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Otto Förschner
Otto Förschner (4 November 1902 – 28 May 1946) was a German SS commander and a Nazi concentration camp official. He served as commandant of the Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp and the Kaufering concentration camp in the Dachau camp system. He was indicted for his crimes, found guilty, and hanged in May 1946. Early life Förschner was born in the town of Dürrenzimmern (today part of Nördlingen), Bavaria on 4 November 1902, and was raised on a farm owned by his family. In 1922, he enlisted in the '' Reichsheer'', and would remain a soldier for the next twelve years. Following his departure from the army in 1934, he became a member of the SS, and was assigned to its military-wing, the ''SS-Verfügungstruppe'', the organization that would eventually become the '' Waffen-SS''. Tom Segev, ''Soldiers of Evil'', Berkley Books, 1991, p. 70 SS career Between April 1934 and December 1936, Förschner attended the SS training camp at Bad Tölz, and became a member of the Nazi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Nördlingen
Nördlingen (; Swabian: ''Nearle'' or ''Nearleng'') is a town in the Donau-Ries district, in Swabia, Bavaria, Germany, with a population of approximately 20,674. It is located approximately east of Stuttgart, and northwest of Munich. It was built in an impact crater 15 million years old and 25 km in diameter—the Nördlinger Ries—of a meteorite which hit with an estimated speed of 70,000 km/h, and left the area riddled with an estimated 72,000 tons of micro-diamonds. Nördlingen was first mentioned in recorded history in 898. The town was the location of two battles during the Thirty Years' War, which took place between 1618 and 1648. Today it is one of only three towns in Germany that still have completely intact city walls, the other two being Rothenburg ob der Tauber and Dinkelsbühl. Another attraction in the town is Saint George's Church's steeple, called "Daniel", which is made of a suevite impact breccia that contains shocked quartz. Other notab ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Dachau Concentration Camp
Dachau () was the first concentration camp built by Nazi Germany, opening on 22 March 1933. The camp was initially intended to intern Hitler's political opponents which consisted of: communists, social democrats, and other dissidents. It is located on the grounds of an abandoned munitions factory northeast of the medieval town of Dachau, about northwest of Munich in the state of Bavaria, in southern Germany. After its opening by Heinrich Himmler, its purpose was enlarged to include forced labor, and, eventually, the imprisonment of Jews, Romani, German and Austrian criminals, and, finally, foreign nationals from countries that Germany occupied or invaded. The Dachau camp system grew to include nearly 100 sub-camps, which were mostly work camps or , and were located throughout southern Germany and Austria. The main camp was liberated by U.S. forces on 29 April 1945. Prisoners lived in constant fear of brutal treatment and terror detention including standing cells, flog ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Forced Labour Under German Rule During World War II
The use of slave and forced labour in Nazi Germany (german: Zwangsarbeit) and throughout German-occupied Europe during World War II took place on an unprecedented scale. It was a vital part of the German economic exploitation of conquered territories. It also contributed to the mass extermination of populations in occupied Europe. The Germans abducted approximately 12 million people from almost twenty European countries; about two thirds came from Central Europe and Eastern Europe.Part1 an Part 2 . Many workers died as a result of their living conditionsextreme mis ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Mittelbau-Dora
Mittelbau-Dora (also Dora-Mittelbau and Nordhausen-Dora) was a Nazi concentration camp located near Nordhausen in Thuringia, Germany. It was established in late summer 1943 as a subcamp of Buchenwald concentration camp, supplying slave labour from many Eastern countries occupied by Germany (including evacuated survivors of eastern extermination camps), for extending the nearby tunnels in the Kohnstein and for manufacturing the V-2 rocket and the V-1 flying bomb. In the summer of 1944, ''Mittelbau'' became an independent concentration camp with numerous subcamps of its own. In 1945, most of the surviving inmates were sent on death marches or crammed in trains of box-cars by the SS. On 11 April 1945, US troops freed the remaining prisoners. The inmates at Dora-Mittelbau were treated in a brutal and inhumane manner, working 14-hour days and being denied access to basic hygiene, beds, and adequate rations. Around one in three of the roughly 60,000 prisoners who were sent to Dor ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Buchenwald Concentration Camp
Buchenwald (; literally 'beech forest') was a Nazi concentration camp established on hill near Weimar, Germany, in July 1937. It was one of the first and the largest of the concentration camps within Germany's 1937 borders. Many actual or suspected communists were among the first internees. Prisoners came from all over Europe and the Soviet Union— Jews, Poles and other Slavs, the mentally ill and physically disabled, political prisoners, Romani people, Freemasons, and prisoners of war. There were also ordinary criminals and sexual "deviants". All prisoners worked primarily as forced labor in local armaments factories. The insufficient food and poor conditions, as well as deliberate executions, led to 56,545 deaths at Buchenwald of the 280,000 prisoners who passed through the camp and its 139 subcamps. The camp gained notoriety when it was liberated by the United States Army in April 1945; Allied commander Dwight D. Eisenhower visited one of its subcamps. From August ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Schutzhaftlagerführer
''Schutzhaftlagerführer'' (head of the "preventive detention camp") was a paramilitary title of the SS, specific to the concentration and extermination camps '' Totenkopfverbande'' ("Death's-Head units"). A ''Schutzhaftlagerführer'' was in charge of the economic function of the camp. Usually, there was more than one SS man performing that function at each location due to their enormous size. ''Schutzhaftlagerführers'' received orders from the central offices in Berlin, such as DEST run directly by the SS. Prisoners' lives were entirely in their hands. Their orders, which usually involved routine maltreatment of condemned victims, were carried out through "assignments" so they would not have to deal with the dead resulting from them. The ''Schutzhaftlagerführer'' and his adjutant were responsible for the operation of the camp. The ''Schutzhaftlagerführer'' had to maintain order, take care of daily routines, roll calls and so on. Under him were the ''Rapportführer'', the '' ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
