance to Auschwitz-Birkenau
extermination camp
Auschwitz
–
Auschwitz I entrance 50°01′39″N 19°12′11″E / 50.027606°N 19.203088°E / 50.027606; 19.203088 (Site of Auschwitz I entrance with Arbeit Macht Frei (work makes you free) gate)
Auschwitz
–
Map showing the location of the three main camps (1944). Prisoners: yellow; facilities: blue-gray
Auschwitz
–
American surveillance photo of Birkenau (1944). South is at the top in this photo.
18.
Majdanek
–
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
Majdanek
–
Aerial reconnaissance photograph of the Majdanek concentration camp (June 24, 1944) from the collections of the
Majdanek Museum; lower half: the barracks under deconstruction with visible chimney stacks still standing and planks of wood piled up along the supply road; in the upper half, functioning barracks
Majdanek
–
KL Lublin Majdanek
Majdanek
–
Red Army soldiers examining the ovens at Majdanek, following the camp's liberation, summer 1944
Majdanek
–
Reconstructed wooden building around the camp's original crematorium, c. 2006
19.
Zyklon B
–
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
Zyklon B
–
Zyklon B labels from
Dachau concentration camp used as evidence at the
Nuremberg trials. The first and third panels contain manufacturer information and the brand name. The centre panel reads "Poison Gas! Cyanide preparation to be opened and used only by trained personnel".
Zyklon B
–
A fumigation team in New Orleans, 1939. Zyklon canisters are visible.
Zyklon B
–
A can of Zyklon B with adsorbent granules and original signed documents detailing ordering of Zyklon B as "materials for Jewish resettlement" (on display at
Auschwitz concentration camp museum)
Zyklon B
–
Empty poison gas canisters found by the Allies at the end of World War II
20.
Auschwitz I
–
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
Auschwitz I
–
The main entrance to Auschwitz-Birkenau
extermination camp
Auschwitz I
–
Auschwitz I entrance 50°01′39″N 19°12′11″E / 50.027606°N 19.203088°E / 50.027606; 19.203088 (Site of Auschwitz I entrance with Arbeit Macht Frei (work makes you free) gate)
Auschwitz I
–
Map showing the location of the three main camps (1944). Prisoners: yellow; facilities: blue-gray
Auschwitz I
–
American surveillance photo of Birkenau (1944). South is at the top in this photo.
21.
Block 11
–
Block 11 was the name of a brick building in the Auschwitz concentration camp. The Block was in the so-called Stammlager and was intended solely to punish prisoners through torture, between the tenth and eleventh block stood the death wall where thousands of prisoners were lined up for execution by firing squad. The block contained special torture chambers in which various punishments were applied to prisoners, some could include being locked in a dark chamber for several days or being forced to stand in one of four standing cells. It was at Block 11 that the first attempts to kill people with Zyklon B were implemented, media related to Auschwitz I death block 11 at Wikimedia Commons
Block 11
–
View of Block 11 (left) as seen from the site of the reconstructed death wall
Block 11
–
Corridor of Block 11
22.
POW
–
A prisoner of war is a person, whether combatant or non-combatant, who is held in custody by a belligerent power during or immediately after an armed conflict. The earliest recorded usage of the prisoner of war dates to 1660. The first Roman gladiators were prisoners of war and were named according to their ethnic roots such as Samnite, Thracian, typically, little distinction was made between enemy combatants and enemy civilians, although women and children were more likely to be spared. Sometimes, the purpose of a battle, if not a war, was to capture women, a known as raptio. Typically women had no rights, and were legally as chattel. For this he was eventually canonized, during Childerics siege and blockade of Paris in 464, the nun Geneviève pleaded with the Frankish king for the welfare of prisoners of war and met with a favourable response. Later, Clovis I liberated captives after Genevieve urged him to do so, many French prisoners of war were killed during the Battle of Agincourt in 1415. In the later Middle Ages, a number of religious wars aimed to not only defeat, in Christian Europe, the extermination of heretics was considered desirable. Examples include the 13th century Albigensian Crusade and the Northern Crusades, likewise, the inhabitants of conquered cities were frequently massacred during the Crusades against the Muslims in the 11th and 12th centuries. Noblemen could hope to be ransomed, their families would have to send to their captors large sums of wealth commensurate with the status of the captive. In feudal Japan there was no custom of ransoming prisoners of war, in Termez, on the Oxus, all the people, both men and women, were driven out onto the plain, and divided in accordance with their usual custom, then they were all slain. The Aztecs were constantly at war with neighbouring tribes and groups, for the re-consecration of Great Pyramid of Tenochtitlan in 1487, between 10,000 and 80,400 persons were sacrificed. During the early Muslim conquests, Muslims routinely captured large number of prisoners, aside from those who converted, most were ransomed or enslaved. Christians who were captured during the Crusades, were either killed or sold into slavery if they could not pay a ransom. The freeing of prisoners was highly recommended as a charitable act, there also evolved the right of parole, French for discourse, in which a captured officer surrendered his sword and gave his word as a gentleman in exchange for privileges. If he swore not to escape, he could gain better accommodations, if he swore to cease hostilities against the nation who held him captive, he could be repatriated or exchanged but could not serve against his former captors in a military capacity. Early historical narratives of captured colonial Europeans, including perspectives of literate women captured by the peoples of North America. The writings of Mary Rowlandson, captured in the fighting of King Philips War, are an example
POW
–
Austro-Hungarian POWs in Russia, 1915
POW
–
An Iranian soldier watching Iraqi prisoners of war sitting in a pickup truck during
Iran-Iraq war.
