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On the night of 5 April 1944, Siegfried Lederer, a Czech Jew, escaped from the Auschwitz concentration camp wearing an SS-TV uniform provided by SS-Rottenführer Viktor Pestek. Pestek opposed the Holocaust ; he was a devout Catholic and was infatuated with Renée Neumann, a Jewish prisoner.
The Nazis had no plan for concentration camps prior to their seizure of power. [11] The concentration camp system arose in the following months due to the desire to suppress tens of thousands of Nazi opponents in Germany. The Reichstag fire in February 1933 was the pretext for mass arrests.
During World War II, some individuals and groups helped Jews and others escape the Holocaust conducted by Nazi Germany. The support, or at least absence of active opposition, of the local population was essential to Jews attempting to hide but often lacking in Eastern Europe. [1] Those in hiding depended on the assistance of non-Jews. [2]
On 19 April 1943, members of the Belgian Resistance stopped a Holocaust train and freed a number of Jews who were being transported to Auschwitz concentration camp from Mechelen transit camp in Belgium, on the twentieth convoy from the camp. In the aftermath of the attack, a number of other captives were able to jump from the train as well.
The Germans did not detain the fugitives, but with clubs and rifle butts gave them a final demonstrative lesson in their philosophy of the "racial myth" for the road; on the other side of the demarcation line, in long sheepskin coats, Budyonny-style pointed helmets and with bayonets drawn, stood the guards of the "class myth", greeting the ...
The Holocaust (/ ˈ h ɒ l ə k ɔː s t / ⓘ, US also / ˈ h oʊ l ə-/), [1] known in Hebrew as the Shoah (שואה), was the genocide of European Jews during World War II.Between 1941 and 1945, Nazi Germany and its collaborators systematically murdered some six million Jews across German-occupied Europe, around two-thirds of Europe's Jewish population.
Richard Glücks, head of the Concentration Camps Inspectorate, sent Walter Eisfeld, former commandant of the Sachsenhausen concentration camp in Oranienburg, Germany, to inspect it. [25] Around 1,000 metres (3,300 ft) long and 400 metres (1,300 ft) wide, [26] Auschwitz consisted at the time of 22 brick buildings, eight of them two-story. A ...
According to the Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, there were 23 main concentration camps (German: Stammlager), of which most had a system of satellite camps. [1] Including the satellite camps, the total number of Nazi concentration camps that existed at one point in time is at least a thousand, although these did not all exist at the same time.