Holocaust victim

  On September 13, 1944, a princess from India named Noor Inayat Khan died at the Dachau concentration camp. She had been tortured by the Nazis and then shot in the head. The Germans knew her by a different name, Nora Baker, and thought she was a British spy. She had gone into France using the code name "Madeline." She carried a radio transmitter from one safe house to another, helping her Resistance group communicate while the Gestapo chased her. Wireless operators in France were expected to be captured or killed within six weeks. Noor lasted more than three times as long. During her time in France, every other operator in her network was caught, and Noor became the only link left between London and Paris. Her job was extremely dangerous and important. She was offered a way to return to Britain, but she refused. In fact, she once told London that she was having "the time of her life" and thanked them for letting her do this work. Noor was captured by the Gestapo, b...

  It was not solely due to the high wire or the guns. The actual answer is much crueler. The guards used a rule known as collective responsibility. If one person escaped the Nazis didn't just hunt that person down. They would pick ten innocent people that were left behind in the camp usually from the same work group and sentence them to death. These ten men were kept in a dark cell in the basement with no food or water. They were left there to starve to death slowly. Think being a prisoner and knowing that if you found freedom ten of your friends would die a slow terrible death because of you. That guilt was a stronger cage than any fence. There is a famous story about this in 1944. A young man called Edek and a woman called Mala actually fell in love in Auschwitz. They were able to obtain a guard uniform and walk right out the front gate. They were free for two weeks before they were caught near the border and brought back to be killed in front of everyone. The Nazis wanted to use...

  Nazi gas chambers did not kill people in a fast and painless manner as others would think. The victims survived through severe hardships. The pellets of Zyklon B used in most camps emitted a gas of cyanide on impact with the air. This was an internal poison that did not allow oxygen to reach the heart and the brain. People could breathe as hard as they like but they did not get any real air. Witnesses and survivors have said it was similar to drowning on solid ground. The rooms were big and had many people and hence it took time before the gas spread. As long as 15 or 20 minutes victims remained awake in terror. Heavier individuals trampled those who were weaker and children out of the way as they scrambled up to the roof, where there were still small spaces of air. The scene has become a hell of panic, screams, and desperate struggle. The Nazis in other camps such as Belzec and Sobibor employed carbon monoxide of big trucks. This was a slower way of killing. The gas initially ca...

 Before World War II, Japanese soldiers were model soldiers. When they helped put down the Boxer Rebellion, they behaved better than Western soldiers. In the Sino-Russian War of 1904-1905, they were very compassionate towards prisoners of war as well as Russian citizens. In the Battle of Manila, they knew they were going to die and, following the Bushido creed, they wanted to take as many as possible from the other side with them. While not a justification, it is an explanation. But Nanking doesn't fall into that category. They were winning. In one generation, the Japanese army had transformed from honorable to horrific. Many of the changes were similar to what happened in Germany. The Japanese thought they were the superior race. They believed they were destined to rule the East. They believed the Chinese were subhuman. But within the army itself, they beat and tortured their own, especially new recruits. If you were a soldier and had been beaten and tortured by your own army, the...

 Nine-year-old Betty and twelve-year-old Mary Henderson climbed out of their bedroom window on the night of October 3, 1941, carrying a small bag between them, and walked seventy-two miles through the mountains of West Virginia to find their father, who was working in a coal mine in another county. He had no idea that their mother had died three weeks earlier, nor that Betty and Mary had been placed in the care of their uncle, a cruel man who beat them, locked them in a closet, and told them their father no longer wanted them. The sisters decided that if their father knew what was happening, he would come for them — so they would go find him and tell him themselves. They climbed out the window and walked all night, all the next day, and the following night. Both sisters arrived alive at the coal mine, found their father, and collapsed into his arms crying. Their father had no idea his wife had died, that his daughters had effectively been taken away from him, or that Betty and Mary...

