How 4 Chaplains Tried—& Failed—to Prevent the Bila Tserkva Massacre

"The Bila Tserkva massacre was the World War II mass murder of Jews, committed by the Nazi German Einsatzgruppe with the aid of Ukrainian auxiliaries, in Bila Tserkva, Soviet Ukraine, on August 21–22, 1941. When the Jewish adult population of Bila Tserkva was killed, several functionaries complained that some 90 Jewish children were left behind in an abandoned building, and had to be executed separately.

The soldiers reported the matter to four chaplains of the Wehrmacht, who passed along their protests to Field Marshal von Reichenau; it was the only time during World War II that Wehrmacht chaplains tried to prevent an Einsatzgruppen massacre, but Paul Blobel's verbal order was direct and decisive.

Description

In August 1941, General Walther von Reichenau, commander of the 6th Army of Nazi Germany, ordered his men to assist the Einsatzgruppen and their Ukrainian auxiliaries with killing the Jews of Bila Tserkva. Over the course of the following days, virtually the entire adult Jewish population of Bila Tserkva was shot. All that remained were the children and a few of the women, who were dumped off at a school to await execution.

Several soldiers were disturbed by the crying of the children and infants at the school, and asked their chaplains what to do. The two chaplains attached to the 295th Infantry Division, Catholic Father Ernst Tewes and Lutheran Pastor Gerhard Wilczek, visited the school. They were appalled by the condition of the frightened, hungry children.

The chaplains asked the local army commander to free the children, but he refused. Tewes later reported he "turned out to be a convinced anti-Semitic".

Joined by two other chaplains from the 295th Division, a series of protest letters were sent to people in positions of authority asking that the children of Bila Tserkva be spared. The chaplains won over staff officer Lieutenant-Colonel Helmuth Groscurth to their cause. He ordered a postponement of the planned massacre of the children.

In areas near the front, the Einsatzgruppen were under Army command and so when Colonel Groscurth ordered the massacre to be delayed, the local Einsatzkommando leader had no choice but to comply. Ultimately, von Reichenau himself intervened and ordered the executions to go ahead. After receiving a protest letter from two of the chaplains, Reichenau wrote in response:

The conclusion of the report in question contains the following sentence:

>"In the case in question, measures against women and children were undertaken which in no way differ from atrocities carried out by the enemy about which the troops are continually being informed." I have to describe this assessment as incorrect, inappropriate and impertinent in the extreme. Moreover this comment was written in an open communication which passes through many hands. It would have been far better if the report had not been written at all. — Walther von Reichenau

Tewes later recalled, "All those we wanted to save were shot. Because of our initiative it just happened a few days later than planned". One SS man who saw the subsequent murders on 21 August 1941 described them as follows:

>I went to the woods alone. The Wehrmacht had already dug a grave. The children were brought along in a tractor. I had nothing to do with this technical procedure. The Ukrainians were standing around trembling. The children were taken down from the tractor. They were lined up along the top of the grave and shot so that they fell into it. The Ukrainians did not aim at any particular part of the body. They fell into the grave. The wailing was indescribable. I shall never forget the scene throughout my life. I find it very hard to bear. I particulary [sic] remember a small fair-haired girl who took me by the hand. She too was shot later.... The grave was near some woods. It was not near the rifle-range. The execution must have taken place in the afternoon at about 3:30 or 4:00. It took place the day after the discussions at the Feldkommandanten.... Many children were hit four or five times before they died.

The protests at Bila Tserkva were unique as being the only time during the war that Wehrmacht chaplains tried to prevent an Einsatzgruppen massacre. The American historian Doris Bergen wrote that all four chaplains involved in the protest were aware that Jewish adults were being killed and protested only when they learned that children were to be shot.

Bergen further observed the "terrible irony" that a gesture of protest further served the genocidal aims of the regime; the soldiers who were troubled by the crying of the children waiting for their time to die felt that they had "dealt with" the issue by "doing something", namely appealing to Father Tewes and Wilczek, and they had no further role to play in this matter." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bila_Tserkva_massacre

NOTE: No photographs of the execution or the children in the school are known to exist. The perpetrators did not photograph this specific event, and any visual record of the final moments of the 90 children comes entirely from the haunting post-war written testimonies of the soldiers, chaplains, and SS officers who were there.

1: Synagogue in Bila Tserkva before the Bolshevik revolution

2-4: This monument was inaugurated in 2019. It commemorate the murder of hundred Jewish children during the Holocaust in the Ukrainian city of Bila Tserkva

When the Swiss Declared Racial & Religious Persecution Insufficient Grounds for Political Asylum

The Swiss Federal Council Officially Orders strict boundary closures and implemented measures to systematically block Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi persecution from entering Switzerland.

Following the Anschluss earlier that year, a massive wave of desperate Austrian and German Jews attempted to cross into the neutral country. In response, Swiss authorities declared that individuals fleeing solely due to racial or religious persecution would not be recognized as political refugees.

The Swiss border police received instructions to turn back any German or Austrian refugees who did not possess valid entry permits or pre-arranged visas. To prevent Jewish refugees from entering disguised as tourists, the Swiss government aggressively lobbied Nazi Germany to identify them. This directly resulted in the October 1938 German decree mandating a large, red "J" stamp on all Jewish passports.

Local figures like Paul Grüninger, the police commander of the St. Gallen border canton, chose to resist the federal directive. He saved roughly 3,600 Jews by backdating their entry papers before his own government dismissed, convicted, and financially ruined him for official misconduct.

In December 1999, an independent panel of historians known as the Bergier Commission concluded that Swiss officials unnecessarily closed borders and abandoned thousands of refugees to their persecutors, leading the Swiss Federal Council to issue a formal apology.

"Prior to and during the Second World War, Switzerland gave refuge to about 23,000 Jewish refugees although the government decided that Switzerland would serve only as a country of transit.

These Jews were protected during the Holocaust due to Swiss neutrality. The Jewish refugees, however, did not receive the financial support from the government that non-Jewish refugees received.

Many more Jews were prevented from entering, effectively shutting the border. The Swiss government persuaded Germany to stamp "J" on the passport of Jews, making it easier to refuse Jewish refugees. The end of the war had delivered many thousands of Jews into the hands of the Nazis and their collaborators.

In 1942, the Swiss police issued a regulation that denied refugee status to "refugees only on racial grounds, e.g., Jews." By the end of the war, less than 25,000 Jews were permitted to take refuge." https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/switzerland-virtual-jewish-history-tour#Holocaus

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“Nazi anti-Jewish policy escalated in 1938. With the annexation of Austria in March 1938 Adolf Eichmann devised a plan for forced emigration. The violent atmosphere, the terrorization of the Jews combined with the loss of their livelihood induced one-half of Austria’s 192,000 Jews to emigrate penniless within half a year.

The Swiss government closed its border to refugees from the German Reich, that now included Austria, and instructed its border police to turn back Jews who had no entry permits.

In October 1938 the Swiss authorities requested that the Germans stamp Jews' passports with the letter "J", so that Jewish refugees could be identified at the border. The situation of the Jews deteriorated enormously.

