Download or read book The Operation Reinhard Death Camps written by Yitzhak Arad and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2018-07-13 with total page 339 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Under the code name Operation Reinhard, more than one and a half million Jews were murdered between 1942 and 1943 in the concentration camps of Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka, located in Nazi-occupied Poland. Unlike more well-known camps, which were used both for slave labor and extermination, these camps existed purely to murder Jews. Few victims survived to tell their stories, and the camps were largely forgotten after they were dismantled in 1943. The Operation Reinhard Death Camps bears eloquent witness to this horrific tragedy. This newly revised and expanded edition includes new material on the history of the Jews under German occupation in Poland; the execution and timing of Operation Reinhard; information about the ghettos in Lublin, Warsaw, Krakow, Radom, and Galicia; and updated numbers of the victims who were murdered during deportations. In addition to documenting the horror of the camps, Yitzhak Arad recounts the stories of those courageous enough to struggle against the Nazis and their "final solution." Arad's work retrieves the experiences of Operation Reinhard's victims and survivors from obscurity and exposes a terrible chapter in humanity's history.
Download or read book Belzec Sobibor Treblinka written by Yitzhak Arad and published by . This book was released on 1987 with total page 456 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Between the years 1942 and 1943, under the code name Operation Reinhard, more than one and a half million Jews were gassed in the concentration camps of Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka, located in Nazi-occupied Poland. Jewish survivors of the operation numbered fewer than 200. Yitzhak Arad reveals here the complete story of Operation Reinhard for the first time. Using sources previously overlooked, such as German and Polish official records and testimonies from Nazi war criminal trials, Arad records the history of the Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka death camps from their construction in 1941 to their destruction in 1943. He describes the camps' physical layouts, the process of extermination used, and the actions of the SS men and Ukrainian guards who operated the camps. Arad tells the tale of the death camps' inmates -- though many of their lives lasted but a few hours following their arrival --he underground organizations, the revolts and escapes, and the details concerning the day-to-day survival of those spared instant death in the gas chambers. Arad's work retrieves the experience of Operation Reinhard's victims and survivors from obscurity and bears eloquent witness to the tragedy which was theirs. Biographical Statement: Yitzhak Arad, Chairman of Yad Vashem, Holocaust Remembrance Authority, is a lecturer in Jewish History at the University of Tel Aviv and author of Ghetto in Flames: Story of the Vilna Ghetto.
Download or read book Eyewitness to Genocide written by Michael Bryant and published by Univ. of Tennessee Press. This book was released on 2014-07-30 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of the deadliest phases of the Holocaust, the Nazi regime’s “Operation Reinhard” produced three major death camps—Belzec, Treblinka, and Sobibor—which claimed the lives of 1.8 million Jews. In the 1960s, a small measure of justice came for those victims when a score of defendants who had been officers and guards at the camps were convicted of war crimes in West German courts. The conviction rates varied, however. While all but one of fourteen Treblinka defendants were convicted, half of the twelve Sobibor defendants escaped punishment, and only one of eight Belzec defendants was convicted. Also, despite the enormity of the crimes, the sentences were light in many cases, amounting to only a few years in prison. In this meticulous history of the Operation Reinhard trials, Michael S. Bryant examines a disturbing question: Did compromised jurists engineer acquittals or lenient punishments for proven killers? Drawing on rarely studied archival sources, Bryant concludes that the trial judges acted in good faith within the bounds of West German law. The key to successful prosecutions was eyewitness testimony. At Belzec, the near-total efficiency of the Nazi death machine meant that only one survivor could be found to testify. At Treblinka and Sobibor, however, prisoner revolts had resulted in a number of survivors who could give firsthand accounts of specific atrocities and identify participants. The courts, Bryant finds, treated these witnesses with respect and even made allowances for conflicting testimony. And when handing down sentences, the judges acted in accordance with strict legal definitions of perpetration, complicity, and action under duress. Yet, despite these findings, Bryant also shows that West German legal culture was hardly blameless during the postwar era. Though ready to convict the mostly workingclass personnel of the death camps, the Federal Republic followed policies that insulated the judicial elite from accountability for its own role in the Final Solution. While trial records show that the “bias” of West German jurists was neither direct nor personal, the structure of the system ensured that lawyers and judges themselves avoided judgment.