POW
–
American prisoners captured in
Ardennes in December 1944
POW
–
Engraving of
Nubian prisoners,
Abu Simbel, Egypt, 13th century BC
23.
Operation Reinhard
–
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
Operation Reinhard
–
Condemned Jewish families board the
Holocaust train to
Treblinka during liquidation of the Ghetto in
Siedlce. Action Reinhard, 1942.
Operation Reinhard
–
Reinhard Heydrich shown as the SS-Gruppenführer and General of the Police
Operation Reinhard
–
SS and Police Leader
Odilo Globocnik in charge of Operation Reinhard
Operation Reinhard
24.
Internal combustion engine
–
An internal combustion engine is a heat engine where the combustion of a fuel occurs with an oxidizer in a combustion chamber that is an integral part of the working fluid flow circuit. In an internal combustion engine the expansion of the high-temperature and high-pressure gases produced by combustion applies direct force to some component of the engine, the force is applied typically to pistons, turbine blades, rotor or a nozzle. This force moves the component over a distance, transforming chemical energy into mechanical energy. The first commercially successful internal combustion engine was created by Étienne Lenoir around 1859, firearms are also a form of internal combustion engine. Working fluids can be air, hot water, pressurized water or even liquid sodium, ICEs are usually powered by energy-dense fuels such as gasoline or diesel, liquids derived from fossil fuels. While there are many applications, most ICEs are used in mobile applications and are the dominant power supply for vehicles such as cars, aircraft. Typically an ICE is fed with fossil fuels like natural gas or petroleum products such as gasoline, there is a growing usage of renewable fuels like biodiesel for compression ignition engines and bioethanol or methanol for spark ignition engines. Hydrogen is sometimes used, and can be made from fossil fuels or renewable energy. Various scientists and engineers contributed to the development of internal combustion engines, in 1791, John Barber developed a turbine. In 1794 Thomas Mead patented a gas engine, also in 1794 Robert Street patented an internal combustion engine, which was also the first to use liquid fuel, and built an engine around that time. In 1798, John Stevens built the first American internal combustion engine, in 1807, Swiss engineer François Isaac de Rivaz built an internal combustion engine ignited by electric spark. In 1823, Samuel Brown patented the first internal combustion engine to be applied industrially, in 1860, Belgian Jean Joseph Etienne Lenoir produced a gas-fired internal combustion engine. In 1864, Nikolaus Otto patented the first atmospheric gas engine, in 1872, American George Brayton invented the first commercial liquid-fuelled internal combustion engine. In 1876, Nikolaus Otto, working with Gottlieb Daimler and Wilhelm Maybach, patented the compressed charge, in 1879, Karl Benz patented a reliable two-stroke gas engine. In 1892, Rudolf Diesel developed the first compressed charge, compression ignition engine, in 1926, Robert Goddard launched the first liquid-fueled rocket. In 1939, the Heinkel He 178 became the worlds first jet aircraft, at one time, the word engine meant any piece of machinery — a sense that persists in expressions such as siege engine. A motor is any machine that produces mechanical power, traditionally, electric motors are not referred to as Engines, however, combustion engines are often referred to as motors. In boating an internal combustion engine that is installed in the hull is referred to as an engine, reciprocating piston engines are by far the most common power source for land and water vehicles, including automobiles, motorcycles, ships and to a lesser extent, locomotives
Internal combustion engine
–
Diagram of a cylinder as found in 4-stroke gasoline engines.: C –
crankshaft. E – exhaust
camshaft. I – inlet
camshaft. P –
piston. R –
connecting rod. S –
spark plug. V –
valves. red: exhaust, blue: intake. W –
cooling water jacket. gray structure –
engine block.