The violence of Kristallnacht, one month later, in November 1938, only increased the Jews' panic and their attempts to cross the borders and flee Germany intensified.

One of the escape routes ran south of Lake Constance across the Swiss-Austrian border in the St. Margarethen area, where Paul Grueninger was in charge of the Swiss border police.” Switzerland

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The little-known story of Swiss Holocaust victims brought to light in new book - https://www.worldjewishcongress.org/en/news/the-little-known-story-of-swiss-holocaust-victims-brought-to-light-in-new-book-2-3-2020

1: Jews queuing in front of a police station hoping to obtain exit permits, Vienna, Austria, 1938

SS Testimonies & Survivor Accounts Detail the Final Days of the Camp's Operations

>"When I came to Treblinka the camp commandant was a doctor named Dr. Eberl. He was very ambitious. It was said that he ordered more transports than could be "processed" in the camp. That meant that trains had to wait outside the camp because the occupants of the previous transport had not yet all been killed.

>At the time it was very hot and as a result of the long wait inside the transport trains in the intense heat many people died. At the time whole mountains of bodies lay on the platform. The Hauptsturmfuehrer Christian Wirth came to Treblinka and kicked up a terrific row.

>And then one day Dr. Eberl was no longer there.

(Willi Mentz quoted in The Good Old Days - E. Klee, W. Dressen, V. Riess, The Free Press, NY, 1988, p. 245-247) https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/testimonies-of-nazi-ss-at-treblinka

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Treblinka - To carry out the mass murder of Europe's Jews, the SS established killing centers devoted exclusively or primarily to the destruction of human beings in gas chambers. Treblinka was among these killing centers. It was one of three killing centers linked to Operation Reinhard, the SS plan to murder almost two million Jews living in the German-administered territory of occupied Poland, called the General Government.--> https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/treblinka

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VIDEO - Treblinka's Last Witness Special | 1h 39m 11s Video has Closed Captions| CC Samuel Willenberg, was the last living survivor of the Treblinka death camp in Nazi-occupied Poland at the height of World War II. Samuel gives a first-hand account about his life during the Holocaust and as a Jewish prisoner of the Treblinka death camp. His story is one of survival against staggering odds.--> https://www.pbs.org/video/treblinkas-last-witness-4rbuxq/

1: Memorial at Treblinka II, with 17,000 quarry stones symbolizing gravestones. Inscriptions indicate places of Holocaust train departures, which carried at least 5,000 victims each, and selected ghettos from across Poland.

a Group of Jews & Soviet POWs Refused to Lose their Humanity

"Since August 18, a third 'Blobel Commando' had been at work at Babi Yar, in the suburbs of Kiev. Blobel himself had visited the site to see the work being done. After the earth on top of the grave had been removed, he later recalled, 'the bodies were covered with inflammable material and ignited.

It took about two days until the grave burnt to the bottom. ' Blobel added: 'I myself observed that the fire had glowed down to the bottom. After that the grave was filled in and the traces practically obliterated.'

More than four hundred Jews and Soviet prisoners-of-war were working at this gruesome task, knowing that when their work was finished they would be killed. They worked with shackles around their ankles, guarded by sixty SS men armed with submachine guns, and accompanied by Alsatian dogs trained to kill.

Within a month, seventy of the prisoners had been killed in random executions, staged each night by the guards for their amusement.

Throughout their work, the SS would address the Jews working in the pits at Babi Yar as Leichen, 'corpses'. But, as the historian Reuben Ainsztein has written, 'in those half-naked men who reeked of putrefying flesh, whose bodies were eaten by scabies and covered with a layer of mud and soot, and of whose physical strength so little remained, there survived a spirit that defied everything that the Nazis '

New Order had done or could do to them. In the men whom the SS men saw only as walking corpses, there matured a determination that at least one of them must survive to tell the world about what they had seen in Babi Yar.'

Plans were made to break out. Among those who coordinated these plans was a Jewish soldier of the Red Army, Vladimir Davydov. Independent of these plans, a non-Jewish Red Army man, Fyodor Zavertanny, managed one day to loosen his shackles, and to escape. In retaliation, the Germans shot twelve of the prisoners.

They also shot the SS man in charge of the guards who had been watching Zavertanny's group.

The scale of the reprisal seemed to rule out individual escapes, and make a mass break-out the only possible course. The method was to search for any keys that remained among the thousands of rotting corpses and decaying garments, in the hope that one of these keys might fit the padlock of the bunker in which the prisoners were locked at night."

From The Holocaust: A History of the Jews of Europe During the Second World War, by Martin Gilbert

NOTE: No photographic evidence exists showing the actual exhumation or burning of bodies during the August 1943 Sonderkommando 1005 operation at Babi Yar. Because the primary goal of Sonderaktion 1005 was to destroy evidence of Nazi crimes, the SS enforced absolute secrecy. Taking photographs of the body disposal process was strictly forbidden.

1: Survivors of a Sonderkommando 1005 unit stand next to a mill used to crush bones at the Janowska concentration camp following its liberation in 1944. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonderaktion_1005

2: Burning of bodies at Auschwitz-Birkenau by Sonderkommando prisoners in 1944 (secret photo by prisoner Alberto Errera)

Rules: ONE GUESS ONLY: Answers (found in a past Post to this Group) MUST BE SPECIFIC. If incomplete or otherwise invalidly worded, we regret that you have wasted your Guess. Read ALL the previous Guesses first & then make your Guess in a Comment Box, NOT a Reply Box, & do confine all Comments to the one allowed Guess only. Too much confusion otherwise. The Winner will be acknowledged as Today's Genius! Good Luck to you! -W

NOTE: Certain historical documents, testimony, quotes & images are presented for the record, as evidence and background pertaining to criminal activities, horrific acts, and other notable evils. The words of murderers, criminals & their lawyers should never be mistaken for fact, as they are often bold-faced lies, nor should they be misconstrued as providing a viable justification for their crimes. Don't believe any of it, beyond the fact they did write & speak this nasty stuff and did purport to believe it. As always, read with an abundant degree of cautious skepticism. -W

IMAGE does not necessarily have any connection to the Question: Eighth-grade student Raina Kim from Brea Junior High School in the Brea Olinda Unified School District earned second place for her artwork titled “Will to Survive.” Weekly roundup: Annual Holocaust Art and Writing Contest recognizes 12 local students, OC spelling bee champ heads to Scripps, and more – OCDE Newsroom

The Grim Fate of Kovno’s Professionals

The German Nazi occupiers order the Jewish Council in the Kovno Ghetto to round up 500 educated individuals, under the false pretense of sending them to organize and work in the city's archives.

Lured by the promise of continuous labor, 534 Jewish men (the "intelligentsia" consisting of teachers, professors, and professionals) reported to the ghetto gates.

But it's a trap; there was no archival work. Instead, the men are marched directly to the Fourth Fort (IV Fort)—part of a nineteenth-century fortress complex on the edge of the city—and murdered by firing squads.

This "Intellectuals Aktion" was designed to break the morale of the ghetto community by eliminating its potential leaders. Today, a granite memorial standing at the Kaunas Fourth Fort honors these specific victims.

