Acts of Barbarism: a Look at History and Now!

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http://www.auschwitz.dk/masha.htm


Masha and Zoya
 
 

 
The 17-year-old Jewish high school graduate, Masha Bruskina, was one of many young women during World War II who were put to death for fighting against the Nazi règime and the first teenage girl to be publicly hanged by the Nazis in Belorussia.
 
She worked as a nurse in a military hospital in Minsk, and was a member of an underground cell which aided Soviet officers hospitalized there, to escape certain death and join the partisans.
 
Despite the constant danger they continued to risk their lives by disobeying orders, sabotaging the daily routine. In 1941 the members of the cell were informed on and quickly rounded up by Nazi officers.
 

Masha and two of her male comrades, Volodya Sherbateivich and Krill Trous, were sentenced to death by the Nazis. They were led through the streets with Masha wearing a large placard proclaiming that they were partisans. Their hands were tied behind their backs with cord and they were hanged one at a time, Masha first, by the German 707 Infanteriedivision who meticulously filmed the proceedings.

 
The young prisoners were neither hooded nor blindfolded, and they were given no drop, so their cruel and slow deaths would act as a stronger deterrent to the local people who witnessed the event.
 
Hanging was the preferred Nazi method for the execution for partisans as it produced more of a public spectacle than shooting and was used to terrorize the local populace as well as entertain the German troops ...
 

The execution of Masha and her comrades took place on October 26th 1941 in the city of Minsk and the bodies were left hanging for several days as a grim reminder to others.

The photograph of the 1941 execution has been reproduced many times all over the world but, in her native Belorussia, Masha Bruskina has not yet gained recognition.

Despite the weight of overwhelming evidence, the testimony of eyewitnesses and the confirmation of respected scholars Masha's homeland denies her identity. She may be recognized elsewhere, but in Minsk, Belorussia, where she fought and for whom she died, the girl in the photograph is still officially described as unknown. The reason: Masha was Jewish.

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Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya, a 18-year-old schoolgirl from Moscow, voluntarily joined a partisan detachment in 1941, when Nazi forces invaded Russia and mounted an offensive in the direction of Moscow. The brutality of the Nazis accelerated with murder, violence and terror, and on the night of the 27 November 1941, Zoya, together with two comrades, set fire to a German stable near Moscow. Nazi officers quickly caught one of them - Wassilij Klubkow. Under interrogation he betrayed Zoya.
 

The Nazis arrested her immediately and brutally tortured her in order to get some information on the partisan detachment.
Rape, torture, and mutilation could not break her, so they hanged her in public in Petrishchevo near Moscow on the 29th November 1941. Just before she was pushed off the platform with a loop about her neck she shouted to the Nazis: 'You cant hang all 190 million of us.'
 

SL: What can be more despicable than gang raping a captured woman and, then, mutilating her?

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Zoya met her death with amazing courage and demonstrated a strong streak of defiance. Her words became a pithy saying.
 
In same partisan squad with Zoya was another young russian girl, Vera Voloshina. Several days before Zoya's execution Vera was wounded in her shoulder during combat and captured. After torture Vera Voloshina was also publicly hanged, later in the same day.
 

[

The Nazis left the half-naked body of Zoya in the snow.

SL: I believe the Nazis cut off Zoya's left breast during torture.
No Real Humans are capable of such acts.

After the war Zoya became the symbol of Soviet resistance to Nazi occupation and she was posthumously decorated a Hero of the Soviet Union as was her brother, Shura, for his service in the Red Army tank corps.
 
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China now.
 

Criminals sentenced to death during an open trial in Zhuzhou, China, December 2006
© Private

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http://www.deathcamps.info/Experiments/experiments.htm

The SS doctors at the Nazi death camps wore black uniforms with a skeleton's head on their hats, the motto Unsere Ehre heisst Treue on their belts and their symbol was the double S-rune. They had sworn eternal faith to Adolf Hitler and they were his most ruthless henchmen, men often seen as the very personifications of evil.

