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Franz Reichleitner
Franz Karl Reichleitner (2 December 1906 – 3 January 1944) was an Austrian member in the SS of Nazi Germany who participated in Operation Reinhard during the Holocaust. Reichleitner served as the second and last commandant of Sobibór extermination camp from 1 September 1942 until the camp's closure on or about 17 October 1943. As the commanding officer of the camp, Franz Reichleitner directly perpetrated the genocide of Jews. SS career Reichleitner joined the Nazi Party in 1936 as member number 6,369,213 and the Schutzstaffel in 1937 as member number 357,065. He began his career as a ''Kriminalsekretär'' of the Gestapo in Linz. Later Reichleitner was assigned to work in the Action T4 euthanasia program at the nearby Hartheim Euthanasia Centre. He first served as an assistant supervisor (together with Franz Stangl) under officer Christian Wirth before assuming Wirth's position of chief supervisor at Hartheim. Reichleitner was also partly responsible for getting Stangl a sup ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Austria-Hungary
Austria-Hungary, often referred to as the Austro-Hungarian Empire,, the Dual Monarchy, or Austria, was a constitutional monarchy and great power in Central Europe between 1867 and 1918. It was formed with the Austro-Hungarian Compromise of 1867 in the aftermath of the Austro-Prussian War and was dissolved shortly after its defeat in the First World War. Austria-Hungary was ruled by the House of Habsburg and constituted the last phase in the constitutional evolution of the Habsburg monarchy. It was a multinational state and one of Europe's major powers at the time. Austria-Hungary was geographically the second-largest country in Europe after the Russian Empire, at and the third-most populous (after Russia and the German Empire). The Empire built up the fourth-largest machine building industry in the world, after the United States, Germany and the United Kingdom. Austria-Hungary also became the world's third-largest manufacturer and exporter of electric home appliances, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Hartheim Euthanasia Centre
The Hartheim killing centre (german: NS-Tötungsanstalt Hartheim, sometimes translated as "Hartheim killing facility" or "Hartheim euthanasia centre") was a killing facility involved in the Nazi programme known as ''Aktion T4'', in which German citizens deemed mentally or physically unfit were systematically murdered with poison gas. Often, these patients were transferred from other killing facilities such as the Am Spiegelgrund clinic in Vienna. This was initially a programme of "involuntary euthanasia" permitted under the law ostensibly to enable the lawful and painless killing of incurably ill patients; these murders continued even after the law was rescinded in 1942. Other victims included Jews, Communists and those considered undesirable by the state. Concentration camp inmates who were unfit for work, or otherwise deemed troublesome, were also executed here. The facility was housed in Hartheim Castle in the municipality of Alkoven, near Linz, Austria, which now is a memo ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Heinrich Himmler
Heinrich Luitpold Himmler (; 7 October 1900 – 23 May 1945) was of the (Protection Squadron; SS), and a leading member of the Nazi Party of Germany. Himmler was one of the most powerful men in Nazi Germany and a main architect of the Holocaust. As a member of a reserve battalion during World War I, Himmler did not see active service, and did not fight. He studied agriculture in university, and joined the Nazi Party in 1923 and the SS in 1925. In 1929, he was appointed by Adolf Hitler. Over the next 16 years, he developed the SS from a 290-man battalion into a million-strong paramilitary group, and set up and controlled the Nazi concentration camps. He was known for good organisational skills and for selecting highly competent subordinates, such as Reinhard Heydrich in 1931. From 1943 onwards, he was both Chief of German Police and Minister of the Interior, overseeing all internal and external police and security forces, including the Gestapo (Secret State Police). H ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Reichsführer-SS
(, ) was a special title and rank that existed between the years of 1925 and 1945 for the commander of the (SS). ''Reichsführer-SS'' was a title from 1925 to 1933, and from 1934 to 1945 it was the highest rank of the SS. The longest-serving and most noteworthy office holder was Heinrich Himmler. Definition was both a title and a rank. The title of was first created in 1926 by the second commander of the SS, Joseph Berchtold. Julius Schreck, founder of the SS and Berchtold's predecessor, never referred to himself as . Yet, the title was retroactively applied to him in later years. In 1929, Heinrich Himmler became and referred to himself by his title instead of his regular SS rank of . This set the precedent for the commander of the SS to be called . Prior to the Night of the Long Knives, the SS was an elite corps of the (SA or storm troopers), and the was subordinate to the SA's operating head, the . On 20 July 1934, as part of the purge of the SA, the SS was made an ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Karl Frenzel
Karl August Wilhelm Frenzel (20 August 1911 – 2 September 1996) was an SS noncommissioned officer in . After the , he was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment for war crimes, but he was ultimately released after serving 16 years in prison. Early life Frenzel was born in , |
Yitzhak Arad