>“The Führer must emphasize once again that for Poles there can be only one master, and that is the German; two masters side by side are not possible … therefore all representatives of the Polish intelligentsia must be killed. This sounds harsh, but such is the law of life.” – Martin Bormann, 1940

“The Intelligenzaktion was a series of mass murders committed against the Polish intelligentsia (teachers, priests, physicians, and other prominent members of Polish society) during the early years of the Second World War (1939–45) by Nazi Germany.

The Germans conducted the operations in accordance with their plan to Germanize the western regions of occupied Poland, before their territorial annexation to the German Reich.

The mass murder operations of the Intelligenzaktion resulted in the killing of 100,000 Polish people; by way of forced disappearance, the Germans imprisoned and killed select members of Polish society, identified as enemies of the Reich before the war; they were buried in mass graves in remote places.

To facilitate the depopulation of occupied Poland, the Germans terrorized the general populace by carrying out public, summary executions of select intellectuals and community leaders, before they expelled the general population from occupied Poland.

The executioners of the Einsatzgruppen death squads and members of the local Volksdeutscher Selbstschutz, the German-minority militia, justified their actions by falsely stating that the purpose of their police-work was to remove politically dangerous people from Polish society.

The Intelligenzaktion was a major step towards the implementation of Sonderaktion Tannenberg (Special Operation Tannenberg), the installation of Nazi policemen and functionaries—from the SiPo (composed of Kripo and Gestapo members), and members of the SD—to manage the occupation and facilitate the realization of Generalplan Ost, the German colonization of Poland.

Among the 100,000 people who were killed in the Intelligenzaktion operations, approximately 61,000 of them were members of the Polish intelligenzia, people who the Germans considered political targets according to the Special Prosecution Book – Poland, a book which was compiled before the war began in September 1939.

The Intelligenzaktion occurred soon after the German invasion of Poland (1 September 1939), and lasted from the autumn of 1939 until the spring of 1940; the mass murder of the Polish intellectuals continued with the operations of the AB-Aktion.” MORE--> Nazi Germany’s War on Polish Intellectuals | Poland at War Tours

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Nazi Germany’s War on Polish Intellectuals: Intelligenzaktion and AB-Aktion--->

Nazi Germany’s War on Polish Intellectuals | Poland at War Tours

1: In occupied Poland, on 9 September 1939, the Germans publicly executed twenty-five prominent citizens, in front of the Municipal Museum, in the Market Square of Bydgoszcz, as part of the mass shootings of Polish intelligentsia. To terrorize the townsfolk, the Germans displayed the bodies for six hours.

2: Poles arrested at Gdynia

3: The execution of prisoners at Rudzki Bridge

4: Hans Frank, architect of AB-Aktion, who would later be hanged following his trial at Nuremberg

How the SS Turned Genocide Into a 9-to-5 Job

“SS Private Johann Antoni and SS man Hans Kartusch from the 3rd Guard Company of Auschwitz II receive eight days’ special leave in the S.S. recreation center of Solahütte as recognition for the successful use of their weapons during the escape of four prisoners, in spite of darkness. Solahütte lay just beyond the camp’s border. It was a long, lodgelike building above the Sola River, which flowed past Auschwitz I; it is now a tavern.” Picturing Auschwitz | The New Yorker

This historical account from The New Yorker serves as a stark reminder of how totalitarian regimes normalize unspeakable evil by turning mass murder into a bureaucratic job with employee perks.

The rewarding of SS guards for murdering escaping prisoners highlights the complete moral bankruptcy and cruelty of the German Nazis. These people treated the systematic execution of human beings as routine, commendable employment, just another day.

These guards were given a vacation at the Solahütte resort as a direct reward for shooting people trying to flee a death camp. In a civilized society, preventing escape from wrongful imprisonment through lethal force is a crime. In Auschwitz, it was an achievement celebrated with special leave.

The proximity of a peaceful, rustic recreation lodge to the horrors of Auschwitz II-Birkenau shows how SS guards could completely detach themselves from the atrocities they committed daily.

1: Nazi officers and auxiliaries having fun at Solahütte.

2: General view of the Solahütte guest-house of the Nazi German personnel and administration of the Auschwitz concentration camp complex during the Holocaust in occupied Poland. Photograph from the Höcker Album

Inside the Clandestine Mass Movement to Smuggle 250,000 Jewish Refugees Out of Europe

"“Beriha” was a postwar movement of 250,000 survivors whose aim was to reach the Mediterranean and Black Sea coasts, so that they could set off for Eretz Israel. By August, about 15,000 survivors had arrived in Italy.

Once in Italy, survivors were taken south to wait for boats to Eretz Israel. Some ships evaded the British blockade and arrived safely in Eretz Israel, while others were sent to detention camps in Cyprus. After the State of Israel was established, “Beriha” was dismantled." https://www.yadvashem.org/holocaust/this-month/august/1945.html

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“Bricha, also called the Bericha Movement, was the underground organized effort that helped Jewish Holocaust survivors settle in British Mandate for Palestine in violation of the White Paper of 1939. It ended when Israel declared independence and annulled the White Paper.

After American, British and Soviet armed forces liberated the camps, survivors suffered from disease, severe malnutrition and depression. Many were displaced persons who were unable to return to their homes from before the war.

In some areas, the survivors continued to face antisemitic violence; during the 1946 Kielce pogrom in Poland 42 survivors were killed when their communal home was attacked by a mob. For many of the survivors, Europe had become "a vast cemetery of the Jewish people" and "they wanted to start life over and build a new national Jewish homeland in Eretz Yisrael".

The movement of Jewish refugees from the Displaced Persons camp in which they were held (one million persons classified as "not repatriable" remained in Germany and Austria) to Palestine was illegal on both sides, as Jews were not officially allowed to leave the countries of Central and Eastern Europe by the Soviet Union and its allies, nor were they permitted to settle in Palestine by the British.

In late 1944 and early 1945, Jewish members of the Polish resistance met up with Warsaw Ghetto fighters in Lublin to form Bricha as a way of escaping the antisemitism of Europe, where they were convinced that another Holocaust would occur.

After the liberation of Rivne, Eliezer and Abraham Lidovsky, and Pasha (Isaac) Rajchmann, concluded that there was no future for Jews in Poland. They formed an artisan guild to cover their covert activities, and they sent a group to Cernăuţi, Romania to seek out escape routes.

It was only after Abba Kovner, and his group from Vilna joined, along with Yitzhak Zuckerman, who had headed the Jewish Combat Organization of the Polish uprising of August 1944, in January 1945, that the organization took shape. They soon joined up with a similar effort led by the Jewish Brigade and eventually the Haganah (the Jewish clandestine army in Palestine).

Officers of the Jewish Brigade of the British army assumed control of the operation, along with operatives from the Haganah who hoped to smuggle as many displaced persons as possible into Palestine through Italy. The American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee funded the operation.

Almost immediately, the explicitly Zionist Berihah became the main conduit for Jews coming to Palestine, especially from the displaced person camps, and it initially had to turn people away due to too much demand.

After the Kielce pogrom of 1946, the flight of Jews accelerated, with 100,000 Jews leaving Eastern Europe in three months. Operating in Poland, Romania, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia through 1948, Berihah transferred approximately 250,000 survivors into Austria, Germany, and Italy through elaborate smuggling networks.