The camp doctors tortured men, women and children and did medical experiments of unspeakable horror during the Holocaust. Victims were put into pressure chambers, tested with drugs, castrated, frozen to death. Children were exposed to experimental surgeries performed without anesthesia, transfusions of blood from one to another, isolation endurance, reaction to various stimuli. The doctors made injections with lethal germs, sex change operations, removal of organs and limbs.



The Children

The truth of the photographs of the crimes and atrocities included in this Holocaust project needs to be shown. The photos may be of graphic nature and disturbing - before providing access to younger learners, parents and teachers should preview the sites and guide through what they may read and see.

- Louis Bülow   Privacy  ©2007-09.
 

 

The Holocaust Websites - Crimes, Heroes And Villains
www.emilieschindler.com
www.oskarschindler.com
www.deathcamps.info
www.auschwitz.dk
www.oskarschindler.info/
www.fatherkolbe.com
www.canaris.dk/
www.mengele.dk/
www.shoah.dk   
www.annefrank.dk

were established 1996 to promote education about the history of the Holocaust and assist visitors in developing understanding of the ramifications of prejudice and racism. The resources include essays, poems, eyewitness testimonies, photographs, documents, films, literature, timelines, links.

 

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http://www.izieu.com/
 
The number of children killed by Hitler and his Nazis is not fathomable and full statistics for the tragic fate of the children will never be known. Estimates range as high as 1.5 million murdered children during the Holocaust. This figure includes more than 1.2 million Jewish children, tens of thousands of Gypsy children and thousands of institutionalized handicapped children.

Plucked from their homes and stripped of their childhoods, the children had witnessed the murder of parents, siblings, and relatives. They faced starvation, illness and brutal labor, until they were consigned to the gas chambers.

This is the story of the children of Izieu - but there are no happy endings. In 1944 the Nazis from Lyon sent three vehicles to the tiny French village to exterminate the children of the orphanage known as La Maison d'Izieu. Here 44 Jewish children in age from 3 to 18 were hidden away from the Nazi terror that surrounded them.

On the morning of April 6, 1944, as the children all settled down in the refectory to drink hot chocolate, the Nazis led by the Butcher of Lyon Klaus Barbie, raided the Home, throwing the crying and terrified children on to the trucks like sacks of potatoes.


The Jewish Children Of Izieu

The little children were deported to the Nazi death camp Auschwitz and murdered immediately upon arrival.
 Of the forty-four children kidnapped by the Nazis in Izieu, not a single one survived.
Of the supervisors there was one sole survivor, twenty-seven year old Lea Feldblum.

Beate and Serge Klarsfeld, who brought Klaus Barbie to justice in 1983, later wrote: "Forty-four children deported - no mere statistic, but rather forty-four tragedies which continue to cause us pain ..."

Sami Adelsheimer, 5
Hans Ament, 10
Nina Aronowicz, 12
Max-Marcel Balsam, 12
Jean-Paul Balsam, 10
Esther Benassayag, 12
Elie Benassayag, 10
Jacob Benassayag, 8
Jacques Benguigui, 12
Richard Benguigui, 7
Jean-Claude Benguigui, 5
Barouk-Raoul Bentitou, 12
Majer Bulka, -
Albert Bulka, 4
Lucienne Friedler, 5
Egon Gamiel, 9
Maurice Gerenstein, 13
Liliane Gerenstein, 11
Henri-Chaïm Goldberg, 13
Joseph Goldberg, 12
Mina Halaunbrenner, -
Claudine Halaunbrenner, 5

 Georges Halpern, 8
Arnold Hirsch, 17
Isidore Kargeman, 10
Renate Krochmal, 8
Liane Krochmal, 6
Max Leiner, 8
Claude Levan-Reifman, 10
Fritz Loebmann, 15
Alice-Jacqueline Luzgart, 10
Paula Mermelstein, 10
Marcel Mermelstein, 7
Theodor Reis, 16
Gilles Sadowski, 8
Martha Spiegel, 10
Senta Spiegel, 9
Sigmund Springer, 8
Sarah Szulklaper, -
Max Tetelbaum, 12
Herman Tetelbaum, 10
Charles Weltner, 9
Otto Wertheimer, -
Emile Zuckerberg, 5

 
 
The Izieu Children

Eleven-year-old Liliane Gerenstein, born January 13, 1933 in Nice, France, wrote a heart-rending letter to God just days before the children of Izieu were sent to their deaths at Auschwitz:

"God? How good You are, how kind and if one had to count the number of goodnesses and kindnesses You have done, one would never finish.