Internal combustion engine
–
Reciprocating engine as found inside a car
Internal combustion engine
–
Big Diesel generator used for backup power
Internal combustion engine
–
Combined cycle power plant
25.
Gerstein Report
–
On 17 August 1942, together with Rolf Günther and Wilhelm Pfannenstiel, Gerstein witnessed the gassing of some 3,000 Jews in the extermination camp of Belzec in occupied Poland. The report features his eyewitness testimony and it was used as evidence in the Nuremberg Trials. There he composed his report, first in French and then in German, Gerstein was born on 11 August 1905 in Münster where he lived until 1910, moving to Saarbrücken, Halberstadt, and Neuruppin near Berlin where he received his secondary school diploma in 1925. He attended universities in Marburg, Aachen and Berlin, receiving a degree in 1931. During his studies he was active in the Protestant youth movements and he joined the Nazi Party in May 1933. As a committed Christian, Gerstein resisted attempts by the Nazi state to control the Christian youth movement and he was expelled from the party in October 1936 after his arrest in September 1936 for circulating anti-Nazi pamphlets. Released, he was arrested a second time in July 1938, spending two months in a concentration camp. Reportedly outraged by the euthanasia or Aktion T4 programme, he decided to join the Waffen SS, “to look into the matter of these ovens and chambers in order to learn what happened there. ”Because of his technical education, Gerstein was placed in the Waffen-SS technical disinfection services where he rose quickly to become its head. It was in that capacity that he traveled to the camps of Belzec and Treblinka offering the supply of hydrogen cyanide. ”He described the gassing operation as it happened directly in front of him. In front a very young girl, so all of them go along the alley, all naked, men, women, children. I myself stand together with Hauptmann Wirth on top of the ramp between the gas chambers, mothers with babies at their breast, they come onward, hesitate, enter the death chambers. Until this moment the people live in these 4 chambers, four times 750 people in 4 times 45 cubic metres, one can see that through the small window in which the electric light illuminates the chambers for a moment. After 28 minutes only a few are still alive, finally, after 32 minutes, everyone is dead. — Gerstein Report The final part of the report describes Gerstein’s attempts to circulate his eyewitness testimony. ” and he also reports on his unsuccessful attempts to see the Papal Nuncio Cesare Orsenigo in Berlin. Gerstein wished to notify the Vatican, informed of the purpose of Gersteins visit, Orenigo refused to meet with him. Gerstein adds that he reported on what he saw to “hundreds of personages. ”His report reached the Dutch war minister van Lidth de Jeude in London in May 1943, Gersteins report has been used as evidence in a number of high-profile cases. It was used at the Nuremberg Trials against major Nazi war criminals such as Hermann Göring and it was also later used in the prosecution of Adolf Eichmann by an Israeli court. More recently in 2000 it was used by Christopher Browning in the Holocaust libel trial between David Irving and Deborah Lipstadt, Holocaust historian Christopher Browning has written, Many aspects of Gersteins testimony are unquestionably problematic
Gerstein Report
–
Obersturmführer
Kurt Gerstein, member of the SS, author of the Gerstein Report, wearing SS 2 "Germania" collar tab, World War II
Gerstein Report
–
Action T4 director and commandant of Bełżec,
Christian Wirth, in SS uniform
26.