Using ships supplied at great cost [citation needed] by the Mossad Le'aliyah Bet, then the immigration arm of the Yishuv, these refugees were then smuggled through the British cordon around Palestine. Bricha was part of the larger operation known as Aliyah Bet, and ended with the establishment of Israel, after which immigration to the Jewish state was legal, although emigration was still sometimes prohibited, as happened in both the Eastern Bloc and Arab countries (see for example refusenik).” Bricha - Wikipedia

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Jewish Survivors on Trucks of the Bericha Movement to Eretz Israel

1: Refugees in the “Beriha” movement in Komo, Italy

2: The Palmach, Immigration to Israel

3: July 15, 1945. Buchenwald survivors arrive in Haifa to be arrested by the British.

4: After Liberation, Jewish Survivors Boarding Trucks of the Bericha Movement, on Their Way to Israel

How a Discovered Tunnel Led to the Execution of an Entire Corpse-Burning Squad

“Polish and Israeli archaeologists discovered traces of an underground tunnel at the site of the former death camp in Sobibor. The tunnel, whose discovery was announced on Wednesday, ran from a barracks to outside the camp fence.

It may have been dug by the prisoners of the Sonderkommando who worked in the camp burning the corpses of murdered Jews. The archeology work at Sobibor is directed by Wojciech Mazurek of Chelm, Poland, and Yoram Haimi of Israel.

Though the tunnel would have helped the prisoners to escape, Mazurek does not believe it was used.

“The Germans found the tunnel and therefore shot and then burned the entire crew of the Sonderkommando,” Mazurek told the Gazeta Wyborcza newspaper. At Sobibor, Nazis murdered about 250,000 Jews mostly from Poland, the Netherlands and Slovakia.

The camp was closed following an uprising on Oct. 14, 1943; about half the remaining prisoners escaped during the uprising.” https://www.timesofisrael.com/underground-tunnel-discovered-at-sobibor/

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Discovery of an Escape Tunnel in Sobibor

1: View of the Sobibor killing center and the German personnel living quarters, taken from a watchtower in the early summer of 1943. A Jewish forced laborer can be seen standing next to the barrack on the left side of the images, as well as in the foreground between the stacks of firewood.

On the right, in the passageway between the camp fences, two Trawniki men patrol. The light roof of the railway building is visible between the fence lines. This photo comes from a collection donated by the descendants of Sobibor deputy camp commandant Johann Niemann.

The images in the collection provide never-before-seen views of the killing center, including photos of barracks buildings, workshops, and SS and Ukrainian guards. The album complements and re-enforces the testimonies of the few Jewish survivors of this notorious camp. Niemann was killed during the Sobibor prisoner revolt on October 14, 1943, after which the camp was closed and demolished. Sobibor Uprising | Holocaust Encyclopedia

2: Archaeologist Yoram Haimi talking to young people from the Dror School in Israel about his findings at the site of the former German Nazi death camp of Sobibor, in eastern Poland, on Tuesday, Aug. 21, 2012

About seventy men were not sent to Treblinka, but kept in prison in Bialystok. Some were locksmiths, some carpenters.

'When we came to the gaol,' Abraham Karasick recalled, 'the Germans told us that we should take off the badge "because the Jews in Europe are no more", and we were marked with a cross on the back.

Each morning, the seventy Jews were taken from prison to work for the Germans. For several months they saw how the Germans continued to round up Jews who had managed to hide during the action of August 16, and deport them. 'At the beginning,' Karasick recalled, 'they were liquidating every three or four days.'

The last Jews to reach Treblinka, on August 18, had been Jews from Bialystok. All were gassed. Four days later, a wagon laden with the clothing of the dead left Treblinka for Germany. The camp was ready to be closed down. Parts of demolished huts, large numbers of wooden planks, and quantities of chlorinated lime were taken away, followed by the excavator.

The Jews who were made to dismantle the camp realized that once their work was done they too would be killed. But within the camp, they were always outnumbered by the armed guards."

From The Holocaust: A History of the Jews of Europe During the Second World War, by Martin Gilbert

"According to the terms of the German-Soviet Pact of 1939, Bialystok, a city in northeastern Poland, was assigned to the Soviet zone of occupation. Soviet forces entered Bialystok in September 1939, and held it until the German army occupied the city in June 1941 following the German invasion of the Soviet Union.

In the early days of the German occupation, Einsatzgruppe detachments and Order Police battalions rounded up and killed thousands of Jews in Bialystok.

In August 1941, the Germans ordered the establishment of a ghetto in Bialystok. About 50,000 Jews from the city and the surrounding region were confined in a small area of Bialystok city.

The ghetto had two sections, divided by the Biala River. Most Jews in the Bialystok ghetto worked in forced-labor projects, primarily in large textile factories located within the ghetto boundaries. The Germans also sometimes used Jews in forced-labor projects outside the ghetto.

Deportations from Bialystok to Treblinka

In February 1943, approximately 10,000 Bialystok Jews were deported to the Treblinka killing center. During the deportations, hundreds of Jews, mainly those deemed too weak or sick to travel, were killed.

In August 1943, the Germans mounted an operation to destroy the Bialystok ghetto. German forces and local police auxiliaries surrounded the ghetto and began to round up Jews systematically for deportation to the Treblinka killing center.

Approximately 7,600 Jews were held in a central transit camp View This Term in the Glossary in the city before deportation to Treblinka. Those deemed fit to work were sent to the Majdanek camp. In Majdanek, after another screening for ability to work, they were transported to the Poniatowa, Blizyn, or Auschwitz camps. Those deemed too weak to work were murdered at Majdanek.

More than 1,000 Jewish children were sent first to the Theresienstadt ghetto in Bohemia, and then to Auschwitz-Birkenau, where they were killed." more: https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/bialystok

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1: Deportation of the Jews from Bialystok, Poland - 50,000 Jews lived in Bialystok prior to WWII, representing more than half of the city’s population. Most of the Jews in Bialystok were deported in August 1943 to Treblinka, Majdanek, Poniatowa, Blizyn and Auschwitz. https://www.yadvashem.org/holocaust/this-month/august/1943.html

Due to protests, Hitler orders a temporary halt (to take effect on Aug 24) in Nazi Germany's systematic euthanasia murder of mentally ill and handicapped.

>"Between December 1939 and August 1941, about 50,000 to 60,000 German children and adults were secretly killed by lethal injections or in gassing installations designed to look like shower stalls. It was a foretaste of Auschwitz." (Never to Forget, New York: HarperCollins, 1976:131.)

“Up to this date, German health care professionals murdered approximately 70,000 people at “euthanasia” facilities. The killing operations continued, however, involving both adults and children with physical and intellectual disabilities. Among the methods used were starvation, lethal injection, and deliberate failure to treat serious disease.

Hitler's call for a halt to the T4 action did not mean an end to the "euthanasia" killing operation. The child "euthanasia" program continued as before. Moreover, in August 1942, German medical professionals and healthcare workers resumed the killings, albeit in a more carefully concealed manner than before.

