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Ernst Zierke
Ernst Zierke (6 May 1905 – 23 May 1972) was a low-ranking member in the SS who took part in the Action T4 forced euthanasia program in Nazi Germany, and after the invasion of Poland worked at Bełżec and Sobibór extermination camps during Operation Reinhard. Zierke helped to perpetrate the Holocaust. He was charged with being an accessory to the murder of 360,000 Jews at death camps, acquitted twice, in the Belzec and Sobibór trials of 1965 on grounds of acting under duress and set free. Career Zierke was born on 6 May 1905 in Köslin. His father, a railroad worker, died in 1917. Zierke joined the Nazi Party and SA in 1930. He trained as a nurse at the Neuruppin hospital and eventually received a permanent civil service appointment. In late 1939, he was recruited by Action T4 and worked as staff in the euthanasia program at both the Grafeneck and Hadamar gassing centers. Zierke was transferred to Eichberg euthanasia center in late 1941. From January to March 1942, ...
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Koszalin
Koszalin (pronounced ; csb, Kòszalëno; formerly german: Köslin, ) is a city in northwestern Poland, in Western Pomerania. It is located south of the Baltic Sea coast, and intersected by the river Dzierżęcinka. Koszalin is also a county-status city and capital of Koszalin County of West Pomeranian Voivodeship since 1999. Previously, it was a capital of Koszalin Voivodeship (other), Koszalin Voivodeship (1950–1998). The current mayor of Koszalin is Piotr Jedliński. History Middle Ages According to the Medieval Wielkopolska Chronicle, Chronicle of Greater Poland (''Kronika Wielkopolska'') Koszalin was one of the Pomeranians (Slavic tribe), Pomeranian cities captured and subjugated by Duke Bolesław III Wrymouth of Poland in 1107 (other towns included Kołobrzeg, Kamień Pomorski, Kamień and Wolin). Afterwards, in the 12th century the area became part of the House of Griffin, Griffin-ruled Duchy of Pomerania, a vassal state of Kingdom of Poland (1025-1385), Pol ...
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The Holocaust
The Holocaust, also known as the Shoah, 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. The murders were carried out in pogroms and mass shootings; by a policy of extermination through labor in concentration camps; and in gas chambers and gas vans in German extermination camps, chiefly Auschwitz-Birkenau, Bełżec, Chełmno, Majdanek, Sobibór, and Treblinka in occupied Poland. Germany implemented the persecution in stages. Following Adolf Hitler's appointment as chancellor on 30 January 1933, the regime built a network of concentration camps in Germany for political opponents and those deemed "undesirable", starting with Dachau on 22 March 1933. After the passing of the Enabling Act on 24 March, which gave Hitler dictatorial plenary powers, the government began isolating Je ...
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Ernst Klee
Ernst Klee (15 March 1942, Frankfurt – 18 May 2013, Frankfurt) was a German journalist and author. As a writer on Germany's history, he was best known for his exposure and documentation of medical crimes in Nazi Germany, much of which was concerned with the Action T4 or involuntary euthanasia program. He is the author of ''"The Good Old Days": The Holocaust Through the Eyes of the Perpetrators and Bystanders'' first published in the English translation in 1991. Life and work Klee was first trained as a sanitary and heating technician. Afterwards, he caught up on his university entrance requirements and then studied theology and social education. As a journalist in the 1970s, he looked at socially excluded groups, such as the homeless, psychiatric patients and the disabled. During this period, he collaborated with Gusti Steiner, who laid the foundation for the federal German emancipatory movement of the disabled at that time. In 1997, he received the ''Geschwister-Scholl-Preis ...
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Belzec - SS Staff (1942)
Belzec (English: or , Polish: ) was a Nazi German extermination camp built by the SS for the purpose of implementing the secretive Operation Reinhard, the plan to murder all Polish Jews, a major part of the "Final Solution" which in total entailed the murder of about 6 million Jews in the Holocaust. The camp operated from to the end of . It was situated about south of the local railroad station of Bełżec, in the new Lublin District of the General Government territory of German-occupied Poland. The burning of exhumed corpses on five open-air grids and bone crushing continued until March 1943. Between 430,000 and 500,000 Jews are believed to have been murdered by the SS at Bełżec. It was the third-deadliest extermination camp, exceeded only by Treblinka and Auschwitz. Only seven Jews performing slave labour with the camp's ''Sonderkommando'' survived World War II; and only Rudolf Reder became known, thanks to his official postwar testimony. The lack of viable wit ...
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Henry Friedlander
Henry Egon Friedlander (24 September 1930 – 17 October 2012) was a German-American Jewish historian of the Holocaust who was noted for his arguments in favor of broadening the scope of casualties of the Holocaust. Born in Berlin, Germany, to a Jewish family, Friedlander moved to the United States in 1947 as a survivor of Auschwitz, obtaining his BA in history at Temple University in 1953 and his MA and PhD at the University of Pennsylvania in 1954 and 1968. From 1975 until his retirement in 2001, Friedlander served as a professor in the department of Judaic studies at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York. Personal life The son of physician Bernhard Fritz Friedländer and Ruth Friedländer, née Löwenthal, Henry Friedlander was married to fellow historian Sybil Milton (1941–2000), who has a German Studies Association memorial prize named after her. Views on the Holocaust Friedlander argued that three groups should be considered victims of the Holocaust, name ...
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Organisation Todt
Organisation Todt (OT; ) was a civil and military engineering organisation in Nazi Germany from 1933 to 1945, named for its founder, Fritz Todt, an engineer and senior Nazi. The organisation was responsible for a huge range of engineering projects both in Nazi Germany and in occupied territories from France to the Soviet Union during World War II. It became notorious for using forced labour. From 1943 until 1945 during the late phase of the Third Reich, OT administered all constructions of concentration camps to supply forced labour to industry. Overview The history of the organisation can be divided into three phases. From 1933 to 1938, before the organisation existed, Fritz Todt's primary post was that of the General Inspector of German Roadways (''Generalinspektor für das deutsche Straßenwesen'') and his primary responsibility, the construction of the ''Autobahn'' network. He was able to draw on "conscripted" (i.e., compulsory) labour, from within Germany, through the Rei ...
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Hadamar Euthanasia Centre
The Hadamar killing centre (german: NS-Tötungsanstalt Hadamar) was a killing facility involved in the Nazi "involuntary euthanasia" programme known as ''Aktion T4''. It was housed within a psychiatric hospital located in the German town of Hadamar, near Limburg in Hessen. Beginning in 1939, the Nazis used Hadamar and five other sites as killing facilities for ''Aktion T4'', which performed mass sterilizations and mass murder of "undesirable" members of German society, specifically those with physical and mental disabilities. In total, an estimated 200,000 people were murdered at these facilities, including thousands of children. These actions were in keeping with Nazi ideas about eugenics. While officially ended in 1941, the programme lasted until the German surrender in 1945. Nearly 15,000 German citizens were transported to the hospital and murdered there, most by gas chamber and the rest by lethal injection and starvation. In addition, hundreds of forced labourers from Pol ...
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Grafeneck Euthanasia Centre
The Grafeneck Euthanasia Centre (german: NS-Tötungsanstalt Grafeneck) housed in Grafeneck Castle was one of Nazi Germany's killing centres as part of their forced euthanasia programme. Today, it is a memorial site dedicated to the victims of the state-authorised programme also referred to since as Action T4. At least 10,500 mentally and physically disabled people, predominantly from Bavaria and Baden-Württemberg, were systematically killed during 1940. It was one of the first places in Nazi Germany where people were killed in large numbers in a gas chamber using carbon monoxide. This was the beginning of the Euthanasia Programme. Grafeneck was also the central office of the "Charitable Ambulance Transport GmbH" (Gekrat), which was responsible for the transport of T4 and was headed by Reinhold Vorberg. Location Grafeneck is a castle-like property in Grafeneck, a part of the municipality of Gomadingen in Baden-Württemberg. History Built around 1560, the Grafeneck Castle serv ...