Yitzhak Arad ( he, יצחק ארד; né Icchak Rudnicki; November 11, 1926 – May 6, 2021) was an Israeli historian, author, IDF brigadier general and Soviet partisan. He also served as Yad Vashem's director from 1972 to 1993, and specialised in the history of the Holocaust. Names He was born Icchak Rudnicki, later adopting the Hebrew surname Arad ( he, ארד). During World War II, he was known as Tolya (Russian diminutive for Anatoly) in the underground and among the partisans.Burkhard SchröderLitauen und die jüdischen Partisanen (Lithuania and the Jewish Partisans) ''Heise Online'', September 14, 2008 Early life Arad was born Icchak Rudnicki on November 11, 1926, in what was then Święciany in the Second Polish Republic (now Švenčionys, Lithuania). In his youth, he belonged to the Zionist youth movement ''Ha-No'ar ha-Tsiyyoni''. World War II According to Arad's 1993 interview with Harry J. Cargas, he was active in the ghetto underground movement from 1942 to 1 ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Treblinka Extermination Camp
Treblinka () was an extermination camp, built and operated by Nazi Germany in occupied Poland during World War II. It was in a forest north-east of Warsaw, south of the village of Treblinka in what is now the Masovian Voivodeship. The camp operated between 23 July 1942 and 19 October 1943 as part of Operation Reinhard, the deadliest phase of the Final Solution. During this time, it is estimated that between 700,000 and 900,000 Jews were murdered in its gas chambers, along with 2,000 Romani people. More Jews were murdered at Treblinka than at any other Nazi extermination camp apart from Auschwitz-Birkenau. Managed by the German SS with assistance from Trawniki guards – recruited from among Soviet POWs to serve with the Germans – the camp consisted of two separate units. Treblinka I was a forced-labour camp (''Arbeitslager'') whose prisoners worked in the gravel pit or irrigation area and in the forest, where they cut wood to fuel the cremation pits. Between 1941 and 1 ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Odilo Globocnik
Odilo Lothar Ludwig Globocnik (21 April 1904 – 31 May 1945) was an Austrian Nazi and a perpetrator of the Holocaust. He was an official of the Nazi Party and later a high-ranking leader of the SS. Globocnik had a leading role in Operation Reinhard, the organized murder of around one and a half million Jews, of mostly Polish origin, during the Holocaust in the Majdanek, Treblinka, Sobibor and Belzec extermination camps. Historian Michael Allen described him as "the vilest individual in the vilest organization ever known". Globocnik took his own life shortly after his capture and detention by British soldiers. Early life and ancestry Odilo Lothar Ludwig Globocnik was born on 21 April 1904 in the Imperial Free City of Trieste, then the capital of the Austrian Littoral administrative region of the Austro-Hungarian Empire (now in Italy). He was the second child of Franz Globocnik, a Slovene cavalry lieutenant in the Austro-Hungarian Army. Because Globocnik was a leading Nazi off ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Obersturmführer
__NOTOC__ (, ; short: ''Ostuf'') was a Nazi Germany paramilitary rank that was used in several Nazi organisations, such as the SA, SS, NSKK and the NSFK. The rank of ''Obersturmführer'' was first created in 1932 as the result of an expansion of the ''Sturmabteilung'' (SA) and the need for an additional rank in the officer corps. ''Obersturmführer'' also became an SS rank at that same time. An SA-''Obersturmführer'' was typically a junior company commander in charge of fifty to a hundred men. Within the SS, the rank of ''Obersturmführer'' carried a wider range of occupations including staff aide, Gestapo officer, concentration camp supervisor, and Waffen-SS platoon commander. Within both the SS and SA, the rank of ''Obersturmführer'' was considered the equivalent of an ''Oberleutnant'' in the German ''Wehrmacht''. The insignia for ''Obersturmführer'' was three silver pips and a silver stripe centered on a uniform collar patch. The rank was senior to an ''Untersturm ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Gitta Sereny
Gitta Sereny, CBE (13 March 192114 June 2012) was an Austrian-British biographer, historian, and investigative journalist who came to be known for her interviews and profiles of infamous figures, including Mary Bell, who was convicted in 1968 of killing two children when she herself was a child, and Franz Stangl, the commandant of the Treblinka extermination camp. Born and initially raised in Austria, she was the author of five books, including ''The Case of Mary Bell: A Portrait of a Child Who Murdered'' (1972) and ''Albert Speer: His Battle with Truth'' (1995). Sereny was awarded the Duff Cooper Prize and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for her book on Albert Speer in 1995, and the Stig Dagerman Prize in 2002. She was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 2004 for services to journalism. Biography Sereny was born in Vienna, Austria in 1921. Her father was a Hungarian Protestant aristocrat, Ferdinand Serény, who died when she was two. Her mother wa ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Steyr
Steyr (; Central Bavarian: ''Steia'') is a statutory city, located in the Austrian federal state of Upper Austria. It is the administrative capital, though not part of Steyr-Land District. Steyr is Austria's 12th most populated town and the 3rd largest city in Upper Austria. The city has a long history as a manufacturing center and has given its name to several manufacturers headquartered there, such as the former Steyr-Daimler-Puch conglomerate and its successor Steyr Motors. Geography The city is situated in the Traunviertel region, with the two rivers Steyr and Enns flowing through it and meeting near the town centre beneath Lamberg Castle and St Michael's Church. This prominent location has made it prone to severe flooding through the centuries until the present, one of the worst cases being recently in August 2002. To the south of the town rises a series of hills that climb in altitude and stretch out to the Upper Austrian Prealps. To the north, the hills roll downwar ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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 ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
