The 2nd SS Panzer Division Das Reich surrounded the tiny hamlet of Oradour-sur-Glane in the Limousin region of South Central France on 10 June 1944. The division then massacred 642 French civilians in the village.
Some believe that the troops were seeking retribution for the kidnap of a German soldier, but others say that resistance members were based in a different, nearby village. Most of the victims were women and children. Many were herded into a local church, and hand grenades thrown in, before being set on fire. The men were locked in a barn. Machine gunners shot at their legs, then doused them in petrol and set them alight. An investigation years later saw some 60 soldiers brought to trial in the 1950s. Twentywere convicted, but all were later released.
How they got away with their crimes is something I don’t understand.
The men of the village were rounded up, pushed into a barn and shot. Then the women and children were forced inside the village church and burned alive. In the meantime, other stormtroopers went through the village, drenching the houses with an incendiary product before setting them afire and machine-gunning those who hid in a vain attempt to escape.
Les Morts Dansant is a 1984 song by Magnum. from their classic album “On a Storytellers night” The song was initially called “Cannon”, this Tony Clarkin composition is about one of the horrors of war. In World War I, a surprising – some would say disgraceful – number of British soldiers were executed by firing squad for cowardice. Many of these men were in fact suffering from shell shock.
Although it is about World War I, I believe it applies to all wars, past and present.
” Cannons roared, in the valley they thundered While the guns lit up the night Then it rained and both sides wondered Who is wrong and who is right?
On the wire like a ragged old scarecrow Bloody hands and broken back When they fire, see him pirouette solo Jump in time to the rat-a-tat
What a night though it’s one of seven What a night for the dancing dead What a night to be called to heaven What a picture to fill your head To fill your head
By the wall in silhouette standing Through a flash of sudden light Cigarette from his mouth just hanging Paper square to his heart pinned tight
Gather ’round, reluctant marksmen One of them to take his life With a smile he gives them pardon Leaves the dark and takes the light
What a night though it’s one of seven What a night for the dancing dead What a night to be called to heaven What a picture to fill your head To fill your head.
They dispatch their precious cargo And knock him back right off his feet And they pray may no one follow Better still to face the beast
When the field has become a garden And the wall has stood the test Children play and the dogs run barking Who would think or who would guess?
What a night though it’s one of seven Le mort dansant What a night for the dancing dead What a night to be called to heaven What a picture to fill your head To fill your head
What a night though it’s one of seven Les mort dansant What a night for the dancing dead What a night to be called to heaven What a picture to fill your head What a night
What a night though it’s one of seven Les mort dansant What a night for the dancing dead What a night to be called to heaven, heaven What a picture to fill your head
The title of this blog is also the title of a book written by Willy Peter Reese.
He was born on born January 22, 1921 in Duisburg. It is not clear when he died but it estimated he more then likely died between June 22 and 27, 1944 near Wizebsk in the Soviet Union.
Willy Peter Reese was a German writer. During the Second World War , as a Wehrmacht soldier on the Eastern Front, he kept records of his experiences, which he edited into a manuscript. It was published in 2003 with the title “A Stranger to Myself: The Inhumanity of War: Russia, 1941-1944”
In the book he describes the things he sees on the battlefields and the crimes which are committed. He is clearly disgusted by it, but even more so because he is a participant in these horrific deeds because he was a soldier.
He was only twenty years old when he found himself marching through Russia with orders to take no prisoners. Three years later he was dead. Bearing witness to-and participating in-the atrocities of war, Reese recorded his reflections in his diary, leaving behind an intelligent, touching, and illuminating perspective on life on the eastern front. He documented the carnage perpetrated by both sides; the destruction that was exacerbated by the young soldiers’ hunger, frostbite, and exhaustion; and their daily struggle to survive. And he wrestled with his own sins, with the realisation that what he and his fellow soldiers had done to civilians and enemies alike was unforgivable, with his growing awareness of the Nazi policies toward Jews, and with his deep disillusionment with himself and his fellow men.
