Majdanek State Museum
The Majdanek State Museum ( pl, Państwowe Muzeum na Majdanku) is a memorial museum and education centre founded in the fall of 1944 on the grounds of the Nazi Germany Majdanek death camp located in Lublin, Poland. It was the first museum of its kind in the world, devoted entirely to the memory of atrocities committed in the network of concentration, slave-labor, and extermination camps and subcamps of ''KL Lublin'' during World War II. The museum performs several tasks including scholarly research into the Holocaust in Poland. It houses a permanent collection of rare artifacts, archival photographs, and testimony. Site After the camp's liberation by the advancing Red Army on 23 July 1944, the site was formally protected. With the war still ongoing, it was preserved as a museum by the autumn of 1944. It remains one the best examples of a Nazi death camp, with largely intact gas chambers and crematoria. The camp became a state monument of martyrology by the 1947 decree of the P ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Polish Language
Polish (Polish: ''język polski'', , ''polszczyzna'' or simply ''polski'', ) is a West Slavic language of the Lechitic group written in the Latin script. It is spoken primarily in Poland and serves as the native language of the Poles. In addition to being the official language of Poland, it is also used by the Polish diaspora. There are over 50 million Polish speakers around the world. It ranks as the sixth most-spoken among languages of the European Union. Polish is subdivided into regional dialects and maintains strict T–V distinction pronouns, honorifics, and various forms of formalities when addressing individuals. The traditional 32-letter Polish alphabet has nine additions (''ą'', ''ć'', ''ę'', ''ł'', ''ń'', ''ó'', ''ś'', ''ź'', ''ż'') to the letters of the basic 26-letter Latin alphabet, while removing three (x, q, v). Those three letters are at times included in an extended 35-letter alphabet, although they are not used in native words. The traditional ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Red Army
The Workers' and Peasants' Red Army (Russian: Рабо́че-крестья́нская Кра́сная армия),) often shortened to the Red Army, was the army and air force of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic and, after 1922, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. The army was established in January 1918. The Bolsheviks raised an army to oppose the military confederations (especially the various groups collectively known as the White Army) of their adversaries during the Russian Civil War. Starting in February 1946, the Red Army, along with the Soviet Navy, embodied the main component of the Soviet Armed Forces; taking the official name of "Soviet Army", until its dissolution in 1991. The Red Army provided the largest land force in the Allied victory in the European theatre of World War II, and its invasion of Manchuria assisted the unconditional surrender of Imperial Japan. During operations on the Eastern Front, it accounted for 75–80% of casual ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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1944 In Poland
Events Below, the events of World War II have the "WWII" prefix. January * January 2 – WWII: ** Free French General Jean de Lattre de Tassigny is appointed to command French Army B, part of the Sixth United States Army Group in North Africa. ** Landing at Saidor: 13,000 US and Australian troops land on Papua New Guinea, in an attempt to cut off a Japanese retreat. * January 8 – WWII: Philippine Commonwealth troops enter the province of Ilocos Sur in northern Luzon and attack Japanese forces. * January 11 ** President of the United States Franklin D. Roosevelt proposes a Second Bill of Rights for social and economic security, in his State of the Union address. ** The Nazi German administration expands Kraków-Płaszów concentration camp into the larger standalone ''Konzentrationslager Plaszow bei Krakau'' in occupied Poland. * January 12 – WWII: Winston Churchill and Charles de Gaulle begin a 2-day conference in Marrakech. * January 14 – WWII: Sovie ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Sobibór Museum
The Sobibór Museum or the Museum of the Former Sobibór Nazi Death Camp ( pl, Muzeum Byłego Hitlerowskiego Obozu Zagłady w Sobiborze), is a Polish state-owned museum devoted to remembering the atrocities committed at the former Sobibor extermination camp located on the outskirts of Sobibór near Lublin. The Nazi German death camp was set up in occupied Poland during World War II, as part of the Jewish extermination program known as the Operation Reinhard, which marked the most deadly phase of the Holocaust in Poland. The camp was run by the '' SS Sonderkommando Sobibor'' headed by Franz Stangl. The number of Jews from Poland and elsewhere who were gassed and cremated there between April 1942 and October 14, 1943 is estimated at 250,000; possibly more, including those who came from other Reich-occupied countries. Since May 1, 2012 the Sobibór Museum has been a branch of the Majdanek State Museum, dedicated to the history and commemoration of the Holocaust camps and subca ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum
The Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum ( pl, Państwowe Muzeum Auschwitz-Birkenau) is a museum on the site of the Auschwitz concentration camp in Oświęcim (German: ''Auschwitz''), Poland. The site includes the main concentration camp at Auschwitz I and the remains of the concentration and extermination camp at Auschwitz II-Birkenau. Both were developed and run by Nazi Germany during its occupation of Poland in 1939–1945. The Polish government has preserved the site as a research centre and in memory of the 1.1 million people who died there, including 960,000 Jews, during World War II and the Holocaust. It became a World Heritage Site in 1979. Piotr Cywiński is the museum's director. Overview The museum was created in April 1946 by Tadeusz Wąsowicz and other former Auschwitz prisoners, acting under the direction of Poland's Ministry of Culture and Art. It was formally founded on 2 July 1947 by an act of the Polish parliament. The site consists of 20 hectares in Auschwitz I ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Operation Reinhard