  A woman decided to celebrate her 70th birthday by treating herself to one night in a very nice hotel. The next morning, when she went to check out, the desk clerk gave her a bill for $250. She was shocked and asked why it was so expensive. “I agree it’s a nice hotel, but the room isn’t worth $250 for just one night — I didn’t even have breakfast,” she said. The clerk explained that $250 was the standard rate, and breakfast was included if she had chosen to have it. She asked to speak with the manager. The manager came out, already informed about the complaint, and said, “Our hotel has an Olympic-sized swimming pool and a large conference center that guests can use.” “But I didn’t use them,” she replied. “Well, they are available, and you could have used them,” he answered. He continued, saying the hotel also offered famous in-house shows with top entertainers from around the world. “But I didn’t attend any of those shows,” she said. “They are available, and you could have gone,” ...

  On April 15, 1945, the first German concentration camp was discovered, revealing the barbaric truth about what was happening inside. A British SAS (Special Air Service) squadron had been sent on a reconnaissance mission in the region, led by Lieutenant John Randall. During the mission, the lieutenant came across an area with impressive iron gates, believing it to be the entrance to some mansion. At first glance, everything seemed abandoned. But as soon as he approached the Bergen-Belsen camp, he would be horrified to discover what lay there. Lieutenant John Randall John was already an experienced soldier. Up to that year, he had already completed many important missions on the Western Front . However, even with his specialized training and all his years of experience, nothing could have prepared him for what he would see when he entered Bergen-Belsen. At that point, most of the world knew that concentration camps existed, but they thought it was a hard labor camp for Jews. They n...

  The bell rang on the third floor of a quiet Amsterdam boarding house in 1942. The Jewish families hidden in the attic had thirty seconds to scramble across the floorboards, slip behind a hidden wall, and vanish. On the stairs below, the Gestapo was already marching up. Tina Strobos was twenty-two years old, a first-year medical student, and she was hiding over a hundred people in her family home. When the Nazis invaded the Netherlands, Tina’s entire world shifted. An old family friend, a Jewish trade union leader, came to her door looking for help. Tina’s mother, Marie, looked at her and asked if she understood the danger. Tina did not hesitate. "I would rather be killed than live in a Nazi society," she told her mother. That choice set off a dangerous, secret operation run by three generations of women: Tina, her mother, and her grandmother. They hired a carpenter from the underground who built a tiny, almost invisible compartment behind a false wall in the attic gable. Ti...

 This is the best answer for this question: the SS got their fame because they were brutal. This is what was invented or rather exaggerated by the world. They were the ones who committed the most atrocities of World War II. SS was not an ordinary group of the German army. They were the military branch of the Nazi Party. Hitler developed them as his security men and to impose his ideology, therefore, their whole operation was connected with Nazism concept of race and terror. The best way to show their brutality is that they operated the whole holocaust. The SS planned it and ran the camps and deployed their personnel in every concentration and extermination camp location. Thus, they had killed approximately six and half million Jews and millions of other individuals who were not liked by the Nazis included the perons who were not in good health and shape. There were also special units within the SS that were known as Einsatzgruppen. They were traveling assassination teams which kill...

 It is a common belief that all the best military men of German origin in the world war two are dead in the war or those who survived were executed at the war ending. But this is not really true. Some of them in fact lived very long and passed peacefully as old men. I have got a story about Gotthard Heinrici. He was an excellent protector of his men. By April 1945, thousands of big guns were prepared by the Russian army to be thrown into the German front line. Heinrici realized that his men could not stay there in their posts as they would all be killed within a short time. His commands declared that he should not ever pull back. Instead, he decided to rescue his men. He silently withdrew his entire army some two kilometers a few hours previous to the commencement of the firing by the Russians. When those shells at last have landed, they struck only empty space and empty holes. His troops were secure still farther on. He rescued thousands of lives on that day. He was captured by th...

