Adolf Eichmann was the organizational talent that orchestrated the mass deportation of Jews from their countries into waiting ghettos and extermination camps. A prodigy of Heydrich, he is sometimes referred to as “the architect of the Holocaust”. He learned Hebrew and studied all things Jewish in order to manipulate Jews, through his power of coercion, to leave their occupied territories and possessions in favor of a better life in the ghettos. At the end of the war, he was doing the same to Hungarian Jews and, if it wasn’t for the intervention of Raoul Wallenberg, the number of victims of the holocaust would have been much higher. He fled Germany at the end of the war via a ratline to south America, and was captured by the Mossad in Argentina. He was extradited to Israel and executed by hanging in 1962, after a highly publicized trial.

(Source: listverse.com)

10:00 pm  •  1 August 2011  •  24 notes

After World War II, the Allies found themselves uncomfortably confronted with an awful truth they had tried studiously to ignore even as the war was in full heat. This was the Holocaust.
The Nuremberg tribunal, an indictment of 24 of the most egregious offenders they had managed to catch, and six organizations that supported the Holocaust in various ways. There were three major charges levied during the Nurermberg tribunals: Crimes against peace (i.e., waging a “war of aggression”), war crimes and crimes against humanity.

The individual defendants included Hermann Goering, Rudolf Hess and Albert Speer, Hitler’s war minister, along with most of the governors of occupied territories and several propaganda and economic support personnel. The President of the Reichsbank was indicted, as well as Julius Streicher, one of Hitler’s chief propagandists; Baldur von Schirach, head of the Hitler Youth; and Karl Doenitz, who led the Third Reich during the approximately five-minute interval between Hitler’s death and the end of the Third Reich.

SS General Otto Olendorf wasn’t considered “important” enough to be prosecuted during the first round of war crimes tribunals, despite the fact that he testified to personally ordering the execution of more than 90,000 Jews. Under questioning from prosecutor Col. John Amen, Olendorf’s testimony summed up the worst qualities of many of the defendants, an incredibly detached attitude toward the Reich’s program of genocide, consistently showing more regret for the workplace stress endured by the executioners than for the victims of said executions:

  COL. AMEN: What were (the S.S. officers’) instructions with respect to the Jews and the Communist functionaries?

OHLENDORF: The instructions were that in the Russian operational areas of the Einsatzgruppen the Jews, as well as the Soviet political commissars, were to be liquidated.

COL. AMEN: And when you say “liquidated” do you mean “killed?”

OHLENDORF: Yes, I mean “killed.” (…) Some of the unit leaders did not carry out the liquidation in the military manner, but killed the victims singly by shooting them in the back of the neck.

COL. AMEN: And you objected to that procedure?

OHLENDORF: I was against that procedure, yes.

COL. AMEN: For what reason?

OHLENDORF: Because both for the victims and for those who carried out the executions, it was, psychologically, an immense burden to bear. (…) Until the spring of 1942, yes. Then an order came from Himmler that in the future women and children were to be killed only in gas vans.

COL. AMEN: How had the women and children been killed previously?

OHLENDORF: In the same way as the men, by shooting.

COL. AMEN: What, if anything, was done about burying the victims after they had been executed?

OHLENDORF: The Kommandos filled the graves to efface the signs of the execution, and then labor units of the population leveled them. (…) I received the report that the Einsatzkommandos did not willingly use the vans.

COL. AMEN: Why not?

OHLENDORF: Because the burial of the victims was a great ordeal for the members of the Einsatzkommandos.

In the end, suicide, escapes and the casualties of war allowed the worst offenders of the Nazi regime to escape the direct hand of Justice, and somehow death by hanging doesn’t quite seem to measure up to lampshades made of human skin.

But Nuremberg did result in some convictions. And the tribunals united the international community against the horrors of genocide and unchecked fascism (at least momentarily).

12:30 pm  •  9 June 2011  •  9 notes

Executed by the Pit so There Is Less Work Cleaning the Mess Up

German Official Making Sure Nobody Survived the Execution

Once Victims Finished Digging the Pit, They Were Shot in the Head by It

Photo of Naked Women Waiting to Be Executed at Babi Yar

(Source: bestgore.com)

4:59 pm  •  27 May 2011  •  8 notes

SS-Hauptsturmfuehrer Bruno Melmer was the SS guy in charge of accounting for Holocaust gold.