I have to be honest I have only read some of the book. In a way it is an easy read in the way it is written, but is extremely hard to read because if the descriptive narration of the horrors. I will however finish the book soon.
One thing that is very clear from the book is that it wasn’t only the SS committing atrocities, but also the regular German army, the Wehrmacht.
These are just two excerpts from the book.
“We are war. Because we are soldiers. I have burned all the cities, Strangled all the women, Brained all the children, Plundered all the land. I have shot a million enemies, Laid waste the fields, destroyed the churches, Ravaged the souls of the inhabitants, the blood and tears of all the mothers. I did it, all me.—I did. Nothing. But I was a soldier.”
“Our quarters were wrecked, and there were corpses littered about everywhere. We covered the German dead with tarpaulins; with the Cossacks we took off their felt boots and caps, as well as their pants and underpants, and put them on. We now moved closer together in the few houses still standing. One soldier had been unable to find any felt boots, which were an excellent protection against the cold. The next day he found a Red Army corpse frozen stiff. He tugged at his legs, but in vain. He grabbed an ax and took the man off at the thighs. Fragments of flesh flew everywhere. He bundled the two stumps together under his arm and set them down in the oven, next to our lunch. By the time the potatoes were done, the legs were thawed out, and he pulled on the bloody felt boots. Having the dead meat next to our food bothered us as little as if someone had wrapped his frostbite between meals or cracked lice.”
Josef Mengele was born in Günzburg on 16 March 1911, the oldest of three sons of Walburga (née Hupfauer) and Karl Mengele. His two younger brothers were Karl Jr. and Alois.
There is an eerie coincidence here, Alois was also the name of the Father of the man he came to admire and serve, Adolf Hitler.
I will not go too deep into the crimes of Josef Mengele as such, because so much has already been written about him, even I have done several pieces in the past. His Father Karl Mengele, a prosperous manufacturer of farming implements. In 1935 Josef got a PhD in physical anthropology at the University of Munich. He also held a doctoral degree in genetic medicine.
A privileged and educated man and yet he could not see how inhumane he was. Or maybe he didn’t want to see. With a slight flick of the finger he would decide who would live or die. Even those who initially were selected to live were subjected to medical experiments or slave labour, eventually often resulting in death.
The most disturbing fact about Mengele is that he died a free man. I have no doubt that he was helped escape Germany after the war and not necessarily only by fellow Nazis. It would not surprise me if he actual had surrendered to the allies, he would have been part of Operation Paperclip, the operation which ensured that many of the Nazi scientists got jobs in the USA and other countries, and not just mediocre positions but highly paid jobs within the scientific fraternity.
But the fact that many of his crimes were well documented and used as evidence during the International Military Tribunal, probably meant that the allies could not be seen endorsing this Angel of Death. Having that said if they would have been serious in capturing him, it would have been very easy to do so because he wasn’t really that hard to find.
The 11th of August marked the 76th anniversary of the August 11 Krakow pogrom. August 11,1945, is a date after Poland was liberated ,in fact it is nearly 4 months after the war in Europe had ended.
The text below comes directly from 2 sources, which I also shall link at the bottom of the blog. Both links will also mention other pogroms which happened in Poland shortly after the war in Europe. Despite the fact that the information comes from very reputable sources ,amongst them historian David Engel and eye witnesses, and despite one link is from a Polish site there will still be people who deny these ever happened. Since the war wasn’t officially over yet they were war crimes committed by Polish citizens. Some will say they were not Polish but communists, as if communist is a nationality.
The really disgusting thing here that the one fatality ,although there may have been more but could not be verified, was a lady who had survived Auschwitz.
“On August 11, 1945, during the Sabbath, there was a pogrom of the Jewish population in Krakow. The pretext for the incident was rumors that the bodies and blood of Christian children had been found in the synagogue.”