Download or read book The Operation Reinhard Death Camps written by Yitzhak Arad and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page 525 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Commandant of Lubizec written by Patrick Hicks and published by Steerforth. This book was released on 2014-03-25 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: After the Nazis invaded Poland in 1939, they quickly began persecuting anyone who was Jewish. Millions were shoved into ghettos and forced to live under the swastika. Death camps were built and something called "Operation Reinhard" was set into motion. Its goal? To murder all the Jews of Poland. The Commandant of Lubizec is a harrowing account of a death camp that never actually existed but easily could have in the Nazi state. It is a sensitive, accurate retelling of a place that went about the business of genocide. Told as a historical account in a documentary style, it explores the atmosphere of a death camp. It describes what it was like to watch the trains roll in, and it probes into the mind of its commandant, Hans-Peter Guth. How could he murder thousands of people each day and then go home to laugh with his children? This is not only an unflinching portrayal of the machinery of the gas chambers, it is also the story of how prisoners burned the camp to the ground and fled into the woods. It is a story of rebellion and survival. It is a story of life amid death. With a strong eye towards the history of the Holocaust, The Commandant of Lubizec compels us to look at these extermination centers anew. It disquiets us with the knowledge that similar events actually took place in camps like Bełzec, Sobibór, and Treblinka. The history of Lubizec, although a work of fiction, is a chillingly blunt distillation of real life events. It asks that we look again at "Operation Reinhard". It brings voice to the silenced. It demands that we bear witness.
Download or read book Treblinka written by Chil Rajchman and published by MacLehose Press. This book was released on 2013-11-05 with total page 156 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Chil Rajchman, a Polish Jew, was arrested with his younger sister in 1942 and sent to Treblinka, a death camp where more than 750,000 were murdered before it was abandoned by German soldiers. His sister was sent to the gas chambers, but Rajchman escaped execution, working for ten months under incessant threats and beatings as a barber, a clothes-sorter, a corpse-carrier, a puller of teeth from those same bodies. In August 1943, there was an uprising at the camp, and Rajchman was among the handful of men who managed to escape. In 1945, he set down this account, a plain, unembellished and exact record of the raw horror he endured every day. This unique testimony, which has remained in the sole possession of his family ever since, has never before been published in English. For its description of unspeakably cruelty, Treblinka is a memoir that will not be superseded. In addition to Rajchman's account, this volume will include the complete text of Vasily Grossman's "The Hell of Treblinka," one of the first descriptions of a Nazi extermination camp; a powerful and harrowing piece of journalism written only weeks after the camp was dissolved.
Download or read book Sobibor the Forgotten Revolt written by Thomas Toivi Blatt and published by . This book was released on 1997 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Hitler s Death Camps in Occupied Poland written by Ian Baxter and published by Pen and Sword Military. This book was released on 2021-04-28 with total page 215 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Covers the six principal extermination camps in Nazi occupied Poland; a sobering reminder of the horrors of the Holocaust. Nearly 80 years on, the concept and scale of the Nazis’ genocide program remains an indelible, nay almost unbelievable, stain on the human race. Yet it was a dreadful reality of which, as this graphic book demonstrates, all too much proof exists. Between 1941 and 1945 an estimated three and a half million Jews and an unknown number of others, including Soviet POWs and gypsies, perished in six camps built in Poland; Auschwitz-Birkenau, Belzec, Chelmno, Majdenak, Sobibor and Treblinka. Unpleasant as it may be, it does no harm for present generations to be reminded of man’s inhumanity to man, if only to ensure such atrocities will never be repeated. This book aims to do just this by tracing the history of the so called Final Solution and the building and operation of the Operation Reinhard camps built for the sole purpose of mass murder and genocide.
Download or read book Death Dealer written by Rudolf Hoss and published by Prometheus Books. This book was released on 2012-08-31 with total page 406 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: By his own admission, SS Kommandant Rudolf Höss was history's greatest mass murderer, having personally supervised the extermination of approximately two million people, mostly Jews, at the death camp in Auschwitz, Poland. Death Dealer is the first complete translation of Höss's memoirs into English. These bone-chilling memoirs were written between October 1946 and April 1947. At the suggestion of Professor Sanislaw Batawia, a psychologist, and Professor Jan Shen, the prosecuting attorney for the Polish War Crimes Commission in Warsaw, Höss wrote a lengthy and detailed description of how the camp developed, his impressions of the various personalities with whom he dealt, and even the extermination of millions in the gas chambers. This written testimony is perhaps the most important document attesting to the Holocaust, because it is the only candid, detailed, and (for the most part) honest description of the Final Solution from a high-ranking SS officer intimately involved in carrying out the plans of Hitler and Himmler. With the cold objectivity of a common hit-man, Höss chronicles the discovery of the most effective poison gas, and the technical obstacles that often thwarted his aim to kill as efficiently as possible. Staring at the horror without reacting, Höss allowed conditions at Auschwitz to reduce human beings to walking skeletons - then he labelled them as subhumans fit only to die. Readers will witness Höss's shallow rationalizations as he tries to balance his deeds with his increasingly disturbed, yet always ineffectual, conscience.
