Holocaust
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A question people often ask me is “Why did so many Germans believe Hitler and the NSDAP?” Hitler did not keep his hate for Jews and other groups he deemed unworthy a secret. In fact he wrote about it in Mein Kampf and other political publications.So why did so many Germans endorse him and his…
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Alois Brunner was one of the most feared and ruthless Nazi war criminals during the Holocaust. As a senior SS officer and a close associate of Adolf Eichmann, Brunner played a pivotal role in the deportation of tens of thousands of Jews to concentration and extermination camps. Known for his cold-blooded efficiency and unrelenting cruelty,…
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The question ‘Is it acceptable to use data from Nazi experiments?’ is one of the most difficult ethical questions to answer. At least for me it is, I am a man who bases a lot of his decisions on his gut feeling. In this case my gut feeling says no. However if I keep my…
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Most of us will have seen the picture of the Nazi rally where one ‘Nazi’ refused to salute. This man was August Landmesser and he defied the Nazi regime in one more than one way. Adopted by the Nazi Party in the 1930s, Hitler’s infamous ‘sieg heil’ (meaning ‘hail victory’) salute was mandatory for all German…
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On October, 1 1944, the first of two sets of medical experiments involving castration were performed on homosexuals at the Buchenwald concentration camp, near Weimar, Germany. Buchenwald was one of the first concentration camps established by the Nazi regime. Constructed in 1937, it was a complement to camps north (Sachsenhausen) and south (Dachau), and was…
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There is no denying that the Dutch should have done more to protect their Jewish neighbours during World War II. But I am looking at this from a retrospective point of view; hindsight always comes with 20/20 vision. That’s why I can’t judge; I really don’t know what I would or wouldn’t have done. However,…
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A caterpillar sneaks into a gate. It looks around and sees empty barracks. It is there for the next phase in its life. It really is something magical, a miracle of nature—from hairy caterpillar to chrysalis to butterfly. The butterfly emerges, it has been more than two years since it was a caterpillar. It flies…
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When you look at the photograph above, your first reaction is to probably think it’s an ordinary historical picture from somewhere in the Netherlands. The picture couldn’t be more typically Dutch if for one detail—the photograph was taken in Amsterdam during the war, and the man is wearing a star on his jacket. As in…
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The Japanese who liberated the Dachau Concentration camps complex.. The soldiers were from the 442nd Infantry Regiment an infantry regiment of the United States Army. The unit is most known as a fighting unit composed almost entirely of second-generation American soldiers of Japanese ancestry aka Nisei.Although some of them had been in internment camps themselves,…