More decentralized than the initial gassing phase, the renewed effort relied closely upon regional exigencies, with local authorities determining the pace of the killing.” https://www.ushmm.org/learn/timeline-of-events/1939-1941/euthanasia-killings-continue

The Holocaust did not start with large-scale death camps; it began with this ‘medical program’. This program targeted disabled children and adults, people with psychiatric conditions, and the elderly. The state labeled these vulnerable individuals "lives unworthy of life."

Medical professionals carried out the killings using lethal injections and, crucially, proto-type gas chambers. This program created the literal and structural infrastructure for the Holocaust. When public protests forced Hitler to officially halt Aktion T4 on this day, the machinery did not stop.

Instead, the Nazi regime transferred the experienced administrators, the medical technicians, and the specialized gassing technology directly to Poland. These individuals used their refined techniques to build and operate the extermination camps that murdered millions of Jews.

The Nazis simply shifted its focus from purging the genetically "imperfect" to wiping out the racially "undesirable." They practiced on their own citizens so they could perfect the murder of humanity. Hitler suspends euthanasia program | August 24, 1941 | HISTORY

1: Hartheim Castle with smoke coming out of the crematorium’s chimney (1941).

I, Waler Loepp, have been doing this since the Internet was a baby; 1995, when I purchased my first computer. At that time, the only 'Groups' site was something called 'E-Groups', which was around for some years and then sold to Yahoo and became Yahoo Groups. When Yahoo then dwindled, it was sold to Facebook, which has since dwindled as well to a shadow of its former energy, prompting me to leave after decades. Now on Reddit, which is SO MUCH BETTER than Facebook!

During that time, I've been maintaining files for every day of the year (plus leap year) with all the major, and most of the minor, Holocaust/Nuremberg stories. Every day I Post them on the current platform, improving them and adding new info each go round.

The current archive has been meticulously maintained since 1995. A single contributor, me, is sufficient to schedule and manage these existing files. Posts must match the exact historical calendar date in real time. Multiple posters would risk duplicate threads for the same historical event. A new user would require extensive training to navigate a 30-year-old proprietary filing system. It just wouldn't work. -W

1: This artwork is Unmasking (2015), an oil on canvas painting by the Lithuanian-American artist and Holocaust survivor Samuel Bak. It features a characteristic surrealist composition where a blindfolded figure pulls back a cloth or mask, surrounded by heavy mechanical elements like pulleys and scales. The piece is part of Bak's profound exploration of memory, identity, and the heavy burden of truth and historical witness

How a Compromised SS Engineer Tried to Leak the Truth to the World

"In Lublin, SS Gruppenfuehrer Globocnik was waiting for us. He said:

>This is one of the most highly secret matters there are, perhaps the most secret. Anybody who speaks about it is shot dead immediately. Two talkative people died yesterday.

Then he explained to us that, at the present moment—August 17, 1942—there were the following installations:

1. Belzec, on the Lublin-Lvov road, in the sector of the Soviet Demarcation Line. Maximum per day: 15,000 persons (I saw it!).

• 2. Sobibor, I am not familiar with the exact situation, I did not visit it. 20,000 persons per day.
• 3. Treblinka, 120 km. NNE of Warsaw, 25,000 per day, saw it!
• 4. Majdanek, near Lublin, which I saw when it was being built.

Globocnik said:

>You will have very large quantities of clothes to disinfect, 10 or 20 times as much as the "Textiles Collection," which is only being carried out in order to camouflage the origin of the Jewish, Polish, Czech and other items of clothing. Your second job is to convert the gas-chambers, which have up to now been operated with exhaust gases from an old Diesel engine, to a more poisonous and quicker means, cyanide. But the Fuehrer and Himmler, who were here on August 15, the day before yesterday, that is, gave orders that I am myself to accompany all persons who visit the installations.

Professor Pfannenstiel replied,

>"But what does the Fuehrer say?"

Then Globocnik, who is now Higher SS and Police Leader in Trieste on the Adriatic Coast, said:

>"The whole Aktion must be carried out much faster."

Ministerial Director Dr. Herbert Lindner [Linden] of the Ministry of the Interior suggested,

>"Would it not be better to incinerate the bodies instead of burying them? Another generation might perhaps think differently about this?"

Then Globocnik,

>"But, Gentlemen, if we should ever be succeeded by so cowardly and weak a generation that it does not understand our work, which is so good and so necessary, then, Gentlemen, the whole of National Socialism will have been in vain. On the contrary, one should bury bronze plaques [with the bodies], on which is inscribed that it was we, we who had the courage to complete this gigantic task."

Hitler said to this,

>"Well, my good Globocnik, you have said it, and that is my opinion, too."

The next day we moved on to Belzec. There is a separate little station with two platforms, at the foot of the hill of yellow sandstone, due north of the Lublin-Lvov road and rail line. To the south of the station, near the main road, there are several office buildings with the inscription "Belzec Office of the Waffen-SS" [Military Unit of the SS].

Globocnik introduced me to SS Hauptsturmfuehrer Obermeyer from Pirmasens, who showed me the installations very much against his will. There were no dead to be seen that day, but the stench in the whole area, even on the main road, was pestilent. Next to the small station there was a large barrack labeled "Dressing Room," with a window that said "Valuables," and also a hall with 100 "Barber's Chairs."

Then there was a passage 150 m. long, in the open, enclosed with barbed wire on either side, and signs inscribed "

>To the Baths and Inhalation Installations."

In front of us there was a house, the bathhouse, and to the right and left large concrete flower pots with geraniums or other flowers. After climbing a few steps there were three rooms each, on the right and on the left. They looked like garages, 4 by 5 m. and 1.90 m. high. At the back, out of sight, there were doors of wood. On the roof there was a Star of David made of copper. The front of the building bore a notice "Heckenholt Institution." That is all I saw that afternoon.

Next morning, a few minutes before 7 o'clock, I was told that the first train would arrive in 10 minutes. And in fact the first train from Lvov arrived a few minutes later. There were 45 carriages with 6,700 persons, of whom 1,450 were already dead on arrival. Through small openings closed with barbed wire one could see yellow, frightened children, men, and women. The train stopped, and 200 Ukrainians, who were forced to perform this service, tore open the doors and chased the people from the carriages with whips.

Then instructions were given through a large loudspeaker: The people are to take off all their clothes out of doors and a few of them in the barracks - including artificial limbs and glasses. Shoes must be tied in pairs with a little piece of string handed out by a small four-year-old Jewish boy. All valuables and money are to be handed in at the window marked "Valuables," without any document or receipt being given.

The women and girls must then go to the barber, who cuts off their hair with one or two snips. The hair disappears into large potato sacks, "to make something special for the submarines, to seal them and so on," the duty SS Unterscharfuehrer explained to me.

Then the march starts: Barbed wire to the right and left and two dozen Ukrainians with rifles at the rear. They came on, led by an exceptionally pretty girl. I myself was standing with Police Captain Wirth in front of the death chambers. Men, women, children, infants, people with amputated legs, all naked, completely naked, moved past us.

In one corner there is a whimsical SS man who tells these poor people in an unctuous voice,

>"Nothing at all will happen to you. You must just breathe deeply, that strengthens the lungs; this inhalation is necessary because of the infectious diseases, it is good disinfection!"

