World War 2
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This may sound strange but is often easier to look at graphic images of the Holocaust, because throughout the years I have seen so many that nothing actually shocks me anymore. But seeing the last words of the victims has such a profound effect. With images you close your eyes or look away and although…
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Recently a list was released with the names of nearly 10,000 SS guards who worked in Auschwitz.Many of the men who appear in the list of 9,686 names worked as farmers, teachers and decorators before the war. Benjamin Wengel. DOB: 14/09/1905. Place of Birth: Lydowen. Nationality: Lithuanian. Occupation: Barrel maker Franz Wunsch. DOB: 21/03/1922. Place…
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Felix Landau (May 21, 1910, Vienna, Austria – April 4, 1983), was a SS Hauptscharführer, a member of an Einsatzkommando , based first in Lwów, Poland (today Lviv, Ukraine), and later in Drohobycz. He was a “central figure in the Nazi program of the extermination of Galician Jews”.He is known for his daily diary and for temporarily sparing the life of the Jewish artist Bruno Schulz in 1942. Landau liked Schulz’s art and supplied him with protection and…
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The possessions and precious belongings of the Jews transported to Auschwitz-Birkenau were left in the train carriages and on the ramp as their owners were quickly put through the selection process. When the selection process was complete, a work group of prisoners called the ‘Kanada Kommando’ collected the belongings of victims and took them to…
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A white cross made of marble or wood is all that is there to remember you by. Unknown, known but to God The fate that awaited you, to you was unknown. Your mother,father,sister brother,wife,son or daughter, unknown Your name, your rank, your unit, unknown Your favorite,actor,singer,movie and song. unknown Where you were born, the name…
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Every meal could have been her last. And when she had finished eating the bland vegetarian dishes put before her, 25-year-old Margot Wölk and her young female colleagues would burst into tears and “cry like dogs” because they were grateful still to be alive. Hitler was a vegetarian, it is not precisely known when he…
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Tani was born 22 December 1882 in Okayama Prefecture. He graduated from the 15th class of the Imperial Japanese Army Academy in 1903 and from the 24th class of the Army War College, where he became an instructor in 1924. The College used his texts on strategy and tactics as required readings. He saw service…
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Esperanto was created in the late 1870s and early 1880s by L. L. Zamenhof, a Polish-Jewish ophthalmologist from Białystok, then part of the Russian Empire, but now part of Poland. According to Zamenhof, he created the language to reduce the “time and labour we spend in learning foreign tongues” and to foster harmony between people from different countries: “Were there but…
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It would be easy to say that all Germans were bad during WWII and that none of the Catholics and Protestant Christians lifted a finger to fight the Nazi regime. Although I hear this increasingly, it is a wrong assumption to make. In fact there were many who risked their lives,knowing quite well the chances…
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What a tremendous feeling it must have been to accuse and identify those who committed awful crimes, without the fear of retaliation. Probably it wasn’t even out of revenge but with a feeling of getting justice done. On the other side how panicking it must have been for those criminals when the finger was pointed…
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