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Sonderkommando 1005
' 1005 (, 'Special Action 1005'), also called ''Aktion'' 1005 or ' (, 'Exhumation Action'), was a top-secret Nazi operation conducted from June 1942 to late 1944. The goal of the project was to hide or destroy any evidence of the mass murder that had taken place under Operation Reinhard, the attempted (and largely successful) extermination of all Jews in the General Government occupied zone of Poland. Groups of ''Sonderkommando'' prisoners, officially called ''Leichenkommandos'' ("corpse units"), were forced to exhume mass graves and burn the bodies; inmates were often put in chains to prevent them from escaping. The project was put in place to destroy evidence of the genocide that had been committed by the Order Police battalions and ''Einsatzgruppen'', the German death squads who murdered millions, including more than 1 million Jews, Roma and Slavs. The ''Aktion'' was overseen by selected squads of the ''Sicherheitsdienst'' (SD) and the uniformed Order Police. Operations In ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Janowska Concentration Camp
Janowska concentration camp (, , ) was a German Nazi concentration camp combining elements of labor, transit, and extermination camps. It was established in September 1941 on the outskirts of Lwów in what had become, after the German invasion, the General Government (today: Lviv, Ukraine). The camp was named after the nearby street ''Janowska'' in Lwów of the interwar Second Polish Republic. The Germans liquidated the camp in November 1943, with the evidence of mass murder being largely destroyed in the Nazi program of '' Sonderaktion 1005''. Estimates put the total number of prisoners who passed through the Janowska camp at between 100,000 and 120,000, mostly Polish and Soviet Jews. The number of victims murdered at the camp is estimated at 35,000–40,000. Background Lwów (now Lviv) was a multicultural city just before World War II, with a population of 312,231. The city's 157,490 ethnic Poles constituted over 50 per cent, with Jews at 32 per cent (99,595) and Ukrainians ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Romani People
{{Infobox ethnic group , group = Romani people , image = , image_caption = , flag = Roma flag.svg , flag_caption = Romani flag created in 1933 and accepted at the 1971 World Romani Congress , pop = 2–12 million , region2 = United States , pop2 = 1 million estimated with Romani ancestry{{efn, 5,400 per 2000 United States census, 2000 census. , ref2 = {{cite news , first=Kayla , last=Webley , url=http://content.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,2025316,00.html , title=Hounded in Europe, Roma in the U.S. Keep a Low Profile , agency=Time , date=13 October 2010 , access-date=3 October 2015 , quote=Today, estimates put the number of Roma in the U.S. at about one million. , region3 = Brazil , pop3 = 800,000 (0.4%) , ref3 = , region4 = Spain , pop4 = 750,000–1.5 million (1.5–3.7%) , ref4 = {{cite web , url ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Bełżec Extermination Camp
Belzec (English: or , Polish: , approximately ) was a Nazi German extermination camp in occupied Poland. It was 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", the overall Nazi effort to complete the genocide of all European Jews. Before Germany's defeat put an end to this project more than six million Jews had been murdered 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 t ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Sobibor Extermination Camp
Sobibor ( ; ) was an extermination camp built and operated by Nazi Germany as part of Operation Reinhard. It was located in the forest near the village of Żłobek Duży in the General Government region of Occupation of Poland (1939–1945), German-occupied Poland. As an extermination camp rather than a Nazi concentration camp, concentration camp, Sobibor existed for the sole purpose of murdering Jews. The vast majority of prisoners were Extermination camp#Gassings, gassed within hours of arrival. Those not killed immediately were forced to assist in the operation of the camp, and few survived more than a few months. In total, some 170,000 to 250,000 people were murdered at Sobibor, making it the fourth-deadliest Nazi camp after Auschwitz, Treblinka, and Belzec extermination camp, Belzec. The camp ceased operation after Sobibor uprising, a prisoner revolt which took place on 14 October 1943. The plan for the revolt involved two phases. In the first phase, teams of prisoners w ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Incendiary Bombs
Incendiary weapons, incendiary devices, incendiary munitions, or incendiary bombs are weapons designed to start fires. They may destroy structures or sensitive equipment using fire, and sometimes operate as anti-personnel weaponry. Incendiaries utilize materials such as napalm, thermite, magnesium powder, chlorine trifluoride, or white phosphorus. Though colloquially often called "bombs", they are not explosives but in fact operate to slow the process of chemical reactions and use ignition rather than detonation to start or maintain the reaction. Napalm, for example, is petroleum especially thickened with certain chemicals into a gel to slow, but not stop, combustion, releasing energy over a longer time than an explosive device. In the case of napalm, the gel adheres to surfaces and resists suppression. Pre-modern history A range of early thermal weapons were utilized by ancient, medieval/post-classical and early modern armies, including hot pitch, oil, resin, animal fat ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Chełmno Extermination Camp
Chełmno, or Kulmhof, was the first of Nazi Germany's extermination camps and was situated north of Łódź, near the village of Chełmno nad Nerem. Following the invasion of Poland in 1939, Polish areas annexed by Nazi Germany, Germany annexed the area into the new territory of Reichsgau Wartheland. The camp, which was specifically intended for no other purpose than mass murder, operated from , to , parallel to Operation Reinhard during the deadliest phase of the Holocaust, and again from , to , during the Soviet counter-offensive. In 1943, modifications were made to the camp's killing methods as the reception building had already been dismantled. At the very minimum, 152,000 people were murdered in the camp, which would make it the fifth deadliest extermination camp, after Auschwitz, Treblinka, Bełżec extermination camp, Bełżec, and Sobibor extermination camp, Sobibór. However, the West German prosecution, citing Nazi figures during the Chełmno trials of 1962–65, laid ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Auschwitz Resistance 280 Cropped