Download or read book Understanding Willing Participants Volume 2 written by Nestar Russell and published by Palgrave Macmillan. This book was released on 2019-01-10 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Horrified by the Holocaust, social psychologist Stanley Milgram wondered if he could recreate the Holocaust in the laboratory setting. Unabated for more than half a century, his (in)famous results have continued to intrigue scholars. Based on unpublished archival data from Milgram’s personal collection, volume one of this two-volume set introduces readers to a behind the scenes account showing how during Milgram’s unpublished pilot studies he step-by-step invented his official experimental procedure—how he gradually learnt to transform most ordinary people into willing inflictors of harm. The open access volume two then illustrates how certain innovators within the Nazi regime used the very same Milgram-like learning techniques that with increasing effectiveness gradually enabled them to also transform most ordinary people into increasingly capable executioners of other men, women, and children. Volume two effectively attempts to capture how step-by-step these Nazi innovators attempted to transform the Führer’s wish of a Jewish-free Europe into a frightening reality. By the books’ end the reader will gain an insight into how the seemingly undoable can become increasingly doable.
Download or read book Fear written by Jan Gross and published by Random House Trade Paperbacks. This book was released on 2007-08-14 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An astonishing and heartbreaking study of the Polish Holocaust survivors who returned home only to face continued violence and anti-Semitism at the hands of their neighbors “[Fear] culminates in so keen a shock that even a student of the Jewish tragedy during World War II cannot fail to feel it.”—Elie Wiesel FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL JEWISH BOOK AWARD • NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE WASHINGTON POST BOOK WORLD Poland suffered an exceedingly brutal Nazi occupation during the Second World War, in which 90 percent of the country’s three and a half million Jews perished. Yet despite this unprecedented calamity, Jewish Holocaust survivors returning to their hometowns in Poland after the war were further subjected to terror and bloodshed. The deadliest peacetime pogrom in twentieth-century Europe took place in the Polish town of Kielce on July 4, 1946. In Fear, Jan T. Gross addresses a vexing question: How was this possible? At the center of his investigation is a detailed reconstruction of the Kielce pogrom and how ordinary Poles responded to the spectacle of Jews being murdered by their fellow citizens. Anti-Semitism, Gross argues, became a common currency between the Communist regime and a society in which many were complicit in the Nazi campaign of plunder and murder—and for whom the Jewish survivors were a standing reproach. For more than half a century, the fate of Jewish Holocaust survivors in Poland was cloaked in guilt and shame. Writing with passion, brilliance, and fierce clarity, Jan T. Gross brings to light a truth that must never be ignored. Praise for Fear “That a civilized nation could have descended so low . . . such behavior must be documented, remembered, discussed. This Gross does, intelligently and exhaustively.”—The New York Times Book Review “Gripping . . . an especially powerful and, yes, painful reading experience . . . illuminating and searing.”—Los Angeles Times Book Review “Gross tells a devastating story. . . . One can only hope that this important book will make a difference.”—Boston Sunday Globe “A masterful work that sheds necessary light on a tragic and often-ignored aspect of postwar history.”—Booklist (starred review) “Astonishing . . . Gross supplies impeccable documentation.”—Baltimore Sun “Compelling . . . Gross builds a meticulous case.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
Download or read book Auschwitz Bergen Belsen Treblinka written by Ann Byers and published by Enslow Publishing, LLC. This book was released on 2014-07-01 with total page 98 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Nazis set up concentration and death camps in order to isolate, torture, and murder millions of men, women, and children. Author Ann Byers details the system of camps in Europe during the Holocaust. Byers recounts the horrifying conditions suffered by camp inmates as well as their struggles for life and hope in a world gone mad. The remains of many camps still stand today to serve as a chilling reminder of the Holocaust.