God? It is You who command. It is You who are justice, it is You who reward the good and punish the evil.

God? It is thanks to You that I had a beautiful life before, that I was spoiled, that I had  lovely things that others do not have.

God? After that, I ask You one thing only: Make my parents come back, my poor parents protect them (even more than You protect me) so that I can see them again as soon as possible.

Make them come back again. Ah! I had such a good mother and such a good father! I have such faith in You and I thank You in advance."

- Louis Bülow 

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http://www.deathcamps.info/Experiments/jpg_exp14.htm



Freezing Experiments

to investigate the most effective means of treating persons who had been severely chilled or frozen. The victims were forced to remain in a tank of ice water for up to 3 hours. Extreme rigor developed in a short time. Numerous victims died in the course of these experiments. After the survivors were severely chilled, rewarming was attempted by various means. In another series of experiments, the victims were kept naked outdoors for many hours at temperatures below freezing. The victims screamed with pain as their bodies froze.

Sea-water Experiments

to study various methods of making sea water drinkable. The victims were deprived of all food and given only chemically processed sea water. Such experiments caused great pain and suffering and resulted in serious bodily injury to the victims.


Report by SS-Untersturmführer Rascher about cooling experiments in Dachau, September 10, 1942. ( Trials of War Criminals Before the Nuremberg Military Tribunals - Washington, U.S Govt. Print. Off., 1949-1953, Vol. I, p. 220):

"The experimental subjects were placed in the water, dressed in complete flying uniform, winter or summer combination, and with an aviator's helmet. A life jacket made out of rubber kapok was to prevent submerging. The experiments were carried out at water temperatures varying from from 2.5 to 12 Centigrade. In one experimental series, the occiput (brain stem) protruded above the water, while in another series of experiments the occiput (brain stem) and back of the head were submerged in water.

Electrical measurements gave low temperature readings of 26.4 in the stomach and 26.5 in the rectum. Fatalities occurred only when the brain stem and the back of the head were also chilled. Autopsies of of such fatal cases always revealed large amounts of free blood, up to one-half litter, in the cranial cavity."

Report by Prof. Dr. Holzloehner, Dr. Rascher, and Dr. Finke, regarding cooling experiments, October 10, 1942. (Trials of War Criminals Before the Nuremberg Military Tribunals - Washington, U.S Govt. Print. Off., 1949-1953, Vol. I, p. 226-243):

"If the experimental subject was placed in the water under narcosis, one observed a certain arousing effect. The subject began to groan and made some defensive movements. In a few cases a state of excitation developed. This was especially severe in the cooling of head and neck. But never was a complete cessation of the narcosis observed.

The defensive movements ceased after about 5 minutes. There followed a progressive rigor, which developed especially strongly in the arm musculature; the arms were strongly flexed and pressed to the body. The rigor increased with the continuation of the cooling, now and then interrupted by tonic-clonic twitchings. With still more marked sinking of the body temperature it suddenly ceased. These cases ended fatally, without any successful results from resuscitation efforts."

 

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http://www.deathcamps.info/Experiments/jpg_exp2.htm

SL: I decline to show th photos from the Web-page as they are too brutal for an average reader/viewer.

As surviving victim of The Angel Of Death, Josef Mengele, Alex Dekel later stated:


"Mengele ran a butcher shop - major surgeries were performed without anesthesia. Once, I witnessed a stomach operation - Mengele was removing pieces from the stomach, but without any anesthetic. Another time, it was a heart that was removed, again, without anesthesia. It was horrifying.

