As if Auschwitz, Dachau, Buchenwald, Nordhausen and Bergen-Belsen weren’t bad enough – in late April, 1945, advancing Soviet infantry reported that:
“The Red Army had found a concentration camp for children at Konstantinov, beyond Lodz in central Poland…There were 862 children in the camp, all Russian, White Russian and Ukrainian.”
Here is an eyewitness account of the daily life at Ravensbrück concentration camp. Ravensbrück was the largest concentration camp for women in Germany. The Germans gassed between 5,000 and 6,000 prisoners at Ravensbrück before Soviet troops liberated the camp in the April of 1945.
Abigail Spannjard was an American citizen of Jewish heritage who was incarcerated in Bergen-Belsen with her husband and teen-age son. They were released early in 1945 as part of a prisoner-swap, and the account she gives of the abuses they endured is chilling.
Here are the observations of Patrick Gordon Walker (1907 – 1980), a broadcast journalist with the BBC who was present with the British Army when they liberated the Bergen-Belsen Death Camp on April 15, 1945.
“Men were hung for hours at a time, suspended by their arms, hands tied behind their back in Belsen. Beatings in workshops were continuous, and there were many deaths there. Just before I left the camp, a crematorium was discovered.”
“The Bad Neighbor Policy of the Axis in Latin America, most sinister menace to Western Hemisphere Democracy, is shown here in a series of remarkable photographs. Hitler, realizing the vulnerability of the U.S. to attack from the south, planned far ahead when he began planting his agents as ‘tourists’ in Central and South American nations… The Chilean Defense League reports 5,060,000 Italians, 1,385,400 German and 200,000 Japanese in South America.”
“The Nazi center of activity is the Deutsche Bund headquarters in Montreal, controlled by the Montreal Consulate of the German Reich. There are branches of the Bund in every large Canadian city. It maintains its own schools in Montreal, Toronto, Winnipeg and Kitchener. Children are taught not only the German language but the German greeting, the Hitler greeting and the Nazi tenets. Their education is completed in the big camps near Winnipeg and Montreal.”
Click here to read about American fascists…
This 1940 article covers the Nazi shenanigans that were regularly pulled by elements of the German Legation stationed in Mexico City during the late Thirties, early Forties. Within a few months, the Mexican authorities would banish the Nazi presence from their land; click here to read about that.
“New Yorkers sat in stunned silence yesterday as they watched the incontrovertible proof of the unbelievable – the U.S. Army Signal Corps motion pictures of Nazi horror camps and charnel houses… People came out of the theaters shaking their heads, or gazing blankly off into space, or cursing them under their breaths. They produced mixed reactions – a mixture of horror, of grief, of anger, of hate.”
“We should reduce Germany to dust. The Germans can’t be trusted, and we have to watch Argentina and Spain.”
The attached article is the PM review of The Fight of the Norwegian Church Against Nazism (1943). It was written by Bjarne Hoye and Trygve M. Ager during the midst of the German occupation. Their subject was the leading roll played by the Norwegian church the widespread anti-Nazi resistance.
“The book reveals that the earliest attempts at Nazification of Norway were met by a ‘general mobilization’ of the people under the leadership of the church. The Christian Council for Joint Deliberation was formed and ‘welded Norwegian Christians together in a single firm block of resistance.'”
This is an Auschwitz testimony from a larger work titled The Camp of Disappearing Men. It was printed in 1944 by an organization called the Polish Workers Party and the singular voice giving the account is unidentified. This eyewitness does not explain how he made good his escape but the testimony was published in the Spring of 1945 – when the existence of the death camp was first discovered and made known to the world.
N.B.: Auschwitz was first called Oświęcim, named for the nearest Polish city.