A lot of this gold probably wound up in South America through Switzerland and Evita Peron, and helped ODESSA.

Captured SS records on microfilm at the National Archives show that Oswald Pohl, head of the SS Economic and Administrative Main Office, had distributed a chart that said: “Efficient utilization of the prisoner’s body at the end of nine months increases this profit by the return of dental gold. It is possible at times to obtain additional revenue from the utilization of bones and ashes.”

When the Americans discovered the Merkers mine treasure in 1945, a partial inventory revealed:

• 8,198 bars of gold bullion
• 55 boxes of crated gold bullion
• hundreds of bags of gold items
• over 1,300 bags of gold Reichsmarks, British gold pounds, and French gold francs
• 711 bags of American twenty-dollar gold pieces
• hundreds of bags of gold and silver coins
• hundreds of bags of foreign currency
• 9 bags of valuable coins
• 2,380 bags and 1,300 boxes of Reichsmarks (2.76 billion Reichsmarks)
• 20 silver bars
• 40 bags containing silver bars
• 63 boxes and 55 bags of silver plate
• 1 bag containing six platinum bars
• 110 bags from various countries

General Dwight D. Eisenhower later described the scene:

“Crammed into suitcases and trunks and other containers was a great amount of gold and silver plate and ornament obviously looted from private dwellings throughout Europe” he wrote. “All the articles,” he noted, “had been flattened by hammer blows, obviously to save storage space, and then merely thrown into the receptacle, apparently pending an opportunity to melt them down into gold or silver bars.” Later Patton would write that he saw “a number of suitcases filled with jewelry, such as silver and gold cigarette cases, wrist-watch cases, spoons, forks, vases, gold-filled teeth, false teeth, etc.” acquired by “bandit methods.”

(Source: rotten.com)

12:30 pm  •  24 April 2011  •  8 notes

Nazi human experimentation was a series of medical experiments on large numbers of prisoners by the Nazi German regime in its concentration camps mainly in the early 1940s, during World War II and the Holocaust.

Experiments on twin children in concentration camps were created to show the similarities and differences in the genetics of twins, as well as to see if the human body can be unnaturally manipulated. The central leader of the experiments was Josef Mengele, who from 1943 to 1944 performed experiments on nearly 1,500 sets of imprisoned twins at Auschwitz. Only 100 individuals survived these studies.

While attending University of Munich (located in the city that remained one of Adolf Hitler’s focal points during the revolution) studying philosophy and medicine with an emphasis on anthropology and paleontology, Mengele stated: “this simple political concept (fascism) finally became the decisive factor in my life”. Mengele’s new-found admiration for the “simple political concept” led him to mix his studies of medicine and politics as his career choice. Mengele received his PhD for a thesis entitled “Racial Morphological Research on the Lower Jaw Section of Four Racial Groups”, which suggested that a person’s race could be identified by the shape of the jaw.

At Auschwitz, Mengele organized genetic experiments on twins. The twins were arranged by age and sex and kept in barracks between experiments, which ranged from injection of different chemicals into the eyes of twins to see whether it would change their color to literally sewing twins together in attempts to create conjoined twins.

5:51 pm  •  25 January 2011  •  26 notes

Code talkers was a term used to describe people who talk using a coded language. It is frequently used to describe Native Americans who served in the United States Marine Corps whose primary job was the transmission of secret tactical messages. 

The name code talkers is strongly associated with bilingual Navajo speakers specially recruited during World War II by the Marines to serve in their standard communications units in the Pacific Theater.

Adolf Hitler knew about the successful use of code talkers during World War I. He sent a team of some thirty anthropologists to learn Native American languages before the outbreak of World War II. However, it proved too difficult for them to learn the many languages and dialects that existed. Because of Nazi German anthropologists’ attempts to learn the languages, the U.S. Army did not implement a large-scale code talker program in the European Theater. Fourteen Comanche code talkers took part in the Invasion of Normandy, and continued to serve in the 4th Infantry Division during further European operations. Comanches of the 4th Signal Company compiled a vocabulary of over 100 code terms using words or phrases in their own language. Using a substitution method similar to the Navajo, the Comanche code word for tank was “turtle”, bomber was “pregnant airplane”, machine gun was “sewing machine” and Adolf Hitler became “crazy white man.”

12:36 pm  •  23 January 2011  •  15 notes