Mengele was a doctor who became mad because of the power he was given. Nobody ever questioned him - why did this one die? Why did that one perish? The patients did not count. He professed to do what he did in the name of science, but it was a madness on his part ..."


At 19, in March 1943, Ernest Michel arrived in Auschwitz after five days and four nights in cattle cars. He was born in Mannheim, Germany, in 1923 to a Jewish family which had been living in Germany for over 300 years. He was arrested on September 3, 1939, three days after the outbreak of World War II, and spent the next five-and-one-half years in slave labor and concentration camps.

Ernest Michel, Auschwitz number 104995, worked as an orderly in the Auschwitz infirmary and later recalled Mengele:

"One day in the summer of 1944 we took eight women, mostly young and all healthy, into the room where the experiments would take place. I saw Mengele standing there in his uniform, surrounded by three or four others. As we brought in each girl, an officer would strap her down. After a while the screaming inside stopped. When we took them out two of the eight were dead, five were in a coma, one was still strapped to the cot. Mengele was standing there, discussing it very casually. The only word I could hear was 'experiment'."


Ernest Michel's parents, grandmother, uncles, aunts, cousins were all murdered by the Nazis, gassed in Auschwitz. He survived and arrived in the United States in 1946. He was active in the survivor community for many years and served as Chairman of the World Gathering of Holocaust Survivors in Israel in 1981.

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http://www.history.ucsb.edu/faculty/marcuse/niem.htm

Die politische Verantwortung des Christen im akademischen Stand : Vortrag gehalten auf Einladung der evangelischen Studentengemeinde vor Studierenden der Philipps-Universität zu Marburg an der Lahn am 4. Mai 1946 / Martin Niemöller. Giessen : W. Schmitz, 1946. 23 p. [RLIN: Yale, Harvard] Also in Reden 45-54, 87ff, from which the passage below is quoted:

97f: "Hier gruendet unsre christliche Schulderkenntnis im Blick auf das, was unter uns geschehen ist. Wir haben den Herrn Christus nicht erkannt, als er in Gestalt des leidenden Bruders in unser Leben trat. Ich habe ihn weder erkannt, als er als Kommunist ins Lager gesteckt wurde, ich habe ihn nicht erkannt, als er als unheilbar Kranker gemordet wurde, noch habe ich ihn erkannt, als er in den armen Opfern seines eigenen Volkes vergast und verbrannt wurde. Hier bin ich schuldig geworden an meiner ganz persoenlichen Verantwortung und kann mich nicht entschuldigen, weder vor Gott, noch vor den Menschen."

Here is the basis of our Christian recognition of guilt in consideration of what happened. We did not recognize the Lord Christ when he came into our lives in the form of a suffering brother.
I didn't recognize him when he was put in the camp as a Communist, nor did I recognize him, when he was murdered as an incurably ill person, nor did I recognize him, when he was gassed and burned as the poor victims of his own people [probably an allusion to the fact that Christ was Jewish]. Here I became guilty in my very personal responsibility and I cannot excuse myself, neither before God, nor before humanity.

Thus in these early texts (Jan-May 1946) MN spoke of the Communists, the disabled, and the Jews, in that order. He also mentioned Jehovah's Witnesses.

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http://www.deathcamps.info/Experiments/jpg_exp4.htm




A Jew and a medical doctor, the Auschwitz prisoner Miklos Nyiszli - No. A8450 - was spared death for a grimmer fate: to perform autopsies and 'scientific research' on his fellow inmates at Auschwitz under the supervision of Dr. Josef Mengele, the chief provider for the gas chambers.

Miraculously, Nyiszli survived to give an horrifying and sobering account, one of the first books to bring the full horror of the Nazi death camps to the public - Auschwitz: A Doctor's Eyewitness Account. You find this account pp. 114-120:


"In number one's crematorium's gas chamber 3,000 dead bodies were piled up. The Sonderkommando had already begun to untangle the lattice of flesh. The noise of the elevators and the sound of their clanging doors reached my room. The work moved ahead double-time. The gas chambers had to be cleared, for the arrival of a new convoy had been announced.

