Dachau
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On April 29, 1945, U.S. troops liberated the Dachau concentration camp. I could share thousands of images of the atrocities committed there, but most people would likely only glance at one or two before turning away. The horror is simply too overwhelming to endure. The human mind struggles to comprehend such profound evil. Instead, I…
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Dachau Concentration Camp was the first of the Nazi concentration camps established in Germany. It opened in 1933, shortly after Adolf Hitler became Chancellor, and it operated until its liberation by American troops in 1945. Situated just north of Munich, Dachau served as a model for other concentration camps that followed. Initially, Dachau held political…
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This is a first; this will be the first time I do a blog in two languages, English and Frisian. The reason why? Firstly it is to acknowledge my heritage from my mother’s side, she was Frisian. Secondly, and more importantly to honor a hero of mine. Father Titus Brandma who was also Frisian, Now…
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I have done a blog before on Arthur Kahn, a 21-year-old Jewish German medical student, who had enrolled at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. He had returned to Germany to retrieve his student records from the University of Würzburg. Arthur was the first to be murdered during the Holocaust. However, this blog is about…
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Otto Neururer was born in Tyrol, Austria, on March 25, 1881. He was the twelfth and youngest child of a peasant farmer, Alois Neururer, and his wife, Hildegard. When Otto was eight years old, his father died, leaving the family in difficult circumstances. His mother, a devout Catholic, suffered recurring bouts of depression, and Otto…
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Primum non nocere is the Latin phrase for “First do no harm” It is part of the Hippocratic Oath including the promise “to abstain from doing harm” . The Hippocratic Oath is an oath historically taken by physicians. It is one of the most widely known of Greek medical texts. In its original form, it requires a new physician to…
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The Holocaust remains the most devastating and horrifying chapter in human history, marked by its relentless dehumanization and systematic annihilation of millions of people. Among the lesser-known stories is that of the Schwanger Kommando, or the “Pregnant Command,” which existed in the Kaufering subcamps of Dachau, one of the many Nazi concentration camps. Background: The…
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It’s interesting how research can lead you to unexpected discoveries. While looking into one topic, I stumbled upon something even more compelling: the photograph above. It’s an identification photo from the Herzogenbusch Concentration Camp, aka Vught concentration camp, in the Netherlands, depicting prisoner Martinus T. Barbier taken by the camp photographer on January 20, 1944.…
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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…
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Generally, I don’t care for colourized photographs, especially not those from the Holocaust. However, I did come across a few striking depictions of that dark era. A former prisoner holds a human bone from a large pile of other bones from the Buchenwald concentration camp’s crematory. 1945. An emaciated 18-year-old female Russian prisoner stares into…
History of Sorts 