Auschwitz, or Oświęcim, was a complex of over 40 Nazi concentration camps, concentration and extermination camps operated by Nazi Germany in Polish areas annexed by Nazi Germany, occupied Poland (in a portion annexed into Germany in 1939) during World War II and the Holocaust. It consisted of #Auschwitz I, Auschwitz I, the main camp (''Stammlager'') in Oświęcim; #Auschwitz II-Birkenau, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, a concentration and extermination camp with gas chambers, #Auschwitz III, Auschwitz III-Monowitz, a Arbeitslager, labour camp for the chemical conglomerate IG Farben, and List of subcamps of Auschwitz, dozens of subcamps. The camps became a major site of the Nazis' final solution, Final Solution to the Jewish question. After Germany Causes of World War II#Invasion of Poland, initiated World War II by Invasion of Poland, invading Poland in September 1939, the ''Schutzstaffel'' (SS) converted Auschwitz I, an army barracks, into a prisoner-of-war camp. The initial transpo ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Gestapo
The (, ), Syllabic abbreviation, abbreviated Gestapo (), was the official secret police of Nazi Germany and in German-occupied Europe. The force was created by Hermann Göring in 1933 by combining the various political police agencies of Free State of Prussia, Prussia into one organisation. On 20 April 1934, oversight of the Gestapo passed to the head of the ''Schutzstaffel'' (SS), Heinrich Himmler, who was also appointed Chief of German Police by Hitler in 1936. Instead of being exclusively a Prussian state agency, the Gestapo became a national one as a sub-office of the (SiPo; Security Police). From 27 September 1939, it was administered by the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA). It became known as (Dept) 4 of the RSHA and was considered a sister organisation to the (SD; Security Service). The Gestapo committed widespread atrocities during its existence. The power of the Gestapo was used to focus upon political opponents, ideological dissenters (clergy and religious org ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Heinrich Müller (Gestapo)
Heinrich Müller (28 April 1900; date of death unknown, but evidence points to May 1945) was a high-ranking German ''Schutzstaffel'' (SS) and police official during the Nazi era. For most of World War II in Europe, he was the chief of the Gestapo, the secret state police of Nazi Germany. Müller was central in the planning and execution of the Holocaust and attended the January 1942 Wannsee Conference, which formalised plans for deportation and genocide of all Jews in German-occupied Europe—the "Final Solution to the Jewish question". He was known as "Gestapo Müller" to distinguish him from another SS general named Heinrich Müller. He was last seen in the ''Führerbunker'' in Berlin on 1 May 1945 and remains the most senior figure of the Nazi Party, Nazi regime who was never captured or confirmed to have died. Early life and career Müller was born in Munich on 28 April 1900 to Roman Catholic Church, Catholic parents. His father had been a rural police official. Müller atte ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Assassination Of Reinhard Heydrich
Reinhard Heydrich, the commander of the German Reich Security Main Office (RSHA), the acting governor of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia and a principal architect of the Holocaust, was assassinated during the Second World War in a coordinated operation by the Czechoslovak resistance. The assassination attempt, code-named Operation Anthropoid, was carried out by resistance operatives Jozef Gabčík and Jan Kubiš on 27 May 1942. Heydrich was wounded in the attack and died of his injuries on 4 June. The operatives who carried out the assassination were soldiers of the Czechoslovak Army who were prepared and trained by the British Special Operations Executive (SOE) with the approval of the Czechoslovak government-in-exile, led by Edvard Beneš. The Czechoslovaks undertook the operation to help confer legitimacy on the government-in-exile, and to exact retribution for Heydrich's brutal rule. The operation was the only verified government-sponsored assassination of a senior ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Paul Blobel
Paul Blobel (13 August 1894 – 7 June 1951) was a German ''Sicherheitsdienst'' (SD) commander and convicted war criminal who played a leading role in the Holocaust. He organised the Babi Yar massacre, the largest massacre of the Second World War at Babi Yar ravine in September 1941, pioneered the use of the gas van, and, following re-assignment, developed the gas chambers for the extermination camps. From late 1942 onwards, he led Sonderaktion 1005, wherein millions of bodies were exhumed at sites across Eastern Europe in an effort to erase all evidence of the Holocaust and specifically of Operation Reinhard. After the war, Blobel was tried at the Einsatzgruppen trial and sentenced to death. He was executed in 1951. Early life Born in the city of Potsdam, Blobel fought in the First World War as an engineer as part of a pioneer battalion, in which by all accounts he served well, being decorated with the Iron Cross first class. After the war, Blobel studied architecture an ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Reich Security Main Office
The Reich Security Main Office ( , RSHA) was an organization under Heinrich Himmler in his dual capacity as ''Chef der Deutschen Polizei'' (Chief of German Police) and , the head of the Nazi Party's ''Schutzstaffel'' (SS). The organization's stated duty was to fight all "enemies of the Reich" inside and outside the borders of Nazi Germany. From its very inception, the RSHA was a central institution for the Nazis, playing a pivotal role in orchestrating and executing the Holocaust. Formation and development In 1934, the Nazi regime accelerated the centralization of state power, abolishing the sovereignty of Germany's federal states and subordinating them directly to the Reich government. Even before the formal creation of the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA), the Gestapo under Himmler had already asserted nationwide authority, laying the groundwork for a unified security apparatus. These moves toward central control were further reinforced by the establishment of the ''Volksger ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