Holocaust trains
–
Modern historians suggest that without the mass transportation of the railways, the scale of the Final Solution would not have been possible. The most modern accurate numbers on the scale of the Final Solution still rely partly on shipping records of the German railways, the first mass deportation of Jews from Nazi Germany occurred in less than a year before the outbreak of war. It was the eviction of German Jews with Polish citizenship fuelled by the Kristallnacht. Approximately 30,000 Jews were rounded up and sent via rail to refugee camps, in July 1938 both the United States and Britain at the Évian Conference in France refused to accept any more Jewish immigrants. The British Government agreed to take in the shipment of children arranged by Nicholas Winton in Prague, Czechoslovakia, on the conditions that he pay the cost, Winton managed to arrange for 669 children to get out on eight trains to London. The ninth train was to leave Prague on 3 September 1939, the train never left the station, and none of the 250 children on board were seen again. All European Jews trapped under the Nazi regime became the target of Hitlers Final Solution to the Jewish Question, within various phases of the Holocaust, the trains were employed differently. At first, they were used to concentrate the Jewish populations in the ghettos, in 1939 for logistical reasons the Jewish communities in settlements without railway lines in occupied Poland were dissolved. By the end of 1941, about 3.5 million Polish Jews had been segregated and ghettoised by the SS in a massive deportation action involving the use of freight trains. Permanent ghettos had direct connections, because the food aid was completely dependent on the SS similar to all newly built labour camps. Jews were legally banned from baking bread and they were sealed off from the general public in hundreds of virtual prison-islands called Jüdischer Wohnbezirk or Wohngebiet der Juden. However, the new system was unsustainable, by the end of 1941, most ghettoised Jews had no savings left to pay the SS for further bulk food deliveries. The quagmire was resolved at the Wannsee conference of 20 January 1942 near Berlin and it was a euphemism referring to the Nazi plan for the annihilation of the Jewish people. During the liquidation of the ghettos starting in 1942, the trains were used to transport the condemned populations to death camps, to implement the Final Solution, the Nazis made their own Deutsche Reichsbahn an indispensable element of the mass extermination machine, wrote historian Raul Hilberg. Although the prisoner trains took away valuable track space, they allowed for the mass scale, the fully enclosed nature of the locked and windowless cattle wagons greatly reduced the number and skill of troops required to transport the condemned Jews to their destinations. The use of railroads enabled the Nazis to lie about the resettlement program and, at the time, build. The Nazis disguised their Final Solution as the mass resettlement to the east, the victims were told they were being taken to labour camps in Ukraine. In reality, from 1942 on for most Jews, deportations meant only death at either Bełżec, Chełmno, Sobibór, Majdanek, Treblinka, some trains that had already transported goods to the Eastern front on their return carried human cargo bound for extermination camps
Holocaust trains
–
Polish Jews being loaded onto trains at
Umschlagplatz of the
Warsaw Ghetto, 1942. The site is preserved today as the Polish national monument
Holocaust trains
–
Entrance, or so-called "death gate", to Auschwitz II-Birkenau, the extermination camp
Holocaust trains
–
"Selection" on the Judenrampe, May–June 1944. To be sent to the right meant assignment to a work detail; to the left, the
gas chambers. This image shows the arrival of Hungarian Jews from
Carpatho-Ruthenia, many of them from the
Berehov ghetto; the image was taken by Ernst Hofmann or Bernhard Walter of the SS. The main entrance, or "death gate", is visible in the background. Courtesy of
Yad Vashem.
Holocaust trains
–
Interior of a
boxcar used to transport
Jews and other
Holocaust victims during
World War II, the
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.
27.
Treblinka
–
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
Treblinka
–
Treblinka extermination camp
Treblinka
–
The
Wannsee Conference, where the plans for Operation Reinhard and the Treblinka extermination camp were outlined, took place at this villa.
Treblinka
–
Official announcement of the founding of Treblinka I, the forced-labour camp
Treblinka
–
Memorial at Treblinka II, with 17,000 quarry stones symbolising
gravestones.
Inscriptions indicate places of
Holocaust train departures with at least 5,000 victims and selected ghettos from across Poland.
28.