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Neuruppin
Neuruppin (; North Brandenburgisch: ''Reppin'') is a town in Brandenburg, Germany, the administrative seat of Ostprignitz-Ruppin district. It is the birthplace of the novelist Theodor Fontane (1819–1898) and therefore also referred to as ''Fontanestadt''. A garrison town since 1688 and largely rebuilt in a Neoclassical style after a devastating fire in 1787, Neuruppin has the reputation of being "the most Prussian of all Prussian towns". Geography Geographical position Neuruppin is one of the largest cities in Germany in terms of area. The city of Neuruppin, northwest of Berlin in the district of Ostprignitz-Ruppin (Ruppin Switzerland), consists in the south of the districts located on the shores of Ruppiner See, which is crossed by the Rhin River, including the actual core city of Neuruppin and Alt Ruppin. In the north, it stretches up to the Rheinsberg Lake Region and the border with Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. It is part of the Stechlin-Ruppiner Land Nature Park and is connected ...
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Sturmabteilung
The (; SA; literally "Storm Detachment") was the original paramilitary wing of the Nazi Party. It played a significant role in Adolf Hitler's rise to power in the 1920s and 1930s. Its primary purposes were providing protection for Nazi rallies and assemblies, disrupting the meetings of opposing parties, fighting against the paramilitary units of the opposing parties, especially the ''Roter Frontkämpferbund'' of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) and the '' Reichsbanner Schwarz-Rot-Gold'' of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD), and intimidating Romani, trade unionists, and especially Jews. The SA were colloquially called Brownshirts () because of the colour of their uniform's shirts, similar to Benito Mussolini's blackshirts. The official uniform of the SA was the brown shirt with a brown tie. The color came about because a large shipment of Lettow- shirts, originally intended for the German colonial troops in Germany's former East Africa colony, was purcha ...
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Nazi Party
The Nazi Party, officially the National Socialist German Workers' Party (german: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei or NSDAP), was a far-right politics, far-right political party in Germany active between 1920 and 1945 that created and supported the ideology of Nazism. Its precursor, the German Workers' Party (; DAP), existed from 1919 to 1920. The Nazi Party emerged from the Extremism, extremist German nationalism, German nationalist, racism, racist and populism, populist paramilitary culture, which fought against the communism, communist uprisings in post–World War I Germany. The party was created to draw workers away from communism and into nationalism. Initially, Nazi political strategy focused on anti–big business, anti-bourgeoisie, bourgeois, and anti-capitalism, anti-capitalist rhetoric. This was later downplayed to gain the support of business leaders, and in the 1930s, the party's main focus shifted to Antisemitism, antisemitic and Criticism of ...
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Köslin
Koszalin (pronounced ; csb, Kòszalëno; formerly german: Köslin, ) is a city in northwestern Poland, in Western Pomerania. It is located south of the Baltic Sea coast, and intersected by the river Dzierżęcinka. Koszalin is also a county-status city and capital of Koszalin County of West Pomeranian Voivodeship since 1999. Previously, it was a capital of Koszalin Voivodeship (other), Koszalin Voivodeship (1950–1998). The current mayor of Koszalin is Piotr Jedliński. History Middle Ages According to the Medieval Wielkopolska Chronicle, Chronicle of Greater Poland (''Kronika Wielkopolska'') Koszalin was one of the Pomeranians (Slavic tribe), Pomeranian cities captured and subjugated by Duke Bolesław III Wrymouth of Poland in 1107 (other towns included Kołobrzeg, Kamień Pomorski, Kamień and Wolin). Afterwards, in the 12th century the area became part of the House of Griffin, Griffin-ruled Duchy of Pomerania, a vassal state of Kingdom of Poland (1025-1385), Pol ...
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