The darker side of WW2

A place to list stories, accounts, and discuss the history of dark underbelly of the war, from the Holocaust and its survivors to use of labor in industry to the internment of Japanese Americans during WW2.

Meeh I don't know. Sure there is historical merit to it. But to discuss these things you need to keep them seperate.

As in don't discuss atrocities of different nations in the same thread. When you do that all you'll get is people comparing which atrocites are worst. Auschwitz vs. Vorkota vs. Dresden vs. Hiroshima vs. Nanking and so on.

All these things are ok topics for historical discussion but a list just gives you nothing.


However a list of good books or articles would be nice to have.

In a previous thread: http://www.coh2.org/topic/32750/the-story-of-my-greatgrandfather/page/2#post_id307405

It was asked how anyone escaped.

Here is one famous story (because they were the first to report on Auschwitz):

http://www.remember.org/witness/wit.res.esc.html
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Escapees from Auschwitz

"On April 7, 1944, two Slovakian Jews, twenty-six-year-old Alfred Weczler and twenty-year-old Rudolf Vrba, escaped from Auschwitz. They provided the first eyewitness account of the concentration and extermination camp to the western world, an account that set off the chain of events that led to the Nuremberg trial.
The Weczler-Vrba Report

"On April 7, 1944, two Slovakian Jews, twenty-six-year-old Alfred Weczler and twenty-year-old Rudolf Vrba, escaped from Auschwitz. They provided the first eyewitness account of the concentration and extermination camp to the western world, an account that set off the chain of events that led to the Nuremberg trial. ...

Escape from Auschwitz was made difficult not only by the physical barriers, but by the negative attitude of the general camp population, which suffered after every escape. If an escapee somehow made his way beyond the two electrified barbed-wire fences and watchtowers, blaring sirens alerted the whole countryside. Dogs were put into pursuit, and SS and military personnel began to comb the fields and woods. With his shorn head and prison uniform, an inmate could expect no help from the local populace, for assisting an escapee meant death.

Weczler and Vrba had, however, learned from the failures of others and been able to secrete civilian clothing, money, and food. On April 7, 1944, they slipped through the cordon at Birkenau, and within a week they were in Bratislava, Slovakia.

When, at first, they told their tale to members of the Jewish community remaining in that city, they were greeted with incredulity.

When Hitler dismantled Czechoslovakia in 1939, he had left the Slovaks nominally in charge of their own internal affairs, dependent on good behavior. The Slovaks had copied most of the German anti-Semitic laws, expropriated Jewish businesses, removed the Jews from government and the professions, and left them with little opportunity to earn a living. By the spring of 1942 most of the eighty thousand Jews were unemployed and compressed into a few blocks in two cities, Sered and Novaky.

In March, Adolf Eichmann, the head of the Gestapo's Jewish Section, offered to take seventeen thousand of the unemployed Jews off the Slovakian government's hands for, ostensibly, work in German arms factories. On April 13, Weczler, packed with threescore other men into a small freight car furnished with a single bucket of water, became part of a transport of 640 men destined for Auschwitz."

Meeh I don't know. Sure there is historical merit to it. But to discuss these things you need to keep them seperate.

As in don't discuss atrocities of different nations in the same thread. When you do that all you'll get is people comparing which atrocites are worst. Auschwitz vs. Vorkota vs. Dresden vs. Hiroshima vs. Nanking and so on.

All these things are ok topics for historical discussion but a list just gives you nothing.

However a list of good books or articles would be nice to have.

I wanted a place for open discussion. On another thread there was much concern about thread hijacking, etc. And posts on which I spent a good bit of time were getting invisied for being off topic (that is SOOOO maddening).

Even if Holocaust deniers were to show up I wouldn't want it invisied (I have encountered that lot in the past) unless they start to mob, troll or lie. That said when they show up things do get ugly and you have to be carefull of them brining their friends and changing the nature of a site.

Sarantini:
This may be a dumb question but how would you exactly escape from concentration camps like Auschwitz?



There were many accounts of escape from death camps, concentration camps, and satellite labor camps. They were not significant as a percentage of prisoners and forced laborers, which numbered in the millions.

For example, the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, in its database on each survivor account has a criteria for tags labeled "Other Experiences" and under my uncles it lists: "Prisons" (perhaps a reference to the Gestapo HQ in Lyons, "Concealment of Jewish Identity", and "Escape from the camps". IOW it was certainly a thing.

I know I have heard some in my time. (I knew a lot of survivors, in fact now that I think on how the US only allowed some 150,000 to enter after WWII, the number I knew or encountered seems huge, being in the 3 figures. But then I grew up in NYC.) In one, the mother of a friend had been left for dead in a not-yet-filled pit of bodies from which they escaped overnight. They had to lie still for hours among the dead until the opportunity to flee came. Many of those survivors then had a second challenge, to escape not just recapture, but to escape being killed by civilians in the area, even if they were in occupied territories like Poland and the Ukraine.

There is also an upcoming special on PBS about the rebellion and mass escape from Sobibor. http://www.pbs.org/program/escape-nazi-death-camp/

Some survivors never spoke of how they escaped. That includes my uncle. But perhaps he did in the end. I just found that there is a multi-hour interview of him at the USHMM and I have ordered a copy.

I wanted a place for open discussion. On another thread there was much concern about thread hijacking, etc. And posts on which I spent a good bit of time were getting invisied for being off topic (that is SOOOO maddening).

Even if Holocaust deniers were to show up I wouldn't want it invisied (I have encountered that lot in the past) unless they start to mob, troll or lie. That said when they show up things do get ugly and you have to be carefull of them brining their friends and changing the nature of a site.

Well I think the Library is open for discussions. But maybe you should use this thread for topic A and make a new thread for topic B. That all im saying

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/04/10/holocaust-train-escape-764-jews_n_5120992.html

A four-year study by a German historian revealed an estimated 764 Jews managed to escape from trains en route to concentration camps during the Holocaust.

Tanja von Fransecky sifted through European and Israeli archives and interviewed survivors and witnesses for her volume, “Jewish Escapes from Deportation Trains,” published March 21. She began investigating this little-known group of survivors after hearing a story in 2006 about the train escapees, she told German newspaper Spiegel Online.

“I was amazed that this happened at all,” Fransecky told British newspaper The Independent. “I had always assumed that the wagons were stuffed full prior to departure and simply opened on arrival and that not much could happen in between.”

As Fransecky learned through her research, lots happened on those journeys: Hundreds attempted to flee from the fast-moving, overcrowded train cars, using anything they had on hand, including smuggled tools and even urine-soaked blankets (to bend bars)....

..... Many of the escapees examined in Fransecky's study experienced years of guilt for leaving other passengers and loved ones behind. Fransecky says their painful remorse is one of the reasons many of them kept a lid on these stories for so long....


Read the whole thing. My guess is there were probably others she never found.