World War 2

  • The title is taken from a  letter written by Marcel Nadjari ,a Jewish-Greek survivor of the Auschwitz-Birkenau. Marcel  was a member of the Sonderkommando in Birkenau from May 1944 to November 1944. The letter is an eye witness account of his experiences as a Sonderkommando in Auschwitz Birkenau. He had the task of of removing…

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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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  • One of the most cruelest crimes committed by the Japanese Imperial Army during WWII, was the Bataan Death March. It was a march in the Philippines of some 66 miles (106 km) that 76,000 prisoners of war (66,000 Filipinos, 10,000 Americans) were forced to take, by the Japanese military to endure in April 1942, during…

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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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  • October 6, 1944 — deep in the tropical waters of the Java Sea, two submarines hunted beneath the same sun. One flew the flag of the Royal Netherlands Navy, the other bore the iron cross of Nazi Germany.By the end of the day, only one would remain afloat. A Dutch Submarine Far From Home The…

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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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  • Bridget Dowling was born on 3 July 1891 in Dublin. She grew up at Flemings Place, near Mespil Road. She was still in her teens when she attended the 1909 RDS Dublin Horse Show and met Adolf Hitler’s half-brother, Alois Hitler, Jr. Alois had pretended to be a wealthy hotelier who was touring Europe, but…

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  • The Buchenwald experiments

    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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  • Trying to Please the Monsters

    I was watching a documentary last night called Lost Home Movies of Nazi Germany. The documentary contained footage taken by German civilians and soldiers. Some of the footage was truly horrendous, but some of the footage appeared at first glance quite pleasing. For example, it showed a young, attractive woman dancing topless for some German soldiers.…

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