Dachau
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After setting up this blog a few years ago, I am amazed that I still come across stories of heroes I had never heard of before. Ernst Sillim was born in 1923, the first of five children. Shortly before that, his father, Albert, a stockbroker, and his mother, Annie, moved from Amsterdam to a house…
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Karl Amadeus Hartmann.was born on 2 August 1905 in Munich and came into contact with art and music at an early stage. He studied trombone and composition at the Staatliche Akademie der Tonkunst in Munich from 1924 to 1929. He hated Nazism and Hitler and anything that ranked extreme socialism and communism. A fellow composer,…
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Noor Inayat Khan, a descendant of Indian royalty and a British special agent, is remembered for her extraordinary bravery during World War II. Born in 1914 in Moscow to an Indian Sufi mystic father, Hazrat Inayat Khan, and an American mother, Noor was raised in a spiritual and intellectual household. Her early life was marked…
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It is a lesser-known, or perhaps lesser-acknowledged, fact that the entire Wehrmacht, including the Navy and Luftwaffe, was involved in the Holocaust. It wasn’t only the SS. The Luftwaffe was directly involved through bombardments and indirectly through experiments carried out on their behalf. The aerial bombardment of the village of Vorizia by the Luftwaffe is…
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When we think of Nazi concentration camps, our minds often conjure images of mass extermination, terror, and starvation. The haunting images of piles of corpses at Bergen-Belsen and the crematoriums of Auschwitz are etched into our collective memory. However, in the final years of the Third Reich’s vast concentration-camp system, the Nazis introduced a disturbing…
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Nico Peeters was born on 12 April 1893 in ‘s-Hertogenbosch and lived in The Hague. He grew up with his brothers and sister in a family with deaf parents. He was an entrepreneur and resistance member. Nico owned a cigar factory with his brother Ben. The Peeters family was idealistic and active in the resistance.…
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Music soothes the savage beast, that is what Shony Alex Braun must have thought when he played for the SS. Shony’s story may seem like he had it relatively easy life, playing for the SS. However, I believe that could not be further from the truth. It wouldn’t take much for the SS to suddenly…
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Since 2016, I have been writing and researching the evils thrust upon Europe and beyond by the NSDAP or in short Nazis, but I had never visited a concentration camp until 4 June 2023. I will not just write about Dachau . I will also include the place I visited the day before—Das NS-Dokumentationszentrum München—the…
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On the 2nd of May a unit from the 522nd Field Artillery Battalion, US Army, encountered Jewish inmates who were put on a death march from Dachau and were approaching Waakirchen. The US soldiers were almost entirely of second-generation American soldiers of Japanese ancestry (Nisei) During these marches, also called the “death marches”, at least…
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Three years ago,in June, I had the chance to visit Dachau, for lack of a better word, it was the highlight of my year. Strangely enough, it inspired me—in a creative way. In shadows cast by history’s hand,Where sorrow’s echo still commands,Lies a place where darkness roams,A haunting tale of Dachau’s home. Amongst the polar…
History of Sorts 