Belzec
–
The camp operated from 17 March 1942 to the end of December 1942. It was situated about 0.5 km south of the railroad station of Bełżec. The burning of exhumed corpses on five open-air grids and bone crushing continued until March 1943, between 430,000 and 500,000 Jews are believed to have been murdered by the SS at Bełżec. Only seven Jews performing slave labour with the camps Sonderkommando survived World War II, the lack of viable witnesses who could testify about the camps operation is the primary reason why Bełżec is so little known despite the enormous number of victims. Bełżec fell within the German zone of occupation in accordance with the German-Soviet Pact against Poland, the prisoners were put to work by the Schutzstaffel in the construction of anti-tank ditches along the transitory Nazi-Soviet border. The Burggraben project was abandoned with the onset of Operation Barbarossa, the decision to begin work on the first stationary gas chambers in the General Government preceded the actual Wannsee Conference by three months. The site near Bełżec was chosen for reasons, it was situated on the border between the Lublin District and the German Distrikt Galizien formed after Operation Barbarossa. It could process the Jews of both regions, the ease of transportation was secured by the railroad junction at nearby Rawa Ruska and the highway between Lublin-Stadt and Lemberg. The northern boundary of the killing centre consisted of an anti-tank trench constructed a year earlier. The ditch, excavated originally for military purposes was likely to serve as the first mass grave, Globocnik brought in Obersturmführer Richard Thomalla who was a civil engineer by profession and the camp construction expert in the SS. Work had commenced in early November 1941, using local builders overseen by a squad of Trawniki guards, the installation, resembling a railway transit point for the purpose of forced labour, was finished before Christmas. It featured insulated barracks for showering among several other structures, the SS completed the work in February 1942 by fitting in the tank engine and the exhaust piping systems for gassing. The trial killings were performed in early March, dolpheid negotiated with the SS-Oberführer Viktor Brack in Berlin for the use of the Action T4 personnel in the process. Only two months later, on 17 March 1942 the daily gassing operations at Bełżec extermination camp began with the T4 leadership brought in from Germany under the guise of Organisation Todt. Christian Wirth had been an expert from the beginning as participant of the first T-4 gassing of handicapped people at the Brandenburg Euthanasia Centre. He was, therefore, a choice to be the first commandant of the first stationary extermination camp of Operation Reinhard in the General Government. Wirth developed his method on the basis of experience he had gained in the gas chambers of Action T4. Even though Zyklon B became broadly available later on, Wirth decided against it, Zyklon B was produced by a private firm for both Birkenau, and Majdanek nearby, but their infrastructure differed
Belzec
–
Bełżec
Belzec
–
Bełżec commandant
Christian Wirth
Belzec
Belzec
–
Belzec extermination camp SS staff, 1942
29.
The Holocaust in Poland
–
The genocide officially sanctioned and executed by the Third Reich during World War II, collectively known as the Holocaust, took the lives of more than three million Polish Jews. German companies bid for the contracts to build the crematoria in concentration camps run by Nazi Germany in the General Government as well as in parts of occupied Poland and beyond. Throughout the German occupation, at risk to themselves and their families. Grouped by nationality, Polish rescuers represent the biggest number of people who saved Jews during the Holocaust, already recognized by the State of Israel, the Polish Righteous Among the Nations include 6,706 gentiles, more than any other nation. Following the 1939 invasion of Poland in accordance with the protocol of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, Nazi Germany. Large areas of western Poland were annexed by Germany, within months, the Polish Jews in the Soviet-occupied zone, who refused to swear an oath of allegiance, were deported to Siberia along with the Catholics. Their number is estimated at about 200,000 men, women and children, both occupying powers were equally hostile to the existence of sovereign Polish state, and endorsed the policy of ethnic cleansing. However, the Soviet rule was short-lived because the terms of the Nazi–Soviet Pact signed earlier in Moscow were broken, from 1941 to 1943 all of Poland was under the control of Nazi Germany. The semi-colonial territory of the General Government, set up in central and south-eastern Poland, prior to World War II, there were 3,500,000 Jews in Poland, living predominantly in the cities, about 10% of the general population. Database of the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews provides information on 1926 Jewish communities across the country, following the conquest of Poland, the first German anti-Jewish measures involved the policy of expulsion of Jews from the territories annexed by the Third Reich. Annexed directly to the new Warthegau district, the city of Łódź absorbed the influx of some 40,000 Polish Jews forced out from the surrounding areas, a total of 204,000 Jews passed through the ghetto in Łódź. Initially, they were to be expelled to the