5th SS Panzer Division Wiking
The 5th SS Panzer Division Wiking (german: 5. SS-Panzerdivision Wiking) or SS Division Wiking was an infantry and later an armoured division among the thirty-eight Waffen-SS divisions of Nazi Germany. It was recruited from foreign volunteers in Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Estonia, the Netherlands and Belgium under the command of German officers. During World War II, the division served on the Eastern Front. It surrendered on 9 May 1945 to the American forces in Austria. Formation and training After the German invasion of Poland in 1939, Heinrich Himmler, the head of the SS, sought to expand the Waffen-SS with foreign military volunteers for the Nazi "crusade against Bolshevism". The enrollment began in April 1940 with the creation of two regiments: the Waffen-SS Regiment Nordland (for Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish volunteers), and the Waffen-SS Regiment Westland (for Dutch and Flemish volunteers). The Nordic formation, originally organised as the ''Nordische Di ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Operation Barbarossa
Operation Barbarossa (german: link=no, Unternehmen Barbarossa; ) was the invasion of the Soviet Union by Nazi Germany and many of its Axis allies, starting on Sunday, 22 June 1941, during the Second World War. The operation, code-named after Frederick Barbarossa ("red beard"), a 12th-century Holy Roman emperor and German king, put into action Nazi Germany's ideological goal of conquering the western Soviet Union to repopulate it with Germans. The German aimed to use some of the conquered people as forced labour for the Axis war effort while acquiring the oil reserves of the Caucasus as well as the agricultural resources of various Soviet territories. Their ultimate goal was to create more (living space) for Germany, and the eventual extermination of the indigenous Slavic peoples by mass deportation to Siberia, Germanisation, enslavement, and genocide. In the two years leading up to the invasion, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union signed political and economic pacts fo ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Nazi Party
The Nazi Party, officially the National Socialist German Workers' Party (german: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei or NSDAP), was a 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 extremist German nationalist, racist and populist paramilitary culture, which fought against the 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-bourgeois, and 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 antisemitic and anti-Marxist themes. The party had little popular support until the Great Depression. Pseudoscientific racist theories were ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
SS-Junkerschule Bad Tölz
SS-Junker Schools (German ''SS-Junkerschulen'') were leadership training facilities for officer candidates of the ''Schutzstaffel'' (SS). The term ''Junkerschulen'' was introduced by Nazi Germany in 1937, although the first facilities were established at Bad Tölz and Braunschweig in 1934 and 1935. Additional schools were founded at Klagenfurt and Posen-Treskau in 1943, and Prague in 1944. Unlike the Wehrmacht's "war schools", admission to the SS-Junker Schools did not require a secondary diploma. Training at these schools provided the groundwork for employment with the ''Sicherheitspolizei'' (SiPo; security police), the ''Sicherheitsdienst'' (SD; security service), and later for the Waffen-SS. Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS, intended for these schools to mold cadets for future service in the officer ranks of the SS. History As part of an effort to professionalize their officers, the SS founded a leadership school in 1934; the first one was at the Bavarian town of Bad Tölz, est ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Berkley Books
Berkley Books is an imprint of the Penguin Group. History Berkley Books began as an independent company in 1955. It was founded as "Chic News Company" by Charles Byrne and Frederick Klein, who had worked for Avon; they quickly renamed it Berkley Publishing Co. The new name was a combination of the their surnames, unrelated to either the philosopher George Berkeley or Berkeley, California. Under their editor-in-chief Thomas Dardis, over the next few years Berkley developed a diverse line of popular fiction and non-fiction, both reprints and mass-market paperback originals, with a particularly strong history in science fiction (books of Robert A. Heinlein and Frank Herbert’s ''Dune'' novels, for example). The company was bought in 1965 by G. P. Putnam's Sons and in years to follow undertook a hardcover line under the Berkley imprint, chiefly but not only for science fiction. For example, Merle Miller’s ''Plain Speaking: An Oral Biography of Harry S. Truman'' (1973), and '' ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Tom Segev
Tom Segev ( he, תום שגב; born March 1, 1945) is an Israeli historian, author and journalist. He is associated with Israel's New Historians, a group challenging many of the country's traditional narratives. Biography Segev was born in Jerusalem. His parents, Ricarda (née Meltzer) and Heinz Schwerin were artists who had met at the Bauhaus art school and fled Nazi Germany in 1935 due to their Communist orientation (Heinz was also Jewish). His mother was a photographer; his father, an architect and toy manufacturer, was killed on guard duty in Jerusalem in the 1948 Arab–Israeli War. Segev's first language was German; his mother never learned Hebrew beyond a basic level. He earned a BA in history and political science from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and a PhD in history from Boston University in the 1970s. His sister is the German politician Jutta Oesterle-Schwerin. Journalism career Segev worked during the 1970s as a correspondent for ''Maariv'' in Bonn. He ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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