Download or read book From Euthanasia to Sobibor written by Martin Cüppers and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2022-11-01 with total page 632 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The mass murder of the European Jews by Nazi Germany went hand in hand with the destruction of evidence attesting to this genocide. As Holocaust survivor Jules Schelvis puts it, "very few documents relating to Sobibor and the other death camps" remain. With its rich photographic imagery, the collection featured in From "Euthanasia" to Sobibor: An SS Officer's Photo Collection sheds new light on the Holocaust and other key aspects of Nazi extermination policy. The materials were compiled by Johann Niemann, an SS officer whose earlier participation in the Nazi "euthanasia" murders made him second-in-command at Sobibor and the first to get killed in the prisoner uprising of October 13, 1943. These documents allow crucial insights into the making of mass murderers, the evolution of the "final solution," and its consequences for the victims. As prevalent as the perpetrator perspective is in Niemann's collection, From "Euthanasia" to Sobibor offers a welcome corrective by complementing his images and documents with testimonies of Sobibor survivors, many of which also available in the US Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) archives. With its compilation of unique primary sources and skillful explication, From "Euthanasia" to Sobibor addresses under-researched aspects of Nazi mass violence beyond the Holocaust and offers a rich resource for researching and teaching. Published in Association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
Download or read book Mielec Poland written by Rochelle G. Saidel and published by Gefen Publishing House Ltd. This book was released on 2012 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book''s 45 visuals include rare documentation of correspondence during the Holocaust. Author Dr Rochelle G Saidel''s research was carried out as a Research Fellow at the Yad Vashem International Research Institute, as well as under the auspices of Remember the Women Institute. Mielec, Poland, is just one of many small dots on the map of the Holocaust, but its remarkable and unique history calls for closer scrutiny. Using an experimental process that was not repeated, the Nazis destroyed the Mielec Jewish community on March 9, 1942. After murdering those deemed too old or disabled to be useful, the German occupiers selected able-bodied survivors (mostly men) for slave labour and then deported the rest (4,000 mostly women, some with children) to another sector of the Generalgouvernement, the Lublin district. This process was recorded not only by the Nazis, but also by some members of the local Jewish and non-Jewish population. The visual and written documentation in this book allows us to learn about the Jewish community that had flourished in Mielec until the Holocaust, as well as the unusual way in which it was wiped out by the Nazis. In addition, testimonies and war criminal trial records describe an almost unknown brutal slave labour camp that operated on the outskirts of Mielec from before March 1942 until July 1944. Mielec is located in the Rzeszów province in southern Poland, quite close to Tarnów (and was in the Kraków district of the Generalgouvernement). Both the Jewish community and the concentration camp of Mielec have almost vanished from history, and evidence at the site is sparse. Nevertheless, what happened there can be recounted using old and new testimonies, rare photographs and documents, survivor interviews, and archival material. With the exception of a small number of people fortunate enough to survive by running and hiding, the entire population was murdered, sent to slave labor camps, or later deported to death camps from the Lublin district. Mielec was the first town in the Generalgouvernement from which the entire Jewish population was deported in the context of the Final Solution. The Nazis'' well-documented decision to deport the Jews of Mielec was made very early, in January 1942. Furthermore, after deportation to the Lublin district following an Aktion on March 9, 1942, the Mielec Jews were not murdered immediately. They were allowed to live for months under terrible circumstances in some of the small towns in that district, near Sobibór and Bełżec. Ultimately these two death camps would be the final destination for Mielec''s Jews. Another unusual aspect of the Mielec story is the labor camp that was located there. The site of the Polish National Aircraft Company (PZL), part of a Centralny Okreg Przemysłowy (Central Industrial District), was taken over by the Nazis for the manufacture of Heinkel airplanes. Later this work camp became a concentration camp, complete with tattoos and sadistic commandants. Despite these facts, histories of the Holocaust rarely mention Mielec. Today, this site is a Euro-Park industrial complex. The rare visuals about Mielec during the Holocaust are from survivor Moshe Borger (who was given a photograph album and correspondence by a Polish neighbour after World War II), from archives (the deportation), from research trips to Mielec, and from other survivors. Very early and much more recent survivor testimonies, as well as Nazi documentation, help to tell the story. The author interviewed survivors and also found Nazi war criminal trial records. Material from the unpublished manuscript of a Mielec concentration camp survivor and from the diary and unpublished manuscript of a Mielec shtetl survivor are included, as is testimony from a Mielec resident who was one of ten women to survive the Sobibór revolt. Research was carried out in Yad Vashem, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Jewish Historical Research Institute in Warsaw, and on site in Mielec.
Download or read book KL written by Nikolaus Wachsmann and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2015-04-14 with total page 881 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Presents an integrated account of the Nazi concentration camps from their inception in 1933 through their demise in the spring of 1945.
Download or read book Nazi Europe and the Final Solution written by David Bankier and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2009 with total page 580 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In recent years scholars and researchers have turned their attention to the attitudes of ordinary men [and women]A during the period of the persecution of the Jews in occupied Europe. This comprehensive work addresses the disturbing question of how people reacted when their neighbours were ostracized, humiliated, deported and later murdered.
Download or read book Escaping Hell in Treblinka written by Israel Cymlich and published by Yad Vashem & the Holocaust Survivors Memoirs Project. This book was released on 2007 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Presents two accounts by Holocaust survivors. Cymlich's diary was written in 1943 in Polish; it appeared in Spanish translation as "Cuando vengas no encontrarás a nadie...: Diario de un joven judío en Polonia (1939-43)" (Buenos Aires: Acervo Cultural, 1999). The English translation was done by Jerzy Michalowicz. Strawczynski's memoirs appeared in English in "Clouds in the Thirties - on Antisemitism in Canada, 1929-1939" (Montreal: Canadian Jewish Congress National Archives, 1981), translated from the Yiddish ["Bleter far Geszichte" 27 (1989)] by Natalie (Nadia) Strawczynski Rotter.