During the year 1944 Allied troops frequently discussed a single man who they feared more than an entire army. His name was Otto. He was a huge man with a conspicuous scar on his face. He was known to be a master of covert operations and that is why many regarded him as a very dangerous man. He was scary in that there was no way one could predict what he would do. One of them occurred in a hotel in a very high mountain top where the Italian leader was imprisoned. The place was nearly inaccessible. Otto instead threw small gliders on a small patch of grass directly in front of the guards rather than throwing them in an assault. He moved so quickly and courageously that the guards capitulated without any shot being fired. Then he flew the leader away in a small plane directly off the edge of a cliff. He did even more panic making a big battle in the winter. He got his men dressed in American uniforms and drive behind the enemy lines in captured Jeeps. They aimed at causing complete confu...

 During the last days of April 1945, Berlin was a fire zone city. Majority of the German officers were disposing of their uniforms and were making an attempt to vanish before the Soviet army came. And yet was there but one man (General Robert Ritter von Greim) who did so do the very reverse. He flew to the very middle of the battle to visit Hitler one more time. The flight logs and eyewitness reports of this journey have been under my study and it is among the most desperate of the whole war. By now, the Soviet army had nearly besieged Berlin to the latter. Hitler had just dismissed his long time Air Force commander Hermann Goring accusing him of being a traitor. He would have preferred von Greim to succeed the job. Von Greim did not take a heavy bomber to get into the city. He flew in a small thin-bodied aircraft termed a Fieseler Storch. Not only was he not alone but he also had the famous female test pilot, Hanna Reitsch who was famous due to her incredible bravery. Since they w...

 Yes, American troops detested the SS during World War 2 to an extent even greater than how much they resented the regular German Army (Wehrmacht). It was not a war-time bias, but an inflamed, lynching anger which often ended in bloodshed against the apprehended SS personnel. This passionate feeling happened because of three large reasons. To start with, the SS were the most extreme believers of the Nazi Party. They had been dipped in the inhuman, vile ideology and were much more savage than other Germans soldiers. They usually did not give up and the combat became much more deadly to the Americans. They were fanatics, as well as ordinary soldiers. Second major reason is that the SS committed colossal war crime. As the news of the Malmedy Massacre, in which SS troops murdered over 80 of the captured American soldiers, hit the U.S., myriads of units resolved that they would not take prisoners of SS any longer. Both verbal and written orders were given to shoot them when they were sp...

 People tend to believe that when he was arrested, after the war, that Goering pretended that he didn't know English, but that isn't really the truth. I have spent years reading about Nuremberg trials, and if you watch the old movies, you could see that he was playing a very dangerous game. He was actually pretty good in English, but used it as a weapon to stay in control. In court, he was always wearing his headphones. He would listen to the American prosecutors ask a question in English, but he would sit perfectly still, and wait for the German translation to finish. This was his trick. It gave him ten seconds or so longer in which to think of a lie or a clever answer while everyone else thought he was just waiting. It made him appear much smarter and faster than the men who were questioning him. He was also a bit of a bully. He would often stop the trial just to tell the official translators that they were doing a bad job. He would dispute the true meaning of German words ju...

  On the 26th of December 1965, a gang of twelve armed men broke into a farmhouse in Alcamo, Sicily. They dragged out a seventeen year old girl. Her name was Franca Viola. The leader of that gang was a man named Filippo Melodia. Franca had once been engaged to him. She was fifteen when they got engaged. He was twenty three, and connected to a local mafia family. When Melodia was arrested for theft, Franca's father made her end the engagement. Melodia left for Germany. Franca moved on. By 1965 she was engaged to another man. Melodia came back to Alcamo. He stalked her. He threatened her father and her new fiancé. She still refused him. So he took her by force. His men beat Franca's mother when she tried to fight them off. They also grabbed Franca's eight year old brother, Mariano, because he wouldn't let go of his sister. They released the boy hours later. Franca they kept. For eight days she was held in a farmhouse owned by Melodia's sister. She was starved and rape...