“The Jews who were praying on Saturday morning in the Kupa synagogue were attacked by the crowd gathered in the nearby square”
In Krakow, a Jewish woman was arrested in late June for allegedly attempting to kidnap and murder a Polish child. The arrest sparked dangerous rumors. Tension mounted throughout the summer, as the rumor circulated that the bodies of thirteen murdered Christian children had been discovered. By the beginning of August, the number of rumored corpses had grown to eighty. A mob gathered every Friday night and Saturday outside Kupa Synagogue in Kazimierz to throw stones at the building and at the Jews praying inside while screaming, laughing and taunting, behavior that did not stop even after guards were posted near the synagogue. Finally, the situation reached the boiling point.
On Saturday, August 11, 1945, a 13-year old Polish boy ran out of Kupa Synagogue screaming “Help! They want to murder me!” The crowd of about 60 Poles outside broke into the synagogue looking for the Christian children’s corpses. They destroyed and plundered the synagogue, tore Torah scrolls, and attacked not only the Jews who were there, but other Jews in the area. The synagogue was set on fire. Roza Berger, an Auschwitz survivor, was murdered; there may have been as many as four other casualties, but this remains unclear. The violence spread throughout the Kazimierz quarter of Krakow;robberies and beatings were recorded in a dozen different apartments. Five Jews were wounded, among them Hanna Zajdman. She gave an account of her experience to the Jewish Historical Commission on August 20, 1945. According to Zajdman’s account, even in the ambulance to the hospital the wounded were called “Jewish scum” by the soldier and the nurse who accompanied them. Once at the hospital they were beaten by other patients and by soldiers. They were threatened repeatedly, even by nurses, who said that, “they were only waiting for the surgery to be over in order to rip us apart.” The scourge of the pogroms had reached the big city.
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I have to warn you up front, this is not an easy read. I will try to stick to the facts and keep my emotions out of it, regardless on how difficult that will be. And I will keep it only to the experiments and the post war situation for Horst Schumann.
Horst Schumann was an SS-Sturmbannführer and medical doctor who conducted sterilization and castration experiments at Auschwitz he was especially interested in the mass sterilization of Jews by using X-ray radiation.
He worked at Block 30 at the women’s hospital, here set up an x-ray unit in 1942. (the picture below is from an x ray machine in Auschwitz but I don’t know if this one was used by Schumann)
Dr. Schumann did not have any particular qualifications for medical research. His duties prior to his research into sterilization involved the direction of killing centers and selection of victims. By 1942, the doctor and his assistants were at work on X-ray sterilization experiments at Block 30 in Birkenau. In these experiments, men and women had their reproductive areas exposed to a five to eight minute dose of X-rays. Depending on the intensity of the dose, this resulted in external burns or worse. Following exposure, some of the women and men underwent operations to remove reproductive organs for evaluation. Ovaries and testicles were removed and examined. The men also were subject to other brutalizing medical procedures involving semen extraction. Many of the victims died from complications following the surgeries. The survivors were not as likely as others to survive assignment to work details in their weakened condition. Roughly one thousand male and female prisoners were subjected to X-ray sterilization with about two hundred of them undergoing follow-up extractive surgery.
(. Lifton, The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide (Basic Books, 2000), pp. 25, 247, 274-282.)
Both men and women were forcibly sterilized . They were positioned repeatedly for a number of minutes between two x-ray machines, the rays were aimed aiming at their sexual organs. Most victims succumbed to the treatment and died after great suffering, Either that or they were gassed because the injuries they sustained made them unfit to work .Men’s testicles were removed and sent to Breslau for histopathological examination. Schumann chose his test persons himself. They were always young, healthy, good-looking Jewish men, women and girls but who would often look like old people afterwards. Often the intestines were also affected. Another element of Schumann’s experiments was to check whether the radiation had worked, For this they used the so-called semen check. The method was by inserting a stick covered with a rubber hose was into the rectum of the victim and the glands stimulated until ejaculation occurred so that the ejaculate could be tested for sperm. These samples were also sent to the University of Breslau for examination.