or ''Einsatz Reinhard'' , location = Occupied Poland , date = October 1941 – November 1943 , incident_type = Mass deportations to extermination camps , perpetrators = Odilo Globočnik, Hermann Höfle, Richard Thomalla, Erwin Lambert, Christian Wirth, Heinrich Himmler, Franz Stangl and others. , participants = , organizations = SS, Order Police battalions, ''Sicherheitsdienst'', Trawnikis , camp = BelzecSobiborTreblinka Additional: ChełmnoMajdanek Auschwitz II , ghetto = European and Jewish ghettos in German-occupied Poland including Białystok, Częstochowa, Kraków, Lublin, Łódź, Warsaw and others , victims = Around 2 million Jews , survivors = , witnesses = , documentation = , memorials = On camp sites and deportation points , notes = This was the most lethal phase of the Holocaust. Operation Reinhard or Operation Reinhardt (german: Aktion Reinhard or ; also or ) was the codename of the secret Ger ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Belzec Extermination Camp
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 w ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Majdanek Trials
The Majdanek trials were a series of consecutive war-crime trials held in Poland and in Germany during and after World War II, constituting the overall longest Nazi war crimes trial in history spanning over 30 years. The first judicial trial of Majdanek extermination camp officials took place from November 27, 1944, to December 2, 1944, in Lublin, Poland. The last one, held at the District Court of Düsseldorf began on November 26, 1975, and concluded on June 30, 1981. It was West Germany's longest and most expensive trial, lasting 474 sessions. A number of former high ranking SS men, camp officials, camp guards, and SS staff were arraigned before the courts on charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity committed at Majdanek in the period between October 1, 1941, and July 22, 1944. Notably, only 170 Nazis who served at Majdanek had been prosecuted at all, of the 1,037 camp personnel known by name. Half of the defendants charged by the West German justice system were set f ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Anton Thernes
Anton Thernes (8 February 1892 – 3 December 1944) was a Nazi German war criminal, deputy commandant of administration at the notorious Majdanek concentration camp on the outskirts of Lublin, Poland in World War II. He was tried at the Majdanek Trials and executed on 3 December 1944, along with five other war criminals, near the gas chambers and the Majdanek crematorium. War crimes Thernes was married with six children in Trier before the Nazi German invasion of Poland. A member of the SS, Thernes served as the last administrative chief of KL Lublin / Majdanek. He was also in charge of food and slave labour administration, starvation rationing, and the maintenance of camp structures including the storage depot for property and valuables stolen from the Holocaust victims at the killing centers in Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka.. Thernes was given the task of destroying the evidence of crimes against humanity and genocide, but ran out of time due to his ineptitude and letharg ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Meter
The metre (British spelling) or meter (American spelling; see spelling differences) (from the French unit , from the Greek noun , "measure"), symbol m, is the primary unit of length in the International System of Units (SI), though its prefixed forms are also used relatively frequently. The metre was originally defined in 1793 as one ten-millionth of the distance from the equator to the North Pole along a great circle, so the Earth's circumference is approximately km. In 1799, the metre was redefined in terms of a prototype metre bar (the actual bar used was changed in 1889). In 1960, the metre was redefined in terms of a certain number of wavelengths of a certain emission line of krypton-86. The current definition was adopted in 1983 and modified slightly in 2002 to clarify that the metre is a measure of proper length. From 1983 until 2019, the metre was formally defined as the length of the path travelled by light in a vacuum in of a second. After the 2019 redefiniti ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Stutthof Concentration Camp
Stutthof was a Nazi concentration camp established by Nazi Germany in a secluded, marshy, and wooded area near the village of Stutthof (now Sztutowo) 34 km (21 mi) east of the city of Danzig (Gdańsk) in the territory of the German-annexed Free City of Danzig. The camp was set up around existing structures after the invasion of Poland in World War II and initially used for the imprisonment of Polish leaders and intelligentsia. The actual barracks were built the following year by prisoners. Most of the infrastructure of the concentration camp was either destroyed or dismantled shortly after the war. In 1962, the former concentration camp with its remaining structures, was turned into a memorial museum. Stutthof was the first German concentration camp set up outside German borders in World War II, in operation from 2 September 1939. It was also the last camp liberated by the Allies, on 9 May 1945. It is estimated that between 63,000 and 65,000 prisoners of Stuttho ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Wiktor Tołkin
Wiktor Tołkin (February 21, 1922 in Tołkacze, Poland – May 7, 2013) was a Polish sculptor and architect. A member of the Armia Krajowa resistance during World War II; he was arrested by the Gestapo, and incarcerated at Auschwitz from November 17, 1942 to February 1944. During this period Tołkin survived a death march to Stalag at Sandbostel. Work Tołkin graduated from two universities, the Gdańsk Polytechnic, and the Academy of Fine Arts in Gdańsk, to become one of the more influential Polish artists of the 1960s. He is best known for his monumental sculptures built in memory of the victims of the German concentration camps in Stutthof and Majdanek. His most recognized works are abstract forms of colored concrete with expressive form, incorporating architectural design and elements. Leading works * Monument ''The Marrying of Poland with the Sea'' in Kolobrzeg, built November 30, 1963. * Monument ''Fight and Martyrdom'' in the Nazi concentration camp in Stutthof, ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |