Darkest History 2

Important Facts About . . .

The Holocaust

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31. The soldiers who patrolled and operated concentration camps were known as Totenkopfverbande, or “Death’s Head” detachments. They wore skull-and-crossbones insignias on their uniforms to reflect their namesake.
32. As Jews fled Europe under Hitler’s rule, representatives from 32 countries met in Evian, France, in 1938 to discuss the growing refugee crisis in Europe. Representatives from Great Britain said it had no room to accommodate Jewish refugees. The Australians said, “We don’t have a racial problem and we don’t want to import one.” Canada said of the Jews that “none was too many.” Holland and Demark offered temporary asylum, but only for a few refuges. Only the Dominican Republic offered to take 100,000 Jews, but their relief agencies were so overwhelmed that only a few Jews could take advantage of the offer. A German foreign officer wrote a letter essentially saying that, in light of such responses, the world could not blame them [the Nazis] for not wanting the Jews.
33. Einsatzgruppen (“task forces”) were mobile killing vans, which were regular trucks with the exhaust pipes redirected into the cargo area. Jews were herded into these trucks, sometimes 90 at a time. The Einsatzgruppen killed over 1.2 million Jews.
34. During the Holocaust, Nazi Germany became a genocide state, a government dedicated to the annihilation of the Jews. Every arm of the government played a role. Parish churches provided the birth records of the Jews. The Finance Ministry took Jewish wealth and property. Universities researched more efficient ways to murder. And government transportation bureaus paid for the trains that carried the Jews to their death.
35. There were several types of concentration camps during the Holocaust, including transit camps, prisoner of war camps, and police detention camps. Six camps served as the main killing centers, all in Poland: Treblinka, Sobibor, Belzec, Chelmno, Auschwitz/Birkenau, and Majdanek. The last two were also slave labor camps.
36. More than 870,000 Jews were killed at Treblinka with a staff of just 150 people. There were fewer than 100 known survivors of Treblinka.
37. At Birkenau (Auschwitz II) alone over 1.1 million Jews were murdered in addition to 20,000 Poles, 19,000 Gypsies, and 12,000 Russian prisoners of war.
38. At the entrance to each death camp, there was a process of Selektion or Selection. Pregnant women, small children, the sick or handicapped, and the elderly were immediately condemned to death.
Nazi Germany established approximately 20,000 concentration camps
39. Concentration camp laborers were forced to run in front of SS officers to show that they still had strength. The SS officers directed the runners into one of two lines. One line went to the gas chambers. The other went back to the barracks. The runners did not know which line went where.
40. During the Holocaust, the most respected German corporations used slave labor including BMW, Daimler-Benz (Mercedes-Benz), Messerschmitt, and Krupp. Though they were not forced to use slaves, they nevertheless used them as “good business practice.” Additionally, I.G. Farben, a German chemical industry conglomerate, invested more than 700 million Reich marks (German dollars) to build a huge petrochemical plant at Auschwitz III, which was staffed by human slaves.
41. Auschwitz was the largest and highly organized death camp in history. It was actually three camps: a concentration camp, a death camp, and a slave labor camp. It was 19 square miles, guarded by 6,000 men, and was located in the Polish town of Oswiecim. It was opened June 1940 and initially held 728 Polish prisoners. By 1945, more than 1.25 million people had been killed there and 100,000 worked as slave laborers.
42. At Auschwitz, thousands of prisoners were sterilized using radiation. Additionally, children of African-German origin and the mentally or physically handicapped were surgically sterilized, often brutally.
43. Signs on the entrance to the gas chambers read: “Baths and disinfecting rooms.” Other notices read: “Cleanliness brings freedom!” It took 20 minutes to kill everyone in the chamber. The chambers at Auschwitz/ Birkenau could kill 6,000 people a day.
44. When Soviet troops entered Birkenau on January 18, 1945, they found 358,000 men’s suits, 837,000 women’ outfits, and 15,400 pounds of human hair packed into paper bags. The Nazis were saving them in warehouses for future use.
45. The Nazis would process Holocaust victims’ hair into felt and thread. Hair was also used to make socks for submarine crews, ignition mechanism in bombs, ropes and cords for ships, and stuffing for mattresses. Camp commanders were required to submit monthly reports on the amount of hair collected.
46. British troops liberating Bergen-Belsen found that the Nazis had experimented using human skin for lampshades.
At least 6 million Jews were murdered by the Nazis
47. Six million is the minimum number of Jews killed by the Nazis. Thousands of infants and babies were killed before their births could be recorded.
48. The first instance of mass murder by gas under Hitler’s rule occurred on November 15, 1939, at the Owinksi psychiatric hospital near Poznan. The 1,100 victims, including 78 children, were Polish mental patients, and the gas used was carbon monoxide.
49. The first mass gassing of Jews took place in the Chelmno extermination camp.
50. To further the façade of “cleanliness,” SS men dressed as doctors pretended to “examine” the victims before they were unknowingly gassed. The real purpose of the procedure was to mark victims who had gold teeth in their mouths so their corpses could be set aside after gassing.
51. Joseph Goebbels (1897-1945) was the Nazi minister of propaganda and, prior to 1933, head of the Nazi organization in Berlin. He committed suicide along with his wife and six children in Berlin during the last week of the war.
52. Heinrich Himmler was the Nazi leader more directly involved than any other officer during the Holocaust. He established Dachau, the first concentration camp in Germany, and the extermination camps in Eastern Europe. Himmler was captured by the British at the end of the war, but he committed suicide before he could be brought to trial.
53. Those who deny the Holocaust argue that the Nazi concept of a Final Solution always meant only the emigration of the Jews, not their extermination. The Jews “missing” from Europe after 1945 are assumed to have resurfaced in the U.S., Israel, and elsewhere as illegal immigrants. For many deniers or “revisionists,” the Holocaust was invented by the Jews to serve their own financial and political ends.
54. More than half of the Jewish victims of the Holocaust were women. Most women with small children were immediately sent to the gas chambers as children were nearly useless to the Nazis and the commotion that separating the women and children might have caused would have jeopardized the efficiency of the killing process. Women were also singled out for experiments in contraception and fertility. Additionally, mothers with babies and other children too young to control their crying had trouble finding hideouts during round-ups to avoid being sent to the camps.
55. In one infamous concentration camp experiment, newborn babies were taken away from nursing mothers to see how long they could survive without feeding.
Thousands of prisoners died after the camps were liberated
56. After concentration camps were liberated, thousands of people who had been starved, beaten, and worked to exhaustion died within their first week of freedom. In Dachau, the daily death rate in the days following liberation was 200, and in Bergen-Belsen it was 300. Some Jews who were liberated from concentration camps died from overeating sweets and chocolate provided by friendly soldiers.
57. Bergen-Belson was the first camp to be liberated by Western Allied officers on April 15, 1945. Originally designed to house 10,000 prisoners, by the last weeks of the war, it held 41,000.
58. Adolf Eichmann (1906-62) was an SS officer who directed the implementation of the Final Solution. At the end of war, he escaped to South America, but in 1960, the Israeli secret service captured him in Argentina and secretly removed him to Israel. In 1961, he was tried and convicted of crimes against humanity. He was hanged in 1962.
59. One observer in 1959 noticed that the dirt at the Treblinka concentration camp was not brown but gray. As he felt the dirt trickle through his fingers, he realized the earth was “coarse and sharp and filled with the fragments of human bone.”
60. At Dachau, the Nazis researched ways to stop a bullet wound from bleeding out. They would administer chemicals such as polygala-10 to prisoners and then shoot various parts of their bodies. The prisoners usually died from their injuries within a few moments.

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