The chief of the gas chamber kommando almost tore the hinges off the door to my room as he arrived out of breath, his eyes wide with fear or surprise.

"Doctor," he said, "come quickly. We just found a girl alive at the bottom of a pile of corpses."

I grabbed my instrument case, which was always ready, and dashed to the gas chamber. Against the wall, near the entrance to the immense room, half covered with other bodies, I saw a girl in the throes of a death rattle, her body seized with convulsions. The gas kommando men around me were in a state of panic. Nothing like this had ever happened in the course of their horrible career.

We moved the still-living body from the corpses pressing against it. I gathered the tiny adolescent body into my arms and carried it back to the room adjoining the gas chamber, where normally the gas kommando men change clothes for work. I laid the body on a bench. A frail young girl, almost a child, she could have been no more than fifteen. I took out my syringe and, taking her arm - she had not yet recovered consciousness and was breathing with difficulty - I administered three intravenous injections.

My companions covered her body which was as cold as ice with a heavy overcoat. One ran to the kitchen to fetch some tea and warm broth. Everybody wanted to help as if she were his own child. The reaction was swift. The child was seized by a fit of coughing which brought up a thick globule of phlegm from her lungs. She opened her eyes and looked fixedly at the ceiling. I kept a close watch for every sign of life. Her breathing became deeper and more and more regular. Her lungs, tortured by the gas, inhaled the fresh air avidly. Her pulse became perceptible, the result of the injections.

I waited impatiently. I saw that within a few minutes she was going to regain consciousness: her circulation began to bring color back into her cheeks, and her delicate face became human again .. I made a sign for my companions to withdraw. I was going to attempt something I knew without saying was doomed to failure.

From our numerous contacts, I had been able to ascertain that Mussfeld had a high esteem for the medical expert's professional qualities. He knew that my superior was Dr. Mengele, the KZ's most dreaded figure, who, goaded by racial pride, took himself to be one of the most important representatives of German medical science. He considered the dispatch of hundreds of thousands of Jews to the gas chambers as a patriotic duty. The work carried out in the dissecting room was for the furtherance of German medical science ...

And this was the man I had to deal with, the man I had to talk into allowing a single life to be spared. I calmly related the terrible case we found ourselves confronted with. I described for his benefit what pains the child must have suffered in the undressing room, and the horrible scenes that preceded death in the gas chamber. When the room had been plunged into darkness, she had breathed in a few lungfuls of cyclon gas. Only a few, though, for her fragile body had given way under the pushing and shoving of the mass as they fought against death. By chance she had fallen with her face against the wet concrete floor. That bit of humidity had kept her from being asphyxiated, for cyclon gas does not react under humid conditions.

These were my arguments, and I asked him to do something for the child. He listened to me attentively then asked me exactly what I proposed doing. I saw by his expression that I had put him face to face with a practically impossible problem.

It was obvious that the child could not remain in the crematorium. One solution would have been to put her in front of the crematorium gate. A kommando of women always worked there. She could have slipped back to the camp barracks after they had finished work. She would never relate what had happened to her. The presence of one new face among so many thousands would never be detected, for no one in the camp knew all the other inmates. If she had been three or four years older that might have worked. A girl of twenty would have been able to understand clearly the miraculous circumstances of her survival, and have enough foresight not to tell anyone about them. She would wait for better times, like so many other thousands were waiting, to recount what she had lived through.

But Mussfeld thought that a young girl of sixteen would in all nai 'vete' tell the first person she had met where she had just come from, what she had seen and what she had lived through. The news would spread like wildfire, and we would all be forced to pay for it with our lives. "There's no way of getting round it," he said, "the child will have to die." Half an hour later the young girl was led, or rather carried, into the furnace room hallway, and there Mussfeld sent another in his place to do the job. A bullet in the back of the neck."

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