When somebody asks what their fate will be, he explains that the men will of course have to work, building streets and houses. But the women will not have to work. If they want to, they can help in the house or the kitchen. A little glimmer of hope flickers once more in some of these poor people, enough to make them march unresisting into the death chambers.

But most of them understand what is happening; the smell reveals their fate! Then they climb up a little staircase and see the truth. Nursing mothers with an infant at the breast, naked; many children of all ages, naked. They hesitate, but they enter the death chambers, most of them silent, forced on by those behind them, who are driven by the whip lashes of the SS men.

A Jewish woman of about 40, with flaming eyes, calls down [revenge] for the blood of her children on the head of the murderers. Police Captain Wirth in person strikes her in the face 5 times with his whip, and she disappears into the gas chamber."

(Source: Documents on the Holocaust, Selected Sources on the Destruction of the Jews of Germany and Austria, Poland and the Soviet Union, Yad Vashem, Jerusalem, 1981, Document no.163. pp.347-350)

Belzec: Testimony from a Camp Engineer---> https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/testimony-from-a-belzec-camp-engineer

NOT MY LINKS

ABOUT Kurt Gerstein: https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/kurt-gerstein

NOT MY LINKS

VIDEO - The Gerstein Report - The Gerstein Report - 2026 07 17 054 Hairstyle Female USEN YouTube 1920X1080

1: Kurt Gerstein - A column of prisoners arrives at the Belzec killing center. Belzec, Poland, ca. 1942. In early 1940 the Germans set up a forced-labor camp for Jewish prisoners in Belzec. The inmates were forced to build fortifications and dig anti-tank ditches along the demarcation line between Germany and Soviet-occupied Poland. The camp was closed down at the end of 1940. The following year, in November 1941, construction began on the Belzec killing center.

"The children believed they were to join their parents. But they were never to see them again."

"At Auschwitz, thirteen thousand Jews were brought from the two nearby towns of Bedzin and Sosnowiec, as well as more than twenty-two thousand from Holland, Belgium, Luxembourg and France.

The French deportees of August 17 included twenty-seven children under the age of four, and 323 girls under the age of sixteen. All were gassed, among them Suzanne Perl, aged seven, and her three-year-old sister Micheline. Both girls had been deported without their parents.

Some days earlier, the Germans had deported most of the parents of the children of this convoy to Auschwitz, where many of them had already been gassed. The children believed that they were to join their parents. But they were never to see them again. On arrival at Auschwitz, all the children were taken to the gas-chamber."

From The Holocaust: A History of the Jews of Europe During the Second World War, by Martin Gilbert

IMAGE: 23 July 1942, Deportation of Jews from Dobsina, Slovakia, to Auschwitz - “In total, about 100,000 Slovak Jews (including those who fled before the war) were murdered in the Holocaust. Approximately 25-35,000 survived, including 4,000-5,000 who hid with the partisans or in cities and towns. After the war, most Slovak Jews immigrated to Israel.”

The Decree Forcing Jews to Adopt Nazi-Mandated Names

"On this day, the Law Regarding Changes of Family Names and Given Names was issued, providing that as of January 1, 1939, all male Jews must assume the given name of Israel and all female Jews the name of Sarah.

Furthermore, Jews were forbidden to take as given names any other than specifically designated "Jewish" given names, as listed in an appendix to the decree.

(More than a hundred years before, the Prussian government prohibited Jews from using "Christian" given names. Leopold Zunz, the founder of Wissenschaft des Judentums, then wrote a scholarly paper, Die Namen der Juden, showing that Christian and Jewish given names had a common source in the Bible. His scholarship was so persuasive that the Prussian government revised its restrictions to apply only to names associated with traditions of the New Testament.)"

From The War Against the Jews, 1933-1945, by Lucy S. Dawidowicz.

“Twice in the course of German history, Jews were forced to change their names: the first time through the introduction of (often stigmatizing) family names during the Emancipation, the second time through the introduction of compulsory first names: “Sara” for Jewish women and “Israel” for Jewish men (August 17, 1938).

Thus, Jews were singled out and made to stand apart from the rest of society. If the given name appeared on an officially approved list of Jewish names issued by the Nazis, no additional name was required. The regime also saw to it that Jews who had changed their family names in order to blend in and avoid discrimination had to return to their previous names.” -> https://www.lbi.org/1938projekt/detail/sara-for-women-israel-for-men/

NOT MY LINKS

https://www.ushmm.org/learn/timeline-of-events/1933-1938/law-on-alteration-of-family-and-personal-names

1: Identity card (Deutsches Reich Kennkarte) issued to Marianne Wolff displaying the imposed middle name of "Sara" and stamped with the letter J for "Jude" (Jew).

Hitler's Last Living Henchman

"Hess died on 17 August 1987, aged 93, in a summer house that had been set up in the prison garden as a reading room. He took an extension cord from one of the lamps, strung it over a window latch, and hanged himself.

A short note to his family was found in his pocket, thanking them for all that they had done. The Four Powers released a statement on 17 September ruling the death a suicide. He was initially buried at a secret location to avoid media attention or demonstrations by Nazi sympathizers, but his body was re-interred in a family plot at Wunsiedel on 17 March 1988; his wife was buried beside him in 1995.

Hess's lawyer Alfred Seidl felt that he was too old and frail to have managed to kill himself. Wolf Rüdiger Hess repeatedly claimed that his father had been murdered by the British Secret Intelligence Service to prevent him from revealing information about British misconduct during the war.

Abdallah Melaouhi served as Hess's medical orderly from 1982 to 1987; he was dismissed from his position at his local district parliament's Immigration and Integration Advisory Council after he wrote a self-published book on a similar theme. According to an investigation by the British government in 1989, the available evidence did not back up the claim that Hess was murdered, and Solicitor General Sir Nicholas Lyell saw no grounds for further investigation.

The autopsy results supported the conclusion that Hess had killed himself. A report released in 2012 led to questions again being asked as to whether Hess had been murdered. Historian Peter Padfield wrote that the suicide note found on the body appeared to have been written when Hess was hospitalized in 1969.

Wunsiedel became a destination for pilgrimages and neo-Nazi demonstrations every August on the date of Hess's death. To put a stop to neo-Nazi pilgrimages, the parish council decided not to allow an extension on the grave site's lease when it expired in 2011.

With the eventual consent of his family, Hess's grave was re-opened on 20 July 2011. The remains were cremated and the ashes scattered at sea by family members. The gravestone, which bore the epitaph "Ich hab's gewagt" ("I have dared"), was destroyed. Spandau Prison was demolished in 1987 to prevent it from becoming a neo-Nazi shrine.