Schumann selected several women from Block 10 at the main camp of Auschwitz. To control the radiation on women, prisoner doctors ,Dr. Maximilian Samuel and Dr. Wladislaw Dering had to remove an ovary from a healthy woman.
Another experiment Schumann conducted was typhus experiment. He did this by injecting people with blood from typhus patients and would then attempt to cure the newly infected subjects.
After the war he was a sports doctor for the city of Gladbeck. But when he was identified in 1951 the East German government issued a warrant for his arrest. He managed to evade capture and worked for 3 years as a ships doctor. He had no German passport but in 1954 he applied for a passport in Japan, which was issued to him under his own name. He then fled to Egypt but shortly after he settled in Khartoum in the Sudan as head of a hospital. In 1962 he was forced to flee Sudan after he was recognized by an Auschwitz survivor. He went to Ghana where he received protection from the President
In 1966 he was extradited to West Germany where he stood trial in Frankfurt on September 23,1970. However due to bad health he only served about 18 months in Jail.
He eventually died on 5 May 1983.age 77. A lot older then most of the victims he killed.
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Stefan Baretzki was an Auschwitz guard of Bukovina German origin. He was conscripted into the Waffen-SS and stationed at Auschwitz from 1942 until 1945.
Baretzki was sentenced to life imprisonment and eight years in August 1965, at the Frankfurt Auschwitz trials. Because he only finished primary education, the court described him as a “simpleton” and “less intelligent than all the other defendants”, However I don’t fully subscribe to that point of view. It was not uncommon in those days that people would only have primary education. But his evidence was helpful, his admission that he knew that the mass murder of Jews was a crime was used as evidence that the other defendants knew that their actions were criminal too.
Barertzki and other guards would be shown propaganda movies like Jud Süß and Ohm Krüger after they finished work. This would than encourage them to beat up Jewish prisoners the morning after.
Baretzki claimed during his trial that when guards asked why prisoners were sent to Auschwitz, they were informed that all of them were dangerous criminals convicted of sabotage.
Baretzki also testified against Kurt Knittel an SS guard who was in charge of the propaganda department at Auschwitz.
Baretzki testified that Knittel had told them that Jewish women and children had to be murdered because they were an inferior race.
Stefan Baretzki tough was not a simpleton, he was an evil man. The crimes he committed were calculated.He was found guilty of five counts of murder: he beat a starving prisoner to death and, on 21 June 1944, drowned four prisoners in a water tank. I a New York Times article from July 28, 1964 , it was also reported that he kicked a newborn baby to death and knifed a prisoner who had just been hanged. The witness Mr. Gotland, a businessman from Paris, said Baretzki had ordered him to recover the child’s body, which the guard had kicked “like a rock.” He said Baretzkl later clubbed the baby’s mother to death.
On June 21,1988 Baretzki committed suicide while in jail.
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The picture is of clothes that once belonged to prisoners of the Dachau concentration camp, it was taken shortly after the camp was liberated.
When you look a it it looks like a launderette has dumped its load in a courtyard.
But this picture tells so much more. Each of those pieces of material and pieces of cloth once belonged to a human being. A human being who was not deemed worthy of live by the ideology spread by the NSDAP_-Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei. The national socialist workers party. Leave those words sink in. and especially the words socialist and workers. Indicating they had the best interest at heart for the workers.
It was all a lie. If the workers would be Jewish, Homosexual, Roma or any other group which did not fit the NSDAP ideal, they would be worked to death or immediately gassed if they arrived in any of the death camps.
Even if you look at those piles of clothes you realize that this only a fraction of all crimes and horrors committed.
How did we ever let this happen?
Dachau was the first concentration camp and was in operation from 1933 to 1945.