 I also read many of my life on history books and I notice that people commit the same error with the female Nazi guards. Most of them believe that they were all captured and killed at the end of the war which is not the case at all. The true reality of the matter is far more distressing: a majority of these women simply got away with it. Probably, there were 3,700 female guards at these camps. Very few ever attended a court room and even less were executed. The individuals fall into this misconception because they listen to the stories of the day when the camps were freed. The Allied troops were stunned and extremely enraged when they first entered such locations as Bergen-Belsen and encountered the corpses. Guards were killed by some of the soldiers or survivors at the moment. It was revenge, not a trial. However, the case was another in those guards that were not killed that day. Notorious ones such as Irma Grese were simply hanged, we do not forget her name. She was not the nor...

 They are trying to strip her of her humanity and dignity, but look into the eyes of this brave and lovable woman, and you will see she has not succumbed to them. The decision to kill all Jews in Kyiv was made by Major General Kurt Eberhardt, Chief of Military Government; Friedrich Jeckeln, Senior SS Commander of Army Group South; and Otto Rush, Commander of Einsatzgruppe C. Sonderkommando 4a, a subordinate organization of Einsatzgruppe C, carried out the order with the support of the Ukrainian Auxiliary Police SD and Order Police Battalions, which were supported by the German Wehrmacht. The shooting was carried out by Sonderkommando 4a and the 45th Battalion of the German Security Police. At the time, members of the 303rd Battalion of the German Security Police were guarding the perimeter of the execution site.

 Reason why the Nazis make people strip naked before being shot or gassed The Nazis employed the dehumanizing practice of making people strip naked before being executed or subjected to gas chambers for several interconnected reasons. Firstly, it served to strip victims of their individuality and dignity. By forcing people to remove their clothing, the Nazis aimed to reduce them to mere numbers, degrading their humanity and making it easier for the perpetrators to view them as disposable entities rather than fellow human beings. Secondly, it facilitated the process of disposal and decontamination. Removing clothing reduced the risk of contamination from any potential chemicals or diseases, making it easier for the Nazis to manage the disposal of bodies and minimize the risks to the executioners themselves. Thirdly, it amplified the psychological torment of the victims. Stripping people of their clothing left them exposed, vulnerable, and humiliated, intensifying their emotional suf...

 The perception of Nazis as an exceptionally evil entity was formed only later when the WWII came to its end. It had been precipitated when on April 15, 1945, the concentration camp at Bergen Belsen was first seen by Western Allied soldiers. Until that time, lots of people had doubts regarding the dark accounts of Nazi injustices. Why? German cruelty had been misrepresented or sensationalized as had been done in the case of the “Rape of Belgium propaganda during the WWI. This background caused rational citizens to believe that the new assertions regarding Nazis were nothing more than another round of propaganda to continue with the war effort and that things were not as bad as the rumors. As the troops entered Bergen Belsen, their skepticism disappeared at once. They discovered approximately 13000 dead bodies that were uncovered, and tens of thousands of starving and dying prisoners. Importantly the horror became photographed and screened all around the world in a matter of seconds...

Here’s something a cut more light-hearted. How about the sheer amount of mockery, derogatory nicknames, barbed quips, and all other forms of insult thrown at each other by most of the ranking officials of the Third Reich? A lot of the Reich’s leaders were people with very keen minds, and very few of them liked each other. This led to a whole heap of barbed quips and cleverly designed nicknames. And all too often, the German people joined in the tradition of finding as many hilariously insulting nicknames as possible. Heinrich Himmler was often the butt of many a joke: the man was despised by his underlings, his superiors, and his colleagues. The diminutive of his name, ‘Heini’ was particularly popular, because it also indicated an idiot, a scatterbrain, or a scared child. Many a variation was built around that diminutive, most scathingly by Sepp Dietrich, who called his superior ‘ Reichsheini ’, ‘Reich’s Idiot’. But in terms of insulting Himmler, Göring got the gold medal: once he quip...