Generalgouvernement, however, the ultimate destination of the massive removal of Jews was left open until the Final Solution was set in motion two years later. Persecution of Polish Jews by the German occupation authority began immediately after the invasion, during this period, the Germans ordered Jewish communities to appoint Jewish Councils to administer the ghettos and to be responsible in the strictest sense for carrying out orders. Most ghettos were set up in cities and towns where Jewish life was well organized, for logistical reasons, the Jewish communities in settlements without railway connections in occupied Poland were dissolved. In a massive deportation action involving the use of freight trains, the food aid was completely dependent on the SS. Jews were legally banned from baking bread, they were sealed off from the public in an unsustainable manner. By the end of 1941, most ghettoised Jews had no savings left to pay the SS for further bulk food deliveries, the Warsaw ghetto contained more Jews than all of France, the Łódź Ghetto more Jews than all of the Netherlands. More Jews lived in the city of Kraków than in all of Italy, all of southeast Europe – Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, and Greece – had fewer Jews than the original four districts of the General Government
The Holocaust in Poland
–
"The Mass Extermination of Jews in German Occupied Poland", by the
Polish government-in-exile addressed to the
wartime allies of the then-
United Nations, 1942
The Holocaust in Poland
–
Map of the Holocaust in occupied Poland during World War II with six
extermination camps:
Auschwitz-Birkenau,
Bełżec,
Chełmno,
Majdanek,
Sobibór and
Treblinka; as well as remote mass killing sites at
Bronna Góra,
Ponary,
Połonka and others. Marked with the
Star of David are selected large Polish cities with the
extermination ghettos
The Holocaust in Poland
–
Entrance to Camp I at
Auschwitz (top) with the sign on the gate reading
Arbeit macht frei, compared with the real
death factory nearby (bottom) at Auschwitz II-Birkenau
The Holocaust in Poland
–
Auschwitz II Birkenau prisoners
30.
SS
–
The Schutzstaffel was a major paramilitary organization under Adolf Hitler and the National Socialist German Workers Party in Nazi Germany. It began with a guard unit known as the Saal-Schutz made up of NSDAP volunteers to provide security for party meetings in Munich. In 1925, Heinrich Himmler joined the unit, which had by then been reformed, under his direction, it grew from a small paramilitary formation to one of the most powerful organizations in Nazi Germany. From 1929 until the collapse in 1945, the SS was the foremost agency of security, surveillance. The two main constituent groups were the Allgemeine SS and Waffen-SS, the Allgemeine SS was responsible for enforcing the racial policy of Nazi Germany and general policing, whereas the Waffen-SS consisted of combat units of troops within Nazi Germanys military. A third component of the SS, the SS-Totenkopfverbände, ran the concentration camps, additional subdivisions of the SS included the Gestapo and the Sicherheitsdienst organizations. The SS was the organization most responsible for the killing of an estimated 5.5 to 6 million Jews. Members of all of its branches committed war crimes and crimes against humanity during World War II, the SS was also involved in commercial enterprises and exploited concentration camp inmates as slave labor. After Nazi Germanys defeat, the SS and the NSDAP were judged by the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg to be criminal organizations, Ernst Kaltenbrunner, the highest-ranking surviving SS officer at the time, was found guilty of crimes against humanity at the Nuremberg trials and hanged in 1946. By 1923, the Nazi Party led by Adolf Hitler had created a volunteer guard unit known as the Saal-Schutz to provide security at their meetings in Munich. The same year, Hitler ordered the formation of a bodyguard unit dedicated to his personal service. He wished it to be separate from the mass of the party, including the paramilitary Sturmabteilung. The new formation was designated the Stabswache, originally the unit was composed of eight men, commanded by Julius Schreck and Joseph Berchtold, and was modeled after the Erhardt Naval Brigade, a Freikorps of the time. The unit was renamed Stoßtrupp in May 1923, the Stoßtrupp was abolished after the failed 1923 Beer Hall Putsch, an attempt by the NSDAP to seize power in Munich. In 1925, Hitler ordered Schreck to organize a new bodyguard unit and it was tasked with providing personal protection for Hitler at NSDAP functions and events. That same year, the Schutzkommando was expanded to an organization and renamed successively the Sturmstaffel. Officially, the SS marked its foundation on 9 November 1925, the new SS was to provide protection for NSDAP leaders throughout Germany. Hitlers personal SS protection unit was enlarged to include combat units
SS
–
Adolf Hitler inspects the
Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler upon arrival at
Klagenfurt, April 1938.
Heinrich Himmler is standing slightly behind Hitler's right
SS
–
SS insignia (
sig runes)
SS
–
Nazi supporters and stormtroopers in Munich during the
Beer Hall Putsch, 1923
SS
–
Heinrich Himmler, head of all SS organisations, stated, "Once the Führer himself has made a decision and given the order, it must be carried out, not only according to the word and the letter, but also in spirit."