Over the years of its operation, thousands of Dachau prisoners died of disease, malnutrition and slave labour. Thousands more were executed for breaking camp rules, which were often very vague.Starting 1941, thousands of Soviet prisoners of war were sent to Dachau then shot to death at a nearby rifle range. In 1942, construction began at Dachau on Barrack X, a crematorium that eventually consisted of four big ovens used to burn corpses. With the implementation in 1942 of Hitler’s “Final Solution” to systematically eradicate all European Jews, thousands of Dachau detainees were moved to Nazi extermination camps in Poland, where they died in gas chambers.
Dachau was also used for some of the most gruesome experiments.For example, prisoners were forced to be test subjects in a series of tests to determine the posibility of reviving individuals immersed in freezing water. For hours at a time, prisoners were forcibly submerged in tanks filled with ice water. Some prisoners died during the process.
Approximately 40,000 died in Dachau, Which is roughly about 0.4% of the total amount of people who died during the Holocaust, and that percentage may even be smaller because I took the number of 11,000,000 which is generally taken as the approximate number of victims, but I think that number is actually more.
But just imagine that although a number of 40,000 looks big it is only 0.4 ” , a fraction of the horrors.
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Most of the SS guards working in Auschwitz and indeed other camps had not been hardened soldiers before the war. They had been ‘ordinary’ people.
And that is still a mystery to me, how could these men become so involved in these unspeakable evil acts, Some were more willingly than others , but each one of them were involved in way or another. I know some people will argue that if they didn’t follow orders they would have been killed themselves, however no evidence was ever found that guards who did not partake in the killing, were ever punished.
They may have been brainwashed but eventually they were never forced.
Below are just some examples of Auschwitz guards and what they had done before the war.
Alois Balletshofer, farmer from Bavaria, Germany.
Franz Hubert, a locksmith and citizen of Romania.
Fritz Taddiken, German painter.
Kolomann Bistritz, Hungarian citizen and farmer.
These are just 4 men but there were thousands of ‘ordinary; evil men.Most of them lived banal lives after the war.
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Today marks the 74th anniversary of the sentencing at the main Nuremberg trials.The sentencing took two days, with the individual sentences read out on the afternoon of 1 October.
The Nuremberg trials were never really meant to serve justice. In one way I can understand it but on the other hand looking at the sentences handed out ,one can not escape the fact that it was really a window dressing exercise.
Of the 24 defendants the international tribunal found all but three of the defendants guilty. Twelve were sentenced to death, one in absentia,Martin Borman, and the rest were given prison sentences ranging from 10 years to life behind bars.
The fact that 3 of them got acquitted speaks volumes, Each one of those 24 men were involved in horrendous war crimes and genocide in one way or another, be it in actively participating or by facilitating No one should have walked out of that court a free man.
Those who did not get the death sentence were given very lenient sentences.
Albert Speer was pivotal in the Nazi crimes but he was very manipulative. His lies were believed and he was sentenced to 20 years. After his release he lived a wealthy life mainly from proceeds of stolen art.
Because the accused men and judges spoke four different languages, the trial saw the introduction of a technological innovation taken for granted today: instantaneous translation. IBM provided the technology and recruited men and women from international telephone exchanges to provide on-the-spot translations through headphones in English, French, German and Russian.
Strangely enough not one staff member of IBM were in the docks with the defendants. IBM played a crucial role in the Holocaust at all six phases: identification, expulsion from society, confiscation, ghettoization, deportation, and even extermination. Moreover, recently discovered documents portray with crystal clarity the personal involvement and micro-management of IBM president Thomas J. Watson in the company’s co-planning and co-organizing of Hitler’s campaign to destroy the Jews.
There were subsequent trials but if you look at the amount of sentences it is absolutely shocking how so many got away with murder. Many of them got high positions in government bodies in Germany and the USSR,USA and the UK.
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History of Sorts 
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