A myth that the Spandau prisoner was not actually Hess was disproved in 2019, when a study of DNA testing undertaken by Sherman McCall, formerly of the Walter Reed Army Medical Center, and Jan Cemper-Kiesslich of the University of Salzburg demonstrated a 99.99 per cent match between the prisoner's y chromosome DNA markers and those of a living male Hess relative." MORE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rudolf_Hess

FULL Rudolf Hess BIO: https://4rs.neocities.org/nur01.html

NOT MY LINKS

VIDEO - Rudolf Hess: The Last Prisoner of Spandau - “Rudolf Hess, the last prisoner in Spandau, Berlin, died in 1987. He had been confined inside since 1947 with six other Nuremberg defendants, but by 1966 he was the last one left in a prison designed for 600. Find out how he ended up in Spandau, how he was guarded by the armed forces of four nations, how he lived and his ultimate fate, along with the fate of the building itself.”---> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t9lM-aaCHJU

The Only Known Jewish Lynching in U.S. History

"In 1913, Leo Frank was convicted of murdering Mary Phagan, a 13-year-old employee of the Atlanta pencil factory that Frank managed. After Georgia’s governor commuted his death sentence, a mob stormed the prison where Frank was being held and lynched him. Leo Frank thus became the only known Jew lynched in American history.

The case still spurs debate and controversy — it even inspired a Broadway play. What are the facts of the Frank case?

The Case Against Frank

“Little Mary Phagan,” as she became known, left home on the morning of April 26 to pick up her wages at the pencil factory and view Atlanta’s Confederate Day parade. She never returned home.

The next day, the factory night watchman found her bloody, sawdust-covered body in the factory basement. When the police asked Leo Frank, who had just completed a term as president of the Atlanta chapter of B’nai B’rith (a Jewish fraternal organization), to view her body, Frank became agitated. He confirmed personally paying Mary her wages but could not say where she went next. Frank, the last to admit seeing Mary alive, became the prime suspect.

Georgia’s solicitor general, Hugh Dorsey, sought a grand jury indictment against Frank. Rumor circulated that Mary had been sexually assaulted. Factory employees offered apparently false testimony that Frank had made sexual advances toward them. The madam of a house of ill repute claimed that Frank had phoned her several times, seeking a room for himself and a young girl.

In this era, the cult of Southern chivalry made it a “hanging crime” for African-American males to have sexual contact with the “flower of white womanhood.” The accusations against Frank, a Northern-born, college-educated Jew, proved equally inflammatory.

The Exonerating Evidence

For the grand jury, Hugh Dorsey painted Leo Frank as a sexual pervert who was both homosexual and who preyed on young girls. What he did not tell the grand jury was that a janitor at the factory, Jim Conley, had been arrested two days after Frank when he was seen washing blood off his shirt. Conley then admitted writing two notes that had been found by Mary Phagan’s body.

The police assumed that, as author of these notes, Conley was the murderer, but Conley claimed, after apparent coaching from Dorsey, that Leo Frank had confessed to murdering Mary in the lathe room and then paid Conley to pen the notes and help him move Mary’s body to the basement.

Even after Frank’s housekeeper placed him at home, having lunch at the time of the murder and despite gross inconsistencies in Conley’s story, both the grand and trial jury chose to believe Conley. This was perhaps the first instance of a Southern black man’s testimony being used to convict a white man. In August of 1913, the jury found Frank guilty in less than four hours. Crowds outside the courthouse shouted, “Hang the Jew.”

Historian Leonard Dinnerstein reports that one juror had been overheard to say before his selection for the jury, “I am glad they indicted the God damn Jew. They ought to take him out and lynch him. And if I get on that jury, I’ll hang that Jew for sure.”

Facing intimidation and mob rule, the trial judge sentenced Frank to death. He barred Frank from the courtroom on the grounds that, had he been acquitted, Frank might have been lynched by the crowd outside.

Frank Is Saved, Briefly

Despite these breaches of due process, Georgia’s higher courts rejected Frank’s appeals and the U. S. Supreme Court voted, 7-2, against reopening the case, with Justices Oliver Wendell Holmes and Charles Evans Hughes dissenting. Frank’s survival depended on Georgia Governor Frank Slaton.

After a 12-day review of the evidence and letters recommending commutation from the trial judge (who must have had second thoughts) and from a private investigator who had worked for Hugh Dorsey, Slaton commuted Frank’s sentence to life imprisonment.

That night, state police kept a protesting crowd of 5,000 from the governor’s mansion. Wary Jewish families fled Atlanta. Slaton held firm.

“Two thousand years ago,” he wrote a few days later, “another Governor washed his hands and turned over a Jew to a mob. For two thousand years that governor’s name has been accursed. If today another Jew [Leo Frank] were lying in his grave because I had failed to do my duty, I would all through life find his blood on my hands and would consider myself an assassin through cowardice.”

On August 17, 1915, a group of 25 men — described by peers as “sober, intelligent, of established good name and character”— stormed the prison hospital where Leo Frank was recovering from having his throat slashed by a fellow inmate. They kidnapped Frank, drove him more than 100 miles to Mary Phagan’s hometown of Marietta, Georgia, and hanged him from a tree.

Frank conducted himself with dignity, calmly proclaiming his innocence.

Townsfolk were proudly photographed beneath Frank’s swinging corpse, pictures still valued today by their descendants. When his term expired a year later, Slaton did not run for reelection and Dorsey easily won election to the governor’s office.

In 1986, the Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles finally granted Leo Frank a posthumous pardon, not because they thought him innocent, but because his lynching deprived him of his right to further appeal. Mary Phagan’s descendants and their supporters still insist on his guilt." https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/leo-frank-is-lynched/

1: Leo Frank - Lynching of Leo M. Frank, August 17, 1915

Defining the Verfügungstruppe's Peacetime & Wartime Roles

"The Verfugungstruppe originated out of political standby squads, which served as an auxiliary police force ready to go into action at any threat to Hitler, at any order from Himmler.

(The most famous unit was the Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler, set up in March 1933.) Aware of the advantages of having his own military force, Himmler united these squads into the Verfiigungstruppe, a sort of National Socialist army to be relied on in the event of treachery on the part of the regular army.

In September 1934 it was accorded official status by a decree of the Defense Minister, permitting the SS to maintain "a standing armed force for such special internal political tasks as may be allotted to the SS by the Fuehrer."

By 1936 the Verfiigungstruppe numbered ten thousand and even had its own cadet schools. Though service in the Verfiigungstruppe under Nazi law counted as military service, the regular army resented it and until the outbreak of war refused to legitimate it as part of Germany's armed forces.

On August 17, 1938, Hitler issued a secret directive clarifying the relationship between the Verfiigungstruppe and the Wehrmacht in peacetime and in the event of war. The directive reaffirmed the military character of the Verfiigungstruppe.

In peacetime, under Himmler's command, its units—which belonged neither to the Wehrmacht nor the police, but were a permanent armed formation of the NSDAP exclusively at Hitler's disposal—were to be available for "internal political tasks."

But in the event of mobilization, the Verfiigungstruppe could be used by the commander-in-chief of the army, and though remaining a branch of the NSDAP, its units would then be subject to army instructions and military law.

The Totenkopfverbande originated from the guard unit at Dachau, the first concentration camp in National Socialist Germany. When the Nazis came to power, "deprivation of freedom in the form of protective custody" became the order of the day, and by March 1933 the prisons could no longer hold the thousands arrested in "preventive" measures to eliminate "threats from subversive elements."

Camps then were set up throughout Germany by Himmler in his capacity as head of the Bavarian police, the first at Dachau. By the summer of 1933 there were ten or more camps and detention centers, organized and operated by the SS, the SA, or the police, with over 25,000 inmates—Social Democrats, Communists, members of other opposition parties, journalists and writers (especially Jews), and various other "unpopular" categories.

In this early period, "wild improvisation," to use Martin Broszat's phrase, characterized the operation of the camps, but soon they came under Himmler's exclusive authority and were thenceforth removed from the control of the state's administrative and legal jurisdiction and operated outside the ordinary processes of law."

From The War Against the Jews, 1933-1945, by Lucy S. Dawidowicz

“SS-Verfügungstruppe (SS-VT, lit. 'SS Dispositional Troops') was formed in 1934 as combat troops for the Nazi Party (NSDAP). On 17 August 1938 Adolf Hitler decreed that the SS-VT was neither a part of the Ordnungspolizei (order police) nor the Wehrmacht, but military-trained men at the disposal of the Führer.

In time of war, the SS-VT were to be placed at the disposal of the army. The SS-VT were involved in the German invasion of Poland in September 1939.

By 1940 these military SS units had become the nucleus of the Waffen-SS.” ALL THE DETAILS--> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SS-Verf%C3%Bcgungstruppe

1: SS-VT in full marching order, 1935

A Jewish Partisan in Southern France

"Founded in January 1942, the French Armee Juive (the Jewish Army) smuggled hundreds of Jews to Spain and Switzerland and launched attacks against the German army in both the northern and southern parts of France.

Among its many activities, the Armee Juive attacked informants and Gestapo agents, as well as smuggling funds from Switzerland to the rescue organizations in France. Hundreds of Jews fell in the ranks of the Armee Juive in their activities against the Germans.

The soldiers of Armee Juive participated in the general French uprising of August 1944, fighting in Paris, Lyon and Toulouse.

A representative council for French Jewry was established in 1944, intended as a coordinating body meant to organize the rebellious activities of the Jewish organizations.

This was a joint effort of the leaders of the Jewish organizations, an attempt to rise above ideological boundaries in order to strengthen the activities on behalf of the Jewish community and contribute to the general French rebel movement.

In June 1944 the forces of the Western Allies invaded Normandy, liberating Paris by August. Nonetheless, the deportation trains bringing Jews from France to the death camps continued until the summer of 1944, with the last train of Jews leaving France three days before the fall of Paris." https://www.yadvashem.org/holocaust/this-month/august/1944-2.html

Defendant Walter Funk, former Reichsbank president, is called back to the stand to be questioned by his counsel, Dr. Fritz Sauter, after which prosecutor Thomas Dodd takes another crack at him on the matter of the dental gold that was found in his vaults, which had been yanked from the mouths of Holocaust victims:

Mr. Dodd: You also told us, on that same day, and in the next answer to the very next question you made this statement before the Tribunal,

>"And I personally assumed, since they were always speaking about a gold deposit, that this gold consisted of coins or other foreign currency or possibly small bars of gold or something similar which had been brought in from the inmates of the concentration camps."

Well then, you had some knowledge of the source and the origin of these deposits, didn't you? You knew where they were coming from, and that is all we want to establish here, and you had a pretty good idea, to put it mildly.

Funk: That didn't necessarily come from the concentration camps only. But that the inmates of the concentration camps . . . .

Mr. Dodd: Now, just a moment. There is no sense in arguing about it at all. All I am trying to clear up here is the fact that you told the Tribunal yourself that you assumed it came from the inmates of the concentration camps. Now, this is your own testimony of 7 May.

Funk: Not only the gold, but also the foreign exchange, the bank notes, and everything which would come under the heading of legal transactions of the Reichsbank. That these things could come from the concentration camps as well was quite clear to me, for these things had to be collected from the inmates of the concentration camps just as from every other person. That was clear to me. It was about the other things that I did not know anything.

FULL TRANSCRIPT: https://avalon.law.yale.edu/imt/08-16-46.asp

NOT MY LINKS

VIDEO: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Spm5Okqcf7Q

“Tom Dodd was again the toast of the Marble Room. His performance in court the day before had made his staying on in Nuremberg worth while. With the support of the anonymous staffers who prepared his appearances, he had shattered the defense of Walther Funk.

Round, soft, weeping, dark-jowled Funk might have seemed an unworthy adversary, a preposterous war criminal. His weak bladder had gotten Funk out of the German army during World War I. At Nuremberg, he often had to be led from the courtroom to the men's room. To the guards he was "the pisser."

This unlikely figure, however, had been indicted on all four counts. The winding trail that had led Funk to the Nuremberg dock had begun at what seemed a moment of success. Hitler had summoned him during a Berlin performance of La Boheme and said, almost as though he could not believe it himself,

>"I'll have to make you the minister of economy after all."

Thus Funk had succeeded the old wizard Schacht. He was, in fact, bright and capable. But Funk was known best in party circles as a bon vivant who savored fine cigars, good scotch, risqué stories, and all-night revelry. Though he was married and liked to play the lecher, Funk discreetly chose his own sex for his most intimate companionship.

The worst thing he had done was to draft a law in the thirties barring Jews from operating retail businesses, a blow that had doomed tens of thousands to poverty or flight.

What hovered over Funk at Nuremberg, however, was something more tangibly horrifying. After the conquest of Frankfurt, a U.S. army film unit had made a motion picture of unusual deposits in the vaults of the Reichsbank—heaps of diamonds, pearls, gold eyeglass frames, gold rings, gold earrings, gold watches, and gold teeth.

The vault looked more like a hock shop than part of a bank. The prosecution had shown the film in court. Earlier in Mondorf, in a fit of remorse, Funk had admitted to Colonel Andrus that he knew how the valuables, including the gold teeth, had found their way into his bank.

Once the trial began, however, Funk had denied any knowledge of these deposits. In cross examining him, Dodd read from an affidavit given by Emil Puhl, Funk's assistant at the Reichsbank. Puhl claimed that Heinrich Himmler had arranged with Funk to accept valuables collected by the SS in the East.

When Puhl asked Funk the source of these valuables, Funk had told him to stop asking questions. Puhl further deposed that he and Funk had gone to the vaults from time to time to see the accumulation of this trove. On the stand, Funk insisted that Puhl's affidavit was a lie. Why did they not produce the man himself? Funk protested. Puhl would clear his old chief.

Dodd pressed the witness on his continued denial of the nature of the SS deposits. "Many people deposited valuables, although the bank was not required to look into them," Funk said petulantly.

"Nobody," Dodd observed, "ever deposited his gold teeth in a bank."

Emil Puhl did, in fact, testify days later, only to incriminate Funk. There had been seventy-seven SS deposits of valuables, he told the court. Funk knew about them, and they were, he said, Schweinerei— they smelled bad from the start.”

From Nuremberg: Infamy on Trial, by Joseph E. Persico

NOT MY LINKS

FULL Walter Funk BIO: https://4rs.neocities.org/nur09.html

1: Walter Funk and Gold rings of victims from Buchenwald concentration camp. Funk as Reichsminister for the Economy and President of the Reichsbank accepted the rings from